Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “What secret?” cried Valentine.

  “The secret of that poor fellow’s death. My God! I can remember the clasp of his hand, and the friendly look of his eyes, the day before he died. He was poisoned by Philip Sheldon!”

  “You must be mad!” gasped Valentine, in a faint voice.

  For one moment of astonishment and incredulity he thought this man must needs be a fool or a lunatic, so wildly improbable did the accusation seem. But in the next instant the curtain was lifted, and he knew that Philip Sheldon was a villain, and knew that he had never wholly trusted him.

  “Never until to-day have I told this secret,” said the surgeon; “not even to my wife.”

  “I thank you,” answered Valentine, in the same faint voice; “with all my heart, I thank you.”

  Yes, the curtain was lifted. This mysterious illness, this slow silent decay of bloom and beauty, by a process inscrutable as the devilry of medieval poisoner or Hecate-serving witch — this was murder. Murder! The disease, which had hitherto been nameless, had found its name at last. It was all clear now. Philip Sheldon’s anxiety; the selection of an utterly incompetent adviser; certain looks and tones that had for a moment mystified him, and had been forgotten in the next, came back to him with a strange distinctness, with all their hidden meaning made clear and plain as the broad light of day.

  But the motive? What motive could prompt the slow destruction of that innocent life? A fortune was at stake, it is true; but that fortune, as Valentine understood the business, depended on the life of Charlotte Halliday. Beyond this point he had never looked. In all his consideration of the circumstances relating to the Haygarthian estate, he had never thought of what might happen in the event of Charlotte’s decease.

  “It is a diabolical mystery,” he said to himself. “There can be no motive — none. To destroy Thomas Halliday was to clear his way to fortune; to destroy Charlotte is to destroy his chance of fortune.”

  And then he remembered the dark speeches of George Sheldon.

  “My God! and this was what he meant, as plainly as he dared tell me! He did tell me that his brother was an unutterable scoundrel; and I turned a deaf ear to his warning, because it suited my own interest to believe that villain. For her dear sake I believed him. I would have believed in Beelzebub, if he had promised me her dear hand. And I let myself be duped by the lying promise, and left my darling in the power of Beelzebub!”

  Thoughts followed each other swift as lightning through his overwrought brain. It seemed but a moment that he had been sitting with his clenched hands pressed against his forehead, when he turned suddenly upon the surgeon.

  “For God’s sake, help me, guide me!” he said. “You have struck a blow that has numbed my senses. What am I to do? My future wife is in that man’s keeping — dying, as I believe. How am I to save her?”

  “I cannot tell you. You may take the cleverest man in London to see her; but it is a question if that man will perceive the danger so clearly as to take prompt measures. In these cases there is always room for doubt; and a man would rather doubt his own perceptions than believe the hellish truth. It is by this natural hesitation so many lives are lost. While the doctor deliberates, the patient dies. And then, if the secret of the death transpires — by circumstantial evidence, perhaps, which never came to the doctor’s knowledge, — there is a public outcry. The doctor’s practice is ruined, and his heart broken. The outcry would have been still louder if he had told the truth in time to save the patient, and had not been able to prove his words. You think me a coward and a scoundrel because I dared not utter my suspicion when I saw Mr. Halliday dying. While it was only a suspicion it would have been certain ruin for me to give utterance to it. The day came when it was almost a conviction. I went back to that man Sheldon’s house, determined to insist upon the calling in of a physician who would have made that conviction certainty. My resolution came too late. It is possible that Sheldon had perceived my suspicions, and had hastened matters. My patient was dead before I reached the house.”

  “How am I to save her?” repeated Valentine, with the same helpless manner. He could not bring himself to consider Tom Halliday’s death. The subject was too far away from him — remote as the dim shadows of departed centuries. In all the universe there were but two figures standing out in lurid brightness against the dense night of chaos — a helpless girl held in the clutches of a secret assassin; and it was his work to rescue her.

  “What am I to do?” he asked. “Tell me what I am to do.”

