by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (uncredited).
Originally published in St. James's Magazine (W. Kent) vol.1 #2 (May 1861).
Chapter III.
The Visitor at the Rectory.
The June sunshine gilded the dingy bosom of the river, and the grass grew long and luxuriant in the meadows of the Grey Farm, when Dudley Carleon returned from a long visit to the metropolis, and resumed his quiet and monotonous life of gentleman farmer. He had been away from home for the best part of the winter and of the spring, only coming down to Lincolnshire now and then for a few days, or sometimes for a week at a time, and then returning to London. The bailiffs sister had left the farm for a situation in York, of a lighter character, as her brother said she had overworked herself in that great house; and an old woman from Olney had been elevated into the post of housekeeper at the Grey Farm.
If anything, Dudley Carleon was moodier and more reserved when he returned than before he went away, and he certainly seemed more than ever under the thrall of his inseparable shadow, Ralph, the bailiff.
Side by side the master and man walked slowly along the river's bank, or round the great cornfields, or paused at a gate leading into a meadow shut up against the hay harvest, to calculate upon the value of the crops. Side by side they loitered of an evening, watching the cattle grazing by the water side, and whoever happened to hear their conversation would generally hear Ralph, the bailiff, telling his master what a valuable property he could make of the farm if he had only money enough for improvements.
A few days after Dudley's return Ralph was for once in a way absent from the premises. His master had sent him to the market-town, ten miles distant, to transact some business relating to the farm, and he was not likely to get back till nightfall.
There was a public right of way through some green lanes, and across some cornfields and meadows on the farm. This led from a village at a little distance into Olney. In one of these green lanes, in which some of the draught-horses on the farm were tethered, Dudley Carleon sauntered, book in hand, as the clocks of the distant village churches struck three.
The master of the Grey Farm, always looking downwards as he walked, took no notice whatever of the wild roses in the hedges, nor of the cowslips upon the grassy banks; but he was suddenly startled into looking up by the sound of the barking of a dog at a few hundred yards from him.
Following with his eyes the direction of this sound, he saw perched upon a green mound, under the hawthorn bushes near him, something so bright in colour, so radiant in appearance, so airy and fluttering in motion, that he might almost have mistaken the something for a new and luxuriant sister to the gay wild-flowers in the hedge. But coming a little nearer to the strange blossom, he found himself face to face with a young lady, dressed in pink muslin and a gipsy hat.
She was almost childlike in appearance, and excessively pretty. She was brilliantly fair, and her pink cheeks were set in a framework of showery golden curls, which trembled and glistened in the summer breezes and the bright June sunshine. Her eyes were of a tender melting blue, large and soft, and expressive of the most innocent candour. She was very little, and all she wore, from the lace which fell about her tiny straw hat to the flowers of her soft and airy muslin dress, floated about her with a peculiar grace. If you could fancy a fairy dressed by a Parisian milliner, you may perhaps imagine the fluttering grace of this exquisite creature.
"Would you be so good," she sail, "as to tell me the way to Olney? I insisted on rambling out to-day by myself, and have been sufficiently punished for my obstinacy, in having lost my way. I have been sitting here very patiently for the last hour, hoping to see some one pass."
Her voice was music itself, and her smile when she spoke made her as bewitching as she was lovely.
Dudley told her that he was going towards Olney, and begged to be allowed to escort her part of the way there. There was something so unmistakably gentlemanly in his address, that after one brief moment of hesitation the young lady accepted his offer; and they strolled on side by side, the dog running backwards and forwards before them, barking merrily.
She told him, in the course of their walk, that she was visiting at the Rectory; that her name was Jenny Trevor, that she was an orphan, that Mr. Marlow was her guardian, and Agnes Marlow her dearest friend.
They had to pass through a field close to Dudley Carleon's house, and then out to the river bank which led to Olney.
As they approached the first gate, by the water side, a man on horseback came slowly towards them.
This man was Ralph, the bailiff.
He slid off his horse on seeing his master, and leading the animal by the bridle, came up to the gate, which he opened for Dudley and Miss Trevor.
