Disturbed at last, “I don’t understand,” the Rector said, addressing Augusta sharply. “Where is your sister?”
“I cannot imagine,” Augusta replied. “She is Usually in time, sir.”
“She is not in time to-day. Wignall, find your young mistress, and send her to me. At once, do you hear! I am seriously displeased with her.”
Wignall may have had his thoughts and even his suspicions, but it was not for him to speak and he went away on his errand. When he returned his face was grave.
“Miss Peggy is not in the house, sir,” he said, “nor in the garden.”
“Then where can she be? I am most seriously displeased.”
“The maid says, sir” — Wignall hesitated an instant—” that she has taken a bag with her.”
“Taken a bag?” Dr. Portnal laid down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair. He glowered at the butler as if he were the person in fault. “Nonsense, man, nonsense!” he said. “What do you mean? Taken a bag?”
But Wignall, an old servant, held his ground. “The maid says so, sir,” he persisted, dropping his voice. “She thinks that — that there are things missing from her room, sir.”
How quickly the dart of calamity, barbed and poisoning life at its source, may penetrate to the unsuspicious, unready, shrinking mind it is impossible to say. Probably it took but a few seconds for the first smart of the wound to reach the Rector’s understanding and to infect him with fear — a fear so amazing, so incredible, so subversive of the orderly world about him, that he still strove to deny its existence. For a moment he stared at Wignall, intolerant of the man’s stupidity. The next his features swelled, his eyes protruded, and the voice in which he addressed Augusta, as he turned to her, made even Augusta quail.
“What does this mean?” he thundered.
She had risen in alarm that was only half feigned. “Indeed, I don’t know,” she stammered. “I cannot imagine. Jane must be mistaken.”
“Look to it.” The rector’s voice was hoarse. “Go, see, girl! See! And you!” He turned to the butler. “I will ring when I want you.”
Augusta escaped in haste, and left alone the Rector rose and strode to the window. He looked out. A flood of wrath, and of what was worse, of alarm, rushed to his head, swelled his temples, beat against his self-control. He stared through the window, but he saw nothing. The smooth, well-mown lawn, shaded by a spreading cedar and shielded from the sea-winds by grey walls fragrant in their season with gillyflowers, might have been the desert of Arabia for all that he saw of it. That which he did see was a thing that he shuddered to contemplate — the spectre of an appalling, and he still strove to think an impossible, calamity! He had stood so high, he had been so proud; proud of his position, of the prosperity of his ordered life, of the success that had hitherto attended him, proud above all things of the sagacity that had ensured him against the mishaps of the common herd and made him the adviser of his fellows! He had held his head high, he had stood above disgrace, he had deemed himself able, if ever man was able, to steer clear of the follies and errors into which lesser men fell.
But if this, this that his awakened suspicions shrank from contemplating, had befallen him — what of his pride and his sagacity and his reputation for wisdom? But it was impossible, he told himself, it was impossible! He strove to reassure himself, to gather together his shattered forces. Such a thing might happen to others, but not to him! Yet, if it had? He forced himself to face the thought, to take in the worst, to view with a shrinking eye the appalling consequences. And he shuddered at the things that he saw. He heard already the sniggering of men who did not love him, he saw the faces of friends averted in pity, he winced under the sympathy of well-meaning idiots.
A weaker man might have given thought to the case of another, and viewed with sorrow the other side of the matter. Such a one might have been cut to the heart by the fate of a daughter who, in her reckless imprudence, had placed herself in the hands of an adventurer and committed her fortunes to a penniless and an unscrupulous man. But the Rector, at any rate in this first burst of the matter, was not so weak. If she had done this — this cruel, this unpardonable thing — if she had so disparaged him, so degraded him in the world’s eye, she was no child of his. He disowned her, he cast her off!
But he could not and he would not believe it. When the door at length opened and Augusta stole in, her face pale and alarmed, “Well!” he cried. “Well! What is all this? What does it mean? Speak, girl!”
