Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 10/Lord Oakburn's daughters - Part 8
LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "EAST LYNNE."
CHAPTER XV.THE FACE AGAIN.
A conflict was going on in the mind of Laura Chesney. Two passions, bad and good, were at work there, each striving for the mastery.
Should it be obedience or disobedience? Should she bear on in the straight line of duty, and be obedient to her father, to all the notions of right in which she had been reared; or should she quit her home in defiance, quit it clandestinely, to become the wife of Mr. Carlton? Reader! It has indeed come to this, grievous as it is to have to write it, st the present day, of a well-trained gentlewoman.
On the day that Mr. Carlton had asked for Laura, Captain Chesney commanded her before him. He did not spare her; every reproach that the case seemed to demand was lavished upon her by the indignant captain; and he finally forbade her ever to give another thought to Mr. Carlton. The abuse he heaped upon the unconscious surgeon would have been something grand if spoken upon the boards of a theatre; it simply made Laura rebellious. He told her that, except in his professional capacity, he disliked Mr. Carlton, and that nothing in the world would ever induce him to admit the man to his family. And this he confirmed with sundry unnecessary words.
Laura retired, apparently acquiescent. Not to him did she dare show disobedience, and the captain concluded that the affair was settled and over. Whether Laura’s rebellious feelings would have subsided afterwards into duty had she been let alone, it is impossible to say; but Mr. Carlton took every possible occasion of fostering them.
He did not want for opportunity. Laura—careless, wilful, reprehensible Laura—had yielded to his persuasions of meeting him in secret. Evening after evening, at the dusk hour, unless unavoidably kept away by the exigencies of patients, was Mr. Carlton in the dark grove of trees that skirted Captain Chesney’s house; and Laura found no difficulty in joining him. The captain and Miss Chesney would as soon have suspected her of stealing out to meet a charged cannon as a gentleman, and Laura’s movements were free.
But it was not possible that this state of things could continue. Laura had not been reared to deceit, and she did feel ashamed of herself. She felt also something else—a fear of detection. Each evening as she glided, trembling, into that grove, he protested with tears to Mr. Carlton that it must be the last; that she dared not come again. And suppose she made it the last, he answered, what then? were they to bid each other adieu for ever?
Ah, poor Laura Chesney’s heart was only too much inclined to open to the specious argument he breathed into it—that there was but one way of ending satisfactorily the present unhappy state of things: that of flying with him. It took but a few days to accomplish—the convincing her that it would be best for them in every way, and inducing her to promise to consent. So long as she was Miss Laura Chesney, Captain Chesney’s obstinacy would continue, he argued; but when once they were married, he would be easily brought to forgive. Mr. Carlton believed this when he said it. He believed that these loud, hot-tempered men, who were so fond of raging out, never bore malice long. Perhaps as a rule he was right, but in all rules there are exceptional cases. With many tears, with many sighs, with many qualms of self-reproach, Laura yielded her consent, and Mr. Carlton laid his plans, and communicated them to her. But for his having been forbidden the house, Laura might never have ventured on the step; but to continue to steal out in fear and trembling to see him, she dared not; and to live without seeing him would have been the bitterest fate of all.
In the few days that had elapsed since the rupture between her father and her lover, Laura Chesney seemed to have lived years. In her after life, when she glanced back at this time, she asked herself whether it was indeed possible that but those few days, a fortnight at most, had passed over her head, during which she was making up her mind to leave her home with Mr. Carlton. Only a few days! to deliberate upon a step that must fix the destiny of her whole life!
But we must hasten on.
It was about a month subsequent to the death of Mrs. Crane, and the moon’s rays were again gladdening the earth. The rays were weak and watery. Dark clouds passed frequently over the face of the sky, and sprinkling showers, threatening heavier rain, fell at intervals.
Gliding out of her father’s door, by the servants’ entrance, came Laura Chesney. She wore a black silk dress, the mourning for Lady Oakburn, and a black shawl was thrown over her head and shoulders. She stepped swiftly down the narrow side-path which led from this entrance to the foot of the garden, and plunged amidst the thick trees there. It was between eight and nine o’clock, and but for this watery moon would have been quite dark. Laura was later than she had wished to be. Captain Chesney was about again now, and it had pleased him to keep the tea waiting on the table, before he allowed Jane to make it. Laura sat in a fever of impatience; was Mr. Carlton waiting for her?—and would he go away? Swallowing down one cup of tea hastily, Laura declined more, and, saying she had a headache, quitted the room.
Unheeding the drops of rain which began to fall, unheeding the many drops which fell when the shrubs and trees were shaken, Laura plunged into their midst. Leaning against the trunk of one that was thicker than the rest, stood Mr. Carlton. Laura, who was in a state of perpetual and continuous terror during these interviews, flew to him for shelter.