"You are home early, Purvis," said Dudley.
"Yes, Sir; matters were managed quicker than I thought for, and I wouldn't loiter. I've settled with the haymakers for next week, Sir."
"That's right."
Ralph the bailiff still lingered, bridle in hand, by the open gate; and from under his black lashes the grey eyes looked furtively, but searchingly, at Jenny Trevor.
Dudley seemed terribly embarrassed. He glanced from the bailiff to the young girl, as if hesitating what to do ; and then said, with considerable confusion of manner—
"I think, Miss Trevor, I need scarcely bore you with my society any longer. The next gate but one opens into the high road, and then you are in a straight line with Olney." He raised his hat, but did not offer to shake hands with her; and, with a glance of surprise, she bowed, wished him good day, and walked onwards.
"Now, then!" he said to Ralph, the bailiff, as soon as Miss Trevor was out of hearing.
"Now, then, Muster Carleon!" echoed Ralph: "what a very pretty young lass yon is."
His master made no reply to this observation, but leaned listlessly, with his elbows on the top bar of the gate, and his chin in his hands.
"Thee and her seemed mighty friendly, too," said Ralph, presently, with a grin.
"What's that to you?"
"May be nothing—may be something."
"She is a young lady staying at the Rectory," said Dudley, sulkily, and as if every word were being wrenched out of him against his will; "and I never saw her in my life till this afternoon. She asked me to show her the way to Olney, and I did so. Will that do?"
"Pretty near. She must be rather a forward lass though, to be so uncommon friendly."
A week after this, Ralph Purvis left the Grey Farm, and Dudley Carleon became a constant visitor at Olney Rectory. It was strange that in his visits to the Rectory he rarely met with Agnes Marlow. If by any chance he happened to find her at home, she would sit staring vacantly out at the window, never addressing him, and only answering by monosyllables when he spoke to her, and she would always take the earliest opportunity of leaving the room on some pretext or other. Jenny Trevor at first complained of this to her friend; but Agnes was so silent and reserved on the subject, that Jenny—who was always a little overawed by the Rector's daughter, with her cold, serious black eyes, and her thin pale face—dared not press it further.
"We are not accountable for our prejudices, Jenny," she would say; "I do not like Dudley Carleon."
"But you have no reason for disliking him, have you, Agnes?"
"None—that I can reconcile with my duty as a Christian. Jenny Trevor, I am the daughter of a minister of the Gospel of Christ; I go to church three times on a Sunday; I visit the sick, and I give my money to the poor; but, for all that, I may not be a Christian; perhaps I am not when Dudley Carleon is concerned. Do not talk to me—do not question me. I hate him!"
Her dark eyes shone with a feverish lustre, and she clenched her slender, wasted hand, as she repeated, "Oh! Heaven have mercy upon me, and upon his soul! I hate him!"
Chapter IV.
The Wedding-Day.
The Olney people were surprised to miss the dark face of Ralph Purvis from among the haymakers in Dudley Carleon's meadows; but the young man told his acquaintance that he had been induced to purchase a small farm in Buckinghamshire, and that he had entrusted his bailiff with the management of it.
Ralph had been a hard and a churlish taskmaster; he was regretted by no one, unless indeed by his employer, who received about once a week a letter, directed in a cramped, mean-looking hand, bearing the postmark of a village in Buckinghamshire. Every week, too, Dudley Carleon rode into Olney for a post-office order, payable to Ralph Purvis; and those who watched the young man's movements began to say that his new farm was costing him more money than it would ever bring him back. But before the harvest there was a talk of his marrying a young lady with a fortune, or at least what was called a fortune in Olney. Jenny Trevor had three thousand pounds. She would be of age in September, and she was, people said, engaged to be married to Dudley Carleon.
Was she engaged to him? No. She let him follow her about as some great, sulky, but faithful, dog follows a beloved master. She allowed herself to fall into a sort of tacit compact with him; she never repelled his silent attentions, nor withdrew herself from his society, however often he came to the Rectory.
