Mr. Levi looked hard at him, and nodded. He was accustomed to excited language in certain situations.
“Well,” said he coolly, a second time returning the keys to his pocket, “your friend will be here at twelve tomorrow, and if you please him as well as he expects, who knows wha-at may be? If he leavesh you half hish money, you’ll not ‘ave many bill transhactionsh on your handsh.”
“May God Almighty have mercy on me!” groans Sir Richard, hardly above his breath.
“You shall have the cheques then. He’ll be here all right.”
“I — I forget; did you say an hour?”
Levi repeats the hour. Sir Richard walks slowly to the stairs, down which Levi lights him. Neither speaks.
In a few minutes more the young gentleman is driving rapidly to his town house, where he means to end that long-remembered night.
When he had got to his room, and dismissed his valet, he sat down. He looked round, and wondered how collected he now was. The situation seemed like a dream, or his sense of danger had grown torpid. He could not account for the strange indifference that had come over him. He got quickly into bed. It was late, and he exhausted, and aided, I know not by what narcotic, he slept a constrained, odd sleep — black as Erebus — the thread of which snaps suddenly, and he is awake with a heart beating fast, as if from a sudden start. A hard bitter voice has said close by the pillow, “You are the first Arden that ever did that!” and with these words grating in his ears, he awoke, and had a confused remembrance of having been dreaming of his father.
Another dream, later on, startled him still more. He was in Levi’s office, and while they were talking over the horrid document, in a moment it blew out of the window; and a lean, ill-looking man, in a black coat, like the famous person who, in old woodcuts, picked up the shadow of Peter Schlemel, caught the parchment from the pavement, and with his eyes fixed cornerwise upon him, and a dreadful smile, tapped his long finger on the bond, and with wide paces stepped swiftly away with it in his hand.
Richard Arden started up in his bed; the cold moisture of terror was upon his forehead, and for a moment he did not know where he was, or how much of his vision was real. The grey twilight of early morning was over the town. He welcomed the light; he opened the window-shutters wide. He looked from the window down upon the street. A lean man with tattered black, with a hammer in his hand, just as the man in his dream had held the roll of parchment, was slowly stepping with long strides away from his house, along the street.
As his thoughts cleared, his panic increased. Nothing had happened between the time of his lying down and his up-rising to alter his situation, and the same room sees him now half mad.
CHAPTER LXIX.
THE MEETING.
Near the appointed hour, he walked across the park, and through the Horse Guards, and in a few minutes more was between the tall oldfashioned houses of the street in which Mr. Levi’s office is to be found. He passes by a dingy hired coach, with a tarnished crest on the door, and sees two Jewish-looking men inside, both smiling over some sly joke. Whose door are they waiting at? He supposes another Jewish office seeks the shade of that pensive street.
Mr. Levi opened his office door for his handsome client. They were quite to themselves. Mr. Levi did not look well. He received him with a nod. He shut the door when Sir Richard was in the room.
“He’sh not come yet. We’ll talk to him inshide.” He indicates the door of the inner room, with a little side jerk of his head. “That’sh private. He hazh that — thing all right.”
Sir Richard says nothing. He follows Levi into a small inner room, which had, perhaps, originally been a lady’s boudoir, and had afterwards, one might have conjectured, served as the treasury of cash and jewels of a pawn-office; for its door was secured with iron bars, and two great locks, and the windows were well barred with iron. There were two huge iron safes in the room, built into the wall.
“I’ll show you a beauty of a dresshing-ca-ashe,” said Levi, rousing himself; “I’ll shell it a dead bargain, and give time for half, if you knowsh any young shwell as wantsh such a harticle. Look here; it was made for the Duchess of Horleans — all in gold, hemerald, and brilliantsh.”