“O, Lewis, I feared you would be gone! I thought I should never get away to-night. Papa was reading the newspaper, and Jane would not make the tea unless he told her. I dared not come away until it was made, because they would have been calling me to it.”
“Only one night more, Laura, and then it will be over,” was his soothing answer.
At least, he had meant it to soothe. But the step she was about to take seemed to yawn before Laura then in all its naked and appalling sternness.
“I don’t know that I can do it,” she murmured with a shiver. “It is an awful thing. Do you mind me, Lewis?—an awful thing.”
“What is?” asked Mr. Carlton.
“The running away from my father’s home. I have read of it in books, but I never knew any one who did it in real life; and now that the time is coming close, I cannot tell you how I seem to shrink from it. We have been brought up to be so obedient.”
“Hush, Laura! You are falling into an unnecessarily grave view of this.”
She did not answer aloud, but she began asking herself whether too grave a view could be taken of a daughter’s leaving clandestinely her father’s home. Laura’s conscience was unusually alive to-night. A glimmer of the watery moon fell on her face through the trees, and Mr. Carlton saw how grave was its expression. He divined her thoughts, as by instinct, and answered them.
“Laura, believe me, you can take too grave a view of it. When a father is unreasonably despotic, a daughter is justified in breaking through her trammels. Surely you are not wavering! Laura, Laura! you will not be the one to frustrate our plans! you will not draw back from me at the last hour!”
She burst into tears. “No, I would not draw back from you,” she sobbed. “But—I don’t know how it is, I feel to-night frightened at everything; frightened above all at the unknown future.”
Mr. Carlton did his best to reassure her. Loving arguments, all too specious; sophistries, whose falseness was lost in their sweetness, were poured into her ear. It was but the old story; one that has been enacted many a time before, that will be enacted many a time again; where inclination and conscience are at war, and the latter yields.
“I could not live without you,” he passionately reiterated. “You must not draw back. now.”
It may be that she felt she could not live without him. She suffered herself to be soothed, to be satisfied. Gradually, one by one, her scruples melted away from her sight; and she discussed with him finally their plans for getting away undetected, unpursued. The time for their purposed flitting was drawing very near; four-and-twenty hours more would bring it.
But it grew late; time for Mr. Carlton to be away, and for Laura to be in-doors again, lest she should be missed. Mr. Carlton, with many a last word and many another, at length quitted her. Laura remained for a few minutes where she was, to still the beating of her agitated heart, to live over again the sweet, stolen interview; only a few hours, and, if all went well, she should belong to him for ever.
The shrubs and trees around afforded a secure shelter. It was pretty dry there, and she had suffered the shawl to fall from her shoulders, never heeding where. But now she turned to look for it, and just at that moment the moon burst from behind a cloud, and Laura looked up at its glitter through the leaves of the trees. It was brighter then than it had been yet that night.
Gathering up the shawl, she had thrown it round her, when a cry escaped her lips, and every pulse in her beating heart stood still. There, amidst the trees, stood some one watching her; some one that certainly bore the form of a human being, but a strange one. It struggled itself forward and came nearer; near enough to speak in a whisper, and be heard:
“Laura Chesney, what have you to do with Lewis Carlton?”
She stood paralysed with fright, with awe, leaning against the trunk of a tree, and saying nothing: her hands clutching the shawl, her eyes dilated.
“Have nothing to do with Lewis Carlton,” went on the voice; “if you care for your own happiness, perhaps your life, have nothing to do with him. Ask him what he did to Clarice. Ask him if he deals in poison.”
With the faintest possible rustling, the figure and the voice died away to her sight and hearing. Laura Chesney felt as if her own heart, almost her life, were dying with it.
Now it happened that Mr. Carlton, after letting himself out at the gate, remembered a word he had forgotten to say to Laura, touching those plans of theirs for the following evening. He had gone a few paces down the road when he thought of it; but he retraced his steps, put his hand over the gate, pressed the spring, and turned in again. But a few yards from him, right in front of the path, enveloped in what looked like a travelling cloak and cap, stood a man, a stout and very short man—as it seemed to Mr. Carlton. He supposed it to be some traveller coming perhaps from a journey, who might have business at the house; he supposed he had passed in at the gate in the minute that had elapsed since he himself had passed out of it. Conscious that he was not upon Captain Chesney’s premises on pursuits of the most honourable nature, the surgeon felt somewhat embarrassed. At that moment the stranger turned and raised his cap, and to Mr. Carlton’s horror he saw beneath it the face he had seen once before.
It was the same face he had seen on the staircase in Palace Street, the night of his patient’s death; the same severe face, with its intensely black whiskers, and its ghastly white skin. A creeping horror, as if the dead were about him, overspread Mr. Carlton: he knew not whether the figure before him was ghostly or human; he leaned his brow on his hand for one single instant to recover self-possession; and when he looked up, the figure was gone.
