Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  The man came scowling up to the table, frowned at the two men, and frowned still more heavily at his wife.

  ‘What have those two fellows been saying to you,’ he asked.

  ‘They are strangers in Paris, and were asking me about the sights. You might as well have taken me to a theatre to-night, Stephen. I should like to see that play the people are all talking about, “ Thirty years in a Gambler’s Life.”’

  ‘You’ll see plays enough, if you behave yourself,’ he answered roughly; and if you don’t, you’ll be the heroine of a tragedy on your own account.’

  ‘What do you mean by bringing me away?’ asked Groman angrily, when they were on the Boulevard. ‘Do you think I’m afraid to face Valaority?’

  ‘What’s the good of a row? or of getting that poor little woman half murdered? I’ve no power to arrest him here. You want to find your brother, don’t you? Yes, of course. Well, I’ve found him.’

  ‘What, do yon mean?’

  ‘We’ve been the blindest moles — we’ve been the most confounded asses — there isn’t language strong enough to say what we’ve been,’ cried Wormald, savagely. ‘To get into that house, and to see him lying there, and not to understand, after thirty years’ experience; and to a come across the Channel, and leave him there at the mercy of those two hags.’

  ‘For pity’s sake, man, don’t trifle with me,’ exclaimed John Groman, in a paroxysm of excitement. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why that the man lying in the kitchen, smothered under a blanket, groaning in his sleep — the man that Irish hag called her husband — was your brother — hocussed, robbed, and left in that den in the care of those two beldames.’

  ‘Great heaven! And we left him there to be murdered.’

  ‘Hardly. They’ve got what they wanted. They’d hardly use foul play afterwards, unless he rode rusty, and they did it in self-defence. Yes, it’s clear as daylight. Valaority drugged him, robbed him, and left him in charge of these women. The stupefaction of the dose, whatever it was — a pinch of powdered tobacco, perhaps, in a tumbler of stout — would keep him quiet for a day or two, and by that time the thief would have got safe off with his plunder.’

  ‘God grant you’re right,’ cried Groman.

  ‘I’m so convinced about it, that although I’ve led you on a wild goose chase over here, I’m not afraid to ask you to go back to London with me, and to trust to me to find your brother.’

  James Wormald was right. They went back to London, and straight to the house by the river. They had some difficulty in getting in. The Greek hag had vanished, but the Irish woman was still at her post by the kitchen fire, cooking sausages, and the man was still lying on the bed covered with a blanket; but this time he was not to be kept quiet by any management of his guardian’s. He flung back the bed coverings, and was talking wildly as Groman and his companion entered the kitchen.

  It was Edward Groman, delirious, and in a high fever. The drug employed in the hocussing process had been something stronger than a pinch of tobacco, and, acting upon a brain in a state of hyper-excitement, had been well nigh fatal. Another twenty-four hours in that underground kitchen would have finished him. That was the verdict of the doctor who assisted in removing John Groman’s brother to Rose Cottage, Pentonville.

  Here, watched and nursed with unspeakable tenderness by Jack and the little woman, Edward Groman slowly recovered from the horror of those five days and nights in the underground den, during which he had had a dim consciousness of his position and surroundings, and a sense of helplessness more awful than the fear of death. He had lain there like a paralysed creature, and had seen the hag brooding over her grimy hearth, and had not known if she were real, or the hideous vision of his distracted brain.

  Neither the Valaoritys nor the stolen diamonds were ever heard of any more, but Edward Groman bore his loss with philosophical equanimity.

  ‘The seed that a man sows in his youth must be reaped in his age, Jack,’ he said. ‘I have had my lesson. It’s a good thing though, old fellow, that all my eggs were not in the same basket. I bought a block of land in New York with some of my money before I shipped myself for Holland and nobody can steal that. So, when yon and the little woman are tired of me, you can send me back to America.’

  ‘That will never be!’ cried Jack and the little woman, in a chorus of two.

  DR. CARRICK

  CHAPTER I. THE DOCTOR.

  DR. CARRICK was a man of genius whose life had been a failure. On his five-and-fortieth birthday he looked back with a gloomy gaze, upon a career that had not been brightened by one solitary success. Most men have their intervals of good luck; but in the desert of this man’s life there had been no green spot People spoke well of him, landed him for his high principles and rugged honesty; but they began to call him poor Carrick. That was bitter.

