Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “Heaven forbid, Jenny! One such death as poor Martin’s is enough in a family.”

  Mrs. Carleon was seated opposite to one of the windows; and looking up at this moment, she saw the dark face of the bailiff between herself and the winter sky.

  He was standing on a short ladder, busy, pruning a creeping plant that grew over the house; and she saw that he had opened the window a couple of inches at the top, in order to extricate a branch that had been shut in.

  “I wish you would send that man back to your other farm, Dudley,” she said; “he is always hanging about the house.”

  The medicines did not come till rather late in the evening. In spite of herself, Jenny could not forget what Agnes Marlow had said, and she wondered whether her husband would offer to administer them to her.

  He was seated at his desk, writing, when the maid-servant brought in the bottles; and he did not even look up as Jenny took them from their paper coverings.

  “I am going to take my medicine, Dudley,” she said.

  “That’s right, Jenny,” he answered, without raising his head.

  She felt an intense relief at finding him so indifferent; she had never confessed to herself that she could possibly be brought to suspect him; but a load seemed lifted from her mind by this most simple circumstance.

  The next day, and the next, she continued to take her medicines without the slightest notice from her husband. He was kind and attentive, asked often after her health, but said nothing about the medical treatment; he evidently attached very little importance to this slight attack of influenza.

  On the third day the surgeon called again at the Grey Farm. He found Jenny in her old place by the fire, Dudley reading the newspaper opposite to her, and Ralph Purvis mending the lock of the door.

  The bailiff was very handy as a smith, carpenter, or painter, and there always seemed something for him to do about the house now.

  This time the surgeon looked grave, as he felt his patient’s pulse.

  “You have not been taking my medicines, Mrs. Carleon,” he said.

  “Yes, indeed, I have taken them very regularly; have I not, Dudley?”

  “Why, to tell you the truth, I haven’t watched you closely enough to be able to vouch for your integrity, Jenny,” said her husband.

  “Then there is more debility than I thought, Mrs. Carleon. We must try and set you up again, however.”

  Jenny’s eyes wandered involuntarily to the portrait of Martin Carleon.

  “Is there any fever?” she asked, looking up anxiously at the surgeon’s face, as he stood before her, with his fingers on her wrist.

  “Why — yes, you are rather more feverish than you were a day or two ago,” he said with some hesitation.

  Her face grew suddenly white; but she said nothing. When the surgeon had taken his departure, she rose from her chair, and seemed as if she was going to run out of the room. Ralph the bailiff, on his knees at the threshold of the half-open door, rattled away at the lock he was mending. Kneeling where he did, he seemed to present an impassable barrier between the mistress of the Grey Farm and the world without.

  Dudley Carleon dropped the newspaper, as he started to his feet.

  “Jenny! Jenny! what is the matter with you?”

  “I want to get out of the house,” she said, looking about her wildly; “I want to run away. I know that if I stay here I shall die as he did!”

  She pointed to Martin’s picture on the wall before her.

  “Jenny!”

  “O, forgive me! forgive me, Dudley!” she said, throwing herself into her husband’s arms, and sobbing hysterically: “I do not doubt you — I esteem, respect, and love you. I know how foolish I am, and hate myself for my folly; but I am frightened! — I am frightened!”

  CHAPTER VII. MASTER AND SLAVE.

  IN spite of the doctor’s attention, in spite of her own care, Jenny Carleon did not regain her health. She felt herself gradually growing weaker; she felt that, by such slow degrees as were almost imperceptible, her strength was ebbing away from her. It was only by looking back at the end of a week, and remembering that seven days before she had been able to do this or that, which she was utterly powerless to do now, that she discovered how much she had changed. She struggled hard against this daily diminution of her strength, for she seemed to have an unreasonable horror of being confined to her room; but she succumbed at last, and kept her bed day after day. A good-tempered maid-servant waited upon her, and brought her medicines, which she poured out herself.

