IT was the afternoon of this same day. The stage-coach, delayed by the snow, was very late when it was heard approaching. It's four well-fed horses drew lip at the Dolphin Lim, to set down Mr. Nettleby. The superintendent of the coastguard, who had been on some business a mile or two inland, had availed himself of the coach for returning. John Bent and his wife came running to the door. The guard, hoping, perhaps, for sixpence or a shilling gratuity, descended from his seat, and was extending a hand to help the officer down from the roof, when he found himself called to by a lady inside, who had been reconnoitring the inn, and the flaming dolphin on its signboard.
"What place is this, guard?"
"Greylands, ma'am."
"That seems a good hotel."
"It is a nice comfortable inn, ma'am."
"I will get out here. Please see to my luggage."
The guard was surprised. He thought the lady must have made a mistake.
"This is not Stilborough, ma'am. You are booked to Stilborough."
"But I will not go on to Stilborough: I will descend here instead. See my poor child"--showing the hot face of a little girl who lay half asleep upon her knee. "She has, I fear, the fever coming on, and she is so fatigued. This must be a healthy place; it has the sea, I perceive; and I think she shall rest here for a day or two before going on."
The landlord and his wife had heard this colloquy, for the lady spoke at the open window. They advanced, and the guard threw wide the door.
"Will you carry my little one?" said the lady to Mrs. Bent. "I fear she is going to be ill, and I do not care to take her on farther. Can I be accommodated with a good apartment here?"
"The best rooms we have, ma'am, are at your service; and you will find them excellent, though I say it myself," returned Mrs. Bent, receiving the child into her arms.
"Marie fatiguée," plaintively called out the little thing, who seemed about three years old. "Marie ne peut marcher."
The lady reassured her in the same language, and alighted. She was a tall, ladylike young woman of apparently some six-and-twenty years, with soft, fair hair, and a pleasing face that wore signs of care, or weariness: or perhaps both. Mrs. Bent carried the child into the parlour; John followed with a large hand-reticule made of plaited black-and-white straw, and the guard put two trunks in the passage, a large one and a small one.
"I am en voyage," said the lady, addressing Mrs. Bent--and it may be remarked that, though speaking English with fluency, and with very little foreign accent, she now and then substituted a French word, or a whole sentence as though the latter were more familiar to her in everyday life--and of which John Bent and his wife did not understand a syllable.
"But we have voyaged far, and the sea-crossing was frightfully rough, and I fear I have brought my little one on too quickly: so it may be well to halt here for a short time, and keep her quiet. I hope your hotel is not crowded with company?"
"There's nobody at all staying in it just now, ma'am," said Mrs. Bent. "We don't have many indoor visitors at the winter season."
"And this snow is not good," said the stranger; "I mean not good for voyagers. I might have put off my journey had I thought it would come. When I left my home, the warm spring sun was shining, and the trees were budding."
"We have had fine warm weather here, too," said Mrs. Bent; "it changed again a week ago to winter: not but what we had the sun out bright to-day. This dear little thing seems delicate, ma'am."
"Not generally. But she is fatigued, you see, and has a touch of fever. We must make her some tisane."
"We'll soon get her right again," said Mrs. Bent, gently; for with children, of whom she was very fond, she lost all her sharpness. "Poor little lamb! And so you've come from over the water, ma'am!--and the sea was rough!--and did this little one suffer?"
"Oh, pray do not talk of that terrible sea! I thought I must have died. To look at, nothing more beautiful; but to be on it--ah, Ciel!"
She shuddered and shrugged her shoulders with the recollection. There was something peculiarly soft and winning in the quiet tones of her voice; something attractive altogether in her features and their sad expression.
"I never was on the sea, thank goodness," said Mrs. Bent; "I have heard it's very bad. We get plenty of it as far as the looks go: and that's enough for us, ma'am. Many an invitation I've had in my life to go off sailing in people's boats--but no, not for me. One knows one's safe on land."
She had sat down, the child on her lap, and was taking off its blue woollen hood and warm woollen pelisse of fleecy grey cloth. The frock underneath was of fine black French merino. The lady wore the same kind of black dress under her cloak: it was evident that both were in mourning. Happening to look up from the semi-sleeping child, Mrs. Bent caught the traveller's eyes fixed attentively upon her, as if studying her face.
"How do you call this village, I was about to ask. Grey----"
"Greylands, ma'am. Stilborough is about three miles off. Are you going there?"
"Not to stay," said the lady, hastily. "I am come to England to see a relative, but my progress is not in any hurry. I must think first of my child: and this air seems good."