I cannot help it," she said, one day, to Agnes; "he is in the drawing-room at this moment; I know it, though I have neither seen nor heard him come in; and I must go to him, though I do not wish to go. What am I to do, Agnes?"
"Come with me to Scarborough; you know that I am going to-morrow, and shall not return here for two or three months. Choose, Jenny, whether you will come with me or stay here with papa to become the wife of that man."
"Agnes, I will go with you!"
The two girls set to work immediately to pack their trunks, and made all their arrangements for starting by the next morning's express for Scarborough; but, that evening, seated in the dusky twilight in the deep bow window of the Rectory drawing-room, Dudley Carleon made Jenny Trevor promise that she would be his wife the very day on which she came of age.
After he had left the house, Agnes Marlow found her sobbing hysterically, with her head upon the sill of the open window, and the scented blossoms of a clematis trailing over her glistening curls.
"Jenny, what is the matter?"
"I must stay here, Agnes; I cannot go with you to-morrow."
"You must be your own mistress, Jenny. Heaven help you, if you forget what 1 have said."
Jenny's loud sobs were her only answer to these ominous words.
Before a sheaf of golden corn had fallen under the sickle, Mr. Marlow had married Dudley Carleon and Jenny Trevor in Olney church.
Her wedding-day was that on which she came of age, as she had promised her lover. Everything was very secretly arranged, and by Dudley Carleon's wish no invitation had been sent to Agnes.
It was one of the glorious and burning summer days we have so often seen at the beginning of autumn. The lazy cattle slept in the flat meadows, and the narrow river dragged its slow course under a yellow haze of heavy noontide heat. The cornfields were gaudy with vivid patches of purple and scarlet, and the golden grain scarcely stirred in the still air. The bride looked lovely, with her simple robes of lace and muslin fluttering round her, and with every golden ringlet dancing in the sun.
"A handsome couple!" said the villagers grouped about the church porch. Every one seemed in high spirits. Even the bridegroom had thrown off his silent reserve, while a glance of pride and triumph shone in his sombre blue eyes. Only one sinister event threw a cloud over the conclusion of the ceremony. As Dudley Carleon turned from the altar to lead his young bride into the vestry, he found himself face to face with a glistening tablet of white marble—a tablet so newly put up upon the wall that the mortar at the edges was still damp, and the workman's tools lay about in the pew beneath—
"Sacred to the Memory of Martin Carleon:
Obit: September 24, 1849. Ætat. 23."
"This monument is erected by his affectionate and sorrowful brother, Dudley Carleon."
The village stonemason, an idle and dilatory man, had had the order for this tablet more than a twelvemonth, and had only completed his work the night before.
When the wedding party returned to the Rectory, they found a fly from the station standing at the gate.
"Can Agnes have returned?" said Mr. Marlow.
If Dudley's face could be whiter than it had grown at the sight of the tablet upon the church wall, it became so now.
"Jenny," he said, clutching the little gloved hand that lay upon his strong arm, "Agnes Marlow is a madwoman, whatever she says to you, remember that."
"Dudley, what do you mean?"
"Good Heavens! How do I know what she may not say? Do you suppose that I have not seen her prejudice against me?"
Pale and careworn, with her dress dusty and disordered, from her hasty journey, and her long dark hair falling loose about her thin face, Agnes Marlow met the bridal party in the sunny hall.
She did not speak either to her father or to Dudley, but grasping the bride's slender wrist with a convulsive strength, she said,
"Am I too late—am I too late, after all? Are you married?"
"Yes," said Dudley, firmly, looking at her with an impatient frown.
She seemed neither to hear nor to see him.
"Jenny," she repeated, "are you married?"
"Yes," answered the terror-stricken girl.
"Oh, that I should be too late; that I should not be told of this in time. But come, come with me, Jenny, to my room."
"Jenny! Mrs. Carleon, I forbid you to do so," cried her husband.
