A sudden faintness overcame Mrs. Jenner for a moment on hearing that dreaded name. But her very terror strung up her energies; and with a light step, and pale face, she entered the nursery, and said —
“Here’s a man come about the baby. Lock the door on the inside, when I go, and keep my precious darling safe.”
“Agoy!” exclaimed Kitty, popping her head out at the nursery door, with round eyes, and round mouth, and good honest round cheeks. “What shall we do wi’ t’ bab, ma’am? We can’t get down wi”t, ‘twould begin bledderin’, and he’d be sure to catch it. If I had but the sword that’s in the master’s study, ma’am.”
“Be quiet, Kitty-don’t talk like a mafflin’. Get into the room, and open to no one till I tell you.”
And with these words, Mrs. Jenner assumed her stateliest air; and shaking out her brown silk dress a little, she went downstairs to the drawingroom with as dauntless a demeanour as she could command, and an awful tremor at her heart.
Mrs. Jenner was quite a lady, though something of that stiff school which has quite passed away.
With her a curtsey was no make-belief, but a dignified salutation, during which you might leisurely count four, or walk across the room. She saw a man lightly and elegantly made, and strikingly handsome, though not young.
He turned about from the window, where he stood as she entered, looking across the lake at the mountains that seemed so towering and so near, and made her a grand-seigneur bow, as ceremonious and more graceful than her own old English curtsey.
She was agreeably surprised! There was here something so deferential, so graceful, so engaging.
Captain Torquil introduced himself, and made many apologies for disturbing her. Ladies in the country, who were known to be really kind and charitable, he knew, had hardly ever an hour to themselves.
He was so glad, he said, that this little excursion to look after a foolish runaway servant should have led him back, though only for a moment, to Golden Friars. When he was a boy he had been here for three months, every year, for three years in succession; and had walked over those beautiful mountains again and again; and knew every rivulet and ravine, every curve and hollow, especially of that huge clump of mountains that overhung the lake. He remembered this house so well; that was long before her time. It was a Mr. Drayton, he thought, that had it then. A change very much for the better when Mr. Jenner came.
This he said pointedly.
And particularly he remembered Mrs. Drayton. She was not at all liked down here. Country people are very discriminating; they know a lady. It would be a great pleasure to his poor wife, who was a sad invalid, to hear how her cousin at Golden Friars was. What this delightful air and exquisite scenery can do for people! A paradise that communicates its own immortality. He wished so much he could get his poor wife into some such exquisite panorama, and vivifying atmosphere.
“She’s not old. Still, I need not tell you, a young woman, poor Janet might be almost in her best looks at this moment; and if she had lived in a place like this, she would have been. You and she are contemporaries, I know.”
Good Mrs. Jenner was six years her senior.
“And I find it certainly very hard to believe. My poor wife so often speaks of you. I felt as if I knew you; as if — I hope I was not very impertinent — I had a kind of right, almost, to come in in this unceremonious way. And there is my particular friend, General Donnington — Sir Edward Donnington he is now, you know, and very rich — a great sum, Indian prize-money. Of course you heard. Poor fellow! He never married, and never will, I suppose. He had his romance, and his grief; I know all about that,” said he, very low, looking down on the carpet.
“And he’s another friend who talks to me, more than I need say, about Golden Friars, and our relations there.”
Mrs. Jenner always blushed easily, and she blushed now, looking down with a faint little smile, and a gentle sigh; and she thought what a melancholy music was in Captain Torquil’s voice, and what a charming person he was, and what nice simple tastes and feelings he seemed to have.
“I am thinking of getting away from town life, I’m tired of London. There is nothing on earth, I think, I should so entirely enjoy as living in a place like this-in this very place — living and dying here.”
There was here a pause, as he looked pensively across the lake to the grand background of mountain.
