by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (uncredited).
Originally published in St. James's Magazine (W. Kent) vol.1 #3 (Jun 1861).
Chapter VI.
In spite of the doctor's attention, in spite of her own care, Jenny Carleon did not regain her health. She felt herself gradually growing weaker; she felt that, by such slow degrees as were almost imperceptible, her strength was ebbing away from her. It was only by looking back at the end of a week, and remembering that seven days before she had been able to do this or that, which she was utterly powerless to do now, that she discovered how much she had changed. She struggled hard against this daily diminution of her strength, for she seemed to have a strange horror of being confined to her room; but she succumbed at last, and kept her bed day after day. A good-tempered maid-servant waited upon her, and brought her her medicines, which she poured out herself.
Her husband came into her room several times a day to ask after her health. He brought her piles of novels obtained for her from a circulating library in the market town; but he still appeared to attach little importance to her illness, and was so much occupied about the farm that he could seldom stay with her for any length of time.
She used to ask every morning whether Ralph, the bailiff, was going away that day, always to be told that he was not; but that he would leave in a day or two at the latest. Once, after having received this answer, she turned her head round impatiently upon her pillow, and, with her face to the wall, burst out crying.
"Jenny, what is the matter with you?" asked her husband.
She did not answer; but he could see that her delicate frame was shaken, by her sobs.
"Jenny, I insist upon knowing the meaning of this?"
She lifted her head from the pillow, supported herself upon her elbow, and, putting her hair away from her tear-stained face, said to him, solemnly, "Dudley Carleon, the presence of that man is killing me, day by day, and hour by hour. Shut up in this room, I cannot see him; but I can feel and know that an unseen influence is sapping my very life, and that influence is his. If you are not his slave, if you are not bound to him by some tie too fearful to be broken, send him from this house; or, if I have strength to crawl out of it, I will go myself."
"Jenny, Jenny, this is an invalid's fancy. Don't give me reason to think you are as mad as Agnes Marlow."
"Dudley Carleon, will you send that man away?"
"Since you are so silly, Yes. He shall go to-night."
She held out her wasted little hand to him with a smile. "Do this, Dudley," she said, "and I shall think that you love me."
Something in the tone of her voice, in the sad but gentle expression of her face, touched his reserved and undemonstrative nature. Dudley Carleon clasped her suddenly to his heart, and, hiding his face upon her shoulder, sobbed aloud.
"Oh, my poor little wife," he said, "what is to become of us—what is to become of us?"
"Dudley, Dudley; don't cry. You terrify—you grieve me!"
He rose from his seat by the bedside, and brushed the tears from his eyes.
"I am a fool, Jenny; for I distress you and myself. But make your mind easy, Ralph shall go to-night! As there is a heaven above us, he shall go to-night!" He turned out of the room as he finished speaking. It was now late in February; there had been continued wet weather for upwards of a week, and on this day the rain beat incessantly against the windows of Jenny's room. The sky without was dull and leaden, and the wind whistled in the long corridor outside the door. Jenny found her novels very stupid. The volumes were too heavy for her to hold, and they dropped out of her weak hands and slid off the counterpane on to the floor. She lay, hour after hour, listening to every sound in the house—to the servants passing now and then across the hall below, to the occasional opening and shutting of a door, to the striking of the clocks, and to the barking of the sheep-dog in the back premises. The day was long and dreary, and the invalid welcomed the winter twilight and the maid-servant who brought her her tea.
"Who makes my tea, Mary?" Jenny asked, as the girl arranged the things on a table by the bed.
"I do, ma'am."
"And nobody ever touches it but yourself?"
"Nobody as I knows of, ma'am. I leave the teapot on the oven-top when I've mashed the tea, for it to draw. I'm sometimes out of the kitchen; but I don't suppose any one would touch it."
"Is Ralph Purvis often in the kitchen?"
"Well; he is, ma'am, pretty well always about there. The weather's too bad for him to be much about the farm now, and he's very handy indoors."
Half an hour afterwards, when the girl came to take the tray, she found the tea untouched; and her mistress told her to remove the tea-things, as she had no inclination either to eat or drink. The ceaseless and monotonous rain seemed to Jenny as if it were bent on flooding the Grey Farm that evening. The cold wind crept under the door of her room till the stiff folds of the heavy damask bed-curtains rustled. The sashes of the windows rattled every now and then, as if an angry hand had been beating at them from without.
