by Ellen Wood
“Very well,” said the surgeon. “What has sent her off her head?”
“It’s an old thing with her, I hear. Mr. Grey tells me she was obliged to be placed in confinement some years ago. Anyway, she’s very violent now. You’ll see her then, sir, some time this evening, and we’ll have her moved the first thing in the morning? I ordered one of my men to come down to you before I left the station, but as I’ve seen you myself it’s all the same. What glorious weather this is!”
“Very. We shall have a fine haymaking.”
“By the way, Mr. Carlton, that affair seems completely to baffle us,” resumed the inspector, halting again as he was about to continue his way.
“What affair?” asked Mr. Carlton.
“About that Mrs. Crane. I’m afraid it’s going to turn out one of those crimes that are never unearthed — there have been a few such. The fact is, if a thing is not properly followed up at the time, it’s not of much use to re-open it afterwards. I have often found it so.”
“I suppose you have given this up, then?”
“Yes, I have. There seemed no use in keeping it open. Not but that in one sense it is always open, for if anything fresh concerning it should come to our ears, we are ready for it. It may come yet, you know, sir.”
Mr. Carlton nodded assent, and the inspector, with all the speed of which he was capable, set off again in pursuit of his errand, whatever that might be. Mr. Carlton went indoors, turned into the dining-room, and broke open his letter. A dark frown gathered on his brow as he read it. Let us peep over his shoulder.
“DEAR LEWIS, — I will thank you not to trouble me with any more begging letters: you know that I never tolerated them. I advised you to marry, you say. True; but I did not advise you to marry a nobleman’s daughter, and I should never have thought you foolish enough to do so. These unequal matches bring dissatisfaction in a hundred ways, as you will find — but that of course is your own and the lady’s look-out. It is not my intention to give you any more money at all; and whether I shall leave you any at my death depends upon yourself. I am quite well again, and am stronger than I have been for years.
“Sincerely yours,
“London, June, 1848.” —
“J. CARLTON.
Mr. Carlton crushed the letter in his hand with an iron pressure. He knew what that hint of inheritance meant — that if he asked for any again he would never touch a farthing of it.
“He has ever been a bad father to me!” he passionately cried: “a bad, cruel father.”
The sight of his wife’s hired carriage at the door interrupted him. He thrust the letter into one of his pockets and hastened out.
“I must manage to get along as well as I can,” he thought, “but she shall not suffer. Laura, my dearest, I thought you had run away,” he exclaimed, as she jumped lightly from the carriage with her beaming face, and caught his smile of welcome.
“Where do you think I have been, Lewis?”
“To a hundred places.” —
“Well, so I have,” she laughed. “But I meant only one of those places. Ah, you’ll never guess. I have been to our old home, Cedar Lodge. I had been paying visits on the Rise, and as I drove back the thought came over me that I would go into the old house and look at it. The woman in charge did not know me, and took me for a lady wanting the house. It’s the servant they engaged after I left home, I found; she is to stop there until the house is let. It is in apple-pie order; all the old tables and chairs in their places, and a few new ones put in to freshen the rooms up. Only fancy, Lewis! the woman gave me a card with the Earl of Oakburn’s town address upon it, and said I could write there, or apply here to Mr, Fisher, the agent, whichever was most agreeable to me.”
Laura laughed merrily as she spoke. She had turned into the dining-room with Mr. Carlton, and was undoing her white bonnet-strings. He was smiling also, and there was nothing in his countenance to betray aught of the checkmate, the real vexation recently brought to him. Few faces betrayed emotion, whether of joy or pain, less than the impassive one of Mr. Carlton.
“I wonder the earl should attempt to let the house furnished,” he remarked. “I have wondered so ever since I saw the board up, advertising it.”
“Papa took it on a long lease,” said Laura. “I suppose he could not give it up if he would. Lewis, what else do you think I have done? — accepted an impromptu invitation to go out to-night.”
“Where to?”
