Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘The will is made, and he will be eager to profit by it,’ she thought, with an icy thrill of horror creeping through her veins. ‘ He is no longer interested in prolonging his patient’s life. He must wish for his death; for he would not have committed this crime if he were not greedy of money. He will want to prevent Mr. Tregonnell’s making a second will, and how is he to do that?’

  How, save by the worst and last of crimes — secret murder?

  A wild terror seized upon Hester, as she saw herself face to face with this hideous thought. The idea, having once taken hold of her, was not to be thrust out of her mind. How else, but by Eustace Tregonnell’s speedy death, could the doctor profit by his crime? His profession gave him a fatal power. He had the keys of life and death in his hand: and Eustace trusted him with blind, unquestioning faith.

  ‘I will not leave him in a secret enemy’s hand,’ she thought; ‘I will tell him everything to-morrow. I owed gratitude and affection to my cousin, while I believed him a good and honourable man. I owe nothing to a traitor.’

  She rose at her usual early hour, with a torturing headache, and hands burning with fever. She was startled when she saw her altered face-in the glass.

  ‘I hope I am not going to be ill,’ she said to herself, ‘just when I want the utmost strength and clearness of mind.’

  It was an effort to dress, an effort to crawl downstairs, and take her place at the breakfast-table. She was obliged to omit those small duties which had been her daily task — the dusting and polishing of the furniture, the arrangement of a bowl of freshly-cut flowers for the table.

  The day was hopelessly wet, a dull grey sky, a straight downpour, that shut out everything except the sullen waste of leaden sea, crested with long lines of livid white. There was no chance of Mr. Tregonnell going to Plymouth on such a day as this.

  Dr. Carrick looked curiously at his cousin’s pale face, but said not a word. Mr. Tregonnell, who rarely appeared so early, joined them before the doctor had finished his first cup of tea.

  He was not slow to perceive that something was wrong with Hester.

  ‘Good heavens, Miss Rushton, how ill you are looking,’ he exclaimed,

  ‘I do not feel very well. I had a wakeful night.’

  ‘Why, what should keep you awake?’ asked Dr. Carrick, looking sharply up at her.

  ‘I hardly know. My mind was full of queer fancies. That awful story of Bulwer’s haunted me, the story you read to me a few days ago, Mr. Tregonnell.’

  ‘Well, it is rather uncanny,’ answered Eustace; ‘ I am so sorry I read it to you. I ought to have considered that your nerves would be more sensitive than mine. I read it to you merely as a work of art, a masterpiece of graphic style.’

  ‘I was very foolish to think of it as a reality,’ said Hester.

  Dr. Carrick laid his fingers on her wrist.

  ‘You had better go to bed, and stay there, if you don’t want to be seriously ill,’ he said; ‘you are in a high fever as it is.’

  ‘Impossible,’ answered Hester; ‘I have all sorts of things to do.’

  ‘Of course. A woman always fancies the earth will stop, if she takes her hand off the machinery that makes it go round. I am sure you can have nothing to do to-day that can’t be as well done to-morrow. If it’s a question of dinner, that clever fellow, Skelter, will cook for you. If it’s any fiddle-faddle about the house, a muslin curtain to be ironed, or a chintz chair-cover to be mended, let it stand over till you are well. I shall be at home all ‘day, if I’m wanted. I’ve no urgent cases, and it would be too cruel to take a horse out of his stable unnecessarily on such a day as this.’

  Hester remembered many such days on which Dr. Carrick had spared neither himself nor his horse. She was obliged to submit to his orders and go back to bed, for she was too ill to resist him. She laid herself down dressed upon the outside of the counterpane, with her thick winter wrapped round her, for although her head and hands were burning, a feeling of deathlike cold crept over her at intervals.

