Caroline lifted her hands.
“I can’t speak of this now!” she burst out. “I can’t! But wait upon me in a few days, Mr. Townsend; a few days, when I am a little more sane. Arrest this coachman, let me see him hanged high outside Newgate, and you will find me the most generous patron you have ever known.”
Then Caroline whirled round.
“Where is that woman?” she asked.
“M’lady, stop! If you wants …” Townsend paused because Caroline did not hear him.
She swept out into the hall, satin rustling. She glanced out of the street door, which Jemmy had left partway open, into an intensely black night scented with rain. Then Caroline turned left, looking up the stairs at the tableau there.
The staircase on the right-hand wall, so high that it looked narrow, was softly lighted by the candles left burning against Caroline’s return. There were glimmers on the wooden balustrade and the broad stair rail, on the thick carpet which padded the steps, on the gold frames of the large portraits which hung step-fashion down the right-hand wall.
Mr. and Mrs. Raleigh, standing at the top of the stairs, were out of the light and therefore mere shadows. But the shame which flowed from them, the abjectness of apology, might have tinged the hall with its mood.
Four steps down, within the light, her right hand on the balustrade, stood Dolly Spencer.
Dolly wore the finery she had chosen; Dolly’s head was high; Dolly didn’t care. Her gown of yellow velvet, with much interlineation of blue color and gold trimming about the waist, was cut according to the usual mode: high at the waist and horizontally low across the breast. This gown had little shoulder puffs, on which Dolly’s yellow ringlets rested.
For a moment she seemed to pose, preening herself. And yet, though the brown eyes smiled, her expression was that of one trying hard to hide pain. Then she saw Caroline’s face.
“I didn’t mean any harm!” Dolly protested.
Caroline looked at her, and made no reply.
“Mr. Raymond,” laughed Dolly, a figure of mirth high on the stairs, “said I had a musical voice or was musical or the like of that. I never saw a real spinet, outside the playhouse. I thought …”
Dolly paused, her eyes widening and a strange expression round her mouth. Suddenly her hand went to her right side.
“What’s wrong?” she cried.
Caroline, almost blind with tears, glanced once more toward the partly open street door behind. She saw only what might have been a vague shape blacker than the night; her mind saw nothing as she looked back up at Dolly.
“My husband is dead,” answered Caroline, so coldly and clearly that each syllable was like a snapped icicle. “Yes! I mean the man you call Dick Darwent.”
Dolly’s hand pressed closer against her right side.
“You will never see him alive again, nor shall I,” continued that cold emotionless voice. “I beg of you to leave my house as soon as is convenient.”
Dolly’s mouth trembled, as in a spasm of pain. In the long yellow-velvet skirt she tried to take a step forward. Then she pitched headforemost down the stairs.
Even Alfred and Thomas, plunging out of the dining-room doorway, were far too late.
The staircase was not wide enough for Dolly to roll, or even try to save herself. Even so, it was as though she were inanimate flesh. She fell helplessly, side to side, in a whirl of yellow velvet and yellow-silk petticoat edged with lace. One of her small blue-and-yellow dancing shoes was torn off as she struck the last tread with a thud, rolled sideways, and fell face-down on the floor.
Old Townsend, hardened in the brine of violence since boyhood, merely grunted. He waddled forward, and bent over Dolly, hauling her round on her back as though she were a dummy.
Townsend felt for a pulse at the wrist. Afterward, without ceremony or apology, he ripped open the heavy corsage with a pocketknife, and felt inside for the heart. Dolly’s eyelids fluttered; she gave a moan of agony.
The little fat white-haired old man stood up, closing the knife with a click.
“Well!” he said wheezily. “She ain’t dead. But I dunno. If you ask me, she’s a-dying.”
From the doorway to the dining room Jemmy Fletcher uttered a bleat like a scream. The street door had swung wide open.
Darwent himself—disheveled, evening clothes torn, but very much alive and not even injured—stepped inside and closed the door with a slam.
“What is happening here?” he asked harshly.
