“O miss, if you please,” she said, “Mrs. Peters says would you step upstairs this minute?”
Mrs. Peters was the nurse who attended on Mr. William. Lucy pressed my hand. “To-morrow, dearest, to-morrow I will tell you all.”
She hurried from the room, and I sank into a chair by the fire, with my book lying open in my lap, unable to read a line, unable to think, except upon one subject — the secret which I was so soon to learn. If she had but spoken then! A few words more, and what unutterable misery might have been averted!
I was aroused from my reverie by Laurence, who came to challenge me to a game at billiards. On my pleading fatigue as an excuse for refusing, he seated himself on a stool at my feet, offering to read aloud to me.
“What shall it be, Bella? — Paradise Lost, De Quincey’s Essays, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson—”
“Tennyson by all means! The dreary rain-blotted sky outside those windows, and the bleak moorland in the distance, are perfectly Tennysonian. Read Locksley Hall.”
His deep melodious voice rolled out the swelling verses; but I heard the sound without its meaning. I could only think of the mystery which had been kept so long a secret from my lover. When he had finished the poem he threw aside his book, and sat looking earnestly at me.
“My solemn Bella,” he said, “what on earth are you thinking about?”
The broad glare of the blaze from an enormous sea-coal fire was full upon his handsome face. I tried to rouse myself, and, laying my hands upon his forehead, pushed back his curling chestnut hair. As I did so I for the first time perceived a cicatrice across his left temple — a deep gash, as if from the cut of a knife, but a wound of remote date.
“Why, Laurence,” I said, “you tell me you were never thrown, and yet you have a scar here that looks like the evidence of some desperate fall. Did you get it in hunting?”
“No, my inquisitive Bella! No horse is to blame for that personal embellishment. I believe it was done when I was a child of two or three years old; but I have no positive recollection of the event, though I have a vague remembrance of wearing a sticking-plaster bandage across my forehead, and being unconscionably petted by Lucy and my mother.”
“But it looks like a scar from a cut — from the cut of a knife.”
“I must have fallen upon some sharp instrument, — the edge of one of the stone steps, perhaps, or a metal scraper.”
“My poor Laurence, the blow might have killed you!”
He looked grave.
“Do you know, Bella,” he said, “how difficult it is to dissociate the vague recollections of the actual events of our childhood from childish dreams that are scarcely more vague? Sometimes I have a strange fancy that I can remember getting this cut, and that it was caused by a knife thrown at me by another child.”
“Another child! what child?”
“A boy of my own age and size.”
“Was he your playfellow?”
“I can’t tell; I can remember nothing but the circumstance of his throwing the knife at me, and the sensation of the hot blood streaming into my eyes and blinding me.”
“Can you remember where it occurred?”
“Yes, in the gallery upstairs.”
We lunched at two. After luncheon Laurence went to his own room to write some letters; Lady Adela and my aunt read and worked in the drawing-room, while I sat at the piano, rambling through some sonatas of Beethoven.
We were occupied in this manner when Lucy came into the room, dressed for walking.
“I have ordered the carriage, mamma,” she said. “I am going over to York to see that Beck has everything prepared. I shall be back to dinner.”
Lady Adela seemed to grow more helpless every day, — every day to rely more and more on her stepdaughter.
“You are sure to do all for the best, Lucy,” she said. “Take plenty of wraps, for it is bitterly cold.”
“Shall I go with you, Lucy?” I asked.
“You! O, on no account, dear Isabel. What would Laurence say to me if I carried you off for a whole afternoon?”
She hurried from the room, and in two minutes the lumbering close carriage drove away from the portico. My motive in asking to accompany her was a selfish one: I thought it possible she might resume the morning’s interrupted conversation during our drive.
If I had but gone with her!
It is so difficult to reconcile oneself to the irrevocable decrees of Providence; it is so difficult to bow the head in meek submission to the awful fiat; so difficult not to look back to the careless hours which preceded the falling of the blow, and calculate how it might have been averted.