  “What it may be wisest to do I cannot tell you,” answered Mr. Burkham, almost as helplessly as the other had asked the question. “I can give you the name of the best man to get to the bottom of such a case — a man who gave evidence on the Fryar trial — Jedd. You have heard of Jedd, I daresay. You had better go straight to Jedd, and take him down with you to Miss Halliday. His very name will frighten Sheldon.”

  “I will go at once. Stay — the address! Where am I to find Dr. Jedd?”

  “In Burlington Row. But there is one thing to be considered.”

  “What?”

  “The interference of Jedd may only make that man desperate. He may hasten matters now as he hastened matters before. If you had seen his coolness at that time; if you had seen him, as I saw him, standing by that poor fellow’s deathbed, comforting him — yes, with friendly speeches — laughing and joking, watching the agonising pain and the miserable sickness, and all the dreary wretchedness of such a death, and never swerving from his work; if you had seen him, you would understand why I am afraid to advise you. That man was as desperate as he was cool when he murdered his friend. He will be more reckless this time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he has reached a higher stage in the science of murder. The symptoms of that poor Yorkshireman were the symptoms of arsenical poisoning; the symptoms of which you have told me to-day denote a vegetable poison. That affords very vague diagnosis, and leaves no trace. That was the agent which enabled the Borgias to decimate Rome. It is older than classic Greece, and simple as a b c, and will remain so until the medical expert is a recognized officer of the law, the faithful guardian of the bed over which the suspected poisoner loiters — past-master of the science in which the murderer is rarely more than an experimentalist, and protected from all the hazards of plain speaking by the nature of his office.”

  “Great Heaven, how am I to save her?” exclaimed Valentine. He could not contemplate the subject in its broad social aspect; he could only think of this one dear life at stake. “To send this Dr. Jedd might be to hasten her death; to send a less efficient man would be mere childishness. WHAT shall I do?”

  He looked despairingly at the surgeon, and in that one glance perceived what a frail reed this was upon which he was leaning. And then, like the sudden gleam of lightning, a name flashed across his mind, — George Sheldon, the lawyer, the schemer, the man who of all the world best knew this vile enemy and assassin against whom he was matched; he it was of whom counsel should be asked in this crisis. Once perceiving this, Valentine was prompt to act. It was the first flash of light in the darkness.

  “You mean to stand by me in this, don’t you?” he asked Mr. Burkham.

  “With all my heart and soul.”

  “Good. Then you must go to Dr. Jedd instantly. Tell him all you know — Tom Halliday’s death; the symptoms of Charlotte’s decline, as you have heard them from me — everything; and let him hold himself in readiness to start for Hastings directly he hears from or sees me. I am going to a man who of all men can tell me how to deal with Philip Sheldon. I shall try to be in Burlington Row in an hour from this time; but in any case you will wait there till I come. I suppose, in a desperate case like this, Dr. Jedd will put aside all less urgent work?”

  “No doubt of that.”

  “I trust to you to secure his sympathy,” said Valentine.

  He was in the darksome entrance-hall by this time. Mr. Burkham followed, and opened the door for him.

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nbsp; “Have no fear of me,” he said. “Good bye.”

  The two men shook hands with a grip significant as masonic sign-manual. It meant on the one part hearty co-operation, on the other implicit confidence. In the next moment Valentine sprang into the cab.

  “King’s Road — entrance to Gray’s Inn, and drive like mad!” he shouted to the driver. The hansom rattled across the stones, dashed round corners, struck consternation to scudding children in pinafores, all but annihilated more than one perambulator, and in less than ten minutes after leaving Mr. Burkham’s door, ground against the kerbstone before the little gate of Gray’s Inn.

  “God grant that George Sheldon may be at home!” Valentine said to himself, as he hurried towards that gentleman’s office. George Sheldon was at home. In this fight against time, Mr. Hawkehurst had so far found the odds in his favour.

  “Bless my soul!” exclaimed the lawyer, looking up from his desk, as Valentine appeared on the threshold of the door, pale and breathless; “to what do I owe the unusual honour of a visit from Mr. Hawkehurst? I thought that rising littérateur had cut all old acquaintances, and gone in for the upper circles.”