“And,” he continued, “we have had a little responsibility — a very pleasant one — thrown upon us by poor dear Alice Mildmay. You have heard of her death, of course, poor thing. She was fond of my wife, and honoured me with her confidence and good opinion, and consulted me latterly about everything, and her poor little girl, only eighteen months old, she has left in our charge; and it would be so delightful to have it here-close to you-and perhaps, sooner or later, we might induce you to take it altogether under your care. The fact is, my poor wife’s miserable health would quite unfit her, except for a short time, for the anxieties and trouble of such a charge. But it would be a very ungracious thing to refuse, and for a few months, I suppose, we must submit and comply with so solemn a request, until we find — I should be so delighted if it were eventually in this house-a suitable protectress for the poor little thing. At present I have had to follow down here a person whom I wish I could describe as simply foolish — in fact, a particularly wicked and audacious woman, who has stolen the child. I detest having to punish any one — in fact, if you knew me, you would understand that it is downright torture to me, the bare idea of doing so. But that wicked woman — it is a duty one can’t get over to stop such doings peremptorily; and I’m come all this way, you see, to do that. Her name is Hileria Pullen. Is she in the house?”
“No, certainly,” said Mrs. Jenner, who, as the crisis seemed to approach, flushed very much, and grew plainly very uncomfortable. “I never saw her-she never was in this house.”
“But the little child is; Doctor Jenner says so, and in a better place it could not possibly be,” said Captain Torquil, “nor under more admirable superintendence or kinder care. You’ll kindly allow me, however, to see the child, and assure myself that it is the very child, and all safe, and quite out of the hands of that wicked woman. And, being once assured upon these points, I would ask you kindly to take pity upon me, who have no servant with me capable of taking charge of the infant, and to permit it to remain here, in your kind hands, as much longer as will consist with your convenience and liking.” Here was a polite and plausible speech enough. But what was that in the captain’s dark greedy eye — in his thin lips, and finely-cut pallid features, that affrighted Mrs. Jenner with a sudden sense of treachery and danger!
CHAPTER XII.
CAPTAIN TORQUIL LEAVES THE DRAWINGROOM.
CAPTAIN TORQUIL smiled. The smile was not at all like the smile of theatrical villainy. It was intended to be genial and reassuring. He was handsome, and doing his best; yet the smile inexplicably alarmed Mrs. Jenner.
Certain shadows that had crossed his face immediately before it, had, no doubt, something to do with the sudden eclipse of the celestial Captain Torquil, and the vague revelation of a counterpart more or less infernal.
The captain, I think, saw the unpleasant change in Mrs. Jenner’s mind, and he tried to restore her happier impressions.
“I see, Mrs. Jenner, we are entirely agreed as to the cruelty of punishing people, and the fact is that I should be immensely relieved if you and Mr. Jenner would join in advising me not to put the law in motion against her. Hileria Pullen is one of the most entirely unscrupulous persons on earth. She fancied she had got poor Mrs. Mildmay entirely in her hands. She hated me because she saw that her mistress consulted me. She fancied that I had an influence. Perhaps she was right. But if I had, the will, leaving but a miserable fifty pounds a year to my wife, shows how I used it. The woman was bitterly disappointed at the amount of her own legacy — handsome as it was. Furious with her late mistress, furious with me, furious with my poor wife, enraged at seeing her prey slip through
her fingers, she framed a plan to abscond with the child. She’s a woman of profound dissimulation — intensely artful and vindictive, beyond your power to conceive. I don’t care a farthing, of course, what she says of me. It can’t be worse than she has already said, again and again, when it suited her purpose, of her dead mistress and benefactress. I have detected her in so many and such awful untruths, that one word she utters I don’t believe. In consequence of these — which justice to the memory of poor Alice Mildmay compelled me to notice — I told her she should leave our service next morning, and she ran away over night with the infant, which she had with her own ears heard poor Alice Mildmay consign, in the most solemn and passionate terms, to my care. This-and I suppose the usual cloud of slanders — she proposes for her revenge, and a mode of accounting for her abrupt departure, and perhaps ultimately of extorting money from more persons than one.”
As he spoke, the lady, over whom was stealing again a mist of perplexity, raised her eyes quite suddenly, and detected those of Captain Torquil fixed upon her with an expectant look that was cunning and intense; it was triumphant, and shocked her. She returned it unconsciously with a fixed stare of fear.