Chapter XX
The Last Bitterness
NOBODY ANSWERED HIM.
All of them stood, upright or crouched over, in a little circle round the foot of the stairs where Dolly lay motionless in her spilled yellow finery, her eyes closed and a smudge of dust against her cheek.
Darwent asked no question about why she was there, nor even referred to it. His eyes had acquired a cold, hard look as implacable as the set of his mouth. He looked slowly round.
“I see!” he observed. “Then the report of my death has already spread here?” His eyes flickered toward Jemmy. “You brought it, I daresay?”
“But it’s true; old boy! I mean: that is …”
“I can’t blame you,” said Darwent, “if you did. I have been denying it ever since.”
“Yes; who …?”
“Who was killed?” demanded the other. “Can’t you think who was mistaken for me, in that dim light?”
Whether or not heightened emotions sting wits to greater height, the answer flashed back at him.
“Lewis!” said Jemmy. “Tillotson Lewis!”
“Yes. Tillotson Lewis.”
Darwent looked down at his empty gold sword scabbard. His cheek muscles were working, and his eyes blinked.
“Ho, the Reverend Mr. Cotton!” he called, in a way which turned Alfred cold. And though the Rev. Mr. Cotton was miles from here, Darwent seemed to find him in the hall and address him. “Why must the decent people always die, Mr. Cotton? And the rogues stuff their food at Watier’s? Tell me that!”
Jemmy Fletcher pressed long fingers together, as though squeezing a gossip orange to the last drop.
“Dick, Dick, what happened?”
“No matter!”
And yet what occupied half his mind so nauseated him that he must speak despite himself.
“I was in the pit. I climbed up the outside of the boxes, to number forty-five: my wife’s box.”
“Well?”
“It wasn’t as easy as I had thought. Some of the projections were rotten wood and crumbled away. It is difficult to get a grip over the padded ledge of a box. I had—had reached my own box with one arm over the ledge, and my right foot trying to brace itself against a pillar, when Lewis came in from the back. He was my friend. ‘Darwent!’ he said. And, ‘Darwent, can I help you?’
“I could not answer. My mouth was pressed against some wooden laurel leaves, and my right foot still groping to get the other arm up. I don’t think Lewis saw me, though I saw him. My sword, with the blood on it, was still lying on the ledge. He picked it up, and looked from side to side.
“Seen from behind, turning his head from side to side, even one who knew us both would have vowed it was myself. The coachman slipped in, stabbed him three times in the back, and melted away.”
Darwent paused.
“It was a trifle pitiable (or d’ye know pity, any one of you?) to see how Lewis tried to make light of it, though he knew he had death in him. By that time I had got my second arm over the rail, and he saw me.
“’Fraid I can’t give you a hand,’ Lewis said. And, ’fraid we won’t have many more of those political talks.’ All this time he was groping and groping for the back of a chair, so that he could sit down and pretend nothing had happened.
“But he missed his last attempt, tried to say something else, and fell down helpless. So died a good man.”
Again Darwent glanced down at the empty sword scabbard. Again he seemed to seek the Rev. Horace Cotton in the hall.
All this time Caroline had not spoken. She had backed away almost to the right-hand wall. In tumult she could not decide what was real and what was imaginary. She stretched out her hand.
“Dick!” she said.
He turned his head. To her horror (or was this imagination too?) his face wore the same look of hard, polite contempt he had worn in the cell at Newgate; his voice had the same mockery.
“Yes, madam?” he inquired.
“Dick! What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing we cannot discuss later, madam, if indeed we need discuss it at all.”
“Dick! No! What’s wrong?”
Again he turned his head. Bewilderment, pain, perhaps even a desire to kill her, touched lights of hardness into his look.
“Why did you do it?” he asked. “Why?”
“Do what?”
Savagely Darwent pointed to the closed street door behind them.
“You saw me come up those steps,” he said slowly and heavily. “You knew I was alive. But you cried out to Dolly and said I was dead. Why did you make her fall? She never harmed anyone.”
