CHAPTER VI.
“Is not short payne well borne that bringes long ease,And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,Ease after warre, death after life....”
“Is not short payne well borne that bringes long ease,And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,Ease after warre, death after life....”
“Is not short payne well borne that bringes long ease,And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,Ease after warre, death after life....”
“Is not short payne well borne that bringes long ease,
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life....”
The morning dawned upon a weeping household. There was nothing to be done when Mr. Dolby, the village surgeon, arrived at Cheriton House. He could only examine the death-wound and express his opinion as to its character.
“It was certainly not self-inflicted,” he told the servants, as they stood about him in a stony group.
“Self-inflicted, indeed!” echoed Lambert, “I should think not. If ever there was a young man who had cause to set store by his life it was Sir Godfrey Carmichael. It’s murder, Mr. Dolby, rank murder.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it’s murder,” said Dolby, with an air which implied that suicide would have been a bagatelle in comparison.
“But who can have done it, and why?” he asked after a pause.
The servants inclined to the opinion that it was the act of a poacher. Lord Cheriton had always been what they called a mark upon poachers. There was doubtless a vendetta to which thepheasant-snaring fraternity had pledged themselves, and Sir Godfrey was the victim of that vendetta; however strange it might appear that hatred of Lord Cheriton should find its expression in the murder of Lord Cheriton’s son-in-law.
“We must wait for the inquest before we can know anything,” said Dolby, when he had done all that surgery could do for that cold clay, which was to compose the lifeless form in its final rest in a spare bedroom at the end of the corridor, remote from that bridal chamber where Juanita was lying motionless in her dumb despair.
The local policeman was on the scene at seven o’clock, prowling about the house with a countenance of solemn stolidity, and asking questions which seemed to have very little direct bearing on the case, and taking measurements between the spot where the murdered man had been found, too plainly marked by the pool of blood which had soaked into the velvet pile, and imaginary points upon the terrace outside, with the doctor at his elbow to make suggestions, and as far as in him lay behaving as a skilled London detective might have behaved under the same circumstances, which conduct on his part did not prevent Mr. Dolby telegraphing to Scotland Yard as soon as the wires were at his disposal.
He was in the village post-office when the clock struck eight, and the postmistress, who had hung out a flag and decorated her shop front with garlands on the wedding day, was watching him with an awe-stricken countenance as he wrote his telegrams.
The first was to Scotland Yard:—
“Sir Godfrey Carmichael murdered late last night. Send one of your most trustworthy men to investigate.”
The second was to Lord Cheriton, Grand Hotel, Paramé St. Malo, France:—
“Sir Godfrey Carmichael was murdered last night, between twelve and one o’clock. Murderer unknown. Death instantaneous. Pray come immediately.”
The third was to Matthew Dalbrook, more briefly announcing the murder.
He was going to send a fourth message to Lady Jane Carmichael, began to write her address, then thought better of it, and tore up the form.
“I’ll drive over and tell her,” he said to himself. “Poor soul, it will break her heart, let her learn it how she may. But it would be cruel to telegraph, all the same.”
Every one at Cheriton knew that Lady Jane’s affections were centred upon her only son. She had daughters, and she was very fond of them. They were both married, and had married well; but their homes lay far off, one in the Midlands, the other in the North of England, and although in each case there was a nursery full of grandchildren, neither the young married women nor the babies had ever filled Lady Jane’s heart as her son had filled it.
And now Mr. Dolby had taken upon himself to go and tell this gentle widow that the light of her life was extinguished; that the son she adored had been brutally and inexplicably murdered. It was a hard thing for any man to do; and Mr. Dolby was a warm-hearted man, with home ties of his own.
Before Mr. Dolby’s gig was half-way to Swanage, his telegram had been delivered at Dorchester, and Matthew Dalbrook and his son were starting for Cheriton with a pair of horses in the solicitor’s neat T cart, which was usually driven with one. Theodore drove, and father and son sat side by side in a dreary silence.
What could be said? The telegram told so little. They had speculated and wondered about it in brief broken sentences as they stood in the office fronting the sunny street, waiting for the carriage. They had asked each other if this ghastly thing could be; if it were not some mad metamorphose of words, some blunder of a telegraph clerk’s, rather than a horrible reality.