Gone where? Mr. Carlton could not say, could not think. That it had not come down the path, was certain, because it must have brushed passed him; and it was equally certain it had not gone on to the house, or it would not yet have been out of sight; neither was he disposed to think it had disappeared amidst the trees, for he had heard no sound of their being moved. He had hitherto considered himself a brave man, a man bolder than the common run, but he was strangely shaken now. The same undefined terror which had unnerved him that other night, unmanned him this. It was not a fear that he could take hold of and grapple with: it was a vague, shadowy dread, perfectly undefined to his mind, partly indistinct; one moment presenting the semblance of a real tangible fear, that might be run from or guarded against; the next, wearing to his conviction but the hues of a fanciful superstition. Never, in all his life, had Mr. Carlton believed in ghostly appearances; he would have been the first to laugh at and ridicule those who did believe in them; most singular, then, was it that the face he had seen that ill-fated night should have conjured up any superstitious fear in his mind of its being a visitant from the other world; it was singular that the same idea should arise, uncalled for, now.
With a face quite as ghastly as the one he had seen,—with shaking nerves that he strove in vain to steady,—with a sickening fear that ran through every fibre of his frame, Mr. Carlton stood still as death, taking a few moments’ respite; and then he penetrated to the spot where he had left Laura Chesney. Not to her did he purpose breathing a syllable of what had passed; what then was his astonishment to find her dart up to him, clasp him tightly for protection, and burst into deep sobs of terror, a terror as great as his own!
“Laura, my love, what means this?”
“Oh, Lewis, did you see it? I did you see it?” she sobbed. “That figure which has been here?”
Mr. Carlton’s heart beat more violently than before; but still he would not betray that he knew anything.
“What figure, Laura?”
“I don’t know; I don’t know who or what it was, It was behind me, amidst the trees, and I saw it when I turned to look after my shawl. At the first moment I thought it was a woman, its voice sounded like a woman’s, but afterwards I thought it was a man; I don’t know which it was.”
“Its voice!” repeated Mr. Carlton. “Did it speak?”
“It spoke, and that was the worst; it warned me against you. Otherwise I might have thought it some curious passer-by, who had heard us speaking, and came intruding in at the gate to look. Oh, Lewis!” she added, with a burst of agitation that almost shook Mr. Carlton as well as herself, “it is not true, is it? Lewis! Lewis!”
Her emotion was so excessive that she lost all self-control, all recollection of the necessity for secrecy. Another fear attacked Mr. Carlton—that they might be betrayed.
“Hush, hush!” he whispered. “Be calm, and tell me what you mean. Is what true?”
“It—I say ‘it', because I don’t know whether it was a man or a woman—it warned me against you,” panted Laura. “It told me that I must have nothing to do with Lewis Carlton; that if I valued my own happiness, perhaps my life, I should not.”
“Some envious fool who has penetrated our secret, and who would step between us,” interrupted Mr. Carlton in a tone of bitter scorn.
“Hear me out,” she continued. “It told me to ask you what you had done with Clarice; to ask if you dealt in poison.”
Mr. Carlton stood as one transfixed—as one confounded. “What Clarice?” he presently asked, “Who is Clarice?”
“I don’t know,” said Laura Chesney, her sobs subsiding into a wail. “Do you know any one of the name?”
“I do not know any Clarice in the world,” he answered.
“But about the poison?” shivered Laura; “what could the words mean? ‘Ask him if he deals in poison!’”
“I suppose they meant ‘deals in drugs,’” was the answer. “A medical man, in general practice, must deal in such.”
There was something in Mr. Carlton’s tone that frightened Laura worse than anything that had gone before. She started away to gaze at him. He was looking forward with a vacant stare, as if he had lost all consciousness of the present.
“Was it a pale face, Laura, with black whiskers,” he presently asked.
“I could see nothing distinctly, except that the face was ashy pale—or perhaps it only looked so in the moonlight. Why? Have you seen it?”
“I believe I have seen it twice,” returned Mr. Carlton. He spoke in a dreamy tone of self-communing, quite as if he had forgotten any one was present; and indeed it seemed that he had lost self-control just as much as Laura had lost it. “I saw it outside that room. the night of the death,” he continued, and I saw it again this minute as I was coming back to you.”
The particular information, and the associations it conjured up, did not tend to reassure Miss Laura Chesney.
“The face you saw outside the lady’s room in Palace Street?” she said, with a faint shriek. “It never could be that face,” she added, relapsing into another fit of trembling.
“What should bring that face here?”
“I know not,” cried Mr. Carlton; and it seemed that he was trembling too. “I am not sure, Laura, that it is either man or woman; I am not sure but it is a ghostly apparition.”
