I remembered that night upon which Mrs. Darrell had stayed out so long in the rain — the night that followed her stormy interview with Angus Egerton.
I told Peter that he had done quite right in telling me this, and begged him not to mention it to any one else until I gave him permission to do so. I went back to Milly’s room directly afterwards, and waited there for Mr. Hale’s coming.
While I was taking my breakfast, Mrs. Darrell came to make her usual inquiries. I ran into the dressing-room to meet her. While she was questioning me about the invalid, I saw her look at the table where the medicine had always been until that morning, and I knew that she missed the bottle.
After she had made her inquiries, she stood for a few moments hesitating, and then said abruptly,
‘I should like to see Mr. Hale when he comes this morning. I want to hear what he says about his patient. He will be here almost immediately, I suppose; so I will stay in Milly’s room till he comes.’
She went into the bedroom, bent over the invalid for a few minutes, talking in a gentle sympathetic voice, and then took her place by the bedside. It was evident to me that she had suspected something from the removal of the medicine, and that she intended to prevent my seeing Mr. Hale alone.
‘You took your medicine regularly last night, I suppose, Milly?’ she inquired presently, when I had seated myself at a little table by the window and was sipping my tea.
‘I don’t think you gave me quite so many doses last night, did you, Mary?’ said the invalid, in her feeble voice. ‘I fancy you were more merciful than usual.’
‘It was very wrong of Miss Crofton to neglect your medicine. Mr. Hale will be extremely angry when he hears of it.’
‘I do not think Milly will be much worse for the omission,’ I answered quietly.
After this we sat silently waiting for the doctor’s appearance. He came in about a quarter of an hour, and pronounced himself better pleased with his patient than he had been the night before. There had been a modification of the more troublesome symptoms of the fever towards morning.
I told him of my omission to give the medicine.
‘That was very wrong,’ he said.
‘Yet you see she had a better night, Mr. Hale. I suppose that medicine was intended to modify those attacks of sickness from which she has suffered so much?’
‘To prevent them altogether, if possible.’
‘That is very strange. It really appears to me that the medicine always increases the tendency to sickness.’
Mr. Hale shook his head impatiently.
‘You don’t know what you are talking about, Miss Crofton,’ he said.
‘May I say a few words to you alone, if you please?’
Mrs. Darrell rose, with a hurried anxious look.
‘What can you have to say to Mr. Hale alone, Miss Crofton?’ she asked.
‘It is about herself, perhaps,’ said the doctor kindly. ‘I have told her all along that she would be knocked up by this nursing; and now I daresay she begins to find I am right.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is about myself I want to speak.’
Mrs. Darrell went to one of the windows, and stood with her face turned away from us, looking out. I followed Mr. Hale into the dressing-room.
I unlocked the wardrobe, took out the medicine-bottle, and told the doctor my suspicions of the previous night. He listened to me with grave attention, but with an utterly incredulous look.
‘A nervous fancy of yours, no doubt, Miss Crofton,’ he said; ‘however,
I’ll take the medicine back to my surgery and analyse it.’
‘I have something more to tell you, Mr. Hale.’
‘Indeed!’
I repeated, word for word, what Peter had told me about Mrs. Darrell’s visit to his grandmother.
‘It is a very extraordinary business,’ he said; ‘but I cannot imagine that Mrs. Darrell would be capable of such a hideous crime. What motive could she have for such an act?’
‘I do not feel justified in speaking quite plainly upon that subject, Mr. Hale; but I have reason to know that Mrs. Darrell has a very bitter feeling about her stepdaughter.’
‘I cannot think the thing you suspect possible. However, the medicine shall be analysed; and we will take all precautions for the future. I will send you another bottle immediately, in a sealed packet. You will take notice that the seal is unbroken before you use the medicine.’
He showed me his crest on a seal at the end of his pencil-case, and then departed. The medicine came a quarter of an hour later in a sealed packet. This time I brought the bottle into the sick-room, and placed it on the mantelpiece, where it was impossible for any one to touch it.
When Mr. Hale came for his second visit, there was a grave and anxious look in his face. He was very well satisfied with the appearance of the patient, however, and pronounced that there was a change for the better — slight, of course, but quite as much as could be expected in so short a time. He beckoned me out of the room, and I went down-stairs with him, leaving Susan Dodd with Milly.
‘I am going to speak to Mrs. Darrell, and you had better come with me,’ he said.
She was in the library. Mr. Hale went in, and I followed him. She was sitting at the table, with writing materials scattered before her; but she was not writing. She had a strange preoccupied air; but at the sight of Mr. Hale she rose suddenly, and looked at him with a deadly white face.
‘Is she worse?’ she asked.
‘No, Mrs. Darrell; she is better,’ he answered sternly. ‘I find that we have been the dupes of some secret enemy of this dear child’s. There has been an attempt at murder going on under our very eyes. Poison has been mixed with the medicine sent by me — a slow poison. Happily for us the poisoner has been a little too cautious for the success of the crime. The doses administered have been small enough to leave the chance of recovery. An accident awakened Miss Crofton’s suspicions last night, and she very wisely discontinued the medicine. I have analysed it since she gave it me, and find that a certain portion of irritant poison has been mixed with it.’