“To that cross old Mrs. Newberry’s. But she has her nieces staying with her, the most charming girls, and I promised to go up after dinner. Half-a-dozen people are to be there, all invited in the same unceremonious manner, and we are going to act charades. Will you come?”
“I will take you, and come for you later in the evening. But I have patients to see to-night.”
Laura scarcely heard the answer. She had lost none of her vanity, and she eagerly made her way to her dressing-room, her head full of what her attire for the evening should be.
Throwing her bonnet, which she had carried upon her arm by its strings, on the sofa, slipping her shawl from her shoulders, Laura opened her drawers and wardrobe, and turned over dresses and gay attire. She was very excited. Loving gaiety much, any slight unexpected accession to it threw her almost into a fever.
“I’ll wear this pearl-grey silk,” she decided at length. “It will be quite sufficient mourning with a little black ribbon on the point-lace sleeves. Sarah must contrive it somehow. Where are they?”
The “where are they” applied to the sleeves just mentioned. A pair of really beautiful sleeves that had belonged to Mrs. Chesney. Laura pulled open a drawer where her laces and fine muslins were kept, and turned its contents over with her white and nimble fingers.
“Now what has Sarah done with them?” she exclaimed as the sleeves did not make their appearance. “She is as careless as she can be. If they are lost—”
Laura flew to the bell, and rang it so sharply that it echoed through the house. Laura had inherited her father’s impatient temper, and the girl hastened up; she knew that her mistress brooked no delay in having her demands attended to. This girl had been engaged as housemaid, but her mistress kept her pretty well employed about her own person. She entered the room to see drawers open, dresses and laces scattered about in confusion, and their owner watching for her in some excitement.
“Where are my point-lace sleeves?”
“Point-lace sleeves, my lady?” repeated Sarah, some doubt in her accent, as if she scarcely understood which were the point-lace sleeves. At least that was how Lady Laura interpreted the tone.
“Those beautiful sleeves of real point, that were mamma’s,” explained Laura angrily and impatiently. “I told you how valuable they were; I ordered you to be always particularly careful in tacking them into my dresses. Now you know.”
“Yes, I remember, my lady,” replied Sarah. “They are in the drawer.”
“They are not in the drawer.”
“But they must be, my lady,” persisted the girl somewhat pertly, for she had as sharp a temper as her mistress. “I never put the laces by in any other place than that.”
“Find them, then,” retorted Laura.
The maid advanced to the drawer, and began taking up one thing after another in it, slowly and carefully; too slowly for the impatient Lady Laura.
“Stand aside, Sarah, you won’t have finished by dinner-time, at that rate,” she cried. And, taking the drawer with her own hands, she pulled it completely out, and turned it upside down on to the carpet. The sheet of newspaper at the bottom was shaken out with the rest of the contents.
“Now, put them back,” said Laura. “You’ll soon see whether or not the sleeves are there.”
Sarah suppressed her anger; she might not give way to it if she cared to keep her place. She took up the sheet of paper, gave it a violent shake, which might be set down either to zeal in the cause or to anger, as her mistress pleased, and then stooped for the lace articles. Lady Laura stood by, watch
ing the process, anticipating her own triumph and Sarah’s discomfiture.
“Now, pray, are the sleeves there?” she demanded, when so few things remained on the floor that there could be no doubt upon the point.
“My lady, all I can say is, that I have neither touched nor seen the sleeves. I remember the sleeves, it’s true; but I can’t remember when they were worn last, or what dress they were worn in. If I took them out of the dress after they were used, I should put them nowhere but here.”
“Do you suppose I lost them myself?” retorted Lady Laura.
Sarah did not say what she supposed, but she looked as though she would like to say a great deal, and that not of the civillest. As she gathered up the last article from the floor, which happened to be a black lace scarf, Lady Laura saw what appeared to be part of a note, that had been lying underneath the things. She caught it up as impatiently as her maid had caught up the scarf, and far more eagerly; the writing on it, seen distinctly, was arousing all the curiosity and amazement that her mind possessed.