“Where did you see it? Where did it go?”
“I saw it in the path, but I did not see where it went. It seemed to vanish. It is either that, or—or—some base villain, some sneaking spy, who steals into houses for his own wicked purposes, and deserves the halter. What should bring him here? here on your father’s premises. Was he dodging my steps? or yours?”
“Lewis, whose was the face, that night?”
“I would give half my allotted life to know.”
“There was a suspicion that he poisoned the draught. I am sure I heard so.”
“Just as he would poison the happiness of our lives,” exclaimed Mr. Carlton, in agitation;—“as he would have poisoned your mind against me. Laura, you must choose between me and him; between his insidious falsehoods and my love.”
“Do not speak in that way,” she passionately uttered; “the whole world could not poison me against you. Oh, Lewis, my best-beloved, soon to be my husband, do not be angry with me that I repeated his words; had I kept them to brood over alone, they would only have rankled in my heart.”
“Angry with you,” he murmured, “no, no. I am not angry with you. I am angry with—with that wicked one, who would have tried to separate us. One more night and day, my love, and then we may defy him and all the world.”
Laura stole back to the house by the path she had come, the side-path leading to the kitchen. Mr. Carlton stood and watched her safely in-doors, and then departed on his way to his home. The garden, for all that could be seen of it, was perfectly free from intruders then, and Mr. Carlton could only believe it to be so.
But as he went down the road, lying so fanciful and still—still in the calm night, in its freedom at that hour from passengers, fanciful with its quaint patches of light and shade—Mr. Carlton walked as though he feared an enemy at every turn. Now he peered before him, now he glanced over his shoulder behind him, now he half turned to see what might be by his side; and once, as an old hare, lurking in the hedge, sprang out before him and scudded to the field opposite, he positively started from it with a sudden cry. Strangely uunerved that night was Mr. Carlton.
And Laura, after all, did not escape without detection. It happened subsequently to the removal of the tea from the drawing-room that Miss Chesney wanted an embroidery pattern, and went to Laura’s bed-room, to ask her for it. Laura was not there: and Jane, fancying she heard a movement overhead, turned to the foot of the upper stairs, and called.
It was not Laura who was up there, but the maid, Judith. She came out of her chamber, looked down, and saw her mistress standing below.
“Did you speak, ma'am?”
“I called to Miss Laura, Judith. Is she up-stairs?”
The only room in which Laura was likely to be, if she was up-stairs, was the one occupied by Jane. Jane Chesney, ever self-denying, had given up the best lower rooms to her father and Laura, herself and Lucy sleeping above. Judith went and looked inside the chamber.
“No, ma'am, Miss Laura is not here. I’m sure she has not come up-stairs, or I should have heard her.”
Jane called again, but there was no answer. She looked everywhere she could think of, and at last went into the kitchen. Pompey was there alone.
“Pompey, do you know where Miss Laura is?”
Pompey was, as the saying runs, taken to. He had had his eyes and ears open this last week or two, and had not been unconscious of Miss Laura’s stolen interviews outside the house in the dusk of evening. Pompey had no idea of making mischief; old Pompey was fond of pretty Miss Laura, and had kept the secret as closely as she could have kept it; but on the other hand Pompey had no idea, could have no idea, of denying any information demanded of him by his mistress, Miss Chesney. So Pompey stood and stared in bewildered indecision, but never spoke.
“I ask you, Pompey, if you know where Miss Laura is,” repeated Jane, certain anxieties touching Laura taking sudden possession of her and rendering her voice sharp. “Why do you not answer me?”
“She there, missee,” replied Pompey at length, pointing to the garden. “She not catch cold; she got great big black shawl over her.”
Who is with her? Pompey, I ask you who is with her?”
She spoke with quiet authority, though she had laid her hand on her heart to still its tumultuous beating; authority that might not be disputed by poor Pompey.”
“I think it Misser Doctor. But she no stay over long with him, missee; she never does.”
Jane Chesney leaned against the dresser, feeling as if an avalanche had fallen and crushed her; feeling that if an avalanche fell and crushed the house for ever, it would be more tolerable than this disgrace which had fallen on it. In that moment there was a slight rustle of silk in the passage; it whirled by the kitchen door, and was lost on the floor above; and Jane knew that Laura had come in and taken shelter in her room.
Come in from the clandestine meeting with Mr. Carlton the surgeon; and the words of Pompey seemed to imply that these meetings were not altogether rare! Jane Chesney turned sick at heart. The disgrace was keen.
CHAPTER XVI. THE LETTERS.
