Within all was gloom, save in one corner by the portress’s den, where a glimmer of gas showed the numbered board whereon hung the keys which admitted the lodgers to their several apartments. But Desrolles knew every twist of the corkscrew staircase. Drunk as he was, he wound his way up safely enough, with only an occasional lurch and an occasional stumble. He managed to unlock the door of his room, after trying the key upside down once or twice, and making some circuitous scratchings on the panel. He managed to strike a lucifer and light his candle, leaning against the mantel-piece as he performed that feat, and giving a drunken chuckle when it was done. But his nerves must have been in a very shaky condition, for when a man, who had crept softly into the room behind him, laid a strong hand upon his shoulder, he collapsed, and made as if he would have fallen to the ground ‘What do you want?’ he asked in French.
‘You,’ answered the intruder in English. ‘I arrest you on suspicion of being concerned in the murder of La Chicot. You know all about it. You were examined at the inquest. Anything you say now will be used as evidence against you. You had better come quietly with me.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Desrolles, still in French. ‘ I am a Frenchman.’
‘Oh, very much of that. You’ve been lodging here three weeks. You are known to be an Englishman. You took your passage to-day for Valparaiso. I called at the office to make inquiries an hour after you left it. No nonsense, Mr. Desrolles. All you’ve got to do is to come quietly with me.’
‘You’ve got some one else outside, I suppose,’ said Desrolles, with a savage glare at the door.
His expression in this moment was diabolical; a wild beast — a beast of a low type, not your kingly lion or your lordly tiger — at bay and knowing-escape impossible, might so look; the thin lips curling upward above the long sharks’ teeth; the grizzled brows contracted — the eyes emitting sparks of lurid light.
‘ Of course,’ answered the man, coolly. ‘ You don’t suppose I should be such a fool as to trust myself in a hole like this without help. I’ve got my mate on the landing, and we’ve both got revolvers. Ah, none of that, now,’ ejaculated the detective suddenly, as Desrolles plunged his lean hand into his breast pocket. ‘ Stow that, now. Is it a knife?’
It was a knife, and a murderous one. Desrolles had it out, and the long-pointed blade ready, before his captor could stop him. The man sprang upon him, caught him by the waist, before the knife could do mischief; and then the two closed, hand against hand, limb against limb, Desrolles wrestling with his foe as only rage and despair can wrestle.
He had been a famous bruiser in days of old. To-night he had the unnatural strength given the overtasked sinews by a mind on the edge of madness. He fought like a madman: he fought like a tiger. There was not a muscle — not a sinew — that was not strained to its utmost in that savage conflict.
For some moments Desrolles seemed the victor. The detective had lied when he said that he had help at hand. The French policeman who bad planned to meet him at that house at midnight had not yet come, and the Englishman had been too impatient to wait, believing himself and bis revolver more than a match for one drunken old man.
He did not want to use his revolver. have been a hazardous thing even to wound his man. It was his duty to take him alive, and surrender him safe and sound to be dealt with by the law of his country.
‘Come,’ he said, soothingly, having hardly enough breath for so much speech, ‘let me put the bracelets on and take you away quietly. What’s the use of this humbug?’
Desrolles, with his teeth set, answered never a word. He had got his antagonist very near the door; once across the threshold, a last vigorous thrust from his lean arms might hurl the man backwards down the steep staircase — certain death to the intruder. Desrolles’ eyes were fixed upon the doorway, the door standing conveniently open. His blood-shot eyeballs flashed fire. It was in his mind that the thing was to be done. One more herculean effort, and his foe would be across the threshold.
Possibly the detective saw that look of triumph in the savage face, and divined his danger. However that might be, he gathered himself together, and with a sudden impetus, flinging all his weight against Desrolles, he drove his foe before him across the narrow room, hurled him with all his might against the wall, casting him loose for the moment in order to grip him tighter afterwards.
But as that tall figure fell with terrific force against the gaudy-papered wall, there was a sudden crashing sound, at which the detective recoiled with a cry of horror. The frail lath and plaster partition split asunder, the rotten wood crumbled and scattered itself in a cloud of dust, half that side of the room dropped into ruin, as if the house had been a house of cards, and, with one hoarse shriek, Desrolles rolled backwards into empty air.
They found him presently upon the pavement below, so battered and disfigured by that awful fall as to be hardly recognizable even by the eyes that had looked upon him a few minutes before. In falling he had struck against the timbers that shored up the rotten old house, and life had bran beaten out of him before he touched the stones below. It was a bad end of a bad man. There was nobody to be sorry for him, except the detective, who had lost the chance of a handsome reward.
The Parisian journals next day made a feature of the catastrophe. ‘Fall of part of a house in the Boulevard Louis Capet. Horrible death of one of the inmates.’