"None so good for miles and miles," returned Mrs. Bent. "A week of it will make this little lady quite another child. Pretty thing! What beautiful eyes!"
The child had woke up again in her restlessness; she was gazing up at her strange nurse with wide-open, dark brown eyes. They were not her mother's eyes, for those were blue. The hot little face was becoming paler.
"I mist make her some tisane" repeated the lady; "or show you how to make it. You have herbs, I presume. We had better get her to bed. Nothing will do her so much good as rest and sleep. Will Marie go to bed?" she said, addressing the little girl.
"Oui," replied the child, who appeared to understand English, but would not speak it. "Marie sommeil," she added in her childish patois. "Marie soif. Maman, donne Marie a boire."
"Will you take her, ma'am, for a few moments?" said Mrs. Bent, placing her in the mother's arms. "I will see after your room and make it ready."
The landlady left the parlour. The child, feverish and weary, soon began to cry. Her mother hushed her; and presently, not waiting for the reappearance of the landlady, carried her upstairs.
Which was the chamber? she wondered, on reaching the landing: but the half-open door of one, and some stir within, guided her thoughts to it, as the right. Mrs. Bent was bustling about it; and the landlord, who appeared to have been taking up the trunks, stood just inside the door. Some kind of dispute seemed to be going on, for Mrs. Bent's tones were shrill. The lady halted, not liking to intrude, and sat down on a short bench against the wall; the child, dozing again, was heavy for her.
"As if there was not another room in the house, but you must make ready this one!" John was saying in a voice of vexed remonstrance. "I told you, Dorothy, I'd never have this chamber used again until we had not space left elsewhere. What are you going to do with the things?"
"Now don't you fret yourself to fiddle-strings," retorted Mrs. Bent. "I am putting all the things into this linen-basket; his clothes and his little desk and all, even the square of scented soap he used, for he brought it with him in his portmanteau. They shall go into the small chest in our bedroom, and be locked up. And you may put a seal upon the top of it for safety."
"But I did not wish to have the things disturbed at all," urged John. "The lady might have had another room."
"The tap-room is your concern, the care of the chambers is mine, and I choose her to have this one," said independent Mrs. Bent. "As to keeping the best chamber out of use just because these things have remained in it unclaimed, is about as daft a notion as ever I heard of. If you don't take care, John, you'll go crazy over Anthony Castlemaine."
The mother outside, waiting, and hushing her child to her, had not been paying much attention: but at the last words she started, and gazed at the door. Her lips parted; her face turned white.
"Peace, wife," said the landlord. "What I say is right."
"Yes, crazy," persisted Mrs. Bent, who rarely dropped an argument of her own accord. "Look at what happened with Miss Ethel Reene to-day! I'm sure you are not in your senses on the subject, John Bent, or you'd never be so imprudent. You may believe Mr. Anthony was murdered by his uncle, but it does not do to turn yourself into a town-crier, and proclaim it."
Oh, more deadly white than before did these words turn the poor lady who was listening. Her face was as the face of one stricken with terror; her breath came in gasps; she clutched at her child, lest her trembling hands should let it fall. John Bent and his wife came forth, bearing between them the piled-up clothes-basket, a small mahogany desk on its top. She let her face drop upon her child's and kept it there, as though she too had fallen asleep.
"Dear me, there's the lady!" whispered John.
"And it's unbeknown whatshehas overheard," muttered Mrs. Bent. "I beg your pardon, ma'am; you'll be cold sitting there. Had you dropped asleep?"
The lady lifted her white face: fortunately the passage was in twilight: she passed a pocket-handkerchief over her brow as she spoke.
"My little child got so restless that I came up. Is the room ready?"
Letting fall her handle of the basket and leaving her husband to convey it into their chamber as he best could, Mrs. Bent took the child from the speaker's arms and preceded her into the room. A spacious, comfortable chamber, with a fine view over the sea, and a good fire burning up in the grate.
"We were as quick as we could be," said Mrs. Bent, in apology for having kept her guest waiting; "but I had to empty the chamber first of some articles that were in it. I might have given you another room at once, ma'am, for we always keep them in readiness, you see; but this is the largest and has the pleasantest look-out; and I thought if the little girl was to be ill, you'd like it best."
"Articles belonging to a former traveller?" asked the lady, who was kneeling then before her trunk to get out her child's night-things.
"Yes, ma'am. A gentleman we had here a few short weeks ago."
"And he has left?"
"Oh yes," replied Mrs. Bent, gently combing back the child's soft brown hair, before she passed the sponge of warm water over her face.
"But why did he not take his things with him?"