And thus haranguing, he displayed its contents, and turned them over, staring on them with a livid admiration. Sir Richard is not thinking of the duchess’s dressing-case, nor is he much more interested when Mr. Levi goes on to tell him, “There’sh three executions against peersh out thish week — two gone down to the country. Sholomonsh nobbled Lord Bylkington’s carriage outshide Shyner’s at two o’clock in the morning, and his lordship had to walk home in the rain;” and Levi laughs and wriggles pleasantly over the picture. “I think he’sh coming,” says Levi suddenly, inclining his ear toward the door. He looked back over his shoulder with an odd look, a little stern, at the young gentleman.
“Who?” asked the young man, a little uncertain, in consequence of the character of that look.
“Your — that — your friend, of course,” said Levi, with his eyes again averted, and his ear near the door.
It was a moment of trepidation and of hope to Richard Arden. He hears the steps of several persons in the next room. Levi opens a little bit of the door, and peeps through, and with a quick glance towards the baronet, he whispers, “Ay, it’s him.”
Oh, blessed hope! here comes, at last, a powerful friend to take him by the hand, and draw him, in his last struggle, from the whirlpool.
Sir Richard glances towards the door through which the Jew is still looking, and signing with his hand as, little by little, he opens it wider and wider; and a voice in the next room, at sound of which Sir Richard starts to his feet, says sharply, “Is all right?”
“All right,” replies Levi, getting aside; and Mr. Longcluse entered the room and shut the door.
His pale face looked paler than usual, his thin cruel lips were closed, his nostrils dilated with a terrible triumph, and his eyes were fixed upon Arden, as he held the fatal parchment in his hand.
Levi saw a scowl so dreadful contract Sir Richard Arden’s face — was it pain, or was it fury? — that, drawing back as far as the wall would let him, he almost screamed, “It ain’t me! — it ain’t my fault! — I can’t help it! — I couldn’t! — I can’t!” His right hand was in his pocket, and his left, trembling violently, extended toward him, as if to catch his arm.
But Richard Arden was not thinking of him — did not hear him. He was overpowered. He sat down in his chair. He leaned back with a gasp and a faint laugh, like a man just overtaken by a wave, and lifted half-drowned from the sea. Then, with a sudden cry, he threw his hands and head on the table.
There was no token of relenting in Longcluse’s cruel face. There was a contemptuous pleasure in it. He did not remove his eyes from that spectacle of abasement as he replaced the parchment in his pocket. There is a silence of about a minute, and Sir Richard sits up and says vaguely, —
“Thank God, it’s over! Take me away; I’m ready to go.”
“You shall go, time enough; I have a word to say first,” said Longcluse, and he signs to the Jew to leave them.
On being left to themselves, the first idea that struck Sir Richard was the wild one of escape. He glanced quickly at the window. It was barred with iron. There were men in the next room — he could not tell how many — and he was without arms. The hope lighted up, and almost at the same moment expired.
CHAPTER LXX.
MR. LONGCLUSE PROPOSES.
“Clear your head,” says Mr. Longcluse, sternly, seating himself before Sir Richard, with the table between; “you must conceive a distinct idea of your situation, Sir, and I shall then tell you something that remains. You have committed a forgery under aggravated circumstances, for which I shall have you convicted and sentenced to penal servitude at the next sessions. I have been a good friend to you on many occasions; you have been a false one to me — who baser? — and while I was anonymously helping you with large sums of money, you forged my name to a
legal instrument for ten thousand pounds, to swindle your unknown benefactor, little suspecting who he was.”
Longcluse smiled.
“I have heard how you spoke of me. I’m an adventurer, a leg, an assassin, a person whom you were compelled to drop; rather a low person, I fear, if a felon can’t afford to sit beside me! You were always too fine a man for me. Your get up was always peculiar; you were famous for that. It will soon be more singular still, when your hair and your clothes are cut after the fashion of the great world you are about to enter. How your friends will laugh!”
Sir Richard heard all this with a helpless stare.
“I have only to stamp on the ground, to call up the men who will accomplish your transformation. I can change your life by a touch, into convict dress, diet, labour, lodging, for the rest of your days. What plea have you to offer to my mercy?”
Sir Richard would have spoken, but his voice failed him. With a second effort, however, he said— “Would it not be more manly if you let me meet my fate, without this.”
