Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘I wish to Heaven it were so. I’ll accept your invitation, though I shall be no better company than the skeleton at an Egyptian feast. I feel interested in this Elyard.’

  ‘Naturally. The man is a genius; and genius is too rare not to be interesting.’

  Captain Bywater had called at Mr. Thomas Leeworthy’s house, in Bryanstone Square, and had been informed that the politician was in Paris, and not expected home for a week or ten days. He was not likely to be away longer than the latter period, his butler told the Captain, as there was a bill coming before the house in which he was keenly interested.

  Captain Bywater had set his heart upon seeing Mr. Leeworthy, though there seemed little hope that Helen’s uncle could help him to discover the secret of her fate, having failed in discovering it himself. But then, the Captain argued, an uncle’s love and a lover’s love are as different as lamp-light and forked lightning. The darkness which the feeble glimmer of affection had failed to penetrate might be illuminated to its nethermost depth by the piercing radiance of a passionate love.

  It was nearly midnight when Captain Bywater presented himself at his friend’s chambers in Gray’s Inn, spacious handsome rooms, with the gloomy grandeur of a departed age. A dozen or so of wax candles lightened the supper table, and a circle round it, and left the dark oak walls in profound shadow.

  The party consisted of the famous actor, and two intellectual nonentities, one a sprouting barrister, whom the great criminal lawyer had taken under his wing, the other a critic on an evening paper.

  There was a good deal of conversation at supper, but the host and the critic were the chief talkers. The young barrister habitually agreed with his patron, and always laughed in the right place. Captain Bywater looked on and said nothing. The actor leaned back in his chair, with his thin white hand pushed through his long black hair, and his shining eyes fixed on space. He might be listening intently to the conversation; or his thoughts might be hundreds of miles away. It was impossible to determine which.

  ‘ What a wretched supper you have eaten, Elyard,’ exclaimed the lawyer, with a vexed air. ‘ Yet that spatchcock with mushrooms was not bad. And you have hardly tasted my Chateau Yquem. Do you never eat or drink?’

  ‘ I am not a voracious eater,’ answered Elyard, in his deep and subdued voice.

  Presently, when the dishes had been cleared away, and the guests had drawn, closer together over their wine, Michael Elyard folded his arms upon the table, and looked steadfastly at his host.

  Phillimore Dorrell touched the sailor’s foot under the table, as much as to say, ‘ Look out for what’s coming now.’

  ‘Dorrell, did you read that case of a mysterious disappearance in to-day’s Chronicle?’

  ‘ Yes, I saw it.’

  ‘And do you still say there are very few murders — none even — that are not eventually found out?’

  ‘Yes, I stick to my colours. But remember, I say “ eventually.” In the statistics of crime — —’

  ‘Oh, pray don’t talk to me about statistics,’ cried the actor impatiently. ‘ I think I know as much about statistics as any man; the statistics of disease, of drunkenness, of crime, of mortality. I went very deeply into statistics at one time of my life.’

  Charles Bywater held his breath. He sat like a man of stone, and. waited for what was coming.

  ‘When you were at the University?’ asked Dorrell.

  After I left the University. I assisted in the preparation, nay, I may go so far as to say that I was the chief author of a very important statistical work; Leeworthy’s ‘ Facts and Figures for the People.’

  ‘ I understand,’ said the lawyer, ‘you did all the work and Mr. Leeworthy had all the credit, and the profit, if there was any, which I should think was doubtful. ‘ Facts and Figures for the People’ is exactly the kind of work I should, expect to find uncut in the sixpenny box at a bookstall. But what a clever fellow you must be, Elyard, to change from such dull drudgery as bookmaking to the glorious triumphs of a famous tragedian.’

  ‘ Yes, it is a change for the better,’ assented Mr. Elyard, with a dismal look, and then he leaned his elbows on the table, and fixed his snaky gaze upon Phillimore Dorrell, and went back to his favourite subject, murder, as one of the fine arts. De Quincey had not then written his wonderful essay upon this theme. Burke and Hare, and even the Ratcliffe Highway murderers were still among the great men of the future. Indeed, the art of murder was just then suffering one of those intervals of mediocrity and decadence which are common to all great arts.