"Well, ma'am, he--he left unexpectedly; and so they remained here."
Now, in making this somewhat evasive answer, Mrs. Bent had no particular wish to deceive. But, what with the work she had before her, and what with the fretful child on her knee, it was not exactly the moment for entering on gossip. The disappearance of Anthony Castlemaine was too public and popular a theme in the neighbourhood for any idea of concealment to be connected with it. The lady, however, thought she meant to evade the subject, and said no more. Indeed the child claimed all their attention.
"Marie soif," said the little one, as they put her into bed. "Maman, Marie soif."
"Thirsty, always thirsty!" repeated the mother in English. "I don't much like it; it bespeaks fever."
"I'll get some milk and water," said Mrs. Bent.
"No, no, not milk," interposed the lady. "Oui, ma chérie! A spoonful or two of sugar and water while maman makes the tisane. Madame has herbs, no doubt," she added, turning to the landlady. "I could make it soon myself at this good fire if I had a little casserole: a--what you call it?--saucepan."
Mrs. Bent promised the herbs, for she had a store-room fall of different kinds, and the saucepan. A little sugared water was given to the child, who lay quiet after drinking it, and closed her eyes. Moving noiselessly about the room, the lady happened to go near the window, and her eye caught the moving sea in the distance, on which some bright light yet lingered. Opening the casement window for a moment, she put her head out, and gazed around.
"The sea is very nice to see, but I don't like to think of being on it," she said as she shut the window. "What is that great building over yonder to the left?"
"It's the Grey Nunnery, ma'am."
"The Grey Nunnery! What, have you a nunnery here in this little place? I had no idea."
"It's not a real nunnery," said Mrs. Bent, as she proceeded to explain what it was, in the intervals of folding the child's clothes, and how good the ladies were who inhabited it. "We heard a bit of news about it this afternoon," she added, her propensity for talking creeping out. "Sister Ann ran over here to borrow a baking-dish--for their own came in two in the oven with all the baked apples in it--and she said she believed Miss Castlemaine was going to join them as the Lady Superior."
"Miss--who?" cried the stranger quickly.
"Miss Castlemaine. Perhaps, ma'am, you may have heard of the Castlemaines of Greylands' Rest. It is close by."
"I do not know them," said the traveller. "Is, then, a Miss Castlemaine, of Greylands' Rest, the Lady Superior of the Nunnery?"
"Miss Castlemaine of Stilborough, ma'am. There is no Miss Castlemaine of Greylands' Rest; save a tiresome little chit of twelve. She has not joined them yet; it is only in contemplation. Sister Ann was all cock-a-hoop about it: but I told her the young lady was too beautiful to hide her head under a muslin cap in a nunnery."
"It is a grand old building," said the traveller, "and must stand out well and nobly on the edge of the cliff. And what a length! I cannot see the other end."
"The other end is nearly in ruins--part of it, at least. The chapel quite so. That lies between the Nunnery and the Friar's Keep."
"The Friar's Keep!" repeated the lady. "You have odd names here. But I like this village. It is quiet: nobody seems to pass."
"There's hardly anybody in it to pass, for that matter," cried Mrs. Bent, with disparagement. "Just the fishermen and the Grey Sisters. But here I am, talking when I ought to be doing! What would you like to have prepared for dinner, ma'am?"
"I could not eat--I feel feverish, too," was the answer given, in an accent that had a ring of piteous wail. "I will take but some tea and a tartine when I have made the tisane."
Mrs. Bent opened her eyes. "Tea and a tart, did you say, ma'am?"
"I said--I mean bread and butter," explained the stranger, translating her French word.
"And--what name--if I may ask, ma'am?" continued Mrs. Bent, as a final question.
"I am Madame Guise."
"Tea's best, after all, upon a day's travelling," were the landlady's final words as she descended the stairs. There she told her husband that the lady had rather a curious name, sounding like Madame Geese.
The small saucepan and the herbs were taken up immediately by Molly, who said she was to stay and help make the stuff, if the lady required her. The lady seemed to be glad of her help, and showed her how to pick the dried leaves from the thicker stalks.
"Do you have travellers staying here often?" asked Madame Guise, standing by Molly after she had asked her name, and doing her own portion of the work.
"A'most never in winter time," replied Molly--a round-eyed, red-cheeked, strong-looking damsel, attired in a blue linsey skirt and a cotton handkerchief crossed on her neck. "We had a gentleman for a week or two just at the turn o' January. He had this here same bedroom."
"They were his things, doubtless, that your mistress said she was removing to make space for me."