The English newspapers of a later date contained the account of the pursuit and arrest of Desrolles, his desperate resistance, and awful death.
EPILOGUE.
MR. and Mrs. Treverton went back to Hazlehurst Manor, and there was much rejoicing among their friends at John Treverton’s escape from the critical position in which the hazards of life had placed him. The subject was a painful one, and people, in their intercourse with John and Laura, touched upon it as lightly as possible. Those revelations about John Treverton’s first marriage, his Bohemian existence under an assumed name, his poverty, and so on, had created no small sensation among a community which rarely had anything more exciting to talk about than the state of the weather, or the appearance of the crops. People had talked their fill by the time Mr. and Mrs. Treverton came back, for they had spent a month at a Dorsetshire watering-place on their way home, for the benefit of Laura’s health, whereby the scandal was stale and almost worn threadbare when they arrived at the Manor House.
Only one event of any importance had happened during their absence. Edward Clare — the poet, the man who sauntered through life hand-in-hand with the muses, dwelling apart from common clay in a world of his own — had suddenly sickened of elegant leisure, and had started all at once for the Cape to learn ostrich farming, with the deliberate intention of settling for life in that distant land.
‘An adventurous career will suit me, and I shall make money,’ he told those few acquaintances to whom he condescended to explain his views. ‘My people are tired of seeing me lead an idle life. They have no faith in my future as a poet. Perhaps they are right. The rarest and finest of poets have made very little money. It is only charlatanism in literature that really pays. A man who can write down to the level of the herd commands an easy success. Herrick, if he were alive to-day, would not make a living by his pen.
So Edward Clare departed from the haunts of his youth, and there was no one save his mother to regret him. The Vicar knew too well that John Treverton’s arrest was his son’s work, and treachery so base was a sin his honest heart could not forgive. He was glad that Edward had gone, and his secret prayer was that the young man might learn honesty as well as industry in his self-imposed exile.
To the exile himself anything was better than to see the man he had impotently striven to injure, happy and secure from all future malice. Weighed against that mortification the possible difficulties and hardships of the life to which he was going were as nothing to him.
The year wore on, and brought a new and strange gladness and a deep sense of responsibility to John Treverton. One balmy May morning his first-b
orn son opened his innocent blue eyes upon a bright young world, arrayed in all the glory of spring. The child was placed in his father’s arms by the good old Hazlehurst doctor, who had attended Jasper Treverton in his last illness.
‘How proud my old friend would have been to see his family name in a fair way of being continued in the land for many a long year to come,’ he said.
‘Thank God all things have worked round well for us, at last,’ answered John Treverton, gravely.
In the ripeness and splendour of August and harvest, when the heather was in bloom on the rolling moor, and the narrow streams were dried up by the fierceness of the sun, George Gerard came down to the Manor House to spend a brief holiday; and it happened, by a strange coincidence, that Laura had invited Celia Clare to stay with her at the same time. They all had a pleasant time in the peerless summer weather. There were picnics and excursions across the moor, with much exciting adventure, and some risk of losing oneself altogether in that sparsely populated world; and in all these adventures George and Celia had a knack of finding themselves abandoned by the other two — or perhaps it was they who went astray, though they always protested that it was Mr. and Mrs. Treverton who deserted them.
‘I shouldn’t wonder if we came to a bad end, like the babes in the wood,’ protested Celia.
‘ Imagine us existing on unripe blackberries for a week or so, and then lying resignedly down to die. I don’t believe a bit in the birds putting leaves over us. That’s a fable invented for the pantomime. Birds are a great deal too selfish. No one who had ever seen a pair of robins fight for a bit of bread would believe in those benevolent birds who buried the babes in the wood.’
Being occasionally lost on the moor gave Celia and Mr. Gerard great opportunities for conversation. They were obliged to find something to talk about; and in the end naturally told each other their inmost thoughts. And so it came about, in the most natural way in the world, that one blazing noontide Celia found herself standing before a Druidic table, gazing idly at the big gray stones half embedded in heather and bracken, with George Gerard’s arm round her waist, and with her head placidly resting against his shoulder.
He had been asking her if she would wait for him. That was all. He had not asked her if she loved him, having made up his own mind upon that question, unassisted.
‘Darling, will you wait for me?’ he asked, looking down at her, with eyes brimming over with love.
‘Yes, George,’ she answered, meekly, quite a transformed Celia, all her pertness and flippancy gone.
‘It may be a long while, dear,’ he said, gravely; ‘almost as long as Rachel waited for Jacob.’
‘I don’t mind that, provided there is no Leah to come between us.’
‘There shall be no Leah.’
So they were engaged, and, in the dim cloudland of the future, Celia saw a vision of Harley Street, a landau, and a pair of handsome grays.