She forgot the lost sleeves, she forgot her anger with Sarah, she forgot her excitement; or, rather, one source of excitement was merged into another, and she sat down with the piece of paper in her hand.
It was the commencement of a letter, written, as Laura believed, to her sister Jane, and was dated from London the 28th of the past February. The lower part of the note had been torn off, only the commencement of the letter and its conclusion on the reverse side being left. Laura knew the handwriting as well as she knew her own: it was that of her sister Clarice.
“I did not think Jane could have been so sly!” she exclaimed at length. “Protesting to me, as she did, that Clarice had not written to her since New Year’s Day. What could be her motive for the denial?”
Laura sat on, the paper in her hand, and lost herself in thought. The affair, trifling as it was, puzzled her excessively; the few words on the note puzzled her; Jane’s conduct in denying that she had heard, puzzled her. She had always deemed her sister the very essence of truth.
“People are sure to be found out,” she exclaimed, with a laugh at her own words. “Jane little thought when she was packing my things to send to me that she dropped this memento amongst them. I’ll keep it to convict her.”
In turning to reach her desk she was confronted by Sarah, with the missing sleeves in her hand.
“I found them folded in your watered-silk gown, my lady, in the deep drawer,” said the girl as pertly as she might venture to speak. “I did not put them there.”
A sudden conviction came over Laura that she had put them there herself one day when she was in a hurry, and she was generous enough to acknowledge it. She showed the maid where to place certain black ribbons that she wished to have attached to them, and again turned to her desk. As the girl retired, Mr. Carlton’s step was heard upon the stairs. Laura thrust the paper into her desk, and locked it again before he should come in, but he only went to the drawing-room.
A feeling, which Laura had never given herself the trouble to analyze, but which had no doubt its rise in pride, had prevented her ever speaking to her husband of her sister Clarice. Naturally proud and haughty, the characteristics of the Chesneys, she had not cared to confess to him, “I have a sister who is out in the world as a governess.” When they — she and Mr. Carlton — should again be brought into contact with her family, as she supposed they should be sometime, and Mr. Carlton should find that there was another sister, whom he had not seen or heard of, it would be easy to say, “Oh, Clarice was away from home during papa’s residence at South Wennock.” It would not be correct to assert that Lady Laura Carlton deliberately planned this little matter, touching upon the future; she did not do so, but it floated through her mind in outline. Thus she never spoke of her sister Clarice, and Mr. Carlton had not the faintest suspicion that she had ever possessed a sister of that name. Laura supposed that Clarice was at home again with them long before this, and when she looked in the Morning Post, or other journal giving space to fashionable movements, a momentary surprise would steal over her at never seeing Clarice’s name. Only that very day, she had seen them mentioned as attending some great flower-show: “The Earl of Oakburn and the Ladies Jane and Lucy Chesney,” but there was no Lady Clarice. “Papa and Jane are punishing her for her governess escapade, and won’t take her out this season,” thought Laura. “Serve her right! It was a senseless trick of Clarice’s ever to attempt such a thing.”
Sarah, who, whatever her other shortcomings, was apt at the lady’s-maid’s duties imposed upon her by her mistress, soon brought back the dress with the sleeves and black ribbons arranged in it, and Laura hastened to attire herself. Very, very handsome did she look. Her beautiful brown hair rested in soft waves on her head, her cheeks were flushed, her fair neck contrasted with the jet chain lying lightly upon it. Laura, vain Laura, all too conscious of her own charms, lingered yet at the glass, and yet again; although perfectly aware that she was keeping dinner waiting.
She tore herself away at last, a brighter flush of triumph on her cheeks, and went down to the dining-room. Mr. Carlton was standing on the lower stairs near the surgery door, talking to some applicant, and Laura looked at them as she crossed the hall, and heard a few words that were then being spoken by the man, who was no other than little Wilkes the barber. “And so, sir, as Mr. John was unable to come, my wife would not have the other; she felt afraid, and said she’d make bold to send for Mr. Carlton. If you’d excuse the being called in at a pinch, like, and attend, sir, we should be very grateful.”