The fascination of this stare continued for little more than a second. It was dispelled; but an ineffaceable lesson remained.
The lady stood up, and very coldly but pointedly asked —
“With respect to poor Alice Mildmay’s child, be good enough, Captain Torquil, to say exactly what you wish?”
“I want you kindly to direct your servant to bring down the child, so as to enable me to satisfy myself by actual inspection that the child is really here. Will you do so?”
“I will not, sir.”
The captain, beginning to forget his politeness, laughed a short, dangerous laugh.
“And may I ask,” said the captain, his eyes beginning to gleam, and his features to grow sharper and whiter, “your reason for that particularly unsustainable resolution?”
The captain leaned a little forward as he put his question, his fingers clenched on each side upon the brim of his hat, which he held firmly to his waistcoat, while the crown was presented for the inspection of Mrs. Jenner.
He peered in her face with a look of the intensest fury, which trembled under strong momentary restraint, at the very point of explosion.
With the crisis Mrs. Jenner’s courage had come. She was terrified; she was excited; she was resolute.
“I won’t have the child brought down, because you might seize it and take it away. Nothing on earth will induce me to part with it until the law has determined who shall keep it. You shan’t see the child, sir; and be good enough to let your visit end.”
“Have you quite decided, Mrs. Jenner?”
“Quite, sir.”
He bowed with a kind of shrug and a fixed smile, and backed towards the door, at which he made her another bow.
This simple lady made him one of her curtseys, fancying that he was taking his departure, and had her hand upon the bell, when it was arrested by a sound which called her instantly to the lobby.
Captain Torquil was not descending, but mounting the stairs, with long and rapid steps, and as she came out on the lobby he was striding up the second staircase.
As luck would have it, the baby was crying, and the sound too surely conducted him to the nursery door. With a loud scream the affrighted lady followed.
CHAPTER XIII.
“I love thee, I doat on thy features so fine,
I must and will have thee, and force makes thee mine.”
MRS. JENNER quite forgot her dignity, and actually ran up the stairs after the gentleman who was scaling them.
Had careless Kitty Bell actually locked the door? Was any one in the nursery except the darling who was bawling? What would that incensed gentleman do when he got in? Would he murder the child outright, or carry it off, swinging by the feet, as the man in the “Promessi Sposi” did the live turkeys?
A thousand dreadful conjectures whirled in the eddy of that moment through her biain, and she shrieked as she ran up —
“Kitty, lock the door; Kitty, lock the door!”
And the baby wailed; and, to her comfort, the women’s voices also were heard from within.
The captain’s hand was on the handle of the door, which he twisted about with a few violent jerks.
It was a clumsy oak door, with a keyhole almost as big as a modem hall-door; and Mrs. Jenner almost fainted with sudden relief when she saw that it resisted.
“Open the door,” said Captain Torquil.
“Oh! no, no, no, no,” cried Mrs. Jenner.
The women’s voices were hushed, and in a tone of undisguised fury Captain Torquil cried again —
“Open the door!”
And Mrs. Jenner’s distracted accompaniment of “No, no, oh! no, no, no, no-o-o!” resounded and quivered through staircase, hall, and passage.
The captain struck the door a furious blow with his foot; but it was none of those flimsy defences which fall down before a pop-gun; but mingled with the ba-a-a-ing of the child came now the frightened whimper of women from within. Captain Torquil recoiled three or four steps, and, with a rush, sprang with his shoulder and side against the door, and — heaven and earth! What is this?
Admirable door this is: heart of oak; solid as the wooden walls of England! Here is a lock and key strong and clumsy as Vulcan himself.
If people hold that locks and keys are necessary to their doors — and what more effectual security against the miscreant on the lobby?-it is worth seeing that the mechanism is in working order. Here the door was right, the key was right, the lock, properly so called, was right; but, alas! the iron socket that receives the bolt, which in rude fashion was there screwed to the doorpost, stripped by the worthy vicar, in an emergency when screws were wanted and not elsewhere at hand, of all its screws but one, yielded to the weight of the captain’s charge, and flew in with ominous clatter among the garrison, and with a tremulous swing, door, key, and lock revolved, and the beseiger, white with rage, strode in through the breach.