"Forbid her!" echoed Agnes, with a harsh discordant laugh, turning her large lustrous eyes for the first time towards Dudley Carleon. Shall I tell her here, at the foot of these stairs, before the servants—those people round the door—before my father—before you? Shall I tell her that which I have to tell her thus, Dudley Carleon?"
He turned away from the wan and burning eyes, and taking her father aside, whispered to him.
"Come, Jenny, come!" She dragged rather than led the wretched girl up the stairs into her own room, and locking the door sank exhausted into a chair by the bed. The windows were open, the birds singing loudly among the honeysuckle and jessamine clustering round the house: a flood of sunshine streaming in upon the pale faces of the two girls.
Jenny fell on her knees, sobbing, and clinging to the Rector's daughter.
"Oh, Agnes, have pity upon me! remember it is my wedding-day."
"I cannot pity you, Jenny. I can remember nothing. I tell you my heart is not wide enough to hold anything but hatred—hatred of him."
"Agnes!"
"If I crush out your heart as my heart has been crushed—if I blight your life as mine has been blighted—if he is as dear to you as his dead brother was to me, still I will speak. Do you know what he is—this man—whom you have sworn to love and cherish?"
"Agnes!"
"Jenny Carleon—(oh, misery, that I should have to call you by that name!)—when I received my father's letter this morning, telling me of your purposed marriage, I thought I should go mad; but do not judge me by my disordered looks or by my bewildered manner. Listen to me, unhappy girl. I cannot tell you what I know, I can only tell you what I believe so firmly, that if my words were to lay you dead at my feet, I would say them rather than see you pass over the threshold of that man's house."
"Oh, Agnes! my wedding-day—my wedding-day!"
She held out her entreating hands as if she would have warded off the cruel words, as she would ward a blow.
"Dudley Carleon poisoned his brother Martin!"
One long piteous wail escaped from the white lips of the bride, as she fell in convulsions at the feet of Agnes, with her bright curls trailing in a tangled mass upon the floor.
"I have no proof of this, or I would have made that proof ring through the length and breadth of the land. I have no proof, but I have—conviction!"
Jenny lifted her white face from the floor, and dragging herself on to her knees, once more looked up at the speaker.
"No proof?"
"None. But I know it—I know it! I was at the Grey Farm on the night of Martin Carleon's death. I saw that man with a ghastly face and a shaking hand meddling with the medicine-bottles. It was from his hand the draught was taken which was to allay, but which only increased, the lingering fever. It was his dark shadow which never left that weary bed. Fidelity! Devotion! Yes, the fidelity of a murderer to his deadly purpose; the devotion of the executioner to his unconscious victim. Girl, our eyes met only once upon that terrible night, and in that one glance I saw, and knew his guilt. I know it, and he knows that I know it!"
"Agnes, Agnes!"
"Martin Carleon died from the effects of slow poison, administered by his brother. Now go back to your husband. I have done with you; Mrs. Carleon!"
"Oh, Agnes! how cruel, how heartless, how pitiless and unchristian! And it is by a vague suspicion—an idea as unfounded as it is hideous—that you would brand an innocent man? I pity you, Agnes, for being the victim to so horrible a delusion."
She rose from her knees, and going to the toilet-table, wiped away her blinding tears, and rearranged her curls with a hand that scarcely trembled. As she did this, she watched the reflection of the haggard face of Agnes in the glass before which she stood. She began to think that Dudley Carleon must indeed be right, and that grief had driven the Rector's daughter mad. Agnes sat on the little white-curtained bed, with hollow eyes, following Jenny's rapid movements at the dressing-table.
"God help us both!" she murmured, clasping her attenuated hands; "God help us, and lend us His light to guide us in this blind, dark world. I should have died if I had not spoken."
Chapter IV.
THE BAILIFF'S RETURN.
Agnes Marlow returned to Scarborough. Her health was broken, her spirits gone, and there were people in Olney who shared Dudley Carleon's opinion in thinking that her reason had been in some degree unsettled by her lover's untimely death.