“But I … I didn’t see you! Stop! There was some vague kind of black shape; yes, there was. But I never noticed!”
Darwent only made a fierce gesture.
To Caroline this was the ultimate horror, far worse than the news of Darwent’s death. She felt like a half-drugged woman stumbling in a dark room, her own room, yet touching no curtain or table top to remind her into what corner she has strayed.
For she and Darwent again looked into each other’s minds, with that uncanny insight. What both of them heard (she knew it as clearly as she saw it in his face) were her own remembered words, cried out in the opera when Darwent had reached his worst pitch of idiotic quixotry.
“I won’t let you have her,” Caroline had cried. “Whatever I have to do, however low I have to sink, I won’t let you have her. I swear this before God.”
Caroline had not done it. She was guiltless. But at the depths of her heart she suddenly realized another truth. In the shock of cruelty following Darwent’s death, she might, just might, have done some such trick as this. That was the worst of it.
“Dick, how could I make her fall? You don’t think I deliberately …?”
Ignoring her, he turned to Alfred.
“Where’s the surgeon?” he demanded. “Isn’t Mr. Hereford here? Where is he?”
Alfred stepped forward.
“My lord, Mr. Hereford dispatched a note to say he would be detained at the hospital. He inquired whether it would be too late if he called at past midnight. Knowing what … er … the circumstances, I ventured to answer that it would not be too late. My lord, it must be nearly twelve-fifteen at this time. Mr. Hereford should be here at any moment.”
“Thank you.”
Augustus Raleigh, seeming even gaunter from his gaiters to his bald head, and with a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles stuck up on his nose, came hurrying down the stairs. Fiercely Darwent waved him back. He bent over Dolly, who was semiconscious in the pain of that malady nobody understood.
“Poor little …” Darwent began, and could not continue.
Gently he bent over and picked her up in his arms. How light she seemed! As he turned to carry her upstairs, he caught sight of the old Bow Street runner.
“You’re Townsend, I imagine?”
“At your service, m’lord!” sang out Townsend, with such grisly cheerfulness that he instantly grew meek and shrank together. “Your lordship writes me a note; I writes back; you writes back again. What’s fairer?”
“Have the goodness to remain,” requested Darwent. “I may have need of you.”
And he carried Dolly upstairs, Mr. Raleigh walking backwards in front of him in case Dolly might fall up instead of down. He carried her, stepping sideways, slowly, so that her feet should not strike against the portraits.
He did not think, or try to think. But, with mind catching at trifles and dully considering the tasteless yellow-and-blue finery which hung from Dolly, it seemed to him that women must gown themselves for their own vanity, or for other women’s envy. For a loved one will seem radiant in any old sack cut from coarse serge, but all Sheba’s emeralds will not adorn another.
On the second floor above the ground floor, where the grandfather clock fluidly rang the quarter-hour after midnight, he carried Dolly back to the Amber Room. He put her down in the great bed, drawing over her shoulders only a light silk coverlet. Then he stood back, because there was nothing else he could do.
But both Mr. and Mrs. Raleigh were at his side.
“Dick,” began Augustus Raleigh in an even deeper voice, “if you could guess what was on my conscience …”
“Oh, do be silent!” interrupted Mrs. Raleigh. “We—we both went to sleep, Dick. That’s the fact of it. But Dolly … the girl’s willful, you know. She would get up. And, Dick,” Mrs. Raleigh hesitated, her muslin cap trembling like her neck, “that lady downstairs. You mustn’t blame Lady Darwent. She …”
Darwent whirled on her savagely.
“Will you oblige me,” he asked in a soft voice, “by not mentioning my so-called wife’s name?”
“Dick!”
“Do I make myself understood, Mrs. Raleigh?”
Mrs. Raleigh’s hands fell helplessly. Again her neck trembled, sending a quiver through her features and round her lace cap. The dull lamp still burned here. Mrs. Raleigh’s tear-smudged gaze moved toward the bed, where Dolly lay and moaned.
“She’s dying, Dick. I’ve seen it too often.”