Mrs. Jenner, rushing forward with her new-found motherly instincts all alive, screamed wildly; Mrs. Jolliffe, with her palms raised and fingers extended, screamed also. Kitty Bell bawled “By Jen! The deaul clake thee,” and dealt the ogre a lusty thump over the head with her shut fist, which made the captain’s small ears sing under the close curls of his black perfumed hair.
Captain Torquil was not accustomed to such handling, and he loosed the hold which Kitty had laid upon his collar with so little ceremony that the heroic girl spun halfway round, and sat involuntarily, with the whole force of her plump person, upon the nurse’s chair of state, from which, for a moment, she gazed bewildered; while Captain Torquil, stooping at the child’s bedside, before any one of the women had recovered the power of action, dived his hands under the infant.
So all seemed over-conclamatum est. In two seconds more the captain would have been running down the vicar’s stairs with his short, vile laugh and the prize in his arms, to spring with it into the chaise, and drive from Golden Friars as fast as the whip of a bribed postboy could speed him.
But it was not to be this time. A powerful chuck at the nape of his neck whisked the captain at this critical moment backward, staggering with a good apparent likelihood of tumbling on the floor.
“Here’s douce wark, clamperin’ through the vicar’s house!” said the stentorian bass of Tom Shackles.
If the captain had thought upon the question of odds at that moment, he would have seen at a glance that Tom was altogether too huge and sinewy to leave him a chance against that modem athlete. But Captain Torquil was for the moment beside himself with anger, and rallying, he struck with all his force at Tom’s face.
The women screamed appeals to heaven at this renewal of the battle, and Tom caught the blow on his open hand; and having a vague idea that the captain was a relation of the family, and therefore to be treated with tenderness, he returned it, not with his formid
able knuckles, but with the same open hand he dealt him a slap on the cheek and ear such as is happily seldom heard in a nursery; and the captain staggered against the wall, where he looked for a moment as if he was going to sleep.
“By my sang, my lad, I’ve a mind to gie thee a gud bevellin’,” said Tom; and to the women he said, pointing to the door that opened into an inner room, “take the bam in there, and shut the door, and don’t stand gapin’ here; ‘t may be killed else.”
“Give up that child!” cried Captain Torquil, again staggering forward — a manifestation which although Tom Shackles placed himself between, hurried the movements of the women, who, with the child in a hasty roll of blankets, scurried into the inner room, through the door and shut it.
At the same moment, grinning happily from ear to ear, the bluff face of Dick Wykes, who had come clanking up in shoes of four pound weight apiece to have his share of the mill, entered the nursery.
“Is thee him?” Dick inquired. “Hoot, man! Lap up! I thout there wor fower o’ ye. Why, I’d thraa thee out o’ t’ window wi’ yan hand!” said this smiling intruder, of whose speech Captain Torquil understood nothing but the goodhumoured contempt expressed in his face and demeanour.
He eyed the two Herculean fellows over. Even in his then State of mind he saw the folly of any attempt to cope with their united strength.
Mrs. Jenner stood staring wildly from the lobby on the strange scene which had for a minute or so profaned the homely roof of the vicarage. The captain looked from one Titan to the other, and collected enough sense not to make a fool of himself by fighting. He was quivering with passion nevertheless.
“You have taken the child; you’ve assaulted me, you-hoo-oo scoundrel! As I hope for heaven, I’ll make every one of you suffer! I’ll have the police here in half an hour.”
He ran downstairs; he roared a curse or two at the postboy, and jumped into the chaise, and sat for a few seconds bewildered, looking first out at one window and then out at the other; and then, seeing that some idlers had collected about the vicar’s door, perceiving that something odd was occurring within, he lowered the front window, and bawled to the driver —
Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated) Page 743