  He had practised as a physician in many places. First in a quiet country town, where he kept his gig, and pinched himself in order to feed bis horse, and where he simulated success by the respectability of this appearance and surroundings. But the cost of this house and servants, his horse and gig, sleek broadcloth and fine linen, crushed him. He succumbed under the severe proprieties of provincial life, and migrated to London, thinking to find there a wider field for his abilities.

  He found the field wide enough, so wide indeed that nobody seemed aware of his existence. If he had been a clever quack who made bread pills he might have advertised his way to fortune; but he was only a man who had adopted a difficult profession from sheer love of science, and who asked for nothing better than to be able to live by his labour, and to go on extending his experience and adding to his knowledge.

  Dr. Carrick tried London, from the western suburbs to the heights of Pentonville, from Bloomsbury to Blackfriars, from Lambeth to Bow, and he left it, after fifteen weary years, as poor a man as when he entered that stony wilderness, save for a legacy of three hundred and forty pounds from an octogenarian great aunt, whose very existence he had forgotten till this godsend dropped into his lap.

  His professional labours in the metropolis had given him just a bare livelihood. He was a man of exceptional temperance and self-denial, and could live upon a pittance which, for a less Spartan mind, would have meant starvation. He left London without a debt, and with a decent coat on his back; and perhaps the monster city, beneath whose feet many a pearl is Hung to be trampled into the mire, has seldom cast out of its bosom, unknown and unvalued, a cleverer man than Theodore Carrick.

  That legacy — the first boon which fortune had ever bestowed upon him — was a turning-point in Dr. Carrick’s life. It can hardly be said to have made him richer, for, with the three hundred and forty pounds, his great, aunt had left him something else — a distant cousin of two-and-twenty, a gentle, patient, willing girl, with a pale placid face, dark hazel eyes, and dark brown hair that had a tinge of ruddy gold in the sunshine. This fourth or fifth cousin of the doctor’s was one of those waifs, which the sea of life is always throwing up on the bleak shores of adversity. No shipwrecked princess in sweet Shakespearian story, was ever more helpless and alone than Hester Rushton at the beginning of life. Old Mrs. Hedger, hearing of the untimely end of the girl’s parents, had taken her at the age of twelve as companion, ‘protégée, drudge, and victim. As a child, Hester had endured the old lady’s tempers with unvarying patience; as a girl she had waited upon her, and nursed her with unfailing care. But she never learned to hatter or to fawn, so Mrs. Hedger left her old servant Betty a thousand pounds, and Hester only a hundred.

  When Dr. Carrick went down to the little Hertfordshire village to attend his aunt’s funeral, in the character of a grateful legatee he found Hester Rushton among the other goods and chattels in the house of death, and with very little more idea as to her future destiny than the chairs and tables, which were to be sold by the auctioneer on the following Monday.

  ‘And what are you going to do, Miss Rushton?’ asked Dr. Carrick, when the funeral was over.

  �
��I don’t know,’ said Hester simply.

  And then the tears came into her eyes at the thought of her loneliness. The old lady had never been particularly kind to her, but she had given her lodging, and Food, and raiment; and life, though joyless, had been sheltered from the bleak winds of misfortune.

  ‘I suppose I shall go and live — somewhere,’ said Hester vaguely. ‘I can get a room in the village for four shillings a week, and perhaps I might get some children to teach-very little children, who would not want to learn much.’

  ‘I think you had much better come and live with me,’ said Dr. Carrick. ‘I am going to buy a county practice, somewhere in the Weal of England, where living is cheap; you can come and keep house for me.’

  Hester accepted the offer as frankly as it was made.

  ‘Do you really think I could be useful to you?’ she asked, ‘I used to look alter the house, and indeed do a good deal of the house-work for aunt Hedger, but, I shouldn’t like to be a burden to you,’ concluded Hester, very seriously.

  She was a conscientious little thing, and had never had a selfish thought in her life.

  The idea that it might not be strictly correct, or in accordance with the laws of society, that a young lady of two and twenty should keep house for a gentleman of five-and-forty never entered her mind. Her only anxiety was not to impose upon her cousin Carrick’s goodness.