  Mr. Dorrell warmed with the discussion. His experience was wide in the dark and winding ways of crime. He had many curious anecdotes, to tell, and told them magnificently. The timepiece behind him struck half hours and hours, and still Michael Elyard listened, with his steadfast eyes rooted on the speaker, and led him on at every pause with some apposite question. The critic yawned, dozed, waked himself, and took his leave. The young stuff-gown listened, and approved and drank burgundy till his eyes began to blink and grow watery, and at last his chin fell comfortably forward on his breast, his head began to roll starboard and larboard, and his deep and steady breathing to sound like the soothing cadence of summer waves. In all this time Charles Bywater never relaxed his attention.

  Just at the close of a thrilling anecdote the clock struck four, and Phillimore Dorrell started up from his chair.

  ‘My dear fellow, I have to be in court at ten to-morrow morning,’ he exclaimed, ‘and here’s Brunton getting absolutely apoplectic. Do you ever sleep, Elyard?’

  ‘ Sometimes,’ answered the tragedian in his dreary voice, ‘but I don’t care much about it. Good night. Thank you for a most interesting evening. I shall go and have a walk upon the bridges. I am very fond of the Thames at sunrise.’

  ‘ I shall go to bed,’ said Dorrell, ‘ and I recommend you to do the same.’

  Mr. Elyard shook hands with his host, saluted Captain Bywater and the newly awakened barrister with a stately bow, and retired. Phillimore Dorrell drew aside the dark moreen curtain and let the grey daylight into the room.

  The candles had burned low in the old silver candelabra. The empty bottles and scattered fragments of the feast had a melancholy look in the chilly morning. The barrister made his adieu and hurried off; the sailor lingered.

  ‘ What do you think of him?’ asked Dorrell, when he found himself alone with his old school fellow.

  ‘ What do I think of him? I think he bears the brand of Cain upon his forehead. I know that he murdered Helen Leeworthy.’

  ‘My dear Charlie, this is midsummer madness.’

  ‘Is it? I tell you this man is a murderer — no other than a murderer would thus harp upon the horrid theme — gloating on the knowledge of his iniquity, or else so oppressed by the weight of his guilty secret that he must talk of it, must drag it out to the light of day, must parade it in some form or other before the eyes of his fellow men. It is demoniac possession, the possession of a monomaniac driven mad by the ever present vision of one hideous crisis in his past life. He is a man of one idea. Could you not see it in the play? It is all murder from the first scene to the last — a murder contemplated — a murder done. He looks and moves like the shedder of blood.’

  ‘ If you will speak more calmly, I may be able to get at your meaning,’ urged Dorrell, as the sailor paced the room, violently agitated.

  ‘ Yes, I will tell you all. I want your help.’

  He explained how from that admission about the volume of statistics he had identified Elphinstone, the secretary, in Elyard the actor.

  ‘That proves nothing against him,’ said Dorrell, ‘you, yourself told me that nobody suspected this Elphinstone; that he was active in the endeavour to trace the missing girl.’

  ‘ A blind to baffle suspicion. I suspect him. I saw in him from the first the possible murderer. I see in him to-night the actual murderer. His own looks, his own lips confess it. He is a man tormented by the furies.’

  ‘Upon my honour,�
�� ejaculated Dorrell solemnly, ‘I begin to think that a murder has been done, and that it is going to be found out. That goes to establish my theory.’

  ‘Promise me one thing,’ urged the Captain. ‘Don’t let that man know who I am. He must have heard of me at Clerevale as an intimate friend of the family, and he would be on his guard before me. When I next meet him you can call me — anything you like — Bedford — Browning.’

  ‘But I introduced you to him as Captain Bywater,’

  ‘You said the name with the usual indistinctness, and there was some little confusion in the room just then. Elyard and your friend the barrister came in together, if you remember. You addressed me as Charley all the evening. No, I don’t think he heard my name. So for the future you can talk of me as Captain Browning.’