The February twilight was closing in. My aunt and Lady Adela had fallen asleep by the fire. I stole softly out of the room to fetch a book which I had left upstairs. There was more light in the hall and on the staircase than in the drawing-room; but the long gallery was growing dark, the dusky shadows gathering about the faded portraits of my lover’s ancestry. I stopped at the top of the staircase, and looked for a moment towards the billiard-room. The door was open, and I could see a light streaming from Laurence’s little study. I went to my own room, contrived to find the book I wanted, and returned to the gallery. As I left my room I saw that the green-baize door at the extreme end of the gallery was wide open.
An irresistible curiosity attracted me towards those mysterious apartments. As I drew nearer to the staircase I could plainly perceive the figure of a man standing at the half-glass door within. The light of a fire shining in the room behind him threw the outline of his head and figure into sharp relief. There was no possibility of mistaking that well-known form — the broad shoulders, the massive head, and clusters of curling hair. It was Laurence Wendale looking through the glass door of the invalid’s apartments. He had penetrated those forbidden chambers, then. I thought immediately of the mystery connected with the invalid, and of Lucy’s anxiety that it should be kept from her brother, and I hurried forward towards the baize-door. As I advanced, he saw me, and rattled impatiently at the lock of the inner door. It was locked, but the key was on the outside. He did not speak, but rattled the lock incessantly, signifying by a gesture of his head that I was to open the door. I turned the key, the door opened outwards, and I was nearly knocked down by the force with which he flung it back and dashed past me.
“Laurence!” I said, “ Laurence! what have you been doing here, and who locked you in?”
He did not answer me, but strode along the gallery, looking at each of the doors till he came to the only open one, that of the billiard-room, which he entered.
I was wounded by his rude manner; but I scarcely thought of that, for I was on the threshold of the apartments occupied by the mysterious invalid, and I could not resist one hurried peep into the room behind the half-glass door.
It was a roomy apartment, very plainly furnished: a large fire burned in the grate, which was closely guarded by a very high brass fender, the highest I had ever seen. There was an easy-chair close to this fender, and on the floor beside it a heap of old childish books, with glaring coloured prints, some of them tom to shreds. On the mantelpiece there was a painted wooden figure, held together by strings, such as children play with; Exactly opposite to where I stood there was another door, which was half open, and through which I saw a bedroom, famished with two iron bedsteads, placed side by side. There were no hangings either to these bedsteads or to the windows in the sitting-room, and the latter were protected by iron bars. A horrible fear came over me. Mr. William was perhaps a madman. The seclusion, the locked doors, the guarded fireplace and windows, the dreary curtainless beds, the watchfulness of Lucy, James Beck, and the nurse, — all pointed to this conclusion.
Tenantless as the rooms looked, the maniac might be lurking in the shadow. I turned to hurry back to the gallery, and found myself face to face with Mrs. Peters, the nurse, with a small tea-tray in her hands.
“My word, miss,” she said, “how you did startle me, to be sure! What are you doing here? and
why have you unlocked this door?”
“To let out Mr. Laurence.”
“Mr. Laurence I” she exclaimed, in a terrified voice.
“Yes; he was inside this door. Someone had locked him in, I suppose; and he told me to open it for him.”
“O miss, what have you done! what have you done! Today, above all things, when we’ve had such an awful time with him! What have you done!”
What had I done? I thought the woman must herself be half distraught, so unaccountable was the agitation of her manner. O merciful Heaven, the laugh! the harsh, mocking, exulting, idiotic laugh! This time it rang in loud and discordant peals to the very rafters of the old house.
“O, for pity’s sake,” I cried, clinging to the nurse, “ what is it, what is it?”
She threw me off, and rushing to the balustrades at the head of the staircase, called loudly, “Andrew, Henry, bring lights!”
They came, the two men-servants, — old men, who had served in that house for thirty or forty years, — they came with candles, and followed the nurse to the billiard-room.