The shaded lamp by the bedside left the corners of the room in obscurity, and Jenny's disordered fancy conjured up the glittering eyes of the bailiff leering at her out of the shadow.
"Oh, this dreary, dismal place!" she said, over and over again. "Why does Dudley leave me here to die alone?"
She could see her face in an oval mirror hanging upon the wall opposite to her bed. The dim reflection in the depths of this glass showed her a wan, pale, wasted face, and hollow, fever-bright eyes. It seemed strange to her; and she shuddered to know it was her own. "I shall look like that in my coffin," she said, "except that my eyes will be closed."
Eleven o'clock struck before her husband came to his room. He had sept during Jenny's illness in an apartment adjoining hers.
She had in the course of the evening fallen several times into a feverish slumber, and could hardly help fancying she had slept for hours, and that the night must be far advanced. As the clock struck eleven, she fell asleep once more—but her rest was broken by troubled dreams.
She dreamt that she was out upon the river-bank, with the rain falling upon her uncovered head, and drenching her thin night-dress. She was watching for Dudley, as she had watched for him upon the night of the bailiff's return. Suddenly she found that she had a child in her arms—a poor, pitiful, baby, that clung to her convulsively, and twisting its tiny hands in the lace about her throat, seemed as if it were trying to strangle her. She strove to release herself, but it hung about her with a heavy leaden weight that almost dragged her to the ground.
The rain beating in her face blinded her; her naked feet slipped upon the river bank; the low wail of the child rose to a shrill scream of terror,—and she awoke, with the cold perspiration streaming down her forehead, to hear the Olney clock chime the quarter and to hear, in the direction of the servants' rooms, the same pitiful wail she had heard from a child in her dream.
What did it mean? There were no children at the Grey Farm; and there never had been since her marriage.
The house was said to be haunted. She had heard a dozen ghost stories attached to the dismal pile of building; but she had laughed at them as absurd. What if one of them were true?
A strange, mad desire to encounter the supernatural terror—if terror there were—took possession of her. She crept out of her bed, wrapped herself in a shawl, and stole into the corridor. She was so weak that she could scarcely stand, but she supported herself by clinging to the wall, and contrived to reach the landing of the principal staircase, on the other side of which was a door communicating with the servants' rooms.
This door was ajar, and she could hear that the child's cries proceeded from the other side.
She passed into the servants' corridor, and traced the sound to the little sitting-room that had once been occupied by Ralph and his sister. A light shone through the crevice under the door of this room, and through a keyhole which had been roughly cut in the wood.
There had never been a lock to the door, which was only fastened by a latch and an iron bolt.
She could hear the low, pitiful wail of the child, and the voice of a woman trying to hush it to sleep. She fell on her knees at the top of the little flight of steps leading to the door, and looked through the keyhole into the room. Her husband was seated, writing, at a small table, by the light of one candle. Behind his chair, and looking over him as he wrote, stood Ralph Purvis, the bailiff. A woman dressed in a black gown and a thick grey shawl sat by the little fireplace with a child in her arms—a pale-faced, puny baby, that kept up an incessant wail. The woman had taken off her bonnet, and fastened it by the strings to the back of her chair.
Jenny knew this woman, by her likeness to the bailiff, to be his sister Martha, Dudley's old housekeeper.
Neither of the three uttered a word, and the silence was only broken by the scratching of Dudley's pen over the paper, and the suppressed crying of the child. When Dudley's pen had reached the bottom of the page he stopped, glanced over what he had written, and then signed his name.
"Now, your signature as witness!" he said, handing the pen to Ralph.
"I shan't sign!" answered the bailiff.
"Why not?"
"Because, I tell you again, it won't do."
"Have you read it?"
"Yes. You settle this place on your lawful son and heir, Dudley Carleon, junior, crying there in the lap of his mother, your lawful wife, Martha Carleon. You settle this property on my sister's child, provided we renounce all claim upon you and keep your secret, and you go off to Australia with that curly-haired Miss who calls herself your wife! I tell you it won't do. It's not enough. I want the farm: but I want money to improve the farm—I want that three thousand pounds; and I'll have that, or nothing."