  ‘You will not be a burden to me,’ answered Dr. Carrick, ‘Poor as I am, I have always been cheated by my servants. Yes, even when I have been so low in the world as to have nobody but a charwoman, that charwoman has stolen my coals, and taken toll of my tea and sugar. You will save me more than you will cost me.’

  So it came to pass that Dr. Carrick gave a hundred and fifty pounds for a practice in a Cornish village, within half-a-dozen miles of Penzance, and set up housekeeping in a roomy old house, on a hill above the broad Atlantic; a house whose windows looked down upon a wild rockbound shore, where the wide-winged cormorants perched upon the craggy pinnacles of serpentine, and where the sea in sunny weather wore the changeful colours of a dolphin’s back.

  CHAPTER II. HIS PATIENT.

  FOR the first three years, Dr. Carrick’s life at the village of St. Hildred was, like all that had gone before it, a hard struggle for the bare necessities of existence. Provisions were cheap at St. Hilda, and it was the fashion to live simply, or else in those first years the doctor could hardly have lived at all. He soon won for himself a reputation for skill in his profession, and people believed in that grave, earnest manner of his, the dark, deep-set eyes, pale, passionless face, and high, bald brow. He was more respected than liked by the lower orders, while he was too grave and wise for the fox-hunting squires and their homely wives; but, happily, all agreed in believing him clever, so that by the end of those probationary years, be had acquired a practice which just enabled him to maintain his small household decently, keep his horse, and indulge himself with a new suit of clothes once a year.

  This was not much to have gained at the end of eight-and-twenty years of toil and study, and any one who looked in the doctor’s face, could see there the stamp of a disappointed life. His spirits had sunk into a settled melancholy, from which he rarely took the trouble to rouse himself. In his professional work his manner was quick, decisive, trenchant; at home he gave himself up to thought and study.

  Hester — or Hettie as she was more familiarly called — had proved a domestic treasure. She kept the big, rambling old house as neat as a new pin, with only the aid of a ruddy-cheeked buxom Cornish girl, whose wages were five pounds a year. She had brightened up the old furniture — left by the doctor’s predecessor, and bought cheap by the doctor — in such a marvellous way, that the clumsy old chairs and tables looked almost handsome. The bedrooms, with their low ceilings, wide fire-places, huge four-post bedsteads, and dark damask draperies, had a gloom which even her art could not dispel; and there were abiding shadows on the darksome old staircase, and in the long narrow corridors, that suggested ghostly visitors. Indeed, it was because the house had long enjoyed the reputation of being haunted, that the doctor had taken it. The Cornish mind was averse from ghosts, so the rent of St. Hildred House was ridiculously small.

  One bleak March evening, Dr. Carrick was summoned to a patient at a distance. The night was wild and rough for a long ride upon a lonely road, and the doctor was tired after his day’s work; but the words Tregonnell Manor, pronounced by the rosy-faced maid-of-all-work, acted like a charm. He started up from his comfortable arm-chair, flung his book aside, and went out into the dimly-lighted hall. The door was open, and a man on horseback was waiting in front of it.

  ‘Has Mr. Tregonnell came back to the manor?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘Yes, sir. Master came home this morning. He’s not been well for some time — a nasty low fever hanging about him; but he kept out with his yacht as long as he could coasting about Spain and the south of France. Yesterday we put in at Plymouth, and came home early this morning by the night coach. He’s looking right down bad, and, and he sent me to ask you to ride over.’

  ‘I’ll come directly. Is there a medicine chest at Tregonnell?’

  ‘There be a chest, I know; but I can’t say as there’s anything in it.’

  ‘I’d better bring what I’m likely to want. I’ll go and saddle my horse.’

  Throughout his residence at St. Hildred, the doctor had groomed his horse. There was no horse better groomed or better fed in the neighbourhood.

  Tregonnell Manor was the most important place between the Land’s End and the Lizard; a good old house of the Elizabethan period, with a fine estate attached to it. The Tregonnells, once a large family, and dwindled down to a single descendant, a bachelor of three-and-thirty, who was rumoured to have lived a wild life in London and other great cities, to have made shipwreck of a fine constitution, and to be not altogether right in his mind. His appearances at Tregonnell Manor were fitful and unexpected. He never stayed there long, and he never seemed to know what to do with his life when he was there. He avoided all society, and his only pleasure appeared to be in yachting. He was an excellent sailor, commanded his own yacht, and went everywhere, from the Start Point to the Black Sea.