“And you are such an admirable judge of what is manly, or even gentlemanlike!” said Longcluse. “Now, mind, I shall arrest you in five minutes, on your three overdue bills. The men with the writ are in the next room. I sha’n’t immediately arrest you for the forgery. That shall hang over you. I mean to make you, for a while, my instrument. Hear, and understand; I mean to marry your sister. She don’t like me, but she suits me; I have chosen her, and I’ll not be baulked. When that is accomplished, you are safe. No man likes to see his brother a spectacle of British justice, with cropped hair, and a log to his foot. I may hate and despise you, as you deserve, but that would not do. Failing that, however, you shall have justice, I promise you. The course I propose taking is this: you shall be arrested here, for debt. You will be good enough to allow the people who take you, to select your present place of confinement. It is arranged. I will then, by a note, appoint a place of meeting for this evening, where I shall instruct you as to the particulars of that course of conduct I prescribe for you. If you mean to attempt an escape, you had better try it now; I will give you fourteen hours’ start, and undertake to catch and bring you back to London as a forger. If you make up your mind to submit to fate, and do precisely as you are ordered, you may emerge. But on the slightest evasion, prevarication, or default, the blow descends. In the meantime we treat each other civilly before these people. Levi is in my hands, and you, I presume, keep your own secret.”
“That is all?” inquired Sir Richard, faintly, after a minute’s silence.
“All for the present,” was the reply; “you will see more clearly, by-and-by, that you are my property, and you will act accordingly.”
The two Jewish-looking gentlemen, whom Richard had passed in a conference in their carriage which stood now at the steps of the house, were the sheriff’s officers destined to take charge of the fallen gentleman, and convey him, by Levi’s direction, to a “sponging house,” which, I believe, belonged jointly to him and his partner, Mr. Goldshed.
It was on the principle, perhaps, on which hunters tame wild beasts, by a sojourn at the bottom of a pit-fall, that Mr. Longcluse doomed the young baronet to some ten hours’ solitary contemplation of his hopeless immeshment in that castle of Giant Despair, before taking him out and setting him again before him, for the purpose of instructing him in the conditions and duties of the direful life on which he was about to enter.
Mr. Longcluse left the baronet suddenly, and returned to Levi’s office no more.
Sir Richard’s rôle was cast. He was to figure, at least first, as a captive in the drama for which fate had selected him. He had no wish to retard the progress of the piece. Nothing more odious than his present situation was likely to come.
“You have something to say to me?” said the baronet, making tender, as it were, of himself. The offer was, obligingly, accepted, and the sheriffs, by his lieutenants, made prisoner of Sir Richard Arden, who strode down the stairs between them, and entered the seedy coach, and sitting as far back as he could, drove rapidly toward the City.
Stunned and confused, there was but one image vividly present to his recollection, and that was the baleful face of Walter Longcluse.
CHAPTER LXXI.
NIGHT.
At about eight o’clock that evening, a hurried note reached Alice Arden, at Mortlake. It was from her brother, and said, —
“MY DARLING ALICE,
“I can’t get away from town tonight, I am overwhelmed with business; but tomorrow, before dinner, I hope to see you, and stay at Mortlake till next morning. — Your affectionate brother,
“DICK.”
The house was quiet earlier than in former times, when Sir Reginald, of rakish memory, was never in his bed till past three o’clock in the morning. Mortlake was an early house now, and all was still by a quarter past eleven. The last candle burning was usually that in Mrs. Tansey’s room. She had not yet gone to bed, and was still in “the housekeeper’s room,” when a tapping came at the window. It reminded her of Mr. Longcluse’s visit on the night of the funeral.
She was now the only person up in the house, except Alice, who was at the far side of the building, where, in the next room, her maid was in bed asleep. Alice, who sat at her dressing-table, reading, with her long rich hair dishevelled over her shoulders, was, of course, quite out of hearing.