"Three thousand pounds!" Jenny mechanically repeated the words with a shudder. It was her fortune, no doubt, that this man wanted. Her fortune, which, should she die childless, would go to Dudley Carleon.
The woman sitting over the fire never once looked up during this brief dialogue. Dudley buried his face in his hands with a groan, and let his head fall upon the writing before him.
Ralph, the bailiff, standing over his master, struck his clenched fist upon the tale, and said—
"Look ye here, Muster Carleon! Go back a bit; go back to four, or nigh upon five year ago, when you was a stripling just come home from College, and Muster Martin was alive, and well and strong, and promising to make older bones than you any day. Do you remember moping about the place, looking miserable; or making believe to be happy, and looking more miserable still for making believe? Do you remember one afternoon, when they was making hay in one of the river-side meadows, and you was lying upon the ground pretending to read your book—do you remember my coming up behind you sudden, and hearing you groan? I asks you what's the matter, and what it is that's on your mind; and after a deal of talk, you tells me it's College debts; debts as you dare not mention to Muster Martin, because he's been so kind to you already; and you're afraid of an exposure, and of being expelled, perhaps, and all sorts of things; and you're very proud, you say, and you'll cut your throat sooner than you'll live to be disgraced. I told you I was very sorry for you, and said that if you'd only been the eldest son instead of the youngest, things would have been easy enough, for then you could have raised the money upon a mortgage. We spoke about it again the next day, and the next, and the next after that, till we came, somehow, to be always talking of it, and we grew quite friendly—a'most like equals."
"Curse you!" groaned Dudley, with his face still hidden.
"At the end of a month, Muster Carleon, I was awoke one moonlight night by you, standing by my bedside. If I'd ever believed in ghosts, I should have thought you was one. If a ghost's horrid to look at, it can't be more horrid to look at than you was that night. You had a slip of paper in your hand, with something wrote upon it—wrote small and backwards, and not like your own handwriting. 'Ralph,' you said, 'you're going to the market-town to-morrow; get me some of the stuff that's written down here, at a chemist's, and don't tell anybody who you're getting it for!' That was every word as passed between us. I got the stuff the next day; but I told the chemist's lad to give me double the quantity that was written on the paper, and to give it me in two packets, labelled alike and sealed alike, and to sign his name and write the date upon one of 'em. The shop was crowded, being market-day, and the master of it took no notice of me, or what I was buying. I kept the packet that was signed and dated, and I gave you the other. This was early in August. Muster Carleon died on the 24th of September. Well; things went smooth enough for a time; you got rid of your debts by means of a mortgage, which was kept pretty dark until the farm improved under my care, and you paid it off. Now, all this time I hadn't asked you a favour, not so much as for a sixpence over my wages; but it isn't strange that I expected to gain something by having served you faithful."
"Served me! Yes! as the devil serves his bonded slaves."
"I served you faithful, anyhow; and I said to you at last, 'Come, Muster Carleon, you're beholden to me for many things, but most of all you're beholden to me for having kept a still tongue. Marry my sister, and make her mistress of the Grey Farm.' You laughed in my face, and refused me what I asked. I could afford to bide my time. Three years after your brother's death I had an explanation with you in this very room. You knocked me down and split my head open; but you came to terms, and, a month after, you married my sister by banns at the Borough Church, London. You were ashamed of your wife, and you were ashamed of what you had done. So you buried her down in a country village, and as soon as you set eyes upon that fine curly-haired Miss of yours, you packed me off to keep company with my sister. But I wasn't quite such a fool as you took me for, Muster Carleon. I had my spies in Olney, and I heard all about you from them. 1 heard of your marriage, and I heard of your wife's fortune; but I determined to bide my time, and to make things work round to my own advantage. I waited three or four months after your marriage, and then, having summoned you up to throw you off your guard, I stole a march upon you, and came down here to look about me. I found poor Miss slightly ailing. Since then she's got worse; and yesterday I wrote to my sister, telling her to come down here, as I thought it likely she might have her rights before long."
Dudley Carleon lifted his ghastly face from his hands, staggered out of his chair, and fell at the bailiff's feet.