Augusta faltered. “I am afraid, sir, that she is gone,” she said.
He glared at her. “Gone!” he cried. “Gone! Where? How? What do you mean?” His heart sank low, but he would not let himself believe the worst.
“I am afraid — with him, sir,” Augusta replied sorrowfully. “Her bag is gone — and some of her things.”
He had to face it now. He could no longer refuse to believe. His daughter gone! His daughter! Gone, fled, with a penniless, nameless, broken adventurer! With the son of the drunken old man whom he had declared a disgrace to his parish, and whom even the petty tradesfolk pitied and viewed askance! His daughter! He stood, the healthy colour driven from his face, but for the moment he could neither speak nor think. He could only feel, like a man who had fallen over a precipice and was stunned, that a dreadful thing had befallen him, that his life lay wounded, his pride in the dust. He envisaged hateful things, humiliations unspeakable. He stumbled, dazed, in a wilderness strange to him and terrible, where no landmarks were.
It was Augusta who brought him back to himself, Augusta who broke the intolerable silence. Accustomed, like all women, to deal with details, she felt the call to action.
“Perhaps,” she murmured uncertainly, “if you were to go, sir, — to the Cottage. It may not be too late.”
But he thrust the suggestion from him. Go out into his parish and ask here and there for his daughter? Publish his shame broadcast in Beremouth? Inquire at the inn if they had seen her, at the quay if she had taken the Plymouth Boat? Never! Let her go first! Let her go and lie in the bed that she had made for herself, and drink to the dregs the cup that her heartlessness and her misconduct had filled! Deceitful, abandoned, shameless girl, let her suffer! He would not stretch out a hand to save her. She had disgraced him! She had disgraced him!
But Augusta, who had had time to review the position, had her own notions of what should be done, and what was becoming. She had no doubt that Peggy was by this time beyond pursuit, but she saw that notwithstanding this it behoved her father to do something, to take some step, were it only for appearances’ sake. She persisted, therefore, with the gentleness but also the firmness that was characteristic of her.
“Still, I think, sir,” she said, that you should go to the Blighs.” It was noticeable that neither of them now doubted what had happened.
But again and angrily he put the suggestion from him. Seeing this Augusta did not argue, but with a woman’s firm grasp of reality she went to the table and poured out a cup of tea. She took it to him where he stood grim and repellent at the window.
“Drink this, sir,” she said. “You will be able to think better what must be done.”
He complied, almost against his will. He drank the tea thirstily and he, too, felt the relief of reality. Some minutes later he spoke.
“I will go to the man’s,” he said.
“You may learn something, sir.”
He shook his head. “It is too late,” he said. “It is too late.”
“Too late to avoid talk, I fear. Still—”
“Too late for everything,” he repeated grimly. “Too late.”
But presently he moved. He went into the hall and she gave him his hat and cane, and after a moment’s pause, but without further words, he left the house. The gardener had gone to the back door and at this moment was greedily drinking in the news. There was no one, therefore, to see him as he passed, yet he felt that the eyes of all Beremouth were on him, and if he did not curse his daughter it was only becau
se he was not a man of wild words or extravagant actions. But his face was hard. The thing that he had to do was the most distasteful that he had had to confront for many a year, and his pride bled as he looked forward to it. Still, now that he came to reflect, he owned that he could not avoid it, that so much would be expected of him. But this done, he would do no more. Henceforth she was no child of his, and he hoped that he might never see her, that if it might be so, he might never hear of her again. Let her be as if she had never been, let her share the cup that he found so intolerably bitter.
He had only to cross the graveyard by the flagged-walk that passed the west end of the church, and thence to descend by the flight of steps that dropped to the steep path that went down to the Cove. As he went heavily down, the descent painful to a man of his years and weight, it seemed to him an age since he had risen free from care, from fear, from thought of this horror. Ay, an age, and how much had happened in that age! The shining surface below him, sparkling under the rays of the sun, wore a new a hard, a pitiless aspect for him. It cared nothing, it smiled at his troubles, it mocked at his degradation.