  ‘So be it — I would do more than that to oblige you.’

  CHAPTER IV. IN THE RED SUNSET.

  THE long vacation had begun, the courts were closed, and Phillimore Dorrell was taking his summer holiday up the river, between Henley and Reading. He had hired a furnished cottage, was doing a little reading and a great deal of boating, and keeping open house in a jovial bachelor fashion for his chosen friends.

  Among these was Charles Bywater, not the liveliest companion in the world, but too much a gentleman to pester his friend with his own particular grief, and too well-informed, unselfish and true-hearted ever to degenerate into a bore.

  He was passionately fond of the Thames, and spent most of his time in the solicitor’s wherry, between banks which were even lovelier then than they are now, the perky Cockney villa not having yet intruded on the sylvan serenity of the shore.

  At the cottage Charles Bywater was known as Captain Browning. He had a room kept for him always, and came and went as he pleased.

  ‘ News for you, Charley,’ said Dorrell, one afternoon, when his friend entered the shady little river-side garden, with the dust of the mail coach road upon his garments. ‘ Elyard is to be here this evening.’

  ‘ I’m very glad of that. I have been waiting my opportunity.’

  ‘ The theatre closed last night, after a season of remarkable able prosperity. The managers have presented him with a diamond snuff-box. He will be in high feather, no doubt.’

  ‘ Do you think his triumphs will make any difference in him? I don’t. He is tormented by memories that make happiness impossible.’

  They were to dine at five, and at a few minutes before the hour Mr. Elyard arrived, looking just as he had looked that night in Gray’s Inn, and very much as he looked in ‘ The Venetian Husband.’ He shook hands with his host, gave the Captain a gloomy nod, and before they were half way through the dinner, at which he eat hardly anything, began to talk about murder.

  A remarkable trial had just taken place at the Lancaster assizes.

  Four men had been condemned to death for the brutal murder of an old woman and a beautiful girl of twenty. The outrage had been committed at mid-day, in a house at Pendleton, near Manchester — a house within ear-shot and eye-shot of other houses. The murderers had been seen leaving the house with their booty, they had spent their afternoon at various village taverns, and one of them had made an idiotic display of his plunder on the evening after the crime.

  ‘ With common prudence those creatures might easily have escaped the gallows,’ said Elyard. ‘ It was their own folly that put the rope round their neck.’

  ‘The jury felt a natural indignation against the murderers of a feeble old woman and a lovely and innocent girl,’ said Dorrell. ‘ Had the evidence been less conclusive than it was the verdict would have been the same. Men’s hearts are stronger than their heads in a case of that kind.’

  ‘Ay,’ sighed the tragedian, ‘young, lovely, innocent, and foully murdered. A hard fate. And in this case, passion could plead no excuse. It was not the madness of a despised love that impelled the murderous stroke. The beautiful Hannah Partington was no victim to a revengeful lover. Such a fate would have been euthanasia as compared with hers. A sordid villain, flushed with greed of gain, wanting money to squander in a village tap-room, a wretch without passion or tenderness, without even the capacity for remorse, struck the blow. I would hang such vulgar ruffians high as Haman.’

  ‘ Would you argue that a despised and rejected love could excuse an assassin?’ asked Dorrell.

  ‘ The tragedy of passion is sublime, even in its darkest depths,’ answered the actor. ‘ Who ever thinks of Othello as of a common murderer?’

  After dinner the three gentlemen strolled out upon the lawn. Phillimore Dorrell ordered the wine to be carried to a table under a willow that dipped its long green tresses into the stream, but Michael Elyard seemed in too restless a humour to enjoy the quiet of the scene.

  ‘You do not appear to appreciate the tranquillity of your first leisure evening,’ said Dorrell, ‘I should have thought it would have been an infinite relief to you to find yourself a free man.’

  ‘I miss the excitement of the theatre, answered Elyard, with a dreary sigh, ‘The country is pretty enough to look at in a picture, but the reality is somewhat oppressive.’

  ‘Yet you endured a long residence in one of the quietest nooks in all England,’ said the Captain.

