Ethel’s husband had to simulate a gaiety he did not feel. The simulation was miserably hollow, as all spurious things must be. But Ethel was too candid a creature to detect the sham smiles, the false unmusical laugh. If her husband smiled, she believed that he was happy; if he laughed, she thought that he was amused.
They had been southward to Nice and Florence, and they had returned to Paris to finish their honeymoon before going to settle at Palgrave Chase.
Palgrave Chase! The Earl of Haughton thought of this place as he might have thought of some black and gloomy mansion in which he had dreamed of wandering in some hideous nightmare vision. Palgrave Chase! the noble old pile of building, with the noise of falling water for ever echoing through the oak-panelled chambers.
It was scarcely strange that these haunting thoughts, these gloomy shadows, darkening all the joys of life, had a fatal effect upon Lord Haughton’s physical health. His strength ebbed away, as the days dragged themselves out so slowly, as it seemed to him, even in this gay French capital, whose citizens appear to have nothing to do but to amuse themselves. The olive tint of his handsome face faded to a waxen hue, over which, with every transient emotion, a vivid crimson flush glowed like low clouds that catch their colour from the sinking sun. These hectic flushes, and the strange brightness in the earl’s dark eyes, were diagnostics that no physician could have failed to interpret unfavourably. But Ethel mistook the crimson glow in her husband’s face for the warm hue of health, and the new brightness in his eyes seemed to her the light of happiness. It never entered into the young wife’s mind that these signs were nature’s danger-signals, and gave warning of a fatally insidious disease.
As for Gervoise himself, he never complained. If, sometimes, after a canter in the Bois de Boulogne, he felt his heart beating at a feverish rate, and the hot perspiration breaking out upon his face, he took little heed of these tokens of weakness. There might be nothing ominous in this decline of strength; if there were, it mattered little — it was perhaps the best thing that could happen to him.
The earl kept the secret of his own feelings, on this point and on every other, and he performed all the duties of his position with as much assiduity as if he had been the happiest and strongest man in Paris. He did everything that was required of him. He rode and drove with his wife in the Bois de Boulogne, in all the pretty suburban regions; he went shopping in the Rue de la Paix, and on the Boulevard des Italiens; he escorted Ethel in all her visits; he attended her at the Opera. He loved her, and he had a kind of pleasure in her happiness, though the burden on his mind was never less heavy to bear, though the haunting shadow of his life was never to be driven away.
CHAPTER XVIII. ETHEL’S VISITOR.
IT had been arranged that Lord Haughton and his wife should remain abroad until the beginning of June, when the apartments which were being newly decorated for the bride at the Chase would be ready; but before the end of May, Gervoise’s health gave way, very much to the alarm of his devoted wife.
An English physician was sent for, in compliance with Ethel’s urgent request, and remained for nearly an hour alone with the earl. He looked very grave when he came out of Lord Haughton’s room, but could tell Ethel nothing, except that her husband was suffering from extreme debility, and that he required perfect repose, both of body and mind.
“His mind has been lately much disturbed, I should imagine,” the physician said.
Ethel shook her head incredulously.
“What should disturb my dear husband’s mind?” she said. “He has every reason to be happy; unless, indeed, the shock of his cousin’s sudden death last year may have affected him.”
“I should think it very possible that Lord Haughton has been so affected,” the physician answered. “In any case, repose is most essential to him. His native air might be of service also in restoring his strength.”
Ethel knew that Gervoise Palgrave’s infancy had been spent in the neighbourhood of the Chase; she therefore did all in her power to hasten the return to Warwickshire, even against her husband’s will; for the earl had a nervous horror of that ivy-covered gothic mansion, perched high above the rushing waters that were for ever falling, falling, falling under the shadow of the steep bank.
The earl and countess arrived at the Chase upon a bright May evening; but, mild as the weather was, Gervoise had suffered considerably on the long journey from Paris to Warwickshire, though he had travelled express for the best part of the way. He was very silent and very pale when he handed his wife into the carriage that was in waiting at the station, and he sank back into a corner of the comfortable vehicle with a long-drawn sigh of relief.
