Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “It couldn’t be worse, sir.”

  Faunce related his discoveries, and Major Tow-good agreed that at all cost the truth must be kept from the murdered man’s mother. In her intervals of consciousness she had repeatedly asked about Faunce and the progress of his inquiry. And there had been hours of delirium in which she thought the fondly-loved son was at her bedside. She had taken a strange doctor for him, and had talked to him as to her son.

  No, she must not know while the knowledge could possibly be kept from her. But should she recover, and leave her room, the newspapers would tell her of Bolisco’s arrest, and the inquiry before the magistrate at Southampton, where he was to be taken on the following day. And it would not be possible to keep the newspapers from her. For her to recover, and know her son’s tragic fate, would mean a broken heart that death alone could cure.

  “Perhaps you’re right, Faunce. Even my wife would hardly wish the dear old lady to struggle back to life to suffer such a crushing blow. Poor Dick! We always knew that woman would be his ruin. His sin has found him out.”

  The Rannock murder was the cause célébre of the next few months. The inquiry before the Southampton magistrate was adjourned from week to week, and the case against James Bolisco gradually developed, till the chain of evidence became as strong as circumstantial evidence well can be. The numbers of the notes paid to the Wandsworth brewer by the landlord of the Game Cock were traced, and proved identical with the numbers in Chater’s list. Bolisco was sworn to by the boatman as the man who hired his boat on the date of Colonel Rannock’s journey to Southampton, and whom he never saw after the hiring. Bolisco was also identified by the landlord of a humble little inn on the road between Redbridge and Southampton, as having come to his house after midnight, on that same date, in a strange condition, his boots and trousers smothered in river mud, and one of his hands torn and bleeding. He had hurt it with a hammer, he said. He ate a heavy supper, drank half a bottle of brandy, paid his bill before he went to bed, and left next morning before anybody in the house was astir.

  Another link in the chain was a life-preserver which a Redbridge boy had picked up in a lane leading from the river to the village street, and on which were found minute splinters of bone, and tufts of human hair, adhering to the heavy leaden knob. Chater pronounced the hair to be of the colour and texture of his master’s, while the surgeon, who had given his evidence before the coroner, considered this formidable weapon the kind of instrument calculated to cause the fracture he had described at the inquest.

  The victim’s watch and tie pin, a valuable ruby, had been pawned by the murderer late in the year, and a West-end pawnbroker swore to Bolisco as the man from whom he received them. Watch and pin were Identified by Major Towgood.

  Bolisco had carried out his design with a kind of brutal carelessness of consequences which might have seemed more natural in one of Nero’s gladiators, a half-tamed savage from Dalmatian forests, than in a son of the London streets. He had presumed upon the consciousness of brute force, and when the inquest was over, and his victim’s identity unsuspected, he had considered himself safe for life. He stared at the witnesses in a blank surprise, as one fact after another was marshalled against him, and stood with bent brows, in a sullen apathy, at the end of the proceedings, when he heard himself committed for trial at the next assizes.

  In the dock at Winchester, and in the condemned cell at Newgate, he had time to reflect upon his mistakes, and to think how he might have done the thing better.

  That was James Bolisco’s repentance.

  Mrs. Rannock did not live to know of her son’s ghastly fate. Her frail life ended peacefully before Faunce’s discovery was a week old. Her last breath expired in words of love, her last movement was a feeble motion of her hand towards the beloved figure which her fancy had conjured out of thin air, the figure of her son, standing by her bedside, as she had seen him again and again in delirious dreams.

  Faunce did all that compassionate kindness could do for Bolisco’s wretched wife. The impression of her letter in the blotting-book had been one of the links in the chain of circumstance, for, taken in conjunction with Chater’s evidence, it showed why Rannock had gone to Southampton the day before the American steamer started. Her position as Bolisco’s wife made her impossible as a witness; but her letter was evidence, and her relations with the murderer became as notorious as every other detail in the story of the crime.

  “It can’t hurt me,” she told Faunce, the night after the death sentence at Winchester. “I’m past hurting. Bolisco’s better out of the world, for he’d never stop doing harm as long as he was in it — and the sooner I follow him the better for me.”

  Faunce proved a kind friend to the unhappy woman whose days and nights were haunted by the image of her murdered lover. Broken in spirits, all the evil ways of her dissipated youth wreaking their revenge upon health and beauty, the physician to whom Faunce took her pronounced her doom. The hand of death was upon her. It was only a question of time.

  “If she stays in London she will hardly last through the winter,” he told Faunce. “I should recommend Bournemouth or Ventnor — Ventnor for choice. And she may rub along through next summer. But you must stop the morphia habit.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” said Faunce; “but I am a busy man. She is not of my kith and kin. Only I don’t want her to die like a dog without a friend near her.”

  “She has been a very beautiful woman,” said the doctor pityingly. “One must be sorry for such a life thrown away.”