  It seemed the longest day she had ever lived through. The ceaseless drip of the rain upon the leaves of the sycamore, whose spreading branches obscured half her window, the unchanging grey of the sky, the sullen murmur of the sea — all added to her gloom of mind. She would have given worlds to have seen Eustace Tregonnell alone, to have told him all she had discovered, all she feared; but she felt powerless to rise from her bed, and, even if she could muster strength and courage to go downstairs in quest of Mr. Tregonnell, she knew that Dr. Carrick was on guard below, and would do his uttermost to prevent her being alone with his patient. There was nothing for her to do but to lie there with aching head and anxious mind, waiting for night.

  The good-natured maid-of-all-work came to her several times in the course of the day, bringing her broth which she could not touch, and divers cups of tea, which were welcome to her parched lips. She eat nothing all day, but drank deep draughts of cold water. Night came at last. She heard the doors shutting below, and footsteps ascending the stairs. How well she knew each footfall. The doctor’s soft, deliberate step; David Skelter’s tread, quick, yet heavy; Mr. Tregonnell’s firm, light step: the maid-of-all-work’s slip-shod ascent. And then all was quiet. The church clock struck ten. The rain was still falling. There was not a star in the sky.

  Hester lifted her head with an effort from the pillow where it had lain so heavily all day long. She crawled to her door, and noiselessly set it ajar, so slightly, that any one passing would hardly notice that it was not shut. Then she opened the door of the closet. The light in Mr. Tregonnell’s room shone brightly through the crevices in the sliding shutter. Then she crept back to the room door and listened with all her might.

  After about ten minutes she heard the doctor’s step coming along the passage from his own room. He knocked softly at Mr. Tregonnell’s door, was told to enter, and entered. Before the door closed, Hester heard the patient say:

  ‘Upon my word, doctor, I don’t believe I need your ministrations to-night. I feel honestly sleepy.’

  Here the door was firmly shut, and on this side Hester could hear no more.

  She went quietly back to the closet, and drew near the sliding shutter. At the same moment the door leading to the servant’s staircase was cautiously opened, and David Skelter crept in.

  All was dark in the closet. It was by intuition only that Hester knew the intruder. One rash exclamation from him and she would be betrayed. She put one hand over his mouth, grasping his wrist firmly with the other, and whispered in his ear:

  ‘Not a word, not a movement. I am going to watch with you to-night.’ And then, with infinite caution, she slid back the shutter for about an inch, and looked into the room.

  Eustace Tregonnell was lying outside the bed, wrapped in his long velvet dressing-gown, in an attitude of supreme repose. Dr. Carrick was seated beside the bed, his hands moving slowly in mesmerical passes before the patient’s dreamy eyes. In less than a quarter of an hour Mr. Tregonnell had sunk into a mesmeric sleep, profound, peaceful, deathlike.

  So far there was no wrong done. The patient was consentient; mesmerism had exerted a healing influence over mind and body; mesmerism had been Dr. Carrick’s only treatment.

  ‘That’s all, miss,’ whispered David. ‘He’ll go away now, and leave master to sleep it out. It’s against nature that one man should be able to send another to sleep, and I don’t like it.’

  ‘There is no harm in it, David,’ replied Hester.

  But the doctor did not leave his patient. He withdrew from the bed, and. stood, with his back to the mantelpiece, intently watchful of the sleeper. This lasted for more than five minutes; Hester.still watching from the shutter, David close at her side.

  And now Dr. Carrick crept stealthily across the room to the dressing-table, opened the medicine-chest, and took out a bottle.

  ‘It’s the chloroform, miss,’ whispered David. ‘I know the bottle.’

  This word chloroform awakened a vague fear in Hester’s wind
. She felt as if she were on the threshold of some hideous discovery.

  ‘David,’ she whispered, close in the valet’s ear, ‘ run down softly, as fast as you can go, open the street door, and ring the bell. Quick, quick!’

  The man obeyed without understanding her. His shoeless feet ran swiftly down the stairs.