Little pleasure had either wealth or love brought this man. He had been selfish all his life, and had sought his own happiness, and yet had utterly failed to win even the negative happiness called peace. He was fain to fall back now upon the physical selfishness of an invalid. The vitality of his mind seemed to have ebbed away with his bodily strength. He only wanted to lie down and rest, and to be let alone.
“Ethel,” he said, as the carriage entered the shrubberied drive leading to the great hall-door, “I think that the shadow will never be lifted from the dwellers in yonder house. I have heard it said that no Palgrave has ever known happiness since Rupert Palgrave, the Hanoverian, betrayed his Jacobite brother more than a hundred years ago.”
Lights were burning in all the principal apartments of the old mansion. Lord Haughton and his wife dined in that very room in which the earl had spent the eve of his wedding-day.
Little happiness awaited the young wife in her splendid home. Gervoise grew rapidly worse after his return to the Chase, and Ethel was tortured by perpetual fears, which she tried in vain to persuade herself were needless and unreasonable. Upon the very morning after his return, the earl was too ill to rise, and at his wife’s earnest entreaty allowed her to send a telegraphic summons to a distinguished physician at Birmingham. At noon this gentleman was with Lord Haughton, and during the interview Ethel wandered about the house, looking very sadly at the old pictures, the faded tapestries, the quaint carvings — looking at them in a strange absent way, and scarcely seeing them.
“I thought that Gervoise would have shown me all these things,” she said to herself mournfully; “my new home seems almost as desolate as if I had come back to it alone.”
There were three drawing-rooms at the Chase, opening one into the other. Ethel seated herself in the smallest of the three, the innermost chamber; a pretty little room, with white panels and gold mouldings, and with an old-fashioned border of painted flowers running all round the cornice. There was a bay window overlooking the gardens, and an old-fashioned high chimneypiece, exquisitely carved, and painted white, like the rest of the woodwork.
There was a fire in this room, for the day was dull, cold, and unseasonable. Ethel seated herself in the bay-window, and looked out at the sloping shrubberies and the stretching meadows beyond the ivy-grown park-fence that shut in the gardens of Palgrave Chase. She was in no humour for any of her familiar occupations, though this room had been specially prepared for her use, and though her piano and books and drawing-materials had been brought from Hyford, and arranged in this apartment by the careful hands of her own maid.
For more than half an hour the countess sat in the old-fashioned window-seat looking listlessly out at the dull gray sky and the dark fir-trees in the shrubbery, with the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. She was so occupied by her own sad thoughts, that she did not hear the footsteps of one of the servants coming through the adjoining room, and was only roused from her reverie when the man was close to her.
Ethel started to her feet, and hastily brushed the tears from her eyes. The man handed her a card upon a salver.
“The gentleman begs to see your ladyship upon most particular business,” the servant said.
The gentleman was Mr. Yokes, otherwise Volterchoker.
Ethel looked wonderingly at the card.
“I do not know anyone of
this name,” she said.
“The gentleman said he was a stranger to your ladyship; but he made sure your ladyship would see him, if you would be so kind as to read what’s written on the back of the card.”
Ethel turned Mr. Yokes’s card. On the back there were a few words scrawled in pencil.
“Will Lady Haughton be good enough to see Mr. V. on business of vital importance to Lord H.?”
“Important to my husband!” cried Ethel. “What can he mean? — Let him come to me immediately.”
The servant went in quest of Mr. Vokes. Ethel walked up and down the room, impatiently awaiting the coming of her strange visitor.
Mr. Yokes, alias Herr von Volterchoker, had endeavoured to adapt his appearance to the occasion, and was no longer the disreputable-looking tramp and tumbler who had handed round his greasy hat for halfpence in the market-place of Avondale. He wore a suit of black, and had almost a clerical look. His manner was courteous and sympathetic, almost oily in its extreme politeness and consideration.