  Faunce engaged Betsy, the good-natured lodging-house drudge, to take care of Mrs, Randall, and took them to cottage lodgings at Ventnor, not far from the Consumption Hospital; and in that lovely spot, facing the blue water, Kate Delmaine lived through the summer and autumn after Bolisco’s execution. Faunce looking in at the cottage now and then — a flying visitor from Portsmouth or Southampton — to see that she was being properly cared for.

  He had found her almost penniless in her Chelsea lodgings after the trial at Winchester, her last five-pound note having been sent to the lawyer who had undertaken Bolisco’s defence. It was Lady Perivale’s generous gift upon which he was now drawing for Kate Delmaine’s comfort.

  “After all I owe it to her that I was able to pull the business through so easily,” he told himself, “and it’s only fair that she should profit by my client’s liberality.”

  The end came when November mists were rolling up the Channel, and the late roses were beginning to droop in the cottage garden. The end came peacefully, and not without the consolations of religion, for Mrs. Randall’s landlady was a good Church-woman, and in touch with her parish priest, who was kindly and sympathetic, and able to understand a broken heart, even in a difficult subject, like this woman, whose life had been a stranger to all good influences.

  “You’ve been a fast friend to me, Faunce,” she said, when she was dying, and he had been summoned hastily for the last farewell; “ and if I’d known a hard-headed, kind-hearted chap like you ten years ago I might have been a better woman. Well, I had my fling. There’s not many women have had more of their own way or been more looked up to than I was in poor old Tony’s time: there’s not many women that ever had a truer lover than Dick Rannock, with all his faults. He couldn’t keep straight with the cards,” she murmured, beginning to wander; “ but he was every inch a gentleman. Christ have mercy on his soul!”

  EPILOGUE.

  GRACE HALDANE TO SUSAN RODNEY.

  “Villa Rienzi, Rome, April 15.

  “YOU ask me, dear Sue, when I am going back to Grosvenor Square. If I were guided by my feelings at this present hour I should reply’Never!’ But feelings and inclinations may change, and my present distaste for London society and disgust at the thought of my London acquaintance may give way to the whim of the moment, and a sudden fancy for art, or music, or drama, which only London can give.

  “I hope I am not a vindictive woman, but I own that I can never again take pleasure in the society of
the people who so cruelly wronged me, the so-called friends who were willing to believe in misconduct that should have seemed impossible to any one who knew me; and who were not brave and honest enough to come to me and discover the truth from my own lips.

  “The tragedy of Colonel Rannock’s death has impressed me deeply. It is appalling to think of that energetic spirit, that soul of fire, quenched in a moment by a murderer’s hand — of the man once so admired and beloved lying unknown and unwept in that solitary spot where the waters rose and fell over his unhallowed grave.

  “I can but remember his talents, his charm of manner, and the days when I was perhaps nearer loving him than I suspected at the time. Thank God for that better and truer lover who came to my rescue, and who had but to enter the circle of my life to influence it for ever. Had I never known Arthur Haldane I might have married Colonel Rannock, and my fate might have been wretched, for I believe the only attraction I ever had for him, over and above my fortune, was my likeness to that other woman, his bad angel.

  “No, Sue, I am not going to bury myself alive, as you suggest. We have a host of friends in this enchanting cosmopolitan city — Italians, Americans, English, French, Germans, Russians, choice spirits whose love of art and beauty has brought them here, and whose pleasures take a higher range than expensive dinners at newly-opened restaurants, and occasional contact with Royal personages.

  “Arthur and I are utterly happy here. The atmosphere suits his work, and puts me in good spirits. We have found a delicious villa at Tivoli, where we shall retire towards the end of May, and where our days and nights will be spent in a garden of roses and lilies, with a fountain that makes music all day long. In the mean time this city furnishes inexhaustible pleasures and interests, and life is so vivid and joyous that I feel as if I only began to live when I came here.

  “Of my husband I need not write, for I think you know all that he is to me; and in August, when we go to our place on the Scottish Border, which I used not to like, but which Arthur says he shall adore, I hope my dear old Sue will break away from troublesome suburban pupils and come to us for a long visit. By that time Arthur’s new novel will be in the Press, and by that time, if all go well, there will be a young life in our home which will give new joys to our lives.

  “Ever your loving friend, “GRACE HALDANE.

  “P.S. — Pray never again address me as ‘Lady Perivale.’ I hate that semi-detached style. I am Mrs. Arthur Haldane, and am proud to bear my husband’s name.”

  THE END

  MARY

  This novel was Braddon’s final work of fiction and appeared posthumously in 1916.

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  I

  THERE is an hour in the twenty-four that has magic in it, that makes common things strange and ugly things beautiful, and London an enchanted city. It is the hour before sunrise, when a greenish-blue light creeps slowly over the housetops, and the street lamps grow dim. Over the river perhaps there is a flush of rose-colour — the first smile of the new day, but in the streets there is only this pale herald of the dawn.

  That strange light lent a certain artistic beauty to the decadence of Sanders Street, which once had dignity and even fashion, but was now a place of tenement houses and squalid shops — a street that had been slowly withering for a century, but had been the pink of respectability, though a little off colour as to fashion, a hundred years ago.

