His voice had grown hoarse with an alarm which he did not himself understand.
“Harm!” cried Dr. Harding. “Adolphus Harwood alive!—harm! Only this harm—that I can’t let old friendship stand in the way. I dare not do injustice; he must be given up to answer for his ill-doings. Harm! The fool! He never did but what was the worst for him! to live till now—with all the misery and ruin that he brought——”
Dolff frantically seized the doctor by the breast.
“Stop,” he said, “tell me what has he done? I knew—I knew there was more in it; what has he done?”
“Done!” cried the doctor, flinging the young man off fromhim, “done! ruined everybody that ever trusted in him! Don’t stop me, young man! Keep yourself clear of him! I cannot help it; I am sorry for your sake—but he must be given up.”
“To what?” cried Dolff, “to what?” He put himself in front of the doctor, who was buttoning his coat hastily and had seized his hat from the floor. “Look here! to what? You don’t stir a foot from here till you tell me.”
He had his arm up in mad excitement as if ready to strike, while Dr. Harding, a man of twice his strength, stood slightly drawn back prepared to defend himself. Then there suddenly came between them, with a cry, a moving, stumbling figure, white shawl and white cap showing doubly white between the dark-clothed men. She put one hand on Dr. Harding’s breast, and with the other pushed her son away.
“John Harding!” she cried, “John Harding! listen to me. He is mad—mad, do you hear? Mad! What is that but dead?”
“Mother, let this man answer to me!”
“Oh, go away, go away with your folly! He is mad, John Harding! He came back to me mad—could I turn my husband to the door? give him up to the police? Listen to me,” she cried, holding the doctor’s coat as if it had been a prop to support her; “you can see him yourself, if you doubt me—he is mad.” The poor woman burst into a shrill hysterical laugh. “Mad as a March hare—silly! Oh, John Harding, John Harding, hear what I have got to say!”
A sudden transformation came over Dr. Harding, such as may be seen in his profession in the most exciting moments. He became a doctor and not an ordinary man. He threw down his hat and took her by the elbows, while she still held fast by his coat.
“Wheel her chair forward,” he said. “Young Harwood, gently, send for her maid. Heavens, boy! be gentle; do you want to kill your mother? Janet, come round here and put the cushions straight, to support her head. There! quiet all of you. Let her rest; and you, Janet, give her air.”
“She has done it before,” said Dolff, with passion. “Oh, I am not taken in, mother! Let her alone, man, and answer me!”
“Go to the devil,” cried the doctor, pushing the young man away. “You confounded cub, be quiet, and let the poor woman come to herself?”
Had he forgotten all about the other, altogether, as if it had never been? He looked like it, bending over Mrs. Harwoodin her chair, giving quick directions, taking the fan out of Janet’s hand to give her air, moistening her lips with the wine he asked for, absorbed in her looks as if there was nothing in his mind but the care of her. Janet, too, ran to get whatever he asked for, stood at hand to do what was wanted, inspired by the doctor’s devotion. As for Dolff, he turned away as if he took no interest in it. His mother to him was a deceiver, getting sympathy by an exhibition of weakness. Julia, half moved by her mother’s faint, half by her brother’s rebellion and excitement, wavered between the two, uncertain. Janet and her doctor alone gave themselves up to Mrs. Harwood as if there was nothing else in the world to think about.
“Such an effort as that to a woman in her state might be fatal,” said the doctor. “She must have the constitution of an elephant. Once before, did you say? Janet, my little darling, you’re made for a doctor’s wife! Hold this fast—and steady as a rock. Now, raise her head a little. There! Now I hope she’ll come to.”
“You make yourself busy about my mother,” said Dolff, coming up to him, striking him upon the shoulder. “There’s nothing the matter with my mother: but you’ve got to explain to me—What does it mean? What do you want with him? What has he done? I never knew he was there,” cried the lad, “till the other day. And then I never suspected he was my father. Oh, don’t you know when one never has had a father, what one thinks he must have been? And then to see—that! but I must have satisfaction,” cried Dolff. “What has he done? What are you going to do?”
At this moment the door was opened hastily, and Gussy came in, followed by Meredith. There had been so much excitement in the house that they all came together for every new incident.
“Is my mother ill?” she said, with a glance at Mrs. Harwood in her chair. “Something has gone wrong. Dolff, who is this gentleman? and for heaven’s sake tell me what is it now? What has gone wrong?”
Only a glance at her mother, who was still but half sensible, supported in Janet’s arms, and then Gussy came and stood by her brother’s side, and looked at the stranger. She had no doubt that he had something to do with the secret in the house. Everything clustered round that, and was drawing to it like flying things to the light.