For some moments after he had finished speaking Mrs. Darrell remained silent, looking at him fixedly with that awful death-like face.
‘Who can have done such a thing?’ she asked at last, in a half-mechanical way.
‘You must be a better judge of that question than I,’ answered Mr.
Hale. ‘Is there any one in this house inimical to your stepdaughter?’
‘No one, that I know of.’
‘We have two duties before us, Mrs. Darrell: the first, to protect our patient from the possibility of any farther attempt of this kind; the second, to trace the hand that has done this work. I shall telegraph to Leeds immediately for a professional nurse, to relieve Miss Crofton in the care of the sick-room; and I shall communicate at once with the police, in order that this house may be placed under surveillance.’
Mrs. Darrell said not a word, either in objection or assent, to this. She seated herself by the table again, and began trifling idly with the writing materials before her.
‘You will do what is best, of course, Mr. Hale,’ she said, after a long pause; ‘you are quite at liberty to act in this matter according to your own discretion.’
‘Thanks; it is a matter in which my responsibility entitles me to a certain amount of power. I shall telegraph to Dr. Lomond, asking him to come down to-morrow. Whatever doubt you may entertain of my judgment will be dispelled when I am supported by his opinion.’
‘Of course; but I have not expressed any doubt of your judgment.’
We left her immediately after this — left her sitting before the table, with her restless hands turning over the papers.
The servant who went in search of her at seven o’clock that evening, when dinner was served, found her sitting there still, with a sealed letter lying on the table before her; but her head had fallen across the cushioned arm of the chair — she had been dead some hours.
There was a post-m
ortem examination and an inquest. Mrs. Darrell had taken poison. The jury brought in a verdict of suicide while in a state of unsound mind. The act seemed too causeless for sanity. Her strange absent ways had attracted the attention of the servants for some time past, and the evidence of her own maid respecting her restlessness and irritability for the last few months influenced the minds of coroner and jury.
The letter found lying on the table before her was addressed to Angus Egerton. He declined to communicate its contents when questioned about it at the inquest. Milly progressed towards recovery slowly but surely from the hour in which I stopped the suspected medicine. The time came when we were obliged to tell her of her stepmother’s awful death; but she never knew the attempt that had been made on her own life, or the atmosphere of hatred in which she had lived.
We left Thornleigh for Scarborough as soon as she was well enough to be moved, and only returned in the early spring, in time for my darling’s wedding.
She has now been married nearly seven years, during which time her life has been very bright and happy — a life of almost uncheckered sunshine. She has carried out her idea of our friendship to the very letter; and we have never been separated, except during her honeymoon and my own visits home. Happily for my sense of independence, there are now plenty of duties for me to perform at Cumber Priory, where I am governess to a brood of pretty children, who call me auntie, and hold me scarcely second to their mother in their warm young hearts. Angus Egerton is a model country squire and master of the hounds; and he and his wife enjoy an unbroken popularity among rich and poor. Peter is under-gardener at the Priory, and no longer lives with his grandmother, who left her cottage soon after Mrs. Darrell’s suicide, and is supposed to have gone to London.
FLOWER AND WEED, AND OTHER TALES
CONTENTS
FLOWER AND WEED
CHAPTER I. A WAYSIDE WAIF.
CHAPTER II. MORE THAN KIN.
CHAPTER III. FROM SUNSHINE TO GLOOM.
CHAPTER IV. OVER SUMMER SEAS.
CHAPTER V. A LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF THE PAST.
CHAPTER VI. A LONELY LIFE.
CHAPTER VII. NOT DISLOYAL.
CHAPTER VIII. AN OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS.
CHAPTER IX. FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH.
GEORGE CAULFIELD’S JOURNEY
CHAPTER I. BY THE NIGHT MAIL.
CHAPTER II. IN DURANCE VILE.
CHAPTER III. STAGE THE FIRST.
CHAPTER IV. THE MYSTERY OF ROSE COTTAGE.
CHAPTER V. ‘DELAY THIS MARRIAGE!’
CHAPTER VI. BROUGHT TO A FOCUS.
THE CLOWN’S QUEST
CHAPTER I. AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS.
CHAPTER II. MISSING.
CHAPTER III. ‘THERE’S A WOMAN IN IT.’
CHAPTER IV. THE DARK HOUSE BY THE RIVER.
CHAPTER V. HIS OLD LOVE.
DR. CARRICK
CHAPTER I. THE DOCTOR.
CHAPTER II. HIS PATIENT.
CHAPTER III. HESTER FINDS A FRIEND.
CHAPTER IV. MR. TREGONNELL MAKES HIS WILL.
CHAPTER V. MYSTERY.
CHAPTER VI FOR LOVE AND LIFE.
‘IF SHE BE NOT FATE TO ME.’
CHAPTER I. AFTER THE SEASON.
CHAPTER II. DOWN BY THE WATER-MILL.
CHAPTER III. ‘BEING SO VERY WILFUL YOU MUST GO.’
CHAPTER IV. ‘O LOVE, TO THINK THAT LOVE CAN PASS AWAY!’