  ‘What do you mean? ‘ asked the actor, startled.

  When you were writing your book of statistics at Clerevale.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Why, man alive, don’t look so scared,’ cried the lawyer. It was you yourself who told us the other night at my chambers.’

  ‘Aye, to be sure,’ assented Elyard, ‘but I did not think I had mentioned the name of the place. It is no matter though. There is no secret in it.’

  He passed his long thin hand across his brow, and for a minute or so seemed quite lost. Then his eye wandered slowly round the scene, as if he were striving to bring his distracted thoughts back to the present.

  ‘You have a boat, I see,’ he said, glancing at the wherry moored a little way from the tree.

  ‘Yes, I spend all my leisure upon the river. Would you like a row this evening? There will be a lovely sunset.’

  ‘I should like it of all things.’

  ‘Then Captain Browning shall row you. I have a postbag of letters to write; but he’s a better sculler than I am.’

  Elyard gave the captain an uneasy glance, as if he hardly cared for his company, but recovered himself the next moment.

  ‘I shall be much beholden to Captain Browning,’ he said, in his stately way.

  Half an hour later the captain and the tragedian were sitting in the boat gliding quietly upon the placid river, the slow dip of the oars falling with a musical rhythm, both men curiously silent, as if the stillness of the summer evening, and the loveliness of the landscape had given a melancholy colour to their thoughts.

  There was a rosy glow in the west as the sun went down, which gradually deepened to a warm crimson, and intensified with every moment. They had reached a point where the stream narrowed. On the western bank there was a long fringe of reeds, behind which burned the red fires of the setting sun.

  Suddenly, Charles By water left off rowing, and leaned forward upon his sculls.

  ‘A picturesque bit of the river this?’ he said, interrogatively.

  The tragedian surveyed the landscape slowly, with his cold, dark eye.

  ‘To my mind neither so picturesque nor so pleasing as other spots we have passed,’ he answered. ‘ The shores are flat and dull — poorly wooded too — there is no relief for the eye, no variety.’

  ‘But that long line of rushes with the crimson glow behind it, urged the captain, pointing to the western bank, ‘surely that m itself is a subject for a painter.’

  ‘I see no interest in it,’ said the other coldly.

  ‘That is strange, for it must recall the scene in your tragedy. Do you not see the resemblance?’

  ‘Yes, now you call my attention to it. There is as much likeness as there can be between a stage play and reality, between the for
mal bank of a canal and the unsophisticated shore of a river.’

  ‘Does it bring back to your mind no other scene, one which it resembles more closely — the banks of a river in Buckinghamshire, just the same reedy shore, the same red sunset. Does it not conjure up before your eye the river-bank at Clerevale, the spot where you murdered Helen Leeworthy?’

  Michael Elyard started up in the boat like a man distraught. He stood gazing at his accuser, dumbfounded, horror-stricken, while the light wherry reeled with the jerk he had given it.

  ‘You would plead that you are not as the murderers of Hannah Partington. Helen Leeworthy had rejected, perhaps even scorned your love. Secretly, stealthily, you had persecuted her with a suit that was odious to her. She threatened, it may be, to inform her relatives of your pursuit, but her gentle nature revolted against doing you this injury. Instead of doing battle with your passion, as a man or a gentleman, and conquering it, you let your passion conquer you, you abandoned yourself wholly to its sway. You let the devil get possession of you. And then one night you urged for the last time your hopeless unavailing love. You knelt, you entreated, you wept, and she remained cold as marble. And then the devil within you burst his bonds, and you slew her.’

  ‘I did,’ shrieked Elyard, these hands slaughtered her. I can feel the white round throat now in their grip. How the muscles quivered under my clutch, how the fair young form writhed in that brief agony, the strained blue eyes staring at me all the while. God! do you think they have ever ceased to haunt me with that awful stare. Day and night, waking and sleeping, I have seen them.’

  He sank down in a heap at the bottom of the boat, and crouched there, looking straight before him at the swiftly darkening landscape, and muttering to himself, as if unconscious of any other presence than his own.