Dr. Harding, on his side, looked at the little crowd round him, meeting their eager eyes with reluctance and embarrassment.
“I presume that you are Miss Harwood,” he said, “but I cannot explain this matter to you. The less you know of it the better, my dear young people. I have no ill-feeling to your poor father—not the least, not the least: though I was one of the victims, I hope I’ve forgiven him freely. But justice is justice. If Adolphus Harwood is in this house, he must be given up.”
“Dear Gussy,” said Meredith behind her, “will you take my advice and go away, and get Dolff to go? Let me speak to this gentleman. I know all about the business affairs. I am to appear for your mother, you know. Let me speak to him, and hear what he has to say.”
Gussy gave him a look and a faint smile, but did not move. They all stood still gathered round the doctor like a ring, more anxious than hostile, and yet hostile too, hemming him in with a sort of enclosure of pale faces. Dr. Harding was greatly moved; he put out his hands as if to put them away—to deliver himself.
“God knows,” he said, “how I feel for you, you poor children! You break my heart; but if Adolphus Harwood has been living quietly here, living in comfort and luxury here, after bringing so many to ruin——”
“He has been living,” said Meredith, “concealed in a couple of rooms, for fifteen years. I don’t know who you are, or what right you have to be here, or to inquire into the affairs of this family.”
“Oh, hush,” cried Gussy, “he will be a friend, he has a kind face!”
“His name is Dr. Harding,” said Julia, breaking in. “He came for Janet, but mamma said he was an old friend: and Dolff told him by chance thathe—he, you know—was living, and not dead.”
“This is all mere madness,” said Dr. Harding. “I did not want to know anything about the affairs of the family, but I have my duty to do—I must do what is my duty.”
There came a faint voice from behind—from the chair in which the mother lay, only as it seemed half-conscious, propped by pillows.
“See him,” it said. “See him, see him; a doctor, he will know.”
They all turned round startled, but it was Meredith alone who caught up the meaning of this half-stifled utterance. He put his hand on the doctor’s arm.
“Come here,” he said, “and look at the man for yourself.”
He opened the door softly as he spoke. There had been sounds outside to which no one had paid any attention till now. The lamp had been lighted in the hall, and it threw a strong light upon a man in a wheeled chair with white hair and beard. He was speaking in a note of half-whispering complaint.
“Why do you bring me in, when I don’t want to come in, Vicars? Dark—I like it when it’s dark and nobody can see.”
“It don’t do you no good, sir,” said Vicars, “to be out in the dark.”
“Vicars, you’re a fool! A man with money about him, a lot of money like me—you want me to be robbed, you villain! And then how can I pay up? When you know it’s my pride to pay up, whenever I’m called upon. Whenever I’m called upon—everybody! There’s plenty for everybody. Ah! there’s an open door! I’m going to see them, Vicars. Their mother tells them lies, but when they know I have it all here to pay up——”
“No, sir,” said Vicars, “you can’t go in there to-night.”
“Why not to-night? Did she say so? She wants to get my money from me, that’s what it is! Swear, Vicars, you’ll never tell them where I keep my money! She got it and gave it to that fellow, but it came back, eh! Vicars? It knows its own master, and it always comes back.” Here the old man burst into a foolish laugh, but presently began to whisper again. “Where are you taking me? You are taking me upstairs. You want me to be murdered for my money in that dark hole upstairs.”
The two men stood at the door, hidden in the curtain that hung on it, and watched this scene. They stood still, listening while the wheels of the chair rumbled along, and the door of the wing closed upon it. Then Meredith spoke.
“Is this the man you are going to give up to punishment?” he said.
The doctor turned away and covered his face for a moment with his hands. When he turned round again to the audience, who watched him so intently, almost without seeming to draw breath, he met the gaze of Mrs. Harwood’s eyes, wide open, full of agonized meaning. She had come to herself and to a consciousness of all that depended upon the decision he would make.
“What does he mean about the money?” he asked in a low tone.
“He means,” she said, answering him before any one could speak, “what he thinks he has in his pocket-book—money to pay everybody. Oh, John Harding, that’s no dishonest meaning. He gives it to me, to pay up—and then he is restless till he has it back again. There’s nothing but old papers, old bills, worth nothing. He thinks,” she said, carried on by her eagerness, “that it is the money he took to Spain.”
“And where is the money he took to Spain?”
She had not meant to say that; but there was only one in the company who was aware that she had betrayed herself, or understood the look of bewilderment that for a moment came over her face. She paused, and that one who was in her confidence trembled. She raised herself up by the arms of her chair, and looked round upon them. Then she burst into a strange hysterical fit of laughter.