An incident occurred the following morning to cause some surprise at the house of Captain Chesney. When Pompey brought in the letters he presented them to Jane, as was customary. There were three. The first was addressed to Captain Chesney, and Jane immediately handed it to him across the breakfast table; the second was addressed to herself; and the third bore the superscription “The Right Honourable the Earl of Oakburn.”
It was not a pleasant morning, for the rain was pattering against the window panes. The breakfast-table was laid near the window in the drawing-room, where the captain, in his despotic will, chose that they should breakfast. He had taken a liking to the room; to its pretty glass windows that opened on the lawn. Captain Chesney unsealed his letter the moment it was handed to him, and became absorbed in the contents. Jane kept glancing at the one addressed to Lord Oakburn, but she would not interrupt her father to speak of it. When he had finished reading his letter he looked up.
“Are both those for you, Jane?”
“Not both, papa. One is directed to Lord Oakburn. See. I cannot make out why it should have been sent here.”
Captain Chesney stretched out his hand for the letter, and turned it about to regard it, after the usual manner of people when a letter puzzles them.
“Yes, it is for him, sure enough. ‘The Right Honourable the Earl of Oakburn, Cedar Lodge, the Rise, South Wennock,’” continued. he, reading the full superscription aloud. “He must be coming here, Jane.”
“I suppose he must, papa. It is the only conclusion I can draw.”
“Very condescending of him, I’m sure,” growled the captain. “It’s an honour he has not accorded me since he was at Eton. What is bringing him here, I wonder? Wants change of scene perhaps.”
Jane took alarm. “You don’t think he can be coming here to stay, papa? We have nothing fit to receive him; no establishment, no accomodation. He cannot surely be coming to stay!”
“If he comes he must take things as he finds them. I shall not put myself out of the way, neither need you. ‘Not able to do it, my lord,’ I shall say to him; ‘Frank Chesney’s too poor; had his family bestirred themselves, old Frank might have carried his head a notch higher.’ All you need do, Jane, is to see that he has a shake-down, a hammock slung for him, somewhere. I suppose that can be managed; there’s the spare room off mine; and for the rest, let him take what he finds.”
“Still I can hardly understand why he should be coming,” resumed Jane, after a pause. “He———”
“Is he in London or at Chesney Oaks?” interrupted Lucy, looking up from her bread-and-milk.
“At Chesney Oaks, my dear,” said Jane.
“He went down a month ago, when his poor young wife was buried, and I think he has remained there.”
“Whew!” interposed the captain, “I can understand it. He is coming cutting across the country from Chesney Oaks to Great Wennock for a day or two on some political business, and so intends to make a convenience of my house to stay in and to have his letters sent to. Very condescending of him indeed!”
“Papa,” said Lucy, somewhat anxiously, “don’t you like Lord Oakburn?”
“Well—yes, I like him well enough, what I know of him; but I hold that I had great grievances against his father. What’s the post-mark of the letter, Jane?”
Jane Chesney turned the letter over and made out the mark “Pembury.” It was the post-town in the vicinity of the Earl of Oakburn’s seat, Chesney Oaks.
“He must have started then, I should think,” remarked Jane, “and this has been sent after him.”
“How did he know our address here, papa?” asked Lucy.
“How did he know our address here?” repeated the captain, in choler. “What should hinder his knowing it? Do I live with my head under a bushel, pray? When I changed from Plymouth to this neighbourhood, the family received intimation of it; and didn’t I write to the earl the other day when his wife died? Was I not asked to the funeral, stupid; and couldn’t go because of that confounded gout!”
“Lucy’s only a child, papa,” soothingly interposed Jane. “She does not reflect.”
“Then she ought to reflect,” said the captain, “and not show herself a simpleton. He’ll be wanting another wife soon, I suppose, so you had better look out, Miss Laura, and set your cap at him when he comes. You’d not make a bad countess.”
The grim sailor spoke in jest. To give him his due, he was not capable of scheming for his daughters in any way. Laura, however, seemed to take the words in earnest, She had sat silent over her nearly untasted breakfast, her face bent; but it was lifted now, flushing with a vivid crimson. Captain Chesney laughed; he thought his random and meaningless shaft must have struck home to her vanity, exciting visions of a peeress’s coronet, pleasing as they were foolish. But Jane, who had also noticed the blush, attributed it to a different cause, and one that pleased her not.
“Papa,” resumed Lucy, venturing on another question, “how far is it from this to Chesney Oaks?”
“About thirty miles, little mouse.”
“I think I ought to have holiday from my lessons to-day, as Lord Oakburn is coming,” continued the child, glancing at Jane.
“Wait for that until he comes,” said the captain. “He’s as uncertain as the wind; all young men are; and it may be days before he gets here. He may,”—the captain drew up his head at the thought—he may be coming to consult me on business matters connected with the estate, for I am—yes I am—the next heir, now he’s a single man again. Not that I shall ever inherit; he is twenty-five and I am fifty-nine. Have you the headache this morning, Laura?”