‘Doctors generally have grays, don’t they, George?’ she asked, presently, apropos to nothing particular.’
George’s thoughts had not travelled so far as the carriage and pair stage of his existence, and he did not understand the question.
‘ Yes, dear, there is a Free Hospital in the Gray’s Inn Road,’ he answered, simply, ‘but I was at Bartlemy’s.’
‘Oh, you foolish George, I was thinking of horses, not hospitals. What colour shall you choose when you start your carriage?’
‘We’ll talk it over, dearest, when we are going to start the carriage.
Mr. and Mrs. Treverton heard of the engagement with infinite pleasure, nor did the Vicar or his easy-tempered wife offer any objection.
Before the first year of Celia’s betrothal was over, John Treverton had persuaded the good old village doctor to retire, and to accept a handsome price for his comfortable practice, which covered a district of sixty miles circumference, and offered ample work for an energetic young man. This practice John Treverton gave to George Gerard as a free gift.
‘ Don’t consider it a favour,’ he said, when the surgeon wanted it to be treated as a debt, to be paid out of his future earnings. ‘ The obligation is all on my side. I want a clever young doctor, whom I know and esteem, instead of any charlatan who might happen to succeed our old friend. The advantage is all on my side. You will help me in all my sanitary improvements, and my nursery will be safe in the inevitable season of measles and scarlatina.’
Thus it came to pass that Celia, as well as John Treverton and his wife, was able to say,
‘But in some wise all things wear round betimes,
And wind up well.’
THE END
VIXEN
Vixen (1879) tells of the experiences of Violet ‘Vixen’ Tempest after the death of her beloved father. She is courted by Captain Winstanely who, after being rejected by Violet, takes the unusual step of marrying her mother instead, leading to an interesting domestic situation, which the novel exploits to sensational effect.
An intriguing feature of this novel is its commentary upon Violet’s voracious reading of sensation fiction (of which Braddon was a prolific writer) and the effect this has on her expectations in life — a technique reminiscent of Jane Austen’s critique of Gothic fiction in Northanger Abbey (1818) and of Braddon’s own novel The Doctor’s Wife (1864).
The dramatic coastline of the Isle of Wight, where part of the novel is set
CONTENTS
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
A Pretty Horsebreaker.
The moon had newly risen, a late October moon, a pale almost imperceptible crescent, above the dark pine spires in the thicket through which Roderick Vawdrey came, gun in hand, after a long day’s rabbit-shooting. It was not his nearest way home, but he liked the broad clearing in the pine wood, which had a ghostly look at dusk, and was so still and lonely that the dart of a squirrel through the fallen leaves was a startling event. Here and there a sturdy young oak that had been newly stripped of its bark lay among the fern, like the naked corpse of a giant. Here and there a tree had been cut down and slung across the track, ready for barking. The ground was soft and spongy, slippery with damp dead leaves, and inclined in a general way to bogginess; but it was ground that Roderick Vawdrey had known all his life, and it seemed more natural to him than any other spot upon mother earth.
On the edge of this thicket there was a broad ditch, with more mud and dead fern in it than water, a ditch strongly suspected of snakes, and beyond the ditch the fence that enclosed Squire Tempest’s domain — an old manor house in the heart of the New Forest. It had been an abbey before the Reformation, and was still best known as the Abbey House.
“I wonder whether I’m too late to catc
h her,” speculated Roderick, shifting his bag from one shoulder to the other; “she’s no end of fun.”
In front of the clearing there was a broad five-barred gate, and beside the gate a keeper’s cottage. The flame of a newly-lighted candle flashed out suddenly upon the autumn dusk, while Roderick stood looking at the gate.
“I’ll ask at the lodge,” he said; “I should like to say good-bye to the little thing before I go back to Oxford.”
He walked quickly on to the gate. The keeper’s children were playing at nothing particular just inside it.
“Has Miss Tempest gone for her ride this afternoon?” he asked.
“Ya-ase,” drawled the eldest shock-headed youngster.
“And not come back yet?”
“Noa. If she doant take care her’ll be bogged.”
Roderick hitched his bag on to the top of the gate, and stood at ease waiting. It was late for the little lady of Tempest Manor to be out on her pony; but then it was an understood thing within a radius of ten miles or so that she was a self-willed young person, and even at fifteen years of age she had a knack of following her own inclination with that noble disregard of consequences which characterises the heaven-born ruler.
Mr. Vawdrey had not waited more than ten minutes when there came the thud of hoofs upon the soft track, a flash of gray in the distance, something flying over those forky branches sprawling across the way, then a half-sweet, half-shrill call, like a bird’s, at which the keeper’s children scattered themselves like a brood of scared chickens, and now a rush, and a gray pony shooting suddenly into the air and coming down on the other side of the gate, as if he were a new kind of skyrocket.
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