"Look at me!" he said, in a thick, choking voice; "look at me; I am so degraded and lost a wretch that I kneel to you, and ask you to pity me? No, not to pity me, to pity her—the helpless woman I have deceived. Save her, and I will surrender this place, and every farthing I have in the world. Save her, and I will go out of this house, penniless and shelterless, to beg my bread or to die of starvation. Save her, and there is nothing I am not prepared to endure."
"Will you endure the gallows?" asked Ralph, with a sneer.
Dudley groaned aloud, but did not answer.
"Ne, I thought not," said the bailiff. "Now, listen to me. Let me alone, and I'll keep your secret to the day of my death. Interfere with me, or try to thwart my plans, or pry into my business, and I'll let people know what you are, and how you poisoned your brother Martin."
Jenny Carleon, crouching at the threshold of the door, had heard every word spoken by Ralph Parvis. But at this hideous climax her senses left her, and she fell down the steps leading from the corridor.
Chapter the Last.
When Jenny recovered her senses, she found herself lying in her own room, with a bandage round her forehead. It was broad daylight, and her husband was seated at the bedside.
She put her hand to her head, and, looking about her, asked—"What have I been doing?"
"We found you in the corridor leading to the servants' rooms. What, in Heaven's name, had taken you there, Jenny?"
The scene of the night before flashed upon her. She felt that her only chance of escape was to affect ignorance of what she had discovered,
"I thought I heard a child cry, and I went to ascertain; but I was so terribly weak that I could scarcely reach the stairs. I suppose I fainted in trying to do so."
Her husband looked at her with a searching glance, and then said—
"Foolish girl, the child you heard was Martha's! My old house-keeper has been married a year and a half, and she has come down here to see if her brother can get her a place. Try and go to sleep, Jenny; you did yourself harm by getting up last night."
She listened to the sound of her husband's receding footsteps as he left the room. She heard him go along the corridor, down the stairs, across the hall, and into the back premises. As the doors closed behind him, she crept from her bed, and began hurriedly to dress herself in the warmest garments she could find. She was dizzy, from the cut on her forehead, and so weak that she was compelled to support herself by holding on to the furniture as she dressed.
"Oh, merciful Heaven! grant me strength to crawl from this horrible place," she said, "or I shall never leave it till I am carried out in my coffin."
She put on her bonnet, and muffled herself in a great woollen shawl; then crept along the corridor and slowly descended the stairs. To her unspeakable relief, she found the hall deserted. She stole out of the front door, and closed it behind her. The cold winter air blew upon her face and revived her. She looked up at the long rows of windows and the dreary stone frontage of the house, as some wretched criminal might look back at a prison from which he had just escaped.
She had tied a thick veil over her plain straw bonnet. "If any of the men are about, they will take me for one of the servants," she thought.
She hurried across the garden, through the gate, and on to the river bank, without meeting any one in her way. The tide was high, the river swollen by the rains, the meadows by the bank half hidden by the standing water. She seemed to have a superhuman strength, as she walked rapidly along the narrow pathway.
"Thank Heaven!" she said. "If I can but reach the high road, I may get a lift in some market-cart going into Olney."
But when she came to the first gate, she stopped suddenly. On the other side of it, two men were hard at work with spades and pickaxes. They had just finished cutting a drain straight across the bank—a channel through which the water off the meadows was pouring down into the river.
This open drain presented an impassable barrier between the Grey Farm and the outer world. To reach the high road by any other way, Jenny must traverse half a dozen fields, and walk a distance of two miles.
Her heart seemed to stop beating. "I must stay here to be murdered," she said; "for escape is impossible."
But what if she were to appeal to one of the men? Wide as the drain was, they might lift her over it, if they pleased. She crawled on until she came up to the spot where they were at work, One of them had his back towards her as she approached, but at the sound of her footsteps he turned round, That man was Ralph, the bailiff.
The fact of his presence revealed to her the terrible truth. This barrier between herself and Olney was a part of the hideous plot, the end and aim of which was her death.
"I want to go into Olney," she said, resolutely; "put a board over that drain, that I may cross it."
"I'm sorry, ma'am," answered Ralph, indifferently, "that it can't be done. First and foremost, there isn't a board to be had; and as to going into Olney, I'm afraid you're acting against the doctor's orders in coming out at all, ma'am—and I'm sure Muster Carleon would break his heart to see you run the risk of catching cold. Here he comes though, so he can settle the question himself."