  It may have been a caprice of Austin Sedgwick’s which brought him through Sanders Street on his way to Tyburnia, after a night spent curiously, the first half at a smart card-party, and the later hours in the East End, where this young man varied the monotony of a government office and the banalities of modern society by an occasional descent into nethermost depths, where people who, having known him first as a queer sort of bloke, who came prying about, and asking questions, had gradually learnt to look upon him as a friend and a helper, and to welcome his appearance among them, and even to reproach him for not coming oftener, although the money help he gave was not large or frequent. The men and women he knew were the poorest of the poor, but even these had come to understand that he brought them something better than money.

  The street was empty and asleep in that faint light, all windows closely shut by people who considered fresh air a noxious thing. Austin looked at the windows and doors as he passed the silent houses, such noble old doors and doorways — massive, early Georgian. Before one threshold where the door was deeply recessed, between Doric pillars, he came to a sudden stop. For here there was something more vital than Georgian architecture to consider.

  A girl was sitting on the doorstep, fast asleep, with her head drooping forward upon her knees, and her face hidden. The hand that hung limp and pale by her side was small — a lady’s hand, Austin thought. She was not the kind of night-bird he expected to find upon a doorstep.

  “Have you no better place than this to rest in, my poor girl?” he asked, in his low serious voice, bending down to speak to her.

  She woke with a start, and looked at him with a countenance that was tragic in its expression of abject fear.

  “No, no,” she said. “Let me alone.”

  “I don’t want to distress you. I want to help you if I can.”

  Her head had resumed its drooping attitude. She had spoken in a drowsy voice, and he thought she was falling asleep again.

  “Have you no home?” he asked gently.

  “No. Can’t you let me sleep. I have been walking about all night. The policeman would not let me sleep. Why do you worry me? You are not a policeman.”

  “I don’t mean to be cruel. I will take you to some shelter, where you can have food and rest. You won’t be allowed to rest here. The first policeman who comes this way will disturb you.”

  “I know, I know,” she answered, lifting her head suddenly, wide-awake now.

  “Then get up and come with me, and I’ll find you a safe shelter.”

  “No, no, no! I won’t go with you — I won’t go into any house. There is a safer shelter that I can find for myself.”

  “You mean that you can throw yourself into the river. That is what you are thinking.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your face tells me your thought. My poor girl, be reasonable. I am a gentleman, and I try to be a Christian. Do you think I would deceive you?”

  “I have been deceived — I will never trust anybody again. I can go to the nearest workhouse. I should be safe there, I suppose. I will go nowhere with a stranger.”

  Her speech was the speech of a lady — voice and accent were refined, and the voice was of a quality that was more attractive to Austin Sedgwick than her face. And that had a certain beauty, perceptible under the disadvantage of haggard cheeks, and pallid lips.

  He talked to her for some time. She stood up to listen to him, stood facing him with one pale hand grasping the iron railing. She was tall and slim, and some long familiar words came into his mind as he looked at her.

  “Fashioned so slenderly, young and so fair.” Slender she was assuredly, of a willowy slenderness as she leant against the railings, faint and wan. And she was young; but for the rest there was only the delicate modelling of her features, and the pathetic expression of grey eyes with long black lashes, to promise that under happier conditions she might be beautiful.

  He remembered her look just now, and a vision
of the “dark arch and the swift flowing river” came upon him with a cold thrill. Had he come only in time to save her from that fate? For a girl to threaten suicide might not mean much; but there was a resolute look in this girl’s face that scared him.

  He talked to her seriously, begged her to confide in him.

  “I’m afraid you have been feeling the pinch of poverty,” he said.

  “Three days ago I was starving.”

  “And since then?”

  “I have been fed and cared for.”

  “By some good friend?”

  “By a she-devil.”

  The words came almost in a whisper between set teeth.

  “Tell me your story.”

  “It is too horrible to be told. I suppose there are many such women in London — going about like Satan, seeking whom they may devour. Not like roaring lions, but like creeping snakes. Loathsome, loathsome, loathsome!”

  The passion of resentment in her face as she spoke was dreadful, the sensitive lips trembled, the eyes grew larger and darker; so dark, yet there was fire in them. This young frail creature had a tremendous force of passion, and could have killed an enemy, he thought. All this time no tear had fallen from those vindictive eyes.

  He had hard work to win her confidence, but he had the divine gift of sympathy, and he won her at last to believe that he wished her well, and that he was a gentleman. Assured of this, she consented to walk a little way with him. They could not stand and talk on the doorstep any longer — for the dead hours were past, and the street was alive with the traffic of a new day.

  It was a quiet neighbourhood, so they could move freely and unnoticed in the dull grey streets, and by and by they came to a poor little coffee-house where a crockery teapot, some cups and saucers, and a stale egg in the window indicated the possibility of breakfast.

  She consented to go into this dingy place with him, and dropped half fainting into the nearest chair, where she sat shivering a little, while he ordered as comfortable a meal as the place could furnish. Tea, rolls and butter, with eggs, and a dish of cold ham.