“He thinks that I know everything,” she said. “How can I tell? Where are the snows of last year?”
Thereare times when Nemesis appears unwitting at the door of a doomed house, and, however unlikely that might be, before she crosses the threshold, with the mere wind of her coming, the cunning webs of deceit are shattered, the blow of vengeance falls. But there are other cases in which Nemesis comes and stands in the doorway and departs again innoxious, either because some veil has been thrown over her clear-sighted eyes, or because the heart of that inexorable goddess has failed.
Nemesis turned and departed from the house of the Harwoods when Dr. Harding went upstairs to the school-room with his little Janet. The middle-aged gentleman there spent an ecstatic hour, the happiest of his life, and he forgot that there were such people as the Harwoods in existence, or anybody worth thinking of except the little girl who had called him to come and take her to himself— Janet, who had flung him over that dark October evening on the edge of the windy common at Clover, but who had now whistled him back and put her little hand in his.
Which was more true to her real meaning—her refusal then, or her delighted acceptance now? The doctor never asked himself any such questions. He was too happy to be allowed to think that when Janet compared the others, all the rest of the world, with him, who had loved her since she was a baby, she had found that none were so much to her taste as her oldlover. That she had “them all” at her feet, Dr. Harding had no doubt—how could it be otherwise? seeing there was no one like her, no one! It seemed clear enough to him that both that cool fellow downstairs who had taken the management of the business, and the dolt—Dolff—what did they call him? had been at Janet’s feet, and had been rejected. The young fellows had done him a good turn. They had shown this little captivating creature, this darling little capricious woman who did not know her own mind, that there was nobody like her old doctor after all.
When he took his departure that night for the hotel where he meant to stay until he could take Janet down to Clover to the vicarage from which he was to marry her, there was no thought in his disturbed and rapturous mind of the awful part which for a moment he had seemed about to play. Not Nemesis—but Dr. Harding, an old fellow in love, and more silly than any boy.
As for Janet, when her old lover left her, her little head was partly turned by his raptures, and by the opinion he had of her as if she had been a queen, and all the gratitude and honor he seemed to think he owed her. A little thing who had not a penny, and who, indeed, had thrown herself into his arms in a kind of despair because of her first disappointment and disgust with the world. But he did not know that at all, and she scarcely remembered it, when he took his leave with a privileged kiss which made her cheeks burn, and a promise to come for her as early as possible in the morning, to take her out shopping, to buy what she would want against the great event, which was to be delayed only as long as was necessary—not a day longer, he vowed.
“For you have cheated me out of six months,” he said. “I might have had you six months ago.”
“Oh, no, no, Dr. Harding,” said Janet, with gravity, remembering that nothing in the world would then have made her accept the old doctor.
But she had no such feeling as that now. She did not even remember that he was apis aller, and she looked forward to to-morrow, when she was to be taken out shopping, and to buy such things as she had never hoped for—dinner-dresses, morning-dresses ball-dresses; for she would require a great deal of dress, she had the sense to perceive, in that great rich town in the north, which was so very different from Clover.
Janet could scarcely think for the moment of anything beyond this, for it was a delight she had never enjoyed before. To buy, is a pleasure to every woman—to get a number of newdresses, is a delight to any girl. If these things are accompanied by a heartbreak, as when she is going to be forced to marry a man whom she does not love, the pleasure evaporates. But this was not Janet’s case. She had made up her mind to have her old doctor, it is true, in a moment of pique and disappointment, and perhaps if he had come instantly as she had expected, if he had not kept her waiting, if he had been still only the doctor of Clover—but none of these things had been. Her heart had been racked with the thought that he, too, had forsaken her; and then he had arrived a new man, in those new, well-cut clothes, with all the confidence of a great success about him.
And he had no sooner appeared than he had taken a commanding position. The father of the family had been in his hand. Dolff was nothing but a foolish boy beside him, and even Meredith—Dr. Harding had held the upper hand easily of them all. He had been able to put aside Janet while that crisis which she but half understood was going on, and then he had come back to her, and poured out gratitude and admiration; and she was to have a handsome house in Liverpool, where there was a great deal of gayety, a great deal of wealth—and a carriage—and a day of shopping to-morrow with nothing to do but to say, “I like this,” or “I like that!”