Her husband rode up to them as the man spoke. "Jenny!" he said. "You out of doors this bitter morning! Are you mad? For Heaven's sake come back to the house!"
"Dudley Carleon," Jenny said, looking her husband full in the face, "I want to escape from this place. I want to go into Olney."
"My dear girl, you are not in a fit state to be out at all. Why, you can scarcely stand. Lift your mistress up to me, Ralph!" he said.
The bailiff lifted Jenny in his arms, and her husband seated her before him upon his horse.
"Why, Jenny, you tremble like a leaf; you will catch your death!"
She looked round at him with grave, sorrowful eyes.
"Oh, Dudley, Dudley ; when I came to this place, I came to meet my death. I was warned, but I would not listen."
Ralph, the bailiff, looked significantly at his master.
"This work must be finished to-night," he said, taking up his spade. "If you want to go into Olney to-morrow, ma'am," he added, "you can go and welcome. We shall have laid down the pipes and covered this dyke before ten o'clock to-night."
Dudley rode slowly back to the house, and carried his wife into the hall. He was about to take her up stairs,—but she stopped him.
"Let me lie on the sofa in the parlour," she said. "I hate those dreary upstairs rooms."
He took her into the parlour, drew the sofa close to the fire, covered her with a thick railway-rug, and left her. She lay, hour after hour, repeating to herself, again and again, "What am I to do?"
Should she appeal to the servants for protection from Ralph Purvis and his accomplice—her guilty husband? They would not believe her. Very likely Ralph had taught them to think her mad—had prepared them to set down every word she could say to the raving of a disordered mind. They would no doubt refuse to credit her accusations, as she had refused to credit those of Agnes Marlow. In that case they might betray her, and she would be only hastening her doom.
All communication between Olney and the farm had been purposely cut off. The doctor could not pay his accustomed visit. She was utterly friendless and alone. She knew that she had been taking slow poison for weeks—that her murderer was lying in wait to give her the final dose, and, that failing, that he would not scruple to have recourse to more violent means. He might force the deadly draught down her throat. How could she resist? A strong hand over her mouth, and her cries would be stifled until they grew still in death. They would bury her, as they had buried Martin Carleon, without a shadow of suspicion arising in the mind of the doctor, and no one outside that lonely house would ever know the truth. This time the day flew by with terrible rapidity. It grew dark; the hour approached at which the men were accustomed to go to bed. This was the hour she dreaded above all others, for she felt she would then be left alone with Dudley Carleon and his bailiff.
She watched the clock intently, listening, as she did so, for the first clang of the bell which rang at the servants' bed-time. It used to ring with unvaried punctuality as the clock struck nine. It was five-and-twenty minutes past eight. There were five-and-thirty minutes left, and during those five-and-thirty minutes she must think of some means of escape. Five-and-thirty minutes! She counted the seconds by the tumultuous beating of her heart. The hand of the clock had just reached the half hour, when, to her horror, the bell rang violently. She started up from her sofa. She heard a hurried trampling of feet in the hall, and the men rushing out at the front door. Ralph Purvis was shouting to them to be quick—to look alive—look alive! or they would be too late.
What could it mean? She ran to one of the windows, drew up the blind, and looked out. A hayrick in a field at some distance had taken fire. It was one of several standing near together, and the men were hurrying to extinguish it, so as to save the others.
Her brain reeled, as the thought flashed upon her that this unlooked-for accident had taken Ralph from the house. She was free—free to attempt once more to escape. But how?
The hall-door had been left open by the men hurrying out. A sudden inspiration made the hot blood rush from her heart into her face. The river! There was the river—the river, which crept close behind the house, and down which the barges were often sailing to Olney! Too desperate to remember her weakness, she stole round to the back premises, across the littered farmyard, and on to the shore. It was pitch dark. She looked about her, wildly. "A dozen barges might pass me," she thought, "and I should not see one of them."
She could hear the voices of the men, trying to extinguish the hayrick in the field in front of the house. She waited about ten minutes—ten interminable minutes—and at the end of that time she saw a feeble light creeping along the river. As it came near her, she perceived that it proceeded from a lantern tied to the mast of a coal-barge.
She called to the men on board this barge. Her voice was feeble from the effects of her long illness, but her repeated cries at last attracted their attention. "What's the matter there?" asked the man who was steering the barge.