THE SHADOW IN THE CORNER.
HIS SECRET
PART I.
PART II.
THOU ART THE MAN
CHAPTER I. ON THE BOARDS.
CHAPTER II. LOVED AND LOST.
CHAPTER III. DRIVEN BY THE FURIES.
CHAPTER IV. IN THE RED SUNSET.
FLOWER AND WEED
CHAPTER I. A WAYSIDE WAIF.
‘A lovely child she was, of looks serene,
And motions which o’er things indifferent shed
The grace and gentleness from whence they came.’
INGLESHAW CASTLE is one of the historic homes of England, built in the days of the Plantagenets, improved and expanded under the last of the Tudors, and never debased or deteriorated by modern alterations, adaptations, or restorations. It stands on low ground, in the heart of an extensive chase, full of deer and ground game — a wild woodland, where many of the oaks and beeches are as old as the establishment of the house of Ingleshaw amongst the ruling families of England. The Castle is built of dark-gray stone, rich in those lovely gradations from deepest purple to palest green which mark the long growth of lichens and mosses, stealthily stealing over the stony surface, and touching it with beauty. There is a grand simplicity about the noble Gothic entrance, and the great square hall with its vaulted roof; while there is all the charm of quaintness and homeliness in the long low passages, the deep-set windows, with here a bay and there an oriel, to break the monotony of long rows of heavily mullioned casements, giving an insufficient light to the dusky old portraits and seventeenth-century pictures which line the panelled walls of the low spacious rooms.
Ingleshaw is one of the show places of Kent, but it is only shown when the family is away; and on this bright May morning the family, beginning and ending with Lord Ingleshaw and his only child, Lady Lucille, is at home; and the tourist, thirsting to steep himself in the historic associations of the Castle, turns from the gate with reluctant feet. Perhaps there never was a more quiet household than this of Ingleshaw Castle. There is something akin to pain in the silence of the long corridors and the empty suites of rooms, where the effigies of departed Ingleshaws stare for ever at vacancy; where a bee comes booming in at an open pane in the mullioned window, hovers over a bowl of hot-house flowers on a Florentine marble table, and goes booming out again, disgusted at the dulness of life within stone walls. Sometimes the ripple of girlish laughter floats through an open window of the southern wing, or the bird-like notes of a girlish soprano are heard in the distance, singing one of Mozart’s tenderest melodies.
Lord Ingleshaw is something of a recluse, and his only daughter has not yet made her entrance upon the bustling theatre of society, to be elbowed and hustled by that common herd to which the doting father deems his child infinitely superior. Her eighteenth birthday is drawing near, and next year, the father tells himself, his innocent simple-minded darling must needs be handed over to the high priestesses of the-temple of fashion; must take her place in society, be wooed, won, and wedded; and then it would be to him almost as if he had no daughter. New associations, new loves, new joys, new hopes, new cares, would arise for her who was now all his own.
‘Well, it is the common lot,’ he muses, dreaming in his library over an open folio of Bacon’s Essays. ‘I must wait for a girl-grandchild, whom I may train up to be something like the companion and friend my little girl has been to me. She will last my time. I shall be dead and gone before she need be presented at Court.’
He has a fixed idea that from the hour his daughter enters society she will be in great measure lost to him. This comes, perhaps, from his profound contempt for modern society, which he despises the more intensely because he has held himself aloof from the vortex, and only contemplates its foolishness from the outside. This external view of fashionable life is like a deaf man’s view of a ball-room. Lord Ingleshaw sees the puppets dancing, without hearing the music which is their motive power; and the whole thing seems rank folly: folly treading on the heels of vice.
His sister, Lady Carlyon, a dowager countess, passing young for her years, as all dowager peeresses are nowadays, a lady who lives in society and for society, has told him that Lucille must take her proper place in the world, must be seen and admired and talked about, and even written about in the newspapers, before she can be properly and creditably married; and he is prepared to submit to the inevitable. He would rather his girl should be wooed by the interchange of a miniature and a few formal letters, and wedded by proxy, like a princess of the seventeenth century. Anything would be better than the turmoil and dissipation of fashiona
ble society, the rubbing shoulders with doubtful beauty and tarnished rank, the inevitable brushing away of youth’s tenderest bloom, sinless Eve’s primitive innocence. One little year yet remains to the fond father. Lucille is not to be presented till next season. The Earl has begged hard for this extension of his happiness.
‘She will be horridly old by that time,’ says Lady Carlyon, in her hard business-like way, staring at the unconscious Lucille, who is playing a dreamy gondolied of Mendelssohn’s at the other end of the long low parlour. ‘I’m afraid she is one of those girls whose looks will go off early. Half the beauty of her eyes depends upon that cabbage-rose bloom of hers. Nothing tells so well as youthful freshness just now. It is the only attraction with which we can counter those horrid professional beauties. If Lucie’s complexion goes off you can keep her at Ingleshaw all your life, for she will not secure an eligible parti.’
‘My heart’s desire is to keep her here for ever,’ answers the Earl; ‘you talk of her as if she were a Circassian slave, waiting for the next market.’
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1101