The door of communication between that and Laurence Wendale’s study was wide open, and on the threshold, with the light shining upon him from within the room, stood the double of my lover; the living, breathing image of my Laurence, the creature I had seen at the half-glass door, and had mistaken for Laurence himself. His face was distorted by a ghastly grin, and he was uttering some strange unintelligible sounds as we approached him, — guttural and unearthly murmurs horrible to hear. Even in that moment of bewilderment and terror I could see that the cambric about his right wrist was splashed with blood.
The nurse looked at him severely; he slunk away like a frightened child, and crept into a corner of the billiard-room, where he stood grinning and mouthing at the blood-stains upon his wrist.
We rushed into the little study. O horror of horrors! the writing-table was overturned; ink, papers, pens, all scattered and trampled on the floor; and in the midst of the confusion lay Laurence Wendale, the blood slowly ebbing away, with a dull gurgling sound, from a hideous gash in his throat.
A penknife, which belonged to Laurence’s open desk, lay amongst the trampled papers, crimsoned to the hilt.
Laurence Wendale had been murdered by his idiot twin-brother.
* * * *
There was an inquest. I can recall at any hour, or at any moment, the whole agony of the scene. The dreary room, adjoining that in which the body lay; the dull February sky; the monotonous voice of the coroner and the medical men; and myself, or some wretched, shuddering, white-lipped creature that I could scarcely believe to be myself, giving evidence. Lady Adela was reproved for having kept her idiot son at Fernwood without the knowledge of the murdered man; but every effort was made to hush-up the terrible story. William Wendale was tried at York, and transferred to the county lunatic asylum, there to be detained during her Majesty’s pleasure. His unhappy brother was quietly buried in the Wendale vault, the chief mausoleum in a damp moss-grown church close to the gates of Fernwood.
It is upwards of ten years since all this happened; but the horror of that February twilight is as fresh in my mind to-day as it was when I lay stricken — not senseless, but stupefied with anguish — on a sofa in the drawing-room at Fernwood, listening to the wailing of the wretched mother and sister.
The misery of that time changed me at once from a young woman to an old one; not by any sudden blanching of my dark hair, but by the blotting-out of every girlish feeling and of every womanly hope. This change in my own nature has drawn Lucy Wendale and me together with a link far stronger than any common sisterhood. Lady Adela died two years after the murder of her son. The Fernwood property has passed into the hands of the heir-at-law.
Lucy lives with me at the Isle of Wight. She is my protectress, my elder sister, without whom I should be lost; for I am but a poor helpless creature.
It was months after the quiet funeral in Fernwood church before Lucy spoke to me of the wretched being who had been the author of so much misery.
“The idiotcy of my unhappy brother,” she said, “was caused by a fall from his nurse’s arms, which resulted in a fatal injury to the brain. The two children were infants at the time of the accident, and so much alike that we could only distinguish Laurence from William by the different colour of the ribbons with which the nurse tied the sleeves of the children’s white frocks. My poor father suffered bitterly from his son’s affliction; sometimes cherishing hope even in the face of the verdict which medical science pronounced upon the poor child’s case, sometimes succumbing to utter despair. It was the intense misery which he himself endured that made him resolve on the course which ultimately led to so fatal a catastrophe. He determined on concealing William’s affliction from his twin-brother. At a very early age the idiot child was removed to the apartments in which he lived until the day of his brother’s murder. James Beck and the nurse, both experienced in the treatment of mental affliction, were engaged to attend him; and indeed the strictest precaution seemed necessary, as, on the only occasion of the two children meeting, William evinced a determined animosity to his brother, and inflicted a blow with a knife the traces of which Laurence carried to his grave. The doctors attributed this violent hatred to some morbid feeling respecting the likeness between the two boys. William flew at his brother as some wild animal springs upon its reflection in a glass. With me, in his most violent fit, he was comparatively tractable; but the strictest surveillance was always necessary; and the fatal deed which the wretched, but irresponsible creature at last committed might never have been done but for the imprudent absence of James Beck and myself.”