The first four months of Jenny Carleon's married life passed peacefully away. Dudley was a kind and an attentive husband, and there was no fault whatever to be found with him in his new position. The Grey Farm was certainly rather a dull abode for Jenny, whose life had been chiefly spent at a boarding-school at the West-end of London; but she had her piano, her books and drawing materials, a pet dog, and an old grey pony, on which she rode about her husband's fields, while he superintended the men; for since Ralph's departure Dudley had devoted himself entirely to the management of his farm.
Not a word had ever been uttered by Mrs. Carleon on the subject of that stormy interview between herself and Agnes Marlow. Often in the dead of the night she awoke suddenly by the side of her sleeping husband, with the echo of those terrible words ringing in her ears, as if some one had just spoken them at her pillow. She had never for one moment thought of them except as of the hallucination of an enfeebled mind, but she could no more forget them than she could forget her own name.
Sometimes seated alone in the twilight, by the fire in the low oak parlour, surrounded by the distorted shadows of the ponderous furniture upon the dark panelled walls, thinking of things as far away from the scene of her bridal morning as it is possible for one thing to be from another—in a moment, in a breath, a hissing whisper at her ear would shape with supernatural distinctness these two horrible sentences—
"Dudley Carleon poisoned his brother Martin."
"Martin Carleon died from the effects of slow poison, administered by his brother."
But this was not the worst; for she would find that by degrees she grew to be perpetually repeating these words to herself, as we often involuntarily repeat a line from a well-known song. At her needle-work, busy with her pencils and colours—even at the piano—she caught herself silently reiterating these hateful phrases. They would fit themselves to the notes of her favourite pieces of music, and she trembled to think that one day she might unconsciously utter them aloud.
The new year came in, cold and rainy. The weather kept Jenny a prisoner in the house. Dudley was often out. She had few visitors, for her Olney acquaintances dreaded the wet walk on the muddy bank of the river.
"Why had she married Dudley Carleon?"
She sometimes asked herself this question, as if she had suddenly awoke from a long sleep to find herself in a strange country.
She did not love him,—she did not even admire him,—but she had allowed him to gain so strong an influence over her, that it was only now and then she remembered this,—only now and then she asked herself wonderingly, "Why did I marry him?"
She was not unhappy,—only, sometimes, lonely and dreary in the gaunt stone house, with its great comfortless rooms and low oaken ceilings, that always seemed to her as if they would some day slowly descend and crush her to death.
The light-hearted girl grew grave and quiet under the shadows of the solemn farm-house. Dudley, kind as he was, was silent and reserved, and had fits of such strange abstraction, of pre-occupation so intense and gloomy, that his wife shrank from addressing him. She would sit at her drawing-board with. the pencil in her hand, and the colours drying on her palette, watching his rigid face as he stared into the burning coal.
Sometimes his silence would have so oppressive an influence upon her, that she would steal quietly from the room, and remain away for hours, to find him, perhaps, on her return, in the same attitude, with unchanged countenance, sitting over a heap of black cinders.
He would apologise for these long reveries by saying he was tired,—that he overworked himself,—that the farm gave him a great deal of trouble, or that he was anxious about his Buckinghamshire property.
One morning, towards the end of January, he found a letter lying on the breakfast-table in the stiff hand-writing of his bailiff. It was a much longer letter than usual, and Jenny saw by her husband's face that its contents were not agreeable.
"Jenny, I shall have to go to Buckinghamshire," said Dudley.
"To Buckinghamshire! Why?"
"Ralph's letter tells me he is in a difficulty about the farm, and must have my advice before he stirs a step; I must go this very morning."
Before she could answer him he had crumpled the letter in his hand, flung it into the fire, and left the room. She heard him ordering his horse to be brought round immediately. He came in hurriedly to wish her good-bye, promised to return to Lincolnshire in a day or two, and galloped off to catch the London express.
Reserved and silent as her husband was, Jenny felt unhappy in this his first absence. The servants, and the great rough farming men about the place, were strange to her,—their very dialect almost unintelligible. She was lonely and uncomfortable among them, and she wandered in and out of the solitary rooms in which the great bare windows opened upon the chill winter sky, hoping and praying for Dudley's return.