Again came the rush of red to her face. What self-conscious feeling induced it?
“No, not this morning, papa. Why?”
“You are as silent and look as down as if you had fifty headaches. Jane,” concluded the captain as he rose, “we must have soup to-day in case he arrives.”
Jane acquiesced. This expected coming of Lord Oakburn’s was only an additional care added to the many household ones that daily oppressed her.
Breakfast over, the captain strolled out. There was a lull in the storm, and the rain had momentarily ceased. He looked up at the skies with his experienced sailor’s eye, and saw that it had not ceased for long. So he did not go beyond the garden, but went strolling about that.
Laura had departed immediately to her room. Jane placed the letter for Lord Oakburn on the mantel-piece and opened the one addressed to herself, which she had not done at breakfast. As she was reading it Captain Chesney came in to ask her for a piece of string to tie up some bush in the garden.
“Is your letter from———”
The captain stopped without concluding the sentence, stopped abruptly, and Jane’s heart fluttered. She believed he had been going to say “from Clarice,” and she felt thankful that the long barrier of silence observed to her by her father in regard to that name, should at length be broken. No such thing, however; the captain’s obstinacy was unconquerable.
“It is only from Plymouth, papa.”
“Oh,” said the captain indifferently; and, taking the string which she had been getting for him he moved away, all unconscious that even in that slight incident she was sparing him pain in her duty and love. The letter was from a creditor at Plymouth, pressing for money on account of some long-standing debt.
Jane set Lucy to her lessons, and then went up-stairs to her sister’s room. Laura had flung herself upon the bed, and lay there with her hands pressed to her temples. It may be questioned which of the two sisters had passed the more unhappy night. The discovery of the previous evening had been one of dire dismay to Jane Chesney, and she had lain awake in her distress, wondering how it was to end, wondering whether Laura could be recalled to a sense of what was right. In her own simple rectitude of feeling, Jane looked on the affair, on Laura’s having allowed herself to meet in secret Mr. Carlton, almost as a crime, certainly as a heavy disgrace. And Laura? Laura could not but regard with shrinking fear the step she was about to take. She had tossed on her uneasy bed, asking herself whether she should not yet draw back from it. Even now the conflict was not over, and she lay there in dire perplexity and distress.
“Laura,” began Jane in a low tone as she entered, “this must end.”
Laura sprang off the bed, startled and vexed at having been found on it. “I feel tired this morning,” she stammered with a lame attempt at apology, “I did not sleep well last night.”
“I say, Laura, this must end,” continued Jane, too agitated with grief to set about her task in any artistic manner, “You have permitted yourself to meet in secret that man—the surgeon, Carlton. O, Laura! what strange infatuation can have come over you?”
Laura Laid her hand upon her chest to still its heavy beating. Found out! In her dismay and perplexity it seemed to her that there was nothing for it but denial. And she stooped to it.
“Who says I have? Whatever will you accuse me of next, Jane?”
“Hush, Laura! falsehood will not mend wrong-doing. Evening after evening you steal out to meet him. Last night I wanted you and I heard you were outside. I saw you come in, Laura, with the disguising shawl over your head. Laura, my dearest sister, I do not wish to speak harshly, but surely you cannot have reflected on how great is the degradation!”
Strange to say, the effect of the discovery was to harden her. With every moment, now that the first startling shock had passed, Laura’s spirit grew more defiant. She made no reply to her sister.
“I speak only for your own sake,” pleaded Jane. “It is for your sake I beg you to break off all intimacy with Mr. Carlton. Laura, I feel certain that he is not the man to make you happy, even were attendant circumstances favourable.”
“It is a strange prejudice, this that you have taken against Mr. Carlton!” resentfully spoke Laura.
“I am not singular in it; papa dislikes him also. But, Laura, answer me a question; what end do you, can you, propose to yourself in this intimacy with him?”
Laura coloured, hesitated, and then took courage to speak out. But the answer was a partially evasive one.
“Mr. Carlton speaks of marriage. In time, when all your prejudices shall be overcome.”
“Do not cherish it, do not glance at it,” said Jane with emotion. “Our objections to Mr. Carlton never can be overcome. And I tell you that he would not make you happy.”
“We must see—wait and see. If the worst comes to the worst, and everybody remains obdurate, we must then—we must then—join common cause against you for ourselves.”
Laura spoke with agitation, but her agitation was as nothing compared to that which seized upon Jane at the words. It was impossible for her to mistake their hidden meaning. Her lips were white, her throat was working, and she held her sister’s hands in hers.