  Dr. Carrick went back to the bed, took the stopper out of the bottle, and deliberately poured the whole of the contents on Eustace Tregonnell’s pillow. The patient lay on his ride with his face towards the fireplace. The doctor sprinkled the chloroform exactly under his nostrils. Then with a delicate hand, as carefully as if he had been covering the face of a sick child, for whom sleep was the sole chance of cure, he drew the light coverlet over Eustace Tregonnell’s head, and stood looking down at the shrouded figure with an evil smile on his face.

  In the next instant the street door bell was ringing violently.

  ‘Great Heaven, who can it be at such a time? ‘ cried the doctor, hurrying from the room, with a backward, uneasy glance at the bed.

  Hester unlocked the closet door, and rushed into Mr. Tregonnell’s room as the doctor disappeared. She threw back the coverlet from the sleeper’s face, snatched the pillow from under his head, dashed cold water over head and face, flung open the window to the cool, moist, night air, all without loss of an instant. She, who all day had been powerless to lift her head from the pillow, seemed in those terrible moments endowed with unnatural strength.

  Eustace stirred, faintly at first; then, as Hester dashed more water into his face, his eyes slowly opened, he gave a struggling sigh, and at last raised his head, and looked at her, with eyes that expressed only vague wonder.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘ What is the matter?’

  ‘I think I have saved your life,’ she said quietly; and then her brain suddenly reeling, she fell in a heap on the floor beside his bed, not unconscious, only giddy and helpless.

  Dr. Carrick came back, saw his intended victim sitting up with his eyes open, and his cousin on the ground by the bed. A glance told him that the game was lost. He did not understand how it had happened — how Hester came there — but he knew that his scheme was a failure.

  ‘What the devil have you been doing to me, Dr, Carrick?’ asked Eustace, not in the most amiable mood after awakening from deepest unconsciousness to find himself in a pool of water. ‘Have you been experimenting in hydropathy? And, good Heavens, what a smell of chloroform! My shirt must have been drenched with it.’

  ‘You were restless, and I sprinkled a few drops on your pillow. In the name of decency, Hester, what are you doing here?’

  The girl rose to her feet, steadied herself with a great effort, and looked her kinsman full in the face. David Skelter had followed the doctor upstairs, and stood on the threshold, ready to rush to his master’s aid the moment he was wanted.

  ‘I know all that has happened to-night said Hester, with those steady eyes on the doctor’s face. ‘ I saw all — David and I — we were both watching you through the little shutter in that closet door. You forgot that shutter, did yon not? I saw you empty the bottle of chloroform on the pillow, and draw the coverlet over your patient’s head. You were trying to suffocate him. I suppose suffocation of that kind leaves no trace. You have got your patient’s will — the will that leaves you everything, no doubt; and all you wanted was to get rid of your patient. You have failed this time. David, take care of your master. Neither his property nor his life is safe in this house.’

  ‘Devil!’ cried the doctor, beside himself. ‘ Liar! Dirt that I picked up out of the gutter — a pauper who must have begged or starved but for my help! A pretty story to hatch against me, forsooth! Mr. Tregonnell, David, I call you both to witness that this woman is either a lunatic or the most outrageous liar that ever drew the breath of life.’

  ‘This woman is my future wife,’ said Eustace Tregonnell, rising from the bed, and supporting Hester’s tottering figure with his arm. ‘ Yes, Hester, you will let it be so, will you not? I offer you the life you have saved. It is no new thought, love; it has been my pleasant day-dream for a month past. David, yon scoundrel, pack my portmanteau this instant. Dr. Carrick, I shall have the felicity of leaving your hospitable abode early to-morrow, but I shall take Miss Brighton with me, and find a more desirable residence for her with our good old vicar and his family, until the marriage service shall have made her mistress of Tregonnell Manor. Now, Hester, my dear, go back to your room, and lock your door. I don’t think Dr. Carrick will try his chloroform treatment on you; he knows that David and I understand him.’

  The baffled villain stood, pale, silent, scarcely breathing — an image of humanity frozen into marble. Then be roused himself slowly, gave a profound sigh, and walked to the door.