"In course they were," replied Molly. "Master said he'd not have this room used--that the coats and things should stay in it: but missis likes to take her own way. This here stalk, mum--is he too big to go in?"
"That is: we must have only the little ones. What was the gentleman's name, Mollee?"
"He was young Mr. Castlemaine: a foreign gentleman, so to say: nephew to the one at Greylands' Rest. He came over here to put in his claim to the money and lands."
"And where did he go?--where is he now?" questioned Madame Guise, with an eagerness that might have betrayed her painful interest, had the servant's suspicions been on the alert.
"It's what my master would just give his head to know," was the answer. "He went into the Friar's Keep one moon light night, and never came out on't again."
"Never came out of it again!" echoed Madame Guise "What do you mean?--How was that?"
Bit by bit Molly revealed the whole story, together with sundry items of the superstition attaching to the Friar's Keep. Very much gratified was she at the opportunity of doing it. The tale was encompassed by so many marvels, both of reality and imagination, by so much mystery, by so wide a field of wonder altogether, that others in Greylands, as well as Molly, thought it a red-letter day when they could find strange ears to impart it to.
Madame Guise sat down in a chair, her hands clasped before her, and forgetting the herbs. Molly saw how pale she looked; and felt prouder than any peacock at her own powers of narration.
"But what became of him, Mollee?" questioned the poor lady.
"Well, mum, that lies in doubt, you see. Some say he was spirited away by the Grey Monk."
Madame Guise shook her head. "That could not be," she said slowly, and somewhat in hesitation. "I don't like revenants myself--but that could not be."
"And others think," added Molly, dropping her voice, "that he was done away with by his uncle, Mr. Castlemaine. Master do, for one."
"Done away with! How?"
"Murdered," said the girl, plunging the herbs into the saucepan of water.
A shudder took Madame Guise from head to foot. Molly looked round at her: she was like one seized with ague.
"I am cold and fatigued with my long journey," she murmured, seeking to afford some plausible excuse to the round-eyed girl. "And it always startles one to hear talk of murder."
"So it do, mum," acquiesced Molly. "I dun'no which is worst to hear tell on; that or ghosts."
"But--this Friar's Keep that you talk of, Mollee--it may be that he fell from it by accident into the sea."
"Couldn't," shortly corrected Molly. "There ain't no way to fall--no opening. They be biling up beautiful, mum."
"And--was he never--never seen again since that night?" pursued Madame Guise, casting mechanically a glance on the steaming saucepan.
"Never seen nor heard on," protested Molly emphatically. "His clothes and his portmanteau and all his other things have stayed on here; but he has never come back to claim 'em."
Madame Guise put her hands on her pallid face, as if to hide the terror there. Molly, her work done, and about to depart, was sweeping the bits of stalks and herbs from the table into her clean check apron.
"Does the voisinage know all this?" asked Madame Guise, looking up. "Is it talked of openly? May I speak of it to monsieur and madame en bas--to the host and hostess, I would say?"
"Why bless you, mum, yes! There have been nothing else talked of in the place since. Nobody hardly comes in here but what begins upon it."
Molly left with the last words. Madame Guise sat on, she knew not how long, her face buried in her hands, and the tisane was boiled too much. The little girl, soothed perhaps by the murmur of voices, had fallen fast asleep. By-and-by Mrs. Bent came up, to know when her guest would be ready for tea.
"I am ready now," was the lady's answer, after attending to the tisane. "And I wish that you and your husband, madame, would allow me to take the meal with you this one evening," added Madame Guise, with a slight shiver, as they descended the dark staircase. "I feel lonely and fatigued, and in want of companionship."
Mrs. Bent was gratified, rather than otherwise at the request. They descended; and she caused the tea-tray, already laid in their room, to be carried into the parlour. The same parlour, as the room above was the same bedroom, that had been occupied by the ill-fated Anthony Castlemaine.
"I hope you are a little less tired than you were when you arrived, madam," said John Bent, bowing, as he with deprecation took his seat at last, and stirred his tea.
"Thank you, I have been forgetting my fatigue in listening to the story of one Mr. Anthony Castlemaine's disappearance," replied Madams Guise, striving to speak with indifference. "The account is curious, and has interested me. Mollee thought you would give me the particulars."
"Oh, he'll do that, madam," put in Mrs. Bent sharply. "There's nothing he likes better than talking ofthat. Tell it, John."
John did as he was bid. But his account was in substance the same as Molly's. He could tell neither more nor less: some few additional small details perhaps, some trifling particulars; but of real information he could give none. The poor lady, hungering after a word of enlightenment that might tend to lessen her dread and horror, listened for it in vain.