Ethel motioned him to a chair with a gesture which had some shade of hauteur in its careless grace. The Countess of Haughton was an impulsive young lady, who had her likings and dislikings, and she was not very favourably impressed by the stranger.
“You have something to say that concerns my husband,” she said. “I am ready to hear anything that interests him.” Mr. Yokes hesitated, and turned the brim of his hat slowly round and round in his bony hands.
“The business upon which I come is not a very pleasant one,” he said; “but I feel that I have a duty to perform — a duty towards society and your ladyship.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Ethel asked haughtily. “I do not understand this preface.”
“You will understand the preface better when you know the story, Lady Haughton,” answered Mr. Vokes, with a sardonic grin upon his face; “but before I go any further, let me ask you one question. When the Earl of Haughton asked you to be his wife did he tell you that he was a widower?”
“No,” cried Ethel. “What do you mean by such a question? Lord Haughton was not a widower.”
“No, my lady,” returned the clown, with insolent significance; “you’re right enough there. When Gervoise Palgrave asked you to marry him he was not a widower, for his first wife was alive.”
Ethel started to her feet in sudden anger.
“What!” she cried, “you would dare to insinuate that I—”
“No, no; I don’t insinuate anything about you,” the man answered. “Don’t be frightened, my lady. You are Gervoise Palgrave’s lawfully wedded wife; for his first wife was treacherously murdered upon the night before your wedding-day.” Some women would have fallen senseless and lifeless to the ground, smitten by these words as by a thunderbolt. But Ethel’s was no common schoolgirl nature. She stood erect, motionless as a statue, with her eyes fixed upon the grinning wretch who sat opposite to her.
“It is a lie!” she cried; “an infamous and wicked lie! A base plot against my happiness and my husband’s honour. I will never believe it.”
CHAPTER XIX. A FRIEND IN NEED.
TEN minutes after Mr. Yokes had been admitted to the presence of the countess, another visitor arrived at Palgrave Chase. This second visitor was Stephen Hurst, who had heard of the arrival of the earl and countess, and had come immediately to call upon his cousin — the cousin he had loved so truly and so hopelessly.
Had loved! — alas, he loved her still. Vainly had he striven to banish her dear image from his heart. He still loved Ethel, as truly and faithfully as he had loved her in those happy, never-to-be-forgotten days when they had wandered together in the woods about Hyford Hall in the long vacation. Of course he indulged in the sophistries common to men in his position; for he was a conscientious man, who tried to do his duty unflinchingly. He flattered himself that his present feelings for Ethel were very different from those of the past. He had ceased to love her: he thought he felt for her now only a tender friendship, an eager desire to serve her, if ever she had need of his aid.
Under these circumstances he considered himself justified in making a very early call at Palgrave Chase.
The servant who admitted Mr. Hurst was the same man who had, five or ten minutes previously, conducted Mr. Yokes to the countess’s apartment. He told Stephen that Lady Haughton was at that moment engaged with a person who had called upon particular business.
The young man would have gone away after hearing this, if he had not happened to encounter Lucy Trotter — Ethel’s maid — a young woman who had been seven years at the Hall, and whom her kind young mistress treated rather as a humble friend than as a servant. This young person was passing across an inner hall — on her way from one part of the house to another — and heard Stephen Hurst’s voice as he spoke to the servant. She made her appearance immediately, and seemed delighted to see her old friend.
“Lor’, Mr. Stephen,” she said, “don’t go away because our young miss — I meanter say, her ladyship the countess — but the old way of talking do come so natural like — don’t you go and run away because her ladyship’s got someone with her in the drawing-room. He’s nobody. I sor him go upstairs; and he’s one of those shabby black, respectable kind of persons that looks something betwixt and between an hotel-waiter and a methody minister. He’s only come for a subscription to a dancing-school for destitute chimley-sweeps, or some such rubbish, I dessay. Never mind Mm, Mr. Stephen; you go up and see Miss Ethel — there I go again! — but, sir, you know it does — now, don’t it? You go up and see her: she’ll be glad enough to see you; and that’ll be an excuse for gettin’ rid of the minister.”