Martha went to the window with a little frown of uncertainty. Opening a bit of the shutter, she saw Sir Richard’s face close to her. Was ever old housekeeper so pestered by nightly tappings at her window-pane?
“La! who’d a thought o’ seeing you, Master Richard! why, you told Miss Alice you’d not be here till tomorrow!” she says pettishly, holding the candle high above her head.
He makes a sign of caution to her, and placing his lips near the pane, says, —
“Open the window the least bit in life.”
With a dark stare in his face, she obeys. An odd approach, surely, for a master to make to his own house!
“No one up in the house but you?” he whispers, as soon as the window is open.
“Not one!”
“Don’t say a word, only listen: come, softly, round to the hall-door, and let me in; and light those candles there, and bring them with you to the hall. Don’t let a creature know I have been here, and make no noise for your life!”
The old woman nodded with the same little frown; and he, pointing toward the hall door, walks away silently in that direction.
“What makes you look so white and dowley?” mutters the old woman, as she secures the window, and bars the shutters again.
“Good creature!” whispers Sir Richard, as he enters the hall, and places his hand kindly on her shoulder, and with a very dark look; “you have always been true to me, Martha, and I depend on your good sense; not a word of my having been here to any one — not to Miss Alice! I have to search for papers. I shall be here but an hour or so. Don’t lock or bar the door, mind, and get to your bed! Don’t come up this way again — goodnight!”
“Won’t you have some supper?”
“No, thanks.”
“A glass of sherry and a bit o’ something?”
“Nothing.”
And he places his hand on her shoulder gently, and looks toward the corridor that led to her room; then taking up one of the candles she had left alight on the table in the hall, he says, —
“I’ll give you a light,” and he repeats, with a wondrous heavy sigh, “Goodnight, dear old Martha.”
“God bless ye, Master Dick. Ye must chirp up a bit, mind,” she says very kindly, with an earnest look in her face. “I’m getting to rest — ye needn’t fear me walkin’ about to trouble ye. But ye must be careful to shut the hall-door close. I agree, as it is a thing to be done; but ye must also knock at my bedroom window when ye’ve gane out, for I must get up, and lock the door, and make a’ safe; and don’t ye forget, Master Richard, what I tell ye.”
He held the candle at the end of the corridor, down w
hich the wiry old woman went quickly; and when he returned to the hall, and set the candle down again, he felt faint. In his ears are ever the terrible words: “Mind, I take command of the house, I dispose of and appoint the servants; I don’t appear, you do all ostensibly — but from garret to cellar, I’m master. I’ll look it over, and tell you what is to be done.”
Sir Richard roused himself, and having listened at the staircase, he very softly opened the hall-door. The spire of the old church showed hoar in the moonlight. At the left, from under a deep shadow of elms, comes silently a tall figure, and softly ascends the hall-door steps. The door is closed gently.
Alice sitting at her dressing-table, half an hour later, thought she heard steps — lowered her book, and listened. But no sound followed. Again the same light footfalls disturbed her — and again, she was growing nervous. Once more she heard them, very stealthily, and now on the same floor on which her room was. She stands up breathless. There is no noise now. She was thinking of waking her maid, but she remembered that she and Louisa Diaper had in a like alarm, discovered old Martha, only two or three nights before, poking about the china-closet, dusting and counting, at one o’clock in the morning, and had then exacted a promise that she would visit that repository no more, except at seasonable hours. But old Martha was so pig-headed, and would take it for granted that she was fast asleep, and would rather fidget through the house and poke up everything at that hour than at any other.
Quite persuaded of this, Alice takes her candle, determined to scold that troublesome old thing, against whom she is fired with the irritation that attends on a causeless fright. She walks along the gallery quickly, in slippers, flowing dressing-gown and hair, with her candle in her hand, to the head of the stairs, through the great window of which the moonlight streams brightly. Through the keyhole of the door at the opposite side, a ray of candlelight is visible, and from this room opens the china-closet, which is no doubt the point of attraction for the troublesome visitant. Holding the candle high in her left hand, Alice opens the door.
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 556