"But what explanation can be given of it?" she urged, biting her dry lips to hide their trembling. "People cannot disappear without cause. Are you sure it was Mr. Castlemaine you saw go in at the gate, and thence into the Friar's Keep?"
"I am as sure of it, ma'am, as I am that this is a tea-cup before me. Mr. Castlemaine denies it, though."
"And you suspect--you suspect that he murdered him! That is a frightful word; I cannot bear to say it. Meurte!" she repeated in her own tongue, with a passing shiver. "Quelle chose affreuse! You suspect Mr. Castlemaine, sir, I say?"
John Bent shook his head. The encounter with Ethel had taught him caution. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered; "I can't say. That the young man was killed in some way, I have no doubt of--and I think Mr. Castlemaine must know something about it."
"Are there any places in this--what you call it?--Friar's Keep?--that he could be concealed in? Any dungeons?"
"He's not there, ma'am. The place is open enough for anybody to go in that likes. Mr. Castlemaine had a man over from Stilborough to help him search, and they went all about it together. I and Superintendent Nettleby also went over it one day, and some others with us. There wasn't a trace to be seen of young Mr. Anthony; nothing to show that he had been there."
"So it resolves itself into this much," said Madame Guise--"that you saw this Mr. Anthony Castlemaine go into the dark place, on that February night; and, so far as can be ascertained, he never came out again."
"Just that," said John Bent. "I'd give this right hand of mine"--lifting it--"to know what his fate has been. Something tells me that it will be brought to light."
Madame Guise went up to her room, and sat down there with her heavy burthen of terror and sorrow, wondering what would be the next scene in this strange mystery, and what she herself could best do towards unravelling it. Mrs. Bent, coming in by-and-by, found her weeping hysterically. Marie woke up at the moment, and they gave her some of the tisane.
"It is the reaction of the cold and long journey, ma'am," pronounced Mrs. Bent, in regard to the tears she had seen. "And perhaps the talking about this unaccountable business has startled you. You will be better after a night's rest."
"Yes, the coach was very cold. I will say goodnight to you and go to bed."
As Mrs. Bent retired, the lady sank on her knees by the side of her child, and buried her face in the white counterpane. There she prayed; prayed earnestly; for help from Above, for strength to bear.
"The good God grant that the enlightenment may be less terrible than are these my fears," she implored, with lifted hands and streaming eyes.
Back came Mrs. Bent, a wine-glass in one hand, and a hot-water bottle for the bed in the other. The glass contained some of her famous cordial--in her opinion a remedy for half the ills under the sun. Madame Guise was then quietly seated by the fire, gazing into it with a far-away look, her hands folded on her lap. She drank the glass of cordial with thanks: though it seemed of no moment what she drank or what she did not drink just then. And little Marie, her cheeks flushed, her rosy lips open sufficiently to show her pretty white teeth, had dropped off to sleep again.
The wind was rising. Coming in gusts from across the sea, it swept round the Dolphin Inn with a force that seemed to shake the old walls and stir the windowpanes--for the corner that made the site of the inn was always an exposed one. Madame Guise, undressing slowly by the expiring fire in her chamber, shivered as she listened to it.
The wind did not howl in this fashion around her own sheltered home in the sunny Dauphine. There was no grand sea there for it to whirl and play over, and come off with a shrieking moan. Not often there did they get cold weather like this; or white snow covering the plains; or ice in the water-jugs. And never yet before in her uneventful life, had it fallen to her lot to travel all across France from South to North with a little child to take care of, and then to encounter the many hours' passage in a stifling ship on a rough and raging sea: and after a night's rest in London to come off again in the cold English stage-coach for how many miles she hew not. All this might have served to take the colour from her face and to give the shiverings to her frame--for land travelling in those days was not the easy pastime it is made now.
But there was worse behind it. Not the cold, not the want of rest, was it that was so trying to her, but the frightful whispers of a supposed tragedy that had (so to say) greeted her arrival at the Dolphin. But a few hours yet within its walls, and she had been told that him of whom she had come in secret search, her husband, had disappeared out of life.
For this poor young lady, Charlotte Guise, was in truth the wife of Anthony Castlemaine. His wife if he were still living; his widow if he were dead. That he was dead, hearing all she had heard, no doubt could exist in her mind; no hope of the contrary, not the faintest shadow of it, could enter her heart. She had come all this long journey in search of her husband, fearing some vague treachery; she had arrived to find that treachery of the deepest dye had only too probably put him out of sight for ever.