“Yes.”
“Then you ought to know,” Mrs. Raleigh pounced at him, “what she should have told you. About the time she was two months away from you, and never visited you in prison; and you thought she was keeping merry house with some man?”
“Have I ever asked to learn?”
“We’re in God’s sight,” said Mrs. Raleigh, “or we soon shall be. Listen to me, Dick! It was foolish and it was stupid; but the girl for some shame’s sake would have it so.”
Mrs. Raleigh looked up, clutching at his sleeve.
“She was drunk, Dick. That’s all. Her parents are two sots who live in a foul alley off Bread Street. D’ye recall, Dick? She had just learned she would never be ‘of the company,’ even to play Lady Macduff? On top of it, they dragged you to prison.
“God forgive me: the girl hadn’t strength of will to face it. She went home. She was blind-fuddled on gin, with times when she’d try to get up, until she stumbled back to us. Don’t you recall, Dick, how strange about her Mr. Mulberry was? And how the surgeon hinted to you (or Mr. Mulberry says he did) she must have been drinking a great deal of wine? We love her, Dick! But …”
Mrs. Raleigh broke off.
Darwent’s lips drew back from his teeth in what was not a smile.
“And that,” he inquired bitterly, “is her hideous crime?”
“Dick, the poor girl can’t face our poor-devil human life. …”
“On my word of honor,” he snarled, “I have been fuddled for months on end, and three Oxford dons with me, mumbling through our duties and misliking the world without a smirch against our respectability.”
“But that’s different!”
“How is it different?”
“May I be permitted to explain?” interposed Augustus Raleigh.
He walked forward, and his dignity was only a small fraction stage dignity when he put his arm round his sobbing, wife. His dark eyes burned with some inner hurt of his own.
“My lord,” he said very formally, “you must be told another thing as well. I have no proof of what I say. But when poor Dolly did this, putting on gowns and playing at the spinet, it is my belief she did so deliberately.”
“Deliberately? Why?”
“To hasten the end of her own life.”
“Are you mad?”
“Have you forgotten,” asked Mr. Raleigh, “how changed and even strange she was, when you talked to her in this very room today?”
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“Changed; well; in a sense; yes! But she was ill! She …”
“No, my friend. You were no longer Dick of Covent Garden, who laughed with her and sported with her and were much loved by her. You were my Lord Marquess of Darwent, with broad lands and gold, as high above her as the sun above a pebble. She was frightened of you. She felt too much beneath you, not good enough for you.”
Darwent’s face became as white as tallow candle. Augustus Raleigh, dropping his drawn-up formal dignity, spoke first.
“No, Dick, you hadn’t changed. But a hundred thousand others would change. The world would change; and you can’t fight the world. Dolly had already changed. She thought herself only a Bread Street slut, hardly fit enough to …”
“You lie,” said Darwent. “If you were not my friend, I would take your scraggy neck and … I tell you, I knew Dolly too well!”
He struggled a moment, to get his breath.
“God damn you,” Darwent said, “if you don’t retract those words I’ll kill you if I hang for it!”
Augustus Raleigh merely inclined his bald head. He was now no longer a rock of strength; he was only an aging, rather eccentric and gentle man who, as he had said to so many, could save nothing from his wages before he left Drury Lane.
“If you insist, Dick, I retract. As for the blame about what happened here tonight …”
Darwent had recovered himself.
“Nobody is to blame; and I apologize.” Awkwardly he patted at Mr. Raleigh’s arm. “But what I said is true. Nobody is to blame, except myself and—a certain woman downstairs.” His voice broke. “And now, for friendship’s sake, will you go away and let me be alone with her?”
“Yes, Dick.”
The door closed.
This chill room, with its frosty dark yellow hangings, had become chillier still. Melting ice overflowed the silver buckets; it fell on the table tops, on the floor, with monotonous dull splashes.
Dolly’s mouth was moving, as though she tried to speak to him. He hurried to her side, seizing one hand. But he heard no word.
The Bride of Newgate Page 24