At that moment the flames of the burning hayrick, which had before been hidden by the house, shot above the roof and cast a lurid light upon the river bank.
"Why, the house must be on fire!" the man said to his comrade.
"Get ashore, Bill, and see what's amiss!"
One of the men jumped into a boat at the stern of the barge, and pushed it to the bank on which Jenny was standing.
"What's the matter?" he asked; "is the house a-fire?"
"No, no; take me to Olney," she cried, imploringly.
The man lifted her into the boat, and from the boat into the barge; his companion wrapped her in a great coat, and seated her against the chimney of the little cabin.
"It's warm there, my lass," he said; "we shall be nigh upon an hour getting into Olney."
She never took her eyes from the red light in the sky, which revealed the sharp outline of the roof-tops and chimneys of the Grey Farm, till a curve of the river hid the gaunt building from her view. Then she lifted her heart to Heaven, and thanked God for her merciful deliverance from peril and death.
One of the men from the barge carried her to the Rectory, and placed her in Mr. Marlow's arms.
The worthy Rector was bewildered and amazed by her appearance; but she only told him that her husband had treated her unkindly, and that she had come to throw herself upon her old guardian for shelter and protection.
But the terrors of the awful night and day through which she had passed had been too much for her weak frame, undermined as her constitution had been. She had an attack of brain fever, in which she lay for weeks upon a sick bed; in her delirium perpetually re-acting the scenes through which she had passed. Agnes Marlow came from Scarborough on hearing of her illness, and nursed her with a sister's devotion.
As soon as she was strong enough to be moved, they carried her to Burlington for change of air.
They had never asked her any questions about her husband's conduct to her, and she had made no inquiries as to what had taken place during her illness. She felt a strange serenity of mind in the society of these dear and devoted friends, and she had scarcely sufficient courage to allude to the terrible past. She had noticed, however, that on the first occasion of her rising from her bed, Agnes, and the servant who helped to nurse her, had dressed her in mourning, and that they still continued to bring her this black dress every day. It was simply made, but trimmed with a deep border of crape. On the third day after her arrival at Burlington, as she sat alone with Agnes, she said, very quietly,—
"Agnes, why am I in mourning? Who is dead?"
"Can you bear to hear, Jenny? Are you strong enough to hear something that may perhaps shock you?"
"Yes, tell me the worst! Who is dead?"
"Dudley Carleon!"
Jenny's cheeks grew white, but she did not utter one exclamation of either surprise or sorrow—"May a merciful God forgive him his sins!" she said, solemnly.
It was not until she had quite recovered that she was told the entire truth—Dudley Carleon had drowned himself in the river, behind his house, on the night of Jenny's escape; and legal proceedings had been instituted by Ralph Purvis, the bailiff, to prove that his sister Martha was the lawful wife of the late master of the Grey Farm, and that her son was the rightful heir to the estate.
The suit was decided in favour of the mother and son; it being proved that Dudley had married his housekeeper a year before his marriage with Jenny Trevor. Immediately upon this decision, Martha Carleon sold the Grey Farm and all appertaining to it, and, accompanied by her brother and her infant, sailed for Australia.
To none but these two people and Jenny Trevor was the real cause of Dudley's suicide ever known. It was supposed by most people to have been caused by financial difficulties, and that the burning of several valuable hayricks had gone some way to drive the young farmer to this terrible deed. It was some time afterwards discovered that the ricks had been fired by a young man who had been dismissed from the farm a few days before, under circumstances of peculiar cruelty, by Ralph Purvis.
* * * * *
Far away in the Bush there is a rich sheep-farm, stretching over many miles of fair and luxuriant land. The master counts his cattle by hundreds, and bids fair to become a wealthy and a respected citizen of that distant world. Grim, sleek, dark and silent, he stalks about amongst his farm-servants, always near them when they least expect to see him—always watching them when they fancy themselves most unobserved.
Dark and silent as himself, his sister, dressed in widow's weeds, sits nursing her sickly child at the door of their roughly-built cottage. They are neither of them liked by their dependants; but they are feared, and are better served than a better master and mistress might be.
Jenny Trevor has kept Dudley Carleon's secret, and has lived to marry happily—but not to forget either her terrible sufferings, or her merciful deliverance out of the murderous hands of Ralph, the Bailiff.