When the father, Basil Castlemaine, was on his death-bed, she had heard the charge he gave to Anthony, to come over to England and put in the claim to his right inheritance; she had heard the warning of possible treachery that had accompanied it.
Basil died. And when Anthony, in obedience to his father's last injunctions, was making ready for the journey to England, his wife recalled the warning to him. He laughed at her. He answered jokingly saying that if he never returned to Gap, she might come off to see the reason, and whether he was still in the land of the living. Ah, how many a word spoken in jest would, if we might read the future, bear a solemn meaning! That was one.
Anthony Castlemaine departed on his mission to England, leaving his wife and little child in their home at Gap. The first letter Charlotte received from her husband told her of his arrival at Greylands, and that he had put up at the Dolphin Inn. It intimated that he might not find his course a very smooth one, and that his uncle James was in possession of Greylands' Rest. Some days further on she received a second letter from him; and following closely upon it, by the next post in fact, a third. Both these letters bore the same date. The first of them stated that he was not advancing at all; that all kinds of impediments were being placed in his way by his uncles; they appeared resolved to keep him out of the estate, refusing even to show him how it was left and it ended with an expressed conviction that his Uncle James was usurping it. The last letter told her that since posting the other letter earlier in the day, he had seen his Uncle James; that the interview, which had taken place in a meadow, was an unpleasant one, his uncle even having tried to strike him that he (Anthony) really did not know what to be at, but had resolved to try for one more conference with his uncle before proceeding to take legal measures, and that he should certainly write to her again in the course of a day or two to tell her whether matters progressed or whether they did not. In this last letter there ran a vein of sadness, very perceptible to the wife. She thought her husband must have been in very bad spirits when he wrote it: and she anxiously looked for the further news promised.
It never came. No subsequent letter ever reached her. After waiting some days, she wrote to her husband at the Dolphin Inn, but she got no answer. She wrote again, and with the like result. Then, feeling strangely uneasy, not knowing how to get tidings of him, or to whom to apply, she began to think that she would have to put in practice the suggestion he had but spoken in jest, and go over to England to look after him. A short period of vacillation--for it looked like a frightfully formidable step to the untravelled young lady--and she resolved upon it. Arranging the affairs of her petit menage, as she expressed it, she started off with her child; and in due time reached London. There she stayed one night, after sending off a note to Greylands, directed to her husband at the Dolphin Inn, to tell of her intended arrival on the following day; and in the morning she took her seat in the Stilborough coach. These three letters, the two from Gap and the one from London, were those that led to the dispute between Mr. and Mrs. Bent, which Ethel Reene had disturbed. The landlord had them safely locked up in his private archives.
Forewarned, forearmed, is an old saying. Anthony Castlemaine's wife had been warned, and she strove to be armed. She would not present herself openly and in her own name at Greylands. If the Castlemaine family were dealing hardly with her husband, it would be more prudent for her to go to work warily and appear there at first as a stranger. The worst she had feared was, that Mr. James Castlemaine might be holding her husband somewhere at bay; perhaps even had put him in a prison--she did not understand the English laws--and she must seek him out and release him. So she called herself Guise as soon as she landed in England. Her name had been Guise before her marriage, and she assumed it now. Not much of an assumption: in accordance with the French customs of her native place, she retained her maiden name as an affix to her husband's, and her cards were printed Madame Castlemaine-Guise. Had her assertion of the name wanted confirmation, there it was on the small trunk; which had GUISE studded on it in brass nails, for it had belonged to her father. Her intention had been to proceed to Stilborough, put up there, and come over to Greylands the following day. But when she found the coach passed through Greylands--which she had not known, and she first recognised the place by the sign of the famous dolphin, about which Anthony had written to her in his first letter--she resolved to alight there, the little girl's symptoms of feverish illness affording a pretext for it. And so, here she was, at the often-heard-of Dolphin Inn, inhabiting the very chamber that her ill-fated husband had occupied, and with the dread story she had listened to beating its terrors in her brain.
A gust of wind shook the white dimity curtain, drawn before the casement, and she turned to it with a shiver. What did this angry storm of wind mean? Why should it have arisen suddenly without apparent warning? Charlotte Guise was rather superstitious, and asked herself the question. When she got out of the coach at the inn door, the air and sea were calm. Could the angry disturbance have come to show her that the very elements were rising at the wrong dealt out to her husband? Some such an idea took hold of her.