CHAPTER VIII
IT was not expected of a man in Dr. Portnal’s position that he should stoop to the humbler duties of his calling. He left the care of individuals, as he left the oversight of Ipe and Downton and Chiddingfold, to his curates. Even within his home parish he visited only, like the wind, where he listed, and it happened that he had not been in the Cottage on the cliff since the Blighs had lived in it. Had this morning been as other mornings he would have felt, as he jerked open the wicket-gate, some curiosity as to the household. But to-day his mind had only room for one thought, the disgrace that had befallen him; and though he had the strength to carry his head high and to mask the turmoil that shook his soul, no soldier straining for the deadly breach ever suffered more.
Still, his mind made up, he was not the man to blench. He strode through the little gateway and struck the door a sharp blow with the head of his cane; then, without pause or ceremony, he opened the door. He counted on the effect of surprise, and possibly at the last moment entertained the hope that his daughter had not yet pushed her flight farther. If so, they little knew him if they imagined that, of age though she was — and by three weeks he remembered — he would not drag her thence! They little knew him if they fancied that she would dare to defy him! The law? He was the law in Beremouth, and he would make them know it. For, alas, put to the test, he was but an angry man like another, and all his wise apothegms were as useless to him as last year’s leaves!
He armed himself, then, with all the terrors of his brow, and in one respect his expectations were fulfilled. The old man who scrambled to his feet in a panic, and stared at him across the meagre table, could not have looked more startled, if in his stead a thunderbolt had entered. The Rector cast one searching look round the humble room, saw that no one but the Captain was present, and acted.
“Where is my daughter?” he thundered, and he advanced on his victim. “Old man, where is my daughter?” He shook his cane in the air. “It is useless to lie to me!”
The Captain clutched the table. “Lord a Mighty!” he quavered, gazing in amazement at his visitor. The Rector saw that his knees shook under him, and that he had much ado to stand.
But mercy was far from Dr. Portnal’s thoughts. He took terror for guilt, and, “Answer, sir!” he repeated. If the table had not been between them he would have taken the old man by the collar and shaken him. “Answer me, or it will be the worse for you! Where is my daughter, sir?”
Alas, the Captain made a poor fight for it, and cut a worse figure! Poverty, misfortune and his failing had long sapped his spirit and lowered his pride, and before this monstrous apparition, this angry Jove, whose swelling figure dwarfed the room, and whose voice shook the rafters, he was but a scared, subservient, downtrodden creature.
“What — what is it?” he gasped. “As God sees me I don’t understand. Indeed, indeed, sir, I don’t understand.”
Dr. Portnal shook his cane. “What have you, or what has your knave of a son done with my daughter?” he repeated. “Answer me! Or — but I will see! By Heaven, I will see for myself! I will not be played with! You shall not triumph in your knavery!”
And impetuously crossing the floor to an inner door — for he knew the premises — he flung it wide. But with the strategic point in his power he paused. He looked behind him to see that the room contained no hiding-place large enough to conceal a person. Assured of this, he climbed with no less violence the narrow staircase, his weight shaking the beams, and his angry breathing going before him like a steam. But above stairs there were only two rooms and both the doors stood open; in a trice the Rector saw his search fruitless, and before the Captain, still in a maze at these frantic proceedings, had gathered his wits, the Rector was down again.
The table no longer intervened, and rage mastered him. He seized the old man by the shoulder and shook him to and fro as he would have shaken a naughty child.
“Where is she? Where is she?” he demanded. “And where is your drunken, your debauched son? Where have you hidden them?”
But this was too much for the old soldier. Stung in his tenderest point he plucked up a spirit.
“I don’t understand a word you are saying,” he declared. “Not a word! Not a word!”
“Your son? Your son?”
“He has stepped out. He stepped out not five minutes ago. But I don’t know what—”
“He slept here?”