Thus Janet’s mind was satisfied, and her fancy delighted. Those little vagaries which had troubled her rest had all dropped into oblivion. Meredith? Yes, he was going to marry Miss Harwood, to struggle into a practice at the Bar, though he was not at all hardworking, and probably would never be known except as an amateur tenor among his friends. Janet wondered maliciously whether they would sing as much together after they were married, or, if not, what they would do to amuse themselves? and could not help the reflection that Gussy’s accompaniments would probably tire her husband, and that he would not conceal the fact from her in these after days. She wished them no harm whatever, none at all, they had done her no harm: but still in her own room, as she was going to bed, Janet could not but laugh at this thought.
Mrs. Harwood had recovered in the most wonderful way. It was she who kept up the conversation at dinner, talking to Dr. Harding of old friends, and, with her head high and another cap on, looking as if agitation or trouble had never come her way. She kept it up all the evening with a courage that never faltered. It happened before they all separated for the night that there was a moment in which Meredith and she were left alone. He went up to her, and took her hand in his.
“You are wonderful!” he said. “I could not have thought it possible. You are able for any emergency.”
She began to cry a little, with a laugh running through the sobs.
“Oh, Charley,” she said, “I hope it will all be forgiven me. What could I do? I had to hold by it. And what would that have been among so many? I shall be able to do justice to Gussy.”
“No,” he said, ignoring these last words, “it would have been nothing among so many.”
“You see that, too?” said Mrs. Harwood. And then she added, raising her hands in an appeal to the roof or the skies, “Heaven knows that it wasthemI thought of—my children—always, always! all the time.”
Nobody was aware of this momentary confidence, for Gussy came into the room a little afterwards, and Meredith led her up to her mother.
“Of course,” he said, “you have known it, dear Mrs. Harwood, for long, and, though there has been nothing absolutely said between us, I think that Gussy and I have understood each other for a long time. You will give her to me, won’t you? I will try to be worthy of her.”
Mrs. Harwood’s eyes were filled with tears. There was no hypocrisy in this, nothing but nature.
“That I will, with all my heart, Charley!” she cried, and held out her arms to her daughter, who in the moment of emotion forgot everything, and forgave her mother who had done so much—had she done so much?—for her children. Gussy did not know all that the mother had done, nor at what cost she herself was to be “done justice to.” She only knew that there had been clouds upon the domestic firmament, and that they were now all blown away by delicious breezes of happiness and sweet content.
Everything was arranged afterwards with the authorities, and Adolphus Harwood, proved to be a harmless though hopeless lunatic, was left in the custody of his wife. When the story stole out, it was as the story of a wife’s devotion, which indeed it was, in some sort. It was said that he had wandered back to England, scarcely recognizable in his madness after he was supposed to be dead, and that she had then and there taken the tremendous task upon her of concealing him, caring for him, watching and providing for his safety and comfort. It was a tremendous task: nobody could exaggerate the weight of the burden that had been upon her shoulders. And those of the victims who heard of it in faint rumors after a time, weremore disposed to shed tears over Mrs. Harwood’s martyr life and her wonderful devotion then to take any steps—if any had been possible—to interfere with her custody of the madman.
The vengeance of Heaven had overtaken that criminal who had been the ruin of so many. And, as for his poor wife, what was she but the first of the victims, the one who had suffered most? The story of the pocket-book with which he was going to pay up every claim touched still more the hearts of those who heard it. They thought it proved that, underneath all the misdoings which had overwhelmed his brain, there had still been an honest instinct, and that perhaps he had never intended but to give the money back. If Dr. Harding felt sometimes, when he looked back upon that strange scene, that there was something beneath, he was the only one to whom that idea came. And nobody suspected even, what there had been in the pocket-book the first time Adolphus Harwood’s wife got it into her hands!
Dolff threw up the university, which did him but little good, and the music-halls, which did him less, and went down to the little property in Wales which had come to him from his grandfather. Notwithstanding that scene with Dr. Harding, he never understood clearly what his father had done. He married there, and was in a small way a gentleman farmer, and got perhaps as much good out of his life as if he had pursued the course his mother intended. Perhaps on the whole, even she admitted, it was as well that the name of Adolphus Harwood, which is a conspicuous name, should not flourish at the Bar, which was a thankless profession; and where even Charley Meredith, who had been always thought so clever, did not flourish as people had hoped, though fortunately he and his wife were sufficiently well off not to care.
As for Janet, the little governess, the wife of the great Liverpool doctor, who acquired such fame in that northern capital, and was knighted, and as great a man as any in the place, her career is too brilliant for these simple pages. And yet when I say that she was beyond question the best-dressed woman in the north of Lancashire, which is saying a great deal, where could there be found a sign more eloquent of the apotheosis and grand culmination of a favorable fate?
THE END.