"Every second minute I ask whether it can be true," she murmured in her native language; "or whether I have but dropped asleep in my own house, and am dreaming it all. It is not like reality. It is not like any story I ever heard before. Anthony comes over here, all those hundreds of weary miles, over that miserable sea, and finds himself amid his family; his family whom he had never seen. 'Greylands' Rest is mine, I think,' he says to them; 'will you give it to me?' And they deny that it is his. 'Then,' says he, 'what you say may be so; but you should just show me the deeds--the proofs that it is not mine.' And they decline to show them; and his uncle, James Castlemaine, at an interview in the field, seeks to strike him. Anthony comes home to the hotel here, and writes that last letter to me, and puts it in the post late at night. Then he and the landlord go walking out together in the moonlight, and by-and-by they see Mr. James Castlemaine go into a lonely place of cloisters called the Friar's Keep, and he, nay poor husband, runs in after him; and he never comes out of it again. The host, waiting for him outside, hears a shot and an awful cry, but he does not connect it with the cloisters; and so he promenades about till he's weary, thinking the uncle and nephew are talking together, and--and Anthony never at all comes out again! Yes, it is very plain: it is too plain to me: that shot took my dear husband's life. James Castlemaine, fearing he would make good his claim to the estate and turn him out of it, has murdered him."
The wind shrieked, as if it were singing a solemn requiem; the small panes of the casement seemed to crack, and the white curtain fluttered. Charlotte Guise hid her shrinking face for a moment, and then turned it on the shaking curtain, her white lips parting with some scarcely breathed words.
"If the spirits of the dead are permitted to hover in the air, as some people believe perhaps his spirit is here now, at this very window! Seeking to hold commune with mine; calling upon me to avenge him. Oh, Anthony, yes! I will never rest until I have found out the mystery of your fate. I will devote my days to doing it!"
As if to encourage the singular fancy, that the whispered story and the surroundings of the hour had called up in her over-strung nerves and brain, a gust wilder than any that had gone before swept past the house at the moment with a rushing moan. The casement shook; its fastenings seemed to strain: and the poor young lady, in some irrepressible freak of courage, born of desperation, drew aside the curtain and looked forth.
No, no; nothing was there but the wind. The white snow lay on the ground, and covered the cliff that skirted the beach on the right. The night was light, disclosing the foam of the waves as they rose and fell; clouds were sweeping madly across the face of the sky.
The little girl stirred in bed and threw out her arms. Her mother let fall the window curtain and softly approached her. The hot face wore its fever-crimson; the large brown eyes, so like her father's, opened the red lips parted with a cry.
"Maman! Marie soif; Marie veut boire."
"Oh, is she fatherless?" mentally cried the poor mother, as she took up the glass of tisane. "Oui, ma petite! ma chérie! Bois donc, Marie; bois!"
The child seized the glass with her hot and trembling little hands, and drank from it. She seemed very thirsty. Before her mother had replaced it within the fender and come back to her, her pretty face was on the pillow again, her eyes were closing.
Madame Guise--as we must continue to call her--went to bed: but not to sleep. The wind raged, the child by her side was restless, her own mind was in a chaos of horror and trouble. The words of the prophet Isaiah in Holy Writ might indeed have been applied to her: The whole head was sick and the whole heart faint.
Towards morning she dropped into a disturbed sleep, during which a dream visited her. And the dream was certainly a singular one. She thought she was alone in a strange, dark garden: gloomy trees clustered about her, ugly looking mountains rose above. She seemed to be searching for something; to be obliged to search, but she did not know for what; a great dread, or terror, lay upon her, and but for being impelled she would not have dared to put one foot before the other in the dark path. Suddenly, as she was pushing through the impeding trees, her husband stood before her. She put out her hand to greet him; but he did not respond to it, but remained where he had halted, a few paces off, gazing at her fixedly. It was not the husband who had parted from her in the sunny South; a happy man full of glad anticipations, with a bright fresh face and joyous words on his lips: but her husband with a sad, stern countenance, pale, cold, and still. Her heart seemed to sink within her, and before she could ask him what was amiss she saw that he was holding his waistcoat aside with his left hand, to display a shot in the region of the heart. A most dreadful sensation of terror, far more dreadful than any she could ever know in this life, seized upon her at the sight; she screamed aloud and awoke. Awoke with the drops of moisture on her face, and trembling in every limb.
Now, as will be clear to every practical mind, this dream, remarkable though it was, must have been only the result of her own imaginative thoughts, of the tale she had heard, of the fears and doubts she had been indulging before going to sleep. But she, poor distressed, lonely lady, looked upon it as a revelation. From that moment she never doubted that her husband had been shot as described; shot in the heart and killed: and that the hand that did it was Mr. Castlemaine's.