  Her husband came into her room several times a day to ask after her health. He brought her piles of novels obtained for her from a circulating-library in the market-town; but he still appeared to make light of her illness, and was so much occupied about the farm that he could seldom stay with her for any length of time.

  She used to ask every morning whether Ralph the bailiff was going away that day, always to be told that he was not, but that he would leave in a day or two at the latest. Once, after having received this answer, she turned her head round impatiently upon her pillow, and, with her face to the wall, burst into tears.

  “Jenny, what is the matter with you?” asked her husband.

  She did not answer; but he could see that her slight frame was shaken by her sobs.

  “Jenny, I insist upon knowing the meaning of this.”

  She lifted her head from the pillow, supported herself upon her elbow, and, putting her hair away from her tear-stained face, said to him solemnly, “Dudley Carleon, the presence of that man is killing me, day by day, and hour by hour. Shut up in this room, I cannot see him; but I can feel and know that an unseen influence is sapping my very life, and that influence is his. If you are not his slave, if you are not bound to him by some tie too fearful to be broken, send him from this house; or, if I have strength to crawl out of it, I will go my self.”

  “Jenny, Jenny, this is an invalid’s fancy. Don’t give me reason to think you are as mad as Agnes Marlow.”

  “Dudley Carleon, will you send that man away?”

  “Since you are so silly, yes. He shall go to-night.”

  She held out her wasted little hand to him with a smile.

  “Do this, Dudley,” she said, “and I shall think that you love me.”

  Something in the tone of her voice, in the sad but gentle expression of her face, touched his reserved and undemonstrative nature. Dudley Carleon clasped her suddenly to his breast, and hiding his face upon her shoulder sobbed aloud.

  “O, my poor little wife,” he said, “what is to become of us — what is to become of us?”

  “Dudley, Dudley, don’t cry. You terrify — you grieve me!”

  He rose from his seat by the bedside, and brushed the tears from his eyes.

  “lama fool, Jenny; for I distress you and myself. But make your mind easy, Ralph shall go to-night. As there is a heaven above us, he shall go to-night!”

  He turned out of the room as he finished speaking. It was now late in February; there had been continued wet weather for upwards of a week, and on this day the rain beat incessantly against the windows of Jenny’s room. The sky without was dull and leaden, and the wind whistled in the long corridor outside the door. Jenny found her novels very uninteresting. The volumes were too heavy for her to hold, and they dropped out of her weak hands and slid off the counterpane on to the floor. She lay, hour after hour, listening to every sound in the house — to the servants passing now and then across the hall below, to the occasional opening and shutting of a door, to the striking of the clocks, and to the barking of the sheep-dog in the back premises. The day was long and dreary, and the invalid welcomed the winter twilight and the maid-servant who brought her tea.

  “Who makes my tea, Mary?” Jenny asked, as the girl arranged the things on a table by the bed.

  “I do, ma’am.”

  “And nobody ever touches it but yourself?”

  “Nobody as I knows of, ma’am. I leave the teapot on the oven-top when I’ve mashed the tea
, for it to draw. I’m sometimes out of the kitchen; but I don’t suppose anyone would touch it.”

  “Is Ralph Purvis often in the kitchen?”

  “Well, he is, ma’am, pretty well always about there. The weather’s too bad for him to be much about the farm now, and he’s very handy indoors.”

  Half an hour afterwards, when the girl came to take the tray, she found the tea untouched; and her mistress told her to remove the tea-things, as she had no inclination either to eat or drink.

  The ceaseless and monotonous rain seemed to Jenny as if it were bent on flooding the Grey Farm that evening. The cold wind crept under the door of her room till the stiff folds of the heavy damask bed-curtains rustled. The sashes of the windows rattled every now and then, as if an angry hand had been beating at them from without.

  The shaded lamp by the bedside left the comers of the room in obscurity, and Jenny’s disordered fancy conjured up the glittering eyes of the bailiff leering at her out of the shadow.

  “O, this dreary, dismal place!” she said, over and over again. “Why does Dudley leave me here to die alone?”