Two days and two nights, and the best part of the third day, dragged themselves out, and he had not returned.
"He will come to-night," she said,—and she had huge fires piled in the grates, till the flames went roaring up the wide chimneys, and a red reflection shone in every panel of the black oak wainscot. It was a bitter evening; but at five o'clock, the hour at which a London train came in, she went out with a shawl thrown loosely over her head, and stood for a long time looking anxiously down the dim pathway by the river bank. She did not return to the house until the Olney clocks chimed the three-quarters.
"He will be here by the nine o'clock train," she said; but seven, eight, nine, ten o'clock struck; the fire burned low, and her heart sank with a Weary feeling of loneliness, for still he did not come.
The old housekeeper and the parlour-maid who waited upon her, recommended her to go to bed, for ten o'clock was a late hour at the Grey Farm; but there was a mail-train that came into Olmey at half-past one in the morning, and Jenny insisted on sitting up in case her husband should come by that. She sent the servants to bed after having made one of them instruct her in the mysteries of the bolts, bars, and chains of the hall-door; and the fires having been once more replenished, she sat down in her low chair by the hearth to wear out the three hours which must elapse before her husband's return.
She drew closer and closer to the blazing fire; she wrapped herself in a thick shawl—but in spite of all, she shivered violently.
"I have caught Martin Carleon's ague," she said, "on the bank of that dismal river."
The words seemed to strike a chill to her inmost heart, for they brought back the scene of her wedding-day, and Agnes Marlow's horrible accusation.
A portrait of the last owner of the farm hung in the shadow at the end of the room—a frank, genial face, with waving chesnut hair and bright blue eyes. The thought of the dead man haunted her in the dreary silence. She tried not to look at his picture; she turned her back to the panel where it hung. What if his likeness should descend from the shadowy canvass, and, stealing noiselessly behind her, lay an impalpable hand upon her shoulder? She was not superstitious, but her monotonous life had weakened her nerves, and she felt as if she were alone with the dead. What if this pictured image should shape itself into a phantom, and approach her? What if on rushing to the door to escape it, she should find it locked, and discover that she was a prisoner with this ghastly companion? What if those painted lips were to be miraculously unsealed, and an unearthly voice were to tell her that the words uttered by Agnes Marlow were the solemn and the awful truth?
The cold perspiration broke out in great beads upon her fair forehead. "I shall go mad," she said, "if I am long alone."
Once she rose from her seat, determined to call up one of the servants, but she had not the courage to traverse the dark hall and the back staircase leading to their rooms—scarcely courage to pass the picture hanging between the fire-place and the door.
What, she thought, if she had indeed caught the ague or the fever that had killed her husband's brother? What if she lay for weeks upon a weary bed, tended and watched by Dudley Carleon? Every syllable spoken by Agnes came back to her, and she seemed to see her husband, with a quiet step and a white, tremulous hand, jingling the thin glass of the medicine-bottles. The slow hands of the clock above the chimney-piece went silently round. She heard the distant chimes of Olney church, the quarters seeming entire hours to her feverish impatience.
One—a quarter-past—half-past—three quarters: two—a quarter-past two. The last white ashes dropped through the lowest bars of the grate. Three loud blows resounded upon the stout panel of the hall door.
"Oh, thank Heaven, thank Heaven!" she said, springing from her seat; "how stupid have I been, and how I can afford to laugh at myself, now that he has come."
Catching up a candle from the table, she flew into the hall, and began to unfasten the door, holding the candle still in one hand, and fumbling with the bolts, in her nervous but joyful agitation.
"Dudley," she said, "Dudley, I won't be long; be patient, I won't be long." But the heavy blows were repeated upon the door, and a gruff voice, muffled and made indistinct by the thick oak, uttered some impatient words.
A sudden terror seized her. "Can he have been drinking?" she thought, "his voice sounds so thick and strange."
"Dudley—now, now I have managed it."
She turned the key with a great effort, and, letting down the chain, opened the door to its utmost width.