"I knew his spirit might be hovering about me," she murmured, trying to still her trembling, as she sat up in bed. "He has been permitted to appear to me to show me the truth--to enjoin on me the task of bringing the deed to light. By Heaven's help I will do it! I will never quit this spot, this Greylands, until I have accomplished it. Yes, Anthony!--can you hear me, my husband?--I vow to devote myself to the discovery; I will bring this dark wickedness into the broad glare of noonday. Country, kindred, home, friends!--I will forget them all, Anthony, in my search for you.
"Where have they hidden him?" she resumed after a little pause. "Had Mr. Castlemaine an accomplice?--or did he act alone. Oh, alone; of a certainty, alone," she continued, answering her own question. "He would not have dared it had others been present; and the landlord below says Mr. Castlemaine was by himself when he went into the cloisters. Did he fling him into the sea after he was dead?--or did he conceal him somewhere in that place--that Keep? Perhaps he buried him in it? if so, his body is lying in unconsecrated ground, and it will never rest.--Marie, then, my little one, what is it? Are you better this morning?"
The child was awaking with a moan. She had been baptised and registered in her native place as Mary Ursula. Her grandfather, Basil, never called her anything else; her father would sometimes shorten it to "Marie Ursule:" but her mother, not so well accustomed to the English tongue as they were, generally used but the one name, Marie. She looked up and put out her little hands to her mother: her eyes were heavy, her cheeks flushed and feverish.
That the child was worse than she had been the previous night, there could be little question of, and Madame Guise felt some alarm. When breakfast was over--of which meal the child refused to partake, but still complained of thirst--she inquired whether there was a doctor in the place. She asked for him as she would have asked in her own land. Is there a medecin here? and Mrs. Bent interpreted it as medicine, comprehended that medicine was requested, and rejoiced accordingly. Mrs. Bent privately put down the non-improvement to the tisane. Had a good wholesome powder been administered over night, the child, she believed, would have been all right this morning.
The doctor, Mr. Parker, came in answer to the summons: a grey-haired, pleasant-speaking man. He had formerly been in large practice at Stilborough; but after a dangerous illness which attacked him there and lasted more than a year, he took the advice of his friends and retired from the fatigues of his profession. His means were sufficient to live without it. Removing to Greylands, for change of air, and for the benefit of the salt sea-breezes, he grew to like the quietude of the place, and determined to make it his home for good. Learning that a small, pretty villa was for sale, he purchased it. It lay back from the coach road beyond the Dolphin Inn, nearly opposite the avenue that led to Greylands' Rest. The house belonged to Mr. Blackett of the Grange--the Grange being the chief residence at a small hamlet about two miles off; and Mr. Castlemaine had always intended to purchase it should it be in the market, but Mr. Blackett had hitherto refused to sell. His deciding to do so at length was quite a sudden whim; Mr. Parker heard of it, and secured the little property--which was anything but agreeable at the time to the Master of Greylands.
There Mr. Parker had since resided, and had become strong and healthy again. He had so far resumed his calling as to attend when a doctor was wanted in Greylands, for there was none nearer than Stilborough. At first Mr. Parker took to respond for humanity's sake when appealed to, and he continued it from love of his profession. Not for one visit in ten did he get paid, nor did he want to: the fishermen were poor, and he was large-hearted.
After examining the little lady traveller, he pronounced her to be suffering from a slight attack of inflammation of the chest, induced, no doubt, by the cold to which she had been exposed when travelling. Madame Guise informed him that they had journeyed from Paris (it was no untruth, for they had passed through the French capital and stayed a night in it), and the weather had become very sharp as they neared the coast--which coast it had taken them two days and a night in the diligence to reach; and the sea voyage had been fearfully hard, and had tried the little one. Yes, yes, the doctor answered, the inclement cold had attacked the little J girl, and she must stay in bed and be taken care of. Madame Guise took occasion to observe that she had been going farther on, but, on perceiving her child's symptoms of illness, had halted at this small village, called Greylands, which looked open and healthy--but the wind had got up at night. Got up very much and very suddenly, assented the doctor, got up to a gale, and it was all the better for the little one that she had not gone on. He thought he might have to put a small blister on in the afternoon, but he should see. A blister?--what was that? returned madame, not familiar with the English word. Oh, she remembered, she added a moment after--a vésicatoire.
"Yes, yes, I see it all: Heaven is helping me," mentally spoke poor Charlotte Guise, as she took up her post by Marie after the doctor's departure, and revolved matters in her mind. "This illness has been sent on purpose: a token to me that I have done right to come to Greylands, and that I am to stay in it. And by the good help of Heaven I will stay, until I shall have tracked home the fate of my husband to Mr. Castlemaine."