“You do not know what you say. Never so speak again; you would not were you to weigh your words. I pray you—Laura, by the remembrance of our dead mother I pray you—never suffer so mistaken a thought to enter your mind, as that of quitting clandestinely your father’s house to become a wife. A marriage entered upon in disobedience and defiance could never prosper. Laura, I don’t think you are happy.”
Laura burst into a flood of hysterical tears and laid her face down on the dressing-table, almost in abandonment. Never had the inward conflict between right and wrong been so great as at that moment. Which should she give up her father, her friends, her duty?—or him whom, with that all-impassioned love, she loved.
Jane stooped to kiss her. “Let it end from this day,” she whispered. “Do not forget again what is due to yourself and to us by running out of the house for any stolen interview. It is not seemly; it is not right.”
Jane quitted the room; it was best to leave Laura’s sobs to subside alone. As she descended the stairs and passed the staircaise window, she saw her father coming up one of the garden paths. Almost at the same moment, a blow, a crash of glass, and a shriek of terror, sounded from below. Jane flew down the stairs; Judith rushed forth from the kitchen; and Pompey, his great eyes glaring, emerged from some peculiar sanctum of his own, sacred to knives and boots. They stared at each other in the hall.
“Who is it?” exclaimed Jane. “What has happened? I thought it must be you, Pompey, come to harm amidst the bottles.”
“Don’t stand there asking who it is,” burst from the choleric captain, as he came flinging into the hall, “It’s Lucy. She has fallen through the drawing-room window, and perhaps killed herself.”
They ran to the drawing-room. Lucy lay on the carpet close to the window, which opened, you know, on the ground. In running heedlessly towards it to say something to her father, her foot had slipped and she fell with her arms against the window, breaking two of its panes The palm of one hand was cut, and the inside of the other wrist. They raised her and placed her in a chair, but the wrist bled dreadfully. Judith grew pale.
“There may be an artery divided, sir,” she whispered to her master. “If so, she may bleed to death.”
“You rascal, to stand there gaping when the child’s dying!” cried the hot captain, “Go along and get help.”
“Is it Misser Carlton I am to get?” asked the unlucky Pompey.
Down came the captain’s stick within an inch of Pompey’s head, and Laura, all dismayed at the disturbance, came in just in time to hear the captain’s answer.
“That villain Carlton! No, sir, not if the whole house were dying together. Get Mr. Grey here, you useless animal. Not the one who poisoned the lady’s draught, sir, do you hear? he shouldn’t come within a mile of me. Find the other one, and be quick over it.”
Poor, affectionate, well-meaning Pompey would certainly have been as quick as his best legs allowed him, but he was saved the trouble of using them. At the very instant they were speaking, Mr. John Grey was seen driving past in his gig. Judith ran out.
The groom heard her call, and pulled up, and Mr. Grey hastened in with Judith when he found what was the matter. In ten minutes the wounds were washed and strapped together with adhesive plaster. Lucy had cried very much with terror.
“Shall I die? Shall I die?” she asked of Mr. Grey, her little heart beating, her hands trembling.
“No, of course not,” he replied. “What made you think of that?”
“I heard them talk about my dying; I am sure I did,” sobbed Lucy, who was of an excitable and also of a timid temperament; “and I heard them say perhaps the artery was divided. Does that kill people?”
“Not always,” said Mr. Grey. “Keep your hands still, like a brave little girl.”
“Are you sure I shall not die?”
“Quite sure; you are not in any danger. Look here,” he added, turning up his coat-sleeve and wristband, and exhibiting his wrist to Lucy, while the others stood around, the captain in rather a subdued mood. “Do you see that scar?”
“Yes, sir,” was Lucy’s answer.
“Well, once, when I was younger than you, I fell against a window just as you have done, and cut my wrist. There was danger in my case, and shall I tell you why?—the cut divided the artery. Though who made you so wise about arteries,” added Mr. Grey smiling, “I don’t know. But you see, Miss Lucy—I think I heard them call you Lucy, and I like the name, it was my mother’s—you see, where there is great danger there is generally great help. My father, a surgeon, was in the room when I did it: he took up the artery immediately, and the danger was past. Now with this foolish little hurt of yours, although the strappings of diachylon look so formidable, there has not been any danger, for the artery is not touched. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” replied Lucy, “and I believe you. I shall not be afraid now. Shall you come and see me again?”
“I will come in this afternoon just to see that the strappings remain in their places. And now good-bye, and be sure you keep your hands still.”
“I think there must be holiday after this,” said Jane, with a smile.
“Oh, decidedly holiday,” returned Mr. Grey, nodding pleasantly to Lucy. “Nursing to-day, lessons to-morrow.”
Captain Chesney went out with him, and linked his arm within his. A rare condescension for the captain, and one that proved he had taken a fancy to Mr. Grey.
“She will do well, Captain Chesney, and I am glad I happened to be passing. It might have been an awkward accident.”