  Dr. Carrick had heard a great deal about this Squire Tregonnell-the last of the good old Tregonnell race-men who had worn sword and gown, and had played their part in every great struggle, from the Wars of the Roses to the Battle of the Boyne. He knew that Eustace Tregonnell was one of the richest men in this part of the country. A valuable patient for a struggling physician, assuredly.

  The stable clock at Tregonnell Manor was striking ten as the doctor and the groom rode in at the open gate, between tall stone pillars crowned with the Tregonnell escutcheon. By the half light of a waning moon, drifting in a sea of clouds, the grounds of the manor-house looked gloomy and unbeautiful, the house itself sombre and uninviting. Within, all had the same air of abiding gloom. The dark oak pannelling and old pictures, the rusty armour, the low ceilings, and deep-set doors were unbrightened by any of the signs of occupation or family life. Tregonnell Manor looked what it was, the house of a man who had never found, or hoped to find, happiness in his home. An old servant opened a door and ushered the doctor into a large room, lined with books. Mr. Tregonnell sat by the wide hearth, where the neglected logs were dropping into grey ashes, a small table with a reading-lamp by his side. This lamp was the only light in the room, it illuminated the table and a narrow circle round it, and left all else in deep shadow.

  ‘Good evening, doctor,’ said Mr. Tregonnell, pleasantly enough, shutting his book, and motioning the doctor to a chair on the opposite side of the hearth.

  The face which he turned to Dr. Carrick was a remarkable, and an interesting one. Ruins are always interesting; and this face was the ruin of one of the handsomest faces Dr. Carrick had ever seen. A face pale as marble, eyes of that dark grey which looks black, a broad brow, whose whiteness was made more striking by the blackness of the thick, short hair that fr
amed it, features well and firmly carved, and about all an expression of intense melancholy — that utter weariness of life, which is more difficult to cure than any other form of depression. Premature lines marked the broad brow, the cheeks were hollow, the eyes wan and haggard. If this man was indeed the last and sole representative of the Tregonnell race, that race seemed in sore danger of extinction.

  Dr. Carrick felt his new patient’s pulse, and looked at him thoughtfully for a minute or so, in the vivid light of the reading-lamp.

  He made none of the stereotyped inquiries.

  ‘What is the matter with you?’ he asked bluntly. ‘You know much better than I can tell you.’

  ‘A restlessness that impels me to be continually shifting the scene of my life; an indescribable disgust at everything, and a hatred of all places; a feeling that [have lived to. long, and yet that I don’t quite want to die.’

  ‘You have made a mistake common to young men who have fine constitutions and line fortunes, You have fancied both inexhaustible.’

  ‘I have been extravagant, but I have hardly spent my income,’ answered Mr. Tregonnell, frankly, ‘but I daresay I have used my constitution rather badly. I had a disappointment early in life — I daresay yon have heard the story. I wanted to marry a woman whom my father was pleased to call my inferior, though she was as much my superior then in her stainless womanhood, as she is now as a sinless soul in paradise, He gave me a yacht, for which I had been longing, and sent me abroad in the hope that I should cure myself of my fancy. I was happy enough in the bustle and variety of my life, thinking that things would work round in time, and that I should come home and find my darling true to me, and my father more indulgent. I wrote to her from every port, and in every letter told her the same story. We had only to be true to each other, and to wait for happier days. I should wait, if need were, till my hair grew grey. I was away a year, and my life during all that time was such a wandering one, that it was no surprise to me to find my letters unanswered. When I came back, I found a grave, and discovered later, that my sweet girl had been sent to drudge as an articled pupil in a school at Exeter. Not one of my letters had been given to her. They would only have unsettled her, her wicked old hag of a grandmother told me. I knew afterwards that my father had bought her people over to his interests. She had no mother. Her father was a weak-minded drunkard; her grandmother a greedy, time-serving old harridan. Between them they killed her, and broke my heart. That was the beginning of my wild career, Dr. Carrick, Not a very cheerful one, was it?’