She felt for the first time in her life as if she really loved Dudley Carleon. She wanted to throw herself into his arms, to cling to him for protection and shelter.
A man in a slouched felt hat, a dark smock-frock, leathern gaiters, and great hob-nailed boots, strode across the threshold.
The lower part of his face was muffled in a coarse woollen handkerchief, but two sinister grey eyes looked out from under the shade of his hat.
Jenny did not remember having seen this man before, but the shock she experienced in meeting a stranger instead of her husband, gave her an unwonted courage. She caught hold of a rope hanging near the doorway, a rope communicating with a great bell on the roof of the house, which was used to summon the men to their meals and to wake them in the morning. "Who are you?" she said, as the man flung down a knotted stick and a bundle in a red cotton handkerchief, and was about to pass her in the direction of the kitchens.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Muster Carleon's bailiff, and maybe with as good a right to come into this house as Muster Carleon himself," said the man, insolently.
"Oh, you are Purvis, the bailiff, are you? Has your master sent you home?"
"Yes, I am Purvis; but my master ha'nt sent me home. And pray, my pretty curly-haired Miss, who may you be?"
"Your master's wife," said Jenny, haughtily.
The man stared at her rudely, for two or three moments, before he spoke.
"My master's what?"
"His wife! Mrs. Carleon," she said, looking him full in the face, terrified, but not daunted, by his insolence.
Ralph the Bailiff burst into a loud hoarse laugh.
"Mr. Dudley Carleon's wife. His right-down lawful wife! Oh, you're that, are you? Give me the light," he said, snatching the silver candlestick from her hand; "let's have a look at you, then, for you're a bit of a curiosity."
Jenny's hand had never left the rope, she pulled it violently, and the bell upon the roof clamoured and shook through the winter night.
Half-a-dozen half-dressed men came tumbling down the back staircase before the bell had ceased ringing.
"This man says he is my husband's bailiff," said Jenny, as they crowded round her; "take him to his room and look after him. He has insulted me; but as he is evidently tipsy, I shall ask no explanation until Mr. Carleon's return. Send Sarah to my room, James," she added, to one of the farm-servants, whose face she knew ; "I will not sleep in the house alone while that man is under this roof."
"Oh, indeed, my lass, do you think I'd murder you?"
"I think you are a bad man," said Jenny, looking back at the bailiff as she slowly ascended the broad staircase.
"I wouldn't stay here at all, if you're so timid, Miss," said Ralph, with a sneering laugh; "there's others besides me, perhaps, to be afraid of at the Grey Farm."
CHAPTER V.
In the Dead of the Night.
Dudley Carleon returned early the next day to find his wife confined to her room by a violent cold, and Ralph Purvis seated, smoking his pipe over the kitchen fire.
The young man was evidently unprepared for his bailiff's arrival. "What brought you down here ?" he asked, angrily.
"My business and yours," muttered Ralph, without taking his pipe from his mouth.
Dudley Carleon did not answer, but led the way into the dining-room, where he and Purvis were closeted together for nearly two hours.
In the course of this long interview the servants heard their master's voice raised several times as if in anger, but the bailiff's not once.
Mrs. Carleon came down stairs in the evening to her favourite seat by the fire-place in the oak parlour. She had told her husband of Ralph's conduct on his arrival; she had told him, indeed, that she could not live happily while the bailiff was at the farm.
"My dear Jenny, the man is, unfortunately, so useful to me that I cannot afford to get rid of him," said Dudley; "but I shall send him back to Buckinghamshire in a week at the latest; in the mean time he must apologise to you." He rang the bell, and the bailiff came in, turning his hat round in his two great hands; sleek, humble, and respectful; utterly different from what he had been at half-past two o'clock that morning.
He made a very elaborate and round-about apology, with a cringing politeness of manner, but with a sulky face and an ominous glitter in his deep-set grey eyes. He seemed as if he had been tutored in what he was to say, or almost as if he had been repeating something learned from a book. But the ground of his excuse was, that he had been drinking, and was a little off his head, as he called it.
Mrs. Carleon bowed gravely when he had finished.