“But, Lucy, I really can’t intrude upon—”
“Intrude upon fiddlesticks!” cried Lucy. “That’s just like you, Mr. Stephen. As if you don’t know my lady will be glad to see you! I am sure I shall be very glad for you to see her, for she’s in very low spirits, poor dear, because of the earl’s health being bad, which I never see anyone lookin’ worse than he does, certainly, poor gentleman; and Miss Ethel don’t see the change in him as I do, through not having seen him since the weddin’-day. Now, you go upstairs, Mr.Stephen, and don’t be nonsensical. The idea of such ceremony between first cousins!”
Stephen went half unwillingly and unannounced to the drawing-rooms which had been familiar to him in the last Lord Haughton’s lifetime. He went into the first room and shut the door behind him, and went into the centre and larger apartment. But here he was arrested suddenly by a sound that came from the inner room — the sound of a woman’s passionate sobbing, while a man’s hard voice went ON, relentless as the voice of fate.
“Upon the afternoon of the last day of February,” said this voice, “you and Gervoise Palgrave were riding together through the town of Avondale. You were riding past a little tavern where the market-people assemble, when a woman ran out, tried to seize the bridle of your lover’s horse, and called him a villain and a scoundrel. The Earl of Haughton took this very lightly: the wretched woman was mad or drunk, he said — it was altogether a most absurd business. But yet I doubt if my Lord Haughton was quite in his usual spirits for the rest of that day.”
The cruel voice paused, and Stephen Hurst heard the woman’s sobs grow louder. He listened — it was base and mean, perhaps, to listen, but if it were so, Stephen was unconscious of either baseness or meanness; he only felt that the most vital interests of the woman he loved were affected by the words to which he listened, and that it was his business to protect and defend her.
“The wretched woman was carried to some humble shelter in the Avondale inn. They put her in a stable, I think, or a loft, or some place of that description. It was good enough for her, for she was only a miserable tramp, who, in her mad drunkenness, had been so audacious as to attack the master of Palgrave Chase. She was put in a loft over a stable, and when she was sought for on the following morning, she was nowhere to be found. Pardon me — she was to be found, but not in the neighbourhood of the inn. She was found drow
ned in the river Avon, and her dead body was carried through Pendon churchyard five minutes before your wedding with the man who had been her husband. O yes, Lady Haughton, I told you only the truth when I said that your marriage was in perfect accordance with the law of the land. Your husband was a widower when you married him; his first wife had been dead half-a-dozen hours.”
“I do not believe it,” cried Ethel’s voice, broken by sobs. “I do not know what motive you may have in bringing me this story; but nothing short of my husband’s own confession would make me believe that he had deceived me.”
“You are very incredulous, Lady Haughton. Why not go to Gervoise Palgrave, tell him what I have told you, and if my assertions are false, let him disprove them?”
Ethel was silent for a few moments, and again Stephen heard her low hysterical sobs.
“My husband is ill,” she said; “I cannot disturb him.”
“You fear to go to him, Lady Haughton,” answered Mr. Yokes; “you fear. You know I have told you the truth. I will tell you even more: that wretched woman, your husband’s first wife, was lured away from Avondale, and treacherously murdered by Gervoise Palgrave, the man you love. I have proof of your husband’s guilt, and I shall know how to make good use of it. Look back, Lady Haughton — look back, and remember all that has passed between you and your husband, and ask yourself if every circumstance in the past does not point to one conclusion. Your husband is ill, you say? Shall I tell you why he is ill? shall I tell you the nature of his disease? He is sinking under the burden of a guilty conscience. It is remorse which is sapping at the very roots of his life. Judge for yourself whether it is any common disorder which has stricken him down.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1082