  She could see her face in an oval mirror hanging upon the wall opposite to her bed. The dim reflection in the depths of this glass showed her a wan, pale, wasted face, and hollow, fever-bright eyes. It seemed strange to her; and she shuddered to know it was her own.

  “I shall look like that in my coffin,” she said, “except that my eyes will be closed.”

  Eleven o’clock struck before her husband came to his room. He had slept in an adjoining apartment during Jenny’s illness.

  She had in the course of the evening fallen several times into a feverish slumber, and could hardly help fancying she had slept for hours, and that the night must be far advanced. As the clock struck eleven, she fell asleep once more; but her rest was broken by troubled dreams.

  She dreamt that she was out upon the river-bank, with the rain falling upon her uncovered head, and drenching her thin nightdress. She was watching for Dudley, as she had watched for him upon the night of the bailiff’s return. Suddenly she found that she had a child in her arms — a miserable, puny baby, that clung to her convulsively, and twisted its tiny hands in the lace about her throat, as if it were trying to strangle her. She strove to release herself, but it hung about her with a heavy leaden weight that almost dragged her to the ground.

  The rain beating in her face blinded her; her naked feet slipped upon the river-bank; the low wail of the child rose to a shrill scream of terror, and she awoke, with the cold perspiration streaming down her forehead, to hear the Olney clock chime the quarter, and to hear, in the direction of the servants’ rooms, the same pitiful wail she had heard from the child in her dream.

  What did it mean? There were no children at the Grey Farm; and there never had been since her marriage.

  The house was said to be haunted. She had heard of more than one ghost-story attached to the dismal pile of building; but she had laughed at them as absurd. What if one of them were true?

  A strange, mad desire to encounter the supernatural terror — if terror there were — took possession of her. She crept out of her bed, wrapped herself in a shawl, and stole into the corridor. She was so weak that she could scarcely stand, but she supported herself by clinging to the wall, and contrived to reach the landing of the principal staircase, on the other side of which was a door communicating with the servants’ rooms.

  This door was ajar, and she could hear that the child’s cries proceeded from the other side.

  She passed into the servants’ corridor, and traced the sound to the little sitting-room that had once been occupied by Ralph and his sister. A light shone through the crevice under the door of this room, and through a keyhole which had been roughly cut in the wood.

  There had never been a lock to the door, which was only fastened by a latch and an iron bolt.

  She could hear the low pitiful wail of the child, and the voice of a woman trying to hush it to sleep. She fell on her knees at the top of the little flight of steps leading to the door, and looked through the keyhole into the room. Her husband was seated writing, at a small table, by the light of one candle. Behind his chair, and looking over him as he wrote, stood Ralph Purvis the bailiff. A woman dressed in a black gown and a thick gray shawl sat by the little fireplace with a child in her arms — a pale-faced, puny baby, that kept up an incessant wail. The woman had taken off her bonnet, and had fastened it by the strings to the back of her chair.

  Jenny knew this woman, by her likeness to the bailiff, to be his sister Martha, Dudley’s old housekeeper.

  Neither of the three uttered a word, and the silence was only broken by the scratching of Dudley’s pen over the paper, and the smothered crying of the child, muffled in the woman’s shawl. When Dudley’s pen had reached the bottom of the page he stopped, glanced over what he had written, and then signed his name.

  “Now, your signature as witness,” he said, handing the pen to Ralph.

  “I sha’n’t sign!” answered the bailiff.

  “Why not?”

  “Because, I tell you again, it won’t do.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Yes. You settle this place on your lawful son and heir, Dudley Carleon junior, crying there in the lap of his mother, your lawful wife, Martha Carleon. You settle this property on my sister’s child, provided we renounce all claim upon you and keep your secret, and you go off to Australia with that curly-haired Miss who calls herself your wife! I tell you it won’t do. It’s not enough. I want the farm: but I want money to improve the farm — I want that six thousand pounds; and I’ll have that, or nothing.”

  “Six thousand pounds!” Jenny mechanically repeated the words with a shudder. It was her fortune, no doubt, that this man wanted. Her fortune, which, should she die childless, would go to Dudley Carleon; such had been the condition in the marriage-settlement to which she had consented.