“Of course he slept here!” Even a worm will turn, and the words this madman had spoken of his boy had roused as much of manhood as remained in the father. “He slept here,” he continued indignantly. “Certainly he did. But what is that to you? You take a liberty, sir, or you are mad! Or you are mad!” the Captain repeated, the colour rising to his worn face. “I will ask you to explain, sir. For I don’t understand a word you are saying. Nor what is your business here.”
There was something so simple in the other’s tremulous indignation that the Rector was sobered and for the moment silenced. He began to doubt, and to doubt succeeded dismay. Had he made a mistake? His band dropped, he stepped back. He looked round him, and as the mist of passion cleared from before his eyes he took in what he saw — the room threadbare hut clean, the humble ornament here and there, the single row of books, the sword slung above the fireplace, and over it a print of a frigate running before the wind. The place resembled a ship’s cabin in its neatness, its order. On a carpenter’s bench in a corner lay a model of a barque half-rigged. Above this a Byzantine-looking enamel broke the whitewashed wall with a splash of colour out of character with its surroundings.
As the Rector gazed, his mind fell into some sort of order. He passed his hand across his brow, and by an effort he collected his thoughts. The violence into which he had been betrayed had done nothing for him; it had but disclosed his trouble. Yet his errand was still to do, he had still to find his daughter or to learn what had happened to her. But he did not see his next step, and he was still glaring about him in angry doubt, though he was inclined to think that the Captain had told him the truth, when the sound of the wicket-gate striking the post broke in on his thoughts. A brisk step trod the path, a form darkened the doorway and barred out the reflected sunshine that shimmered on the rafters.
The Rector turned and saw within two paces of him the man who had brought this evil upon him. And if his gaze could have blasted, young Bligh would have ceased to breathe. But the evil eye has lost its power, and this young man’s impudence was proof against scathing looks. Unmoved, with the glimmer of a smile in his eyes, he met the Rector’s gaze, and “Hallo, father!” he said with provoking indifference. “What’s this? What is the matter?”
The Captain began to explain. “It’s Dr. Portnal,” he stammered, “he’s come to ask — he wants to know, Charles—”
But the Rector read amusement in the young man’s eyes, and his wrath blazed up afresh. He cut the old man short.
“Where is my daughter?” he demanded. “Where is she, sir? What have you done with her?”
But young Bligh’s impudence was proof even against this. He did not quail. Indeed he smiled.
“You do me too much honour,” he said. And it seemed to the Rector that he rallied him.
Dr. Portnal’s face grew purple. “Don’t bandy words with me, sir!” he thundered. “Where is she?”
The young man looked at the clock. “I am sure I cannot say,” he replied. “But I should suppose that she is about finishing her breakfast. You are early, sir.”
The Rector had not been so bearded for years. Men had stood up to him, but not after this fashion. Men had opposed him, but not with contempt. He did not have a fit; he was a healthy man, and it was well that he was. But he came very near to it.
“Do you dare — do you dare to tell me, sir,” he cried with ill-governed fury, “that you know nothing of her?”
“I dare tell you anything,” Bligh retorted, as calmly as he had spoken before. “But I tell you nothing. She is in your care, not mine. I am not responsible for her. Do I gather” — and the mischievous sparkle in his eyes belied the innocence of his words—” that she has left you? If she has, all that I can say is that she is not here. And I, as you see, am here.”
The Rector could hardly contain himself. If he had ever doubted, he no longer doubted that he owed his misfortune to this man.
“Insolent!” he exclaimed. “But you shall smart for this! You shall repent of this! You shall repent before I have done with you.”
Bligh shrugged his shoulders. “Possibly,” he said.
“I repent of many things, and I may repent of this.”
“And you will not answer me? You refuse to answer me?”
“Absolutely. It is not my affair to take care of your daughter. I have not lost her, and it is not my business to find her.” He smiled — mockery could go no further.
But the old man, listening in alarm and amazement, could not longer be silent. He saw his son in conflict with the powers that were, he knew of old their long arm and the defencelessness of the poor who fell under their ban, and he apprehended dreadful things.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 749