Murdered—a man who had been sitting at their table, full of life and spirits, in the glow of youth, and health, and happiness, less than twenty-four hours ago! Murdered—a man who had never known what it was to have an enemy, who had been popular with all classes! Had been! How awful to think of him as belonging to the past, he who yesterday looked forward to so radiant a future! And Theodore Dalbrook had envied him, as even the most generous of men must needs envy the winner in the race for love.
Could it be? Or if it were really true, how could it be? What manner of murderer? What motive for the murder? Where had it happened? On the highway—in the woody labyrinths of the Chase? And upon the mind of Theodore flashed the same idea which had suggested itself to the servants. It might be the work of a poacher whom Sir Godfrey had surprised during a late ramble. Yet a poacher must be hard bested before he resorts to murder, and Sir Godfrey—easy tempered and generous—was hardly the kind of man to take upon himself the functions of a gamekeeper, and give chase to any casual depredator. It was useless to wonder or to argue while the facts of the case were all unrevealed. It would be time to do that when they were at Cheriton. So the father and son sat in a dismal silence, save that now and again the elder man sighed, “Poor Juanita, my poor Juanita; and she was so happy yesterday.”
Theodore winced at the words. Yes, she had been so happy, and he had despaired because of her happiness. The cup of gladness which had brimmed over for her had been to him a fountain of bitterness. It seemed to him as if he had never realized how fondly he loved her till he saw her by her husband’s side, an embodiment of life’s sunshine, innocently revealing her felicity in every look and word. It was so long since he had ceased to hope. He had even taught himself to think he was resigned to his fate,that he could live his life without her. But that delusion ceased yesterday, and he knew that she was dearer than she had ever been to him now that she was irrevocably lost. It was human nature, perhaps, to love her best when love was most hopeless.
They drove along the level road towards Cheriton, in the dewy freshness of the summer morning, by meadow and copse, by heath and cornfield, the skylarks carolling in the hot blue sky, the corncrake creaking inside the hedge, the chaffinch reiterating his monotonous note, the jay screaming in the wood, all living creatures revelling in the cloudless summer. It was hard, awful, unsupportable, that he who was with them yesterday, who had driven along this road under the westering sun, was now cold clay, a subject for the coroner, a something to be hidden away in the family vault, and forgotten as soon as possible; for what does consolation mean except persuasion to forget?
Never had the way between Dorchester and Cheriton Chase looked lovelier than in this morning atmosphere; never had the cattle grouped themselves into more delightful pictures amidst those shallow waters which reflected the sky; never had the lights and shadows been fairer upon those level meadows and yonder broken hills. Theodore Dalbrook loved every bit of that familiar landscape; and even to-day, amidst the horror and wonder of his distracted thoughts, he had a dim sense of surrounding beauty, as of something seen in a dream. He could have hardly told where he was, or what the season was, or whether it was the morning or the evening light that was gilding the fields yonder.
The lowered blinds at Cheriton told only too surely that the ghastly announcement in the telegram was no clerical error. The face of the footman who opened the door was pale with distress. He conducted Mr. Dalbrook and his son to the library, where the butler appeared almost immediately to answer the elder man’s eager questions.
Not on the highway, not in the woods or the Park, but in the drawing-room where the butler had seen him sitting in a low arm-chair by the open window, in the tranquil summer night, absorbed in his book.
“He was that wrapped up that I don’t believe he knew I was in the room, sir,” said Lambert, “till I asked him if there was anything further wanted for the night, and then he starts, looks up at me with his pleasant smile, and answers in his quiet friendly way, ‘Nothing more, thank you, Lambert. Is it very late?’ I told him it was past eleven, and I asked if I should shut the drawing-room shutters before I went to bed, but he says, ‘No, I’ll see to that—I like the windows open,’ and then he went on reading, and less than two hours afterwards he was lying on the ground, in front of the window—dead.”
“Have you any suspicion, Lambert, as to the murderer?”
“Well, no, sir; not unless it was a poacher or an escaped lunatic.”
“The lunatic seems rather the more probable conjecture,” said Matthew Dalbrook. “The police are at work already, I hope.”
“Well, sir, yes; our local police are doing all that lies in their power, and I have done what I could to assist them. Mr. Dolby wired to Scotland Yard at the same time as he wired to you.”