“I’ll be round in half-an-hour,” was Mr. Carlton’s answer. “She is quite right; it is not pleasant to be attended by one who has made so fatal a mistake; one is apt to feel that it might possibly be made again.”
And Laura knew that they were alluding to Stephen Grey.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A FINE LADY.
IN the same reception-room in Portland Place, in which you saw them a fortnight ago, again sat the Earl of Oakburn and his daughter Jane. Jane was knitting some wrist-cuffs for her father, her mind busy with many themes: as Jane’s thoughtful mind was sure to be. She was beginning to doubt whether she should like the governess, who had entered on her new situation some ten days now: and she was deliberating how she should best introduce the subject she was determined to speak of that morning — Clarice. A whole fortnight had Jane hesitated, but the hesitation must have an end.
The earl was reading the Times. — He was glancing over a short speech of his own, therein reported; for he had been on his legs the previous night, and given the Lords a little of his mind in his own peculiar fashion. A question had arisen in regard to the liberties of seamen in Government vessels, and the earl told the assemblage, and especially the Lord Chancellor, that they were all wrong together, and knew no more about the matter than a set of ignorant landlubbers could be expected to know.
“Papa,” said Jane, knitting rapidly at the cuffs — the old sailor called them muffatees—” does it appear to you that Miss Lethwait will suit?”
“She’ll suit for all I know,” the earl replied. “Why shouldn’t she suit?”
Jane was silent for a moment before making any answer. “I fear she is above her situation, papa: that we shall find her — if I may use the word — too pretentious.”
“Above her situation?” repeated the earl. “How can she be above that?”
“Papa, I allude to her manner. I do not like it. Wishing to treat her with all courtesy as a gentlewoman, I made no arrangements for her sitting apart from us in the evening; but I must say I did not expect her to identify herself so completely with us as she is doing; at least in so short a time. When visitors are here, Miss Lethwait never seems to remember that she is not in all respects their equal; she comports herself entirely as if she were a daughter of the house, taking more, upon herself a great deal than I think is seemly. She quite pushes herself before me; she does indeed.”
“Push her back again,” said Lord
Oakburn.
“That is easier said than done, with regard to Miss Lethwait,” replied Jane. “I grant that she is in manner naturally imperious, inclined to treat every one de haut en bas—”
“Treat every one how?” was the angry interruption. “Where’s the sense of jabbering that foreign stuff, Jane; I thought you were above it.”
“I beg your pardon, papa,” Jane meekly answered, full of contrition for her fault, which had been committed without thought, for Lord Oakburn understood no language but that of his native land, and had little toleration for those who interlarded it with another. “It is evident that Miss Lethwait is by nature haughty, I was observing; haughty in manner; but I do consider that she forgets her position in this house in a way that is anything but agreeable. But that you are unobservant, papa, you would see that she does.”
“Tell her of it,” said Lord Oakburn, seizing his stick and giving a forcible rap with it.
“I should not much like to do that,” returned Jane. “What annoys me is, that she does not feel herself what is becoming conduct, and what is not—”
“I don’t see that there’s anything unbecoming in her conduct,” was the interruption. “She should not stop long with Lucy, I can tell you, if I saw anything of that sort in her.”
“No, no, papa; there is nothing unbecoming in one sense of the word; I never meant to imply it. Miss Lethwait is always a lady. She is too much of a lady, if you can understand it; she assumes too much; she never seems to recollect, when in the drawing-room of an evening, that she is not one of ourselves, and a very prominent one. A stranger, coming in, might take her for the mistress of the house, certainly for an elder daughter. And when we are alone, papa, don’t you note how familiar she is with you, conversing with you freely on all kinds of subjects, listening to you, and laughing at your stories of sea life?”