  “I have come to you on a matter of life and death, George Sheldon,” said Valentine; “this is no time to talk of why I haven’t been to you before. When you and I last met, you advised me to beware of your brother Philip. It wasn’t the first, or the second, or the third time that you so warned me. And now speak out like an honest man, and tell me what you meant by that warning? For God’s sake, speak plainly this time.”

  “I cannot afford to speak more plainly than I have spoken half a dozen times already. I told you to beware of my brother Phil, and I meant that warning in its fullest significance. If you had chosen to take my advice, you would have placed Charlotte Halliday’s fortune, and Charlotte Halliday herself, beyond his power, by an immediate marriage. You didn’t choose to do that, and there was an end of the matter. I have been a heavy loser by your pigheaded obstinacy; and I dare say before you and Phil Sheldon have done with each other, you too will find yourself a loser.”

  “God help me, yes!” cried Valentine, with a groan; “I stand to make the heaviest loss that was ever made by man.”

  “What do you mean?” exclaimed George.

  “Shall I tell you what you meant when you warned me against your own brother? Shall I tell you why you so warned me? You know that Philip Sheldon murdered Tom Halliday.”

  “Great God!”

  “Yes; the secret is out. You knew it; how or when you discovered it I cannot tell. You knew of that one hellish crime, and would have prevented the commission of a second murder. You should have spoken more plainly. To know what you knew, and to confine yourself to cautious hints and vague suggestions, as you did, was to have part in that devilish work. If Charlotte Halliday dies, her blood be upon your head — upon yours — as well as upon his!”

  The young man had risen in his passion, and stood before George Sheldon with uplifted hands, and eyes that flashed angry lightnings. It seemed almost as if he would have called down the Divine vengeance upon this man’s head.

  “If Charlotte Halliday dies!” repeated George, in a horror-stricken whisper; “why should you suggest such a thing?”

  “Because she is dying.”

  There was a pause. Valentine flung himself passionately upon the chair from which he had just risen, with his back to George Sheldon, and his face bent over the back of the chair. The lawyer sat looking straight before him, with a ghastly countenance.

  “I told him he meant this,” he said to himself, in a hoarse whisper. “I told him in this office not six months ago. Powers of hell, what a villain he is! And there are people who do not believe there is a devil!”

  For a few moments Valentine gave free vent to his passion of grief. These tears of rage, of agony the most supreme, were the first he had shed since he had bent his face over Charlotte’s soft brown hair, to hide the evidence of his sorrow. When he had dashed these bitter drops away from his burning eyes, he turned to confront George Sheldon, pale as death, but very calm. And after this he gave way no more to his passion. He was matched against Time, of all enemies the most pitiless and unrelenting, and every minute wasted was a point scored by his foe.

  “I want your help, George Sheldon,” he said. “If you have ever been sorry that you made no effort to save Charlotte Halliday’s father, prove yourself his friend by trying to save her.”

  “If I have ever been sorry!” echoed the lawyer. “Why, my miserable dreams have never been free from the horror of that man’s face. You don’t know what it is — murder! Nobody knows who hasn’t been concerned in it. You read of murders in your newspapers. A shot B, or C poisoned D, and so on, all through the letters of the alphabet, with a fresh batch for every Sunday; but it never comes home to you. You think of the horror of it in a shadowy kind of way, as you might think of having a snake twisted round your waist and legs, like that blessed man and boys one never sees the last of. But if you were to look at that plaster cast all your life, you couldn’t realize ten per cent of the horror you’d feel if the snake was there, alive, crushing your bones, and hissing in your ear. I have been face to face with murder, Valentine Hawkehurst; and if I were to live a century, I should never forget what I felt when I stood by Tom Halliday’s deathbed, and it flashed upon me, all at once, that my brother Phil was poisoning him.”

  “And you did not try to save him — your friend?” cried Valentine.