  The woman sitting over the fire never once looked up during this brief dialogue. Dudley buried his face in his hands, with a loud groan, and let his head fall upon the writing before him.

  Ralph Purvis struck his clenched fist upon the table, and said, “Look ye here, Muster Carleon. Go back a bit; go back to four, or nigh upon five years ago, when you was a stripling just come home from college, and Muster Martin was alive, and well and strong, and promising to make older bones than you, any day. Do you remember moping about the place; looking miserable; or making believe to be happy, and looking more miserable still for making believe? Do you remember one afternoon, when they was making hay in one of the river-side meadows, and you was lying upon the ground pretending to read your book — do you remember my coming up behind you sudden, and hearing you groan? I asks you what’s the matter, and what it is that’s on your mind; and after a deal of talk, you tells me it’s college debts; debts as you dare not mention to Muster Martin, because he’s been so kind to you already; and you’re afraid of an exposure, and of being expelled, perhaps, and all sorts of things; and you’re very proud, you say, and you’ll cut your throat sooner than you’ll live to be disgraced. I told you I was very sorry for you, and said that if you’d only been the eldest son instead of the youngest, things would have been easy enough, for then you could have raised the money upon a mortgage. We spoke about it again the next day, and the next, and the next after that, till we came, somehow, to be always talking of it, and we grew quite friendly — a’most like equals.”

  “Curse you!” groaned Dudley, with his face still hidden.

  “At the end of a month, Muster Carleon, I was awoke one moonlight night by you standing by my bedside. If I’d ever believed in ghosts, I should have thought you was one. If a ghost’s horrid to look at, it can’t be more horrid to look at than you was that night. You had a slip of paper in your hand, with something wrote upon it — wrote small and backwards, and not like your own handwriting. ‘Ralph,’ you said, ‘you’re going to the market-town to-morrow; get me some of the stuff that’s written dow
n here, at a chemist’s, and don’t tell anybody who you’re getting it for!’ That was every word as passed between us. I got the stuff the next day; but I told the chemist’s lad to give me double the quantity that was written on the paper, and to give it me in two packets, labelled alike and sealed alike, and to sign his name and write the date upon one of ‘em. The shop was crowded, being market-day, and the master of it took no notice of me, or what I was buying. I kept the packet that was signed and dated, and I gave you the other. This was early in August. Muster Carleon died on the 24th of September. Well; things went smooth enough for a time; you got out of your debts by means of a mortgage, which was kept pretty dark until the farm improved under my care, and you paid it off. Now, all this time I hadn’t asked you a favour, not so much as for a sixpence over my wages; but it isn’t strange that I expected to gain something by having served you faithful.”

  “Served me! Yes, as the devil serves his bonded slaves.”

  “I served you faithful, anyhow: and I said to you at last, ‘Come, Muster Carleon, you’re beholden to me for many things, but most of all you’re beholden to me for having kept a still tongue. Marry my sister, and make her mistress of the Grey Farm.’ You laughed in my face, and refused me what I asked. I could afford to bide my time. Three years after your brother’s death I had an explanation with you in this very room. You knocked me down and split my head open; but you came to terms, and, a month after, you married my sister by bans at the Borough Church, London. You were ashamed of your wife, and you were ashamed of what you had done. So you buried her down in a country village, and as soon as you set eyes upon that fine curly-haired Miss of yours, you packed me off to keep company with my sister. But I wasn’t quite such a fool as you took me for, Muster Carleon. I had my spies in Olney, and I heard all about you from them. I heard of your marriage, and I heard of your wife’s fortune; but I determined to bide my time, and to make things work round to my own advantage. I waited three or four months after your marriage, and then, having sent for you to throw you off your guard, I stole a march upon you, and came down here to look about me. I found poor Miss slightly ailing. Since then she’s got worse; and yesterday I wrote to my sister, telling her to come down here, as I thought it likely she might have her rights before long.”