SAMUEL LOWGOOD’S REVENGE
FROM the first to the last we were rivals and enemies. Perhaps it was on my part that the hatred, which eventually became so terrible a passion between us, first arose. Perhaps it was, perhaps it was! At any rate, he always said that it was so. I am an old man, and many memories of the past have lost their vivid colouring; but that portion of my life which relates to him is as fresh in my mind to-night as ever it was fifty years ago, when his gracious Majesty George the Second was king, and Christopher Weldon and I were junior clerks together in the great house of Tyndale and Tyndale, shipowners, Dockside, Willborough.
He was very handsome. It was hard for a pale-faced, sallow-complexioned, hollow-eyed, insignificant lad as I was to sit at the same desk with Christopher Weldon, and guess the comparisons that every stranger entering the counting-house must involuntarily make as he looked at us — if he looked at us, that is to say; and it was difficult not to look at Christopher. Good heavens! I can see him now, seated at the worn, old, battered, ink-stained desk, with the July sunlight streaming down through the dingy office-windows upon his pale golden curls; his bright blue eyes looking out through the smoky panes at the forests of masts, dangling ropes, and grimy sails in the dock outside; one girlish white hand carelessly thrown upon the desk before him, and the delicate fingers of the other twisted in his flowing curls. He was scarcely one-and-twenty, the spoiled pet of a widowed mother, the orphan son of a naval officer, and the idol of half the women in the seaport of Willborough. It was not so much to be wondered at, then, that he was a fop and a maccaroni, and that the pale golden curls which he brushed off his white forehead were tied on his coat-collar with a fine purple ribbon on Sundays and holidays. His cravat and ruffles were always of delicate lace, worked by his loving mother’s hands; his coats were made by a London tailor, who had once worked for Mr. George Selwyn and Lord March, and he wore small diamond shoe-buckles and a slender court-sword sometimes out of office-hours.
I, too, was an orphan; but I was doubly an orphan. My father and mother had both died in my infancy. I had been reared in a workhouse, had picked up chance waifs and strays of education from the hardest masters, and had been drafted, at the age of ten, into the offices of Tyndale and Tyndale. Errand boy, light porter, office drudge, junior clerk — one by one I had mounted the rounds in this troublesome la
dder, which for me could only be begun from the very bottom; and at the age of twenty-one I found myself — where? In a business character, I was on a level with Christopher Weldon, the son of a gentleman. How often I, the pauper orphan of a bankrupt cornchandler, had to hear this phrase, — the son of a gentleman! In a business character, I say, I, Samuel Lowgood, who had worked and slaved and drudged, and been snubbed, throughout eleven long weary years — and in spite of all had become a clever accountant and a thorough arithmetician — was in the same rank as Christopher Weldon, who had been in the office exactly four weeks, just to see, as his mother said, whether it would suit him.
He was about as much good in the counting-house as a wax doll would have been, and, like a wax doll, he looked very pretty; but Messrs. Tyndale and Tyndale had known his father; and Tyndale senior knew his uncle, and Tyndale junior was acquainted with his first cousin, who lived at the court-end of London; so he was taken at once into the office as junior clerk, with every chance, as one of the seniors told me confidentially, of rising much higher, if he took care of himself.
He knew about as much arithmetic as a baby; but he was very clever with his pen in sketching pretty girls with powdered heads, flowing sacques, and pannier hoops; so he found plenty of amusement in doing this and reading Mr. Henry Fielding’s novels behind the ledger; and the head clerks left him to himself, and snubbed me for not doing his work as well as my own.
I hated him. I hated his foppish ways and his haughty manners; I hated his handsome boyish face, with its frame of golden hair, and its blue, beaming, hopeful eyes; I hated him for the sword which swung across the stiff skirts of his brocaded coat, for the money which he jingled in his waistcoat-pockets, for the two watches which he wore on high days and holidays, for his merry laugh, for his melodious voice, for his graceful walk, for his tall, slender figure, for his jovial, winning ways, which won everybody else’s friendship, — I hated him for all these; but, most of all, I hated him for his influence over Lucy Malden.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1058