  “Why, you see,” replied the other, in a strange slow way, “it was too late to save him: I knew that, and — I held my tongue. What could I do? Against my own brother! That sort of thing in a family is ruin for every one! Do you think anybody would have brought their business to me after my brother had stood in the Old Bailey dock to take his trial for murder? No; my only course was to keep my own counsel, and I kept it. Phil made eighteen thousand pounds by his marriage with poor Tom’s widow, and a paltry hundred or two is all I ever touched of that money.”

  “And you could touch that money?” cried Valentine, aghast.

  “Money carries no infection. Did you ever ask any questions about the money you won at German gaming-tables. I dare say some of your napoleons and ten-thaler notes could have told queer stories if they had been able to talk. Taking Phil’s money has never weighed upon my conscience. I’m not very inquisitive about the antecedents of a five-pound note; but I’ll tell you what it is, Hawkehurst, I’d give all I have, and all I ever hope to have, and would go out and sweep a crossing to-morrow, if I could get Tom Halliday’s face out of my mind, with the look that he turned upon me the last time I saw him. ‘Ah, George,’ he said, ‘in illness a man feels the comfort of being among friends!’ And he took my hand and squeezed it, in his old hearty way. We had been boys together, Hawkehurst, birds-nesting in Hyley Woods; on the same side in our Barlingford cricket-matches. And I shook his hand, and went away, and left him to die!”

  And here Mr. Sheldon of Gray’s Inn, the Sheldon who was in with the money-lenders, sharpest of legal prestigitators, most ruthless of opponents, most unscrupulous of allies, buried his face in a flaming bandanna, and fairly sobbed aloud. When the passion had passed, he got up and walked hastily to the window, more ashamed of this one touch of honest emotion than of all the falsehoods and chicaneries of his career.

  “I didn’t think I could have been such an ass,” he muttered sheepishly.

  “I did not hope that you could feel so deeply,” answered Valentine. “And now help me to save the only child of your ill-fated friend. I am sure that you can help me.”

  Without waiting to be questioned, Valentine related the circumstances of

  Charlotte’s illness, and of his interview with Mr. Burkham.

  “I did not even know that the poor girl was ill,” said George Sheldon. “I have not seen Phil for months. He came here one day, and I gave him a bit of my mind. I told him if he tried to harm her I’d let the light in upon him and his doings. And I’ll keep my word.” />
  “But his motive? What, in the name of Heaven, can be his motive for taking her innocent life? He knows of the Haygarth estate, and must hope to profit by her fortune if she lives.”

  “Yes, and to secure the whole of that fortune if she dies. Her death would make her mother sole heir to that estate, and the mother is the merest tool in his hands. He may even have induced Charlotte to make a will in his favour, so that he himself may stand in her shoes.”

  “She would not have made a will without telling me of it.”

  “You don’t know that. My brother Phil can do anything. It would be as easy for him to persuade her to maintain secrecy about the transaction as to persuade her to make the will. Do you suppose he shrinks from multiplying lies and forgeries and hypocrisies? Do you suppose anything in that small way comes amiss to the man who has once brought his mind to murder? Why, look at the Scotch play of that fellow Shakespeare’s. At the beginning, your Macbeth is a respectable trustworthy sort of person, anxious to get on in life, and so on, and that’s all; but no sooner has he made an end of poor old Duncan, than he lays about him right and left — Banquo, Fleance, anybody and everybody that happens to be in his way. It was lucky for that Tartar of a wife of his that she hook’d it, or he’d soon have put a stop to her sleep-walking. There’s no such wide difference between a man and a tiger, after all. The tiger’s a decent fellow enough till he has tasted human blood; but when once he has, Lord save the country-side from the jaws of the man-eater!”

  “For Heaven’s sake let us waste no time in talk!” Valentine cried, impetuously. “I am to meet Burkham in Burlington Row directly I have got your advice.”

  “What for?”

  “To see Dr. Jedd, and take him down to Hastings, if possible.”

  “That won’t do.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Jedd’s appearance would give Phil the office. Jedd gave evidence on the Fryar trial, and must be a marked man to him. All Jedd can tell you is that Charlotte is being poisoned. You know that already. Of course she’ll want medical treatment, and so on, to bring her round; but she can’t get that under my brother’s roof. What you have to do is to get her away from that house.”