“That was wisely done. Have there been no traces of the murderer discovered? No indication of any kind?”
“Nothing, sir; but one of the under housemaids remembers to have heard footsteps about on the terrace, after dark, on several occasions within the last fortnight; once while Sir Godfrey and our young lady were at dinner, and two or three times at a later hour when they were in the drawing-room or the library.”
“Did she see any one?”
“No, sir; she is rather a dull kind of girl, and never so much as troubled to find out what the footsteps meant. Her bedroom is one of the old attics on the south side of the house, and she was sitting at work near her open window when she heard the footsteps—going and coming—slow and stealthy-like—upon the terrace at intervals. She is sure they were not her ladyship’s nor Sir Godfrey’s steps on either occasion. She says she knows their walk, and she would swear to these footsteps as altogether different. Slower, more creeping-like, as she put it.”
“Has no one been seen lurking about after dark?”
“No one, sir, as we have heard of; and the constable questioned all the servants, pretty close, I can tell you. He hasn’t left much for the London detective to do.”
Matthew Dalbrook had been the only questioner in this interrogatory. Theodore had sunk into a chair on entering the room, and sat silent, with a face of marble. He was thinking of the stricken girl whose life had been desolated by this mysterious crime. His father had not forgotten her; but he had wanted, first of all, to learn all he could about her husband’s death.
“How does Lady Carmichael bear it?” he asked presently.
“Very sadly, sir; very sadly. Mrs. Morley and Celestine are both with her. Mr. Dolby ordered that she should be kept as quiet as possible, not allowed to leave her room if they could help it, but it has been very difficult to keep her quiet. Poor dear young lady! She wanted to go tohim.”
“Poor girl! poor girl! So happy yesterday!” said Matthew Dalbrook.
His son sat silent, as if he were made of stone.
Far, very far off, as it were at the end of a long dark vista, cut sharply across an impenetrable wood of choking thorns and blinding briars, he saw Juanita again radiant, again happy, again loving and beloved, and on the threshold of another life. The vision dazzled him, almost to blindness. But could it ever be? Could that lovingheart ever forget this agony of to-day—ever beat again to a joyful measure? He wrenched himself from that selfish reverie; he felt a wretch for having yielded up his imagination, even for a moment, to that alluring vision. He was here to mourn with her, here to pity her—to sympathize with this unspeakable grief. Murdered! Her lover-husband shot to death by an unknown hand, her honeymoon ended with one murderous flash—that honeymoon which had seemed the prelude to a lifetime of love.
“I should like to see her,” said Mr. Dalbrook. “I think it would be a comfort to her to see me, however agitated she may be. Will you take my name to the housekeeper, and ask her opinion?”
Lambert looked doubtful as to the wisdom of the course, but was ready to obey all the same.
“Mr. Dolby said she was to be kept very quiet, sir—that she wasn’t to see anybody.”
“That would hardly apply to her own people. Mr. Dolby telegraphed for me.”
“Did he, sir? Then I conclude he would not object to her ladyship seeing you. I’ll send up your name. Perhaps, while the message is being taken, you would like to have a look at the spot where it happened?”
“Yes. I want to know all that can be known.”
Lambert had been so busy with the constable all the morning that he felt himself almost on a level with Scotland Yard talent, and he took a morbid interest in that dark stain on the delicate half tints of the velvet pile, and in such few details as he was able to expound. He despatched a footman upstairs, and he led the Dalbrooks to the drawing-room, where he opened the shutters of that window through which the assassin must have aimed, and let a flood of sunshine into the darkened room.
The chair, the table, and lamp stood exactly as they had stood last night. Lambert took credit to himself for not having allowed them to be moved by so much as an inch.
“Any assistance in my power I shall be only too happy to give to the London detective,” he said. “Of course, coming on the scene as a total stranger, he can’t be expected to do much without help.”
There was no need to point out that ghastly stain upon the carpet. The shaft of noonday sunshine seemed to concentrate its brightness on that grisly patch. Dark, dark, dark with the witness of a cruel murder—the murder of a man who had never done an unkindly act, or harboured an unworthy thought.