“Sir, I thank you,” said the captain; “and sir, I see that you are a gentleman, and a man to be esteemed. And I can only regret one thing.”
“What is that?” inquired Mr. Grey.
“That I ever took up with that fool of a Carlton, I dislike him, sir, and he shall never darken my doors again; he has proved himself anything but a gentleman. He’s not fit to tie your shoes, socially, Mr. Grey, I can tell you that; and I don’t suppose he is, professionally.”
John Grey laughed, said a word to the captain to set him right as to Mr. Carlton’s professional skill, which was really superior, ascended to his gig amidst the pelting rain, and drove away.
Lucy meanwhile was giving her opinion in-doors as to the relative merits of the two medical men. “How glad I am it was Mr. Grey to do my hand and not Mr. Carlton!” she exclaimed.
Laura fired at the remark. “Has Jane been setting you against Mr. Carlton?” she resentfully asked.
Lucy lifted her eyes in surprise. “Jane has never set me against Mr. Carlton. I don’t like Mr. Carlton, Laura. He frightened me one day; it was the day I was drawing, when I asked him about that dead lady. He was angry with me, and his face looked so that it frightened me; but I did not like him before that. Judith, you like Mr. Grey, don’t you?”
“Oh yes, miss,” replied Judith, who was on her knees washing the stain from the carpet. “I have seen a good deal of the two Mr. Greys, and I like them both.”
“And do you like Mr. Carlton?”
“I can’t say I do, Miss Lucy, what little I have seen of him. But I have not seen him many times.”
Laura flung her head back with a haughty gesture and quitted the room in displeasure. She believed they had leagued themselves together to speak against Mr. Carlton; she never believed it possible that the dislike they expressed was genuine.
The day went on. The evening post brought another letter for the Earl of Oakburn, though the day had failed to bring the earl himself. They dined at five as usual, and afterwards Captain Chesney went into the town to meet the omnibus from Great Wennock, thinking it night possibly bring the earl, or news of him. It was after his departure that this second letter came, and Jane saw that it bore the London postmark. Mr. John Grey, who had not been able to get up before, called in towards dusk.
As he stood at the table, talking to Jane, Lucy sitting in an easy chair at the fire, his eye happened to fall on the letter that lay there, directed to the Earl of Oakburn.
“Do you know the earl?” he exclaimed, the remark appearing to escape him involuntarily.
“Yes,” replied Jane; “we are related to him.”
“Then perhaps you can tell me how he is?”
“I suppose he is well. We have been expecting him here all day.”
“Expecting him here all day!” repeated Mr. Grey in an accent of astonishment. “I beg your pardon, Miss Chesney, I believe I cannot have caught your meaning.”
“We have been expecting Lord Oakburn here since the morning,” resumed Jane, “and we still expect him here to sleep. This letter and another have come to await him.”
“You must, I fancy, be labouring under an error,” returned Mr. Grey, in a tone that seemed to say he did not fully comprehend Miss Chesney. “Lord Oakburn is dangerously ill; ill almost to death. Two days ago very slight hopes indeed were entertained of him.”
“What is the matter with him?” exclaimed Jane, puzzled in her turn, and looking as if the letter must contradict Mr. Grey’s assertion. “Is he at Chesney Oaks?”
“He is lying at Chesney Oaks, ill of typhus fever. I know it in this way. The day before yesterday I had to go fifteen miles from this, to meet a physician from Pembury: we were to meet half way. He did not come, but sent a friend, another medical man, who explained to me that the first was detained by the alarming illness of Lord Oakburn. He has been staying at Chesney Oaks since the funeral of the countess, went into a house where the fever was raging, and caught it. On the day I met this gentleman he told me that a few hours would probably terminate his life.”
Jane was silent, silent from positive bewilderment. Lucy spoke up from her chair.
“But, Mr. Grey, if Lord Oakburn should not be coming why should he have his letters sent here?” Lucy felt disappointed, she had been anticipating great pleasure from the visit of Lord Oakburn.
“That is what I am thinking of,” said Jane. “It is not only one letter, it is two; the one is from Pembury, the other from London. Unless Lord Oakburn should be intending to come here, why, as Lucy says, should letters be sent to meet him?”
“You may rely upon it that the Lord Oakburn who was lying ill at Chesney Oaks is not intending to come here yet awhile, Miss Chesney. Probably you may know the next heir?”
“Papa is the next heir,” said Jane.
“Captain Chesney is the next heir to the earldom of Oakburn?” quickly repeated Mr. Grey.
“Yes, he is.”
“Then, my dear young lady, it is explained, I fear,” returned Mr. Grey, after a grave pause. “Rely upon it, the young earl is dead; and that these letters are addressed to your father as Earl of Oakburn.”