  On the threshold he turned, and looked steadily at his patient.

  ‘The night I first saw you I was inclined to think you a madman, Mr. Tregonnell,’ he said deliberately; ‘now I know that you are one. I shall be heartily glad to get rid of such a dangerous inmate. My house is not certified for the reception of lunatics; and if your habits were known, I should get into trouble. Take care of your master, David. He’ll want a strait-waistcoat before you have been much longer in his service.’

  ‘That’s a lie, and you know it,’ David retorted bluntly.

  Mr. Tregonnell took Hester to the vicarage early next morning. He told the vicar everything, and confided the young lady to his friendly care, pending her marriage. The vicar had a comfortable wife, and grown-up daughters; and Hester spent a month among these new friends — a month that was like one long dream of delight, for did not Eustace Tregonnell dedicate all his days to her society?

  St. Hildred House was left empty within a few hours of Mr. Tregonnell’s departure. The maid-of-all-work was paid and dismissed without warning. Dr. Carrick told her that he had received a letter from London which obliged him to leave St. Hildred without an hour’s delay. A rich relative was dying, a relative likely to leave Dr. Carrick a handsome fortune.

  This fiction decently covered the doctor’s retreat. He was soon lost in the labyrinth he knew so well. Despair had fastened its grip upon his soul. He had tried honesty; he had tried fraud and crime. Both had failed.

  ‘I am one of those unlucky mortals born to fail,’ he told himself. Pas de chance. Neither God nor the devil will help me.’

  Dr. Carrick made another appeal to the devil. He started in a disreputable neighbourhood as a practitioner of the lowest order — a practitioner who stuck at nothing. For a time things went well with him, and he made money. Then came a scandal, imprisonment, disgrace; and Dr. Carrick went down to the very bottom of the social gulf, never to rise again.

  For Hester and her lover life holds nothing but happiness. They spend six months of every year cruising in the brightest waters, anchoring by the fairest shores, and the rest of their days at Tregonnell Manor, where, being wealthy and generous, they are universally beloved.

  ‘IF SHE BE NOT FATE TO ME.’

  CHAPTER I. AFTER THE SEASON.

  MISS FERRIER’S first season was over, and she had come back to Loxley Park little injured morally or physically by the adulation she had received, and the fatigues she had undergone. Blanche Ferrier’s début had been a decided success. She was a very beautiful girl. Her people were rich and of a good old family. She had no brothers, and only one sister, five years her junior, a damsel who had been christened Antoinette, but who was commonly known as Tiny: a golden-haired, little girl, with long legs and short petticoats, who had never left the precincts of Loxley, and was ignored altogether by that busy, inquisitive, yet superficially informed London world which was quick to accept Blanche Ferrier as the sole heiress of her father’s lands.

  She had been greatly admired, written about in fashionable journals, stared at to a degree which seemed to the home-reared English girl vulgar persecution. She had been wooed, but not won, and she came back to Loxley unspoiled and fancy free. Yes, unspoiled, for she was s
till frank and unaffected, though more given to slang and a conventional kind of short-hand society talk than before she went to town. She had not yet learnt to consider dressing well and looking lovely the sole end and aim of a woman’s life; but she had certainly become fully aware of her own value, from the fashionable point of view; and she had made up her mind that when she should condescend to fall in love it must needs be with an eminently eligible lover — a man who would lift her to a much higher place in the social scale than, as a country squire’s daughter, she could by right of birth and lineage claim for herself.

  Loxley was a wonderful place; and much as Blanche had enjoyed the novel delights of a London season, with all its bustle and society, she was very pleased to come home. She was very glad to have the fair-haired Tiny to bring her morning cup of tea and tray full of letters, and to sit on the bed watching her with widely-opened blue eyes while she read them, with a reversionary interest in the crests and monograms.

  ‘What a lot of letters you get now, Blanche!’ exclaimed the little maid wonderingly. ‘Before you went to London you used not to have more than two or three letters in a week.’