"Then you will look over it, Jenny?" asked her husband.
"Oh, certainly," she replied, coldly, turning away her head—for she hated to feel the glittering eyes of the bailiff fixed upon her face.
"If Agnes had told me that man was a poisoner, I could almost have believed her," she thought, as Ralph left the room.
Jenny's cold lasted for some days, and at her husband's request the surgeon from Olney rode over one morning to see her.
"A slight attack of influenza," he said, "nothing more; Mrs. Carleon is a little debilitated; I will send her some strengthening medicine."
"It is not ague, is it?" asked Jenny, anxiously.
"Ague! oh dear no, nothing of the kind."
"Nor fever?"
"No, you are not in the least feverish."
"Why, Jenny, what are you thinking of?" asked her husband.
"I was thinking of your brother Martin's death, and wondering whether any of my symptoms resembled his."
Dudley Carleon started half out of his chair, and looked earnestly at his wife's face; then sighing deeply, he said, as he reseated himself,—
"Heaven forbid, Jenny! One such death as poor Martin's is enough in a family."
Mrs. Carleon was seated opposite to one of the windows; and looking up at this moment, she saw the dark face of the bailiff between herself and the winter sky.
He was standing on a short ladder, busy, snipping the branches of a creeping plant that grew over the house; and she saw that he had opened the window a couple of inches at the top, in order to extricate a branch that had been shut in.
"I wish you would send that man back to your other farm, Dudley," she said; "he is always hanging about the house."
The medicines did not come till rather late in the evening. In spite of herself, Jenny could not forget what Agnes Marlow had said, and she wondered whether her husband would offer to administer them to her.
He was seated at his desk, writing, when the maid-servant brought in the bottles; and he did not even look up as Jenny took them from their paper coverings.
"I am going to take my medicine, Dudley," she said.
"That's right, Jenny," he answered, without raising his head.
She felt an intense relief at finding him so indifferent; she had never allowed to herself that she could possibly be brought to suspect him; but a load seemed lifted from her mind by this most simple circumstance.
The next day, and the next, she continued to take her medicines without the slightest notice from her husband. He was kind and attentive, asked often after her health, but said nothing about the medical treatment; he evidently attached very little importance to this slight attack.
On the third day the surgeon called again at the Grey Farm. He found Jenny in her old place by the fire, Dudley reading the newspaper opposite to her, and Ralph Purvis mending the lock of the door.
The bailiff was very handy as a smith, carpenter, or painter, and there always seemed something for him to do about the house now.
This time the surgeon looked grave, as he felt his patient's pulse.
"You have not been taking my medicines, Mrs. Carleon," he said.
"Yes, indeed, I have taken them very regularly; have I not, Dudley?"
"Why, to tell you the truth, I haven't watched you closely enough to be able to vouch for your integrity, Jenny," said her husband.
"Then there is more debility than I thought, Mrs. Carleon. We must try and set you up again, however."
Jenny's eyes wandered involuntarily to the portrait of Martin Carleon.
"Is there any fever?" she asked, looking up anxiously at the surgeon's face, as he stood before her, with his fingers on her wrist.
Why—yes, I think there is a little," he said, with some hesitation.
Her face grew suddenly white; she rose from her chair, and seemed as if she was going to run out of the room. Ralph the bailiff, on his knees at the threshold of the half-open door, rattled away at the lock he was mending. Kneeling where he did, he seemed to present an impassable barrier between the mistress of the Grey Farm and the world without.
Dudley Carleon dropped the newspaper, as he started to his feet.
"Jenny! Jenny! what is the matter with you?"
"I want to get out of the house," she said, looking about her wildly; "I want to run away. I know that if I stay here I shall die as he did!"
She pointed to Martin's picture on the wall before her.
"Jenny Carleon!"
"Oh, forgive me! forgive me, Dudley!" she said, throwing herself into her husband's arms, and sobbing hysterically: "I do not doubt you—I esteem, respect, and love you. I know how foolish I am, and hate myself for my folly; but I am frightened!—I am frightened!"