Theodore Dalbrook stood looking at that stain. It seemed to bring the fatal reality nearer to him. He looked at the low chair with its covering of peacock plush, and its Turkish embroidery draped daintily across the broad back and capacious arms—a chair to live in—a sybarite’s estate,—and then at the satinwood book-table filled with such books as the lounger loves—Southey’s “Doctor,”“Burton,” “Table Talk,” by Coleridge, Whateley, Rogers, “The Sentimental Journey,” “Rochefoucauld,” “Caxtoniana,” “Elia,” and thrown carelessly upon one of the shelves a handkerchief of cobweb cambric, with a monogram that occupied a third of the fabric, “J.C.” Her handkerchief, dropped there last night, as she arranged the books for her husband’s use—putting her own favourites in his way.
Lambert took up a book and opened it with a dismal smile, handing it to Mr. Dalbrook as he did so.
It was “Wider Horizons,” the volume he had been reading when the bullet struck him, and those open pages were spattered with his blood.
“Put it away for God’s sake, man,” cried Dalbrook, horrified. “Whatever you do, don’t let Lady Carmichael see it.”
“No, sir, better not, perhaps, sir—but it’s evidence, and it ought to be produced at the inquest.”
“Produce it if you like; but there is evidence enough to show that he was murdered on this spot.”
“As he sat reading, sir; the book is a great point.”
And then Lambert expounded the position of that lifeless form, making much of every detail, as he had done to the constable.
While he was talking, the door was opened suddenly, and Juanita rushed into the room.
“Lord have mercy on us, she mustn’t see that,” cried Lambert, pointing to the carpet.
Matthew Dalbrook hurried forward to meet her, and caught her in his arms before she could reach that fatal spot. He held her there, looking at her with pitying eyes, while Theodore approached slowly, silently, agonized by the sight of her agony. The change from the joyous self-abandonment of yesterday to the rigid horror of to-day was the most appalling transformation that he had ever looked upon. Her face was of a livid pallor, her large dark eyes were distended and fixed, and all their brilliancy was quenched like a light blown out. Her blanched lips trembled as she tried to speak, and it was after several futile efforts to express her meaning that she finally succeeded in shaping a sentence distinctly.
“Have they found his murderer?”
“Not yet, dearest. It is far too soon to hope for that. But it is not for you to think about that, Juanita. All will be done—be sure—rest secure in the devotion of those who love you; and——” with a break in his voice, “who loved him.”
She lifted her head quickly, with an angry light in the eyes which had been so dull till that moment.
“Do you think I will leave that work to others?” she said. “It is my business, it is all that God has left me to do in this world. It is my business to see that his murderer suffers,—not as I suffer—that can never be,—but all that the law can do—the law which is somerciful to murderers nowadays. You don’t think he can get off lightly, do you, uncle? They will hang him, won’t they? Hang him—hang him—hang him,” she repeated, in hoarse dull syllables. “A few moments’ agony after a night of terror. So little—so little! And I have to live my desolate life. My punishment is for a lifetime.”
“My love, God will be good to you. He can lighten all burdens,” murmured Mr. Dalbrook, gently.
“He cannot lighten mine, not by the weight of a single hair. He has stretched forth His hand against me in hatred and anger, perhaps because I loved His creature better than I loved Him.”
“My dearest, this is madness——”
“I did, I did,” she reiterated. “I loved my husband better than I loved my God. I would have worshipped Satan if I could have saved him by Satan’s help. I loved him with all my heart, and mind, and strength, as we are taught to love God. There was not room in my heart for any other religion. He was the beginning and the end of my creed. And God saw my happy love and hated me for it. He is a jealous God. We are taught that when we are little children. He is a jealous God, and He put it into the head of some distracted creature to come to that window and shoot my husband.”
A violent fit of hysteria followed these wild words. Matthew Dalbrook felt that all attempts at consolation must needs be vain for some time to come. Until this tempest of grief was calmed nothing could be done.
“She will have her mother here in a day or two,” said Theodore. “That may bring some comfort.”
Juanita heard him even in the midst of her hysterical sobbing. Her hearing was abnormally keen.
“No one, no one can comfort me, unless they can give me back my dead.”
She started up suddenly from the sofa where Matthew had placed her, and grasped his arm with convulsive force.
“Take me to him,” she entreated, “take me to him, uncle. You were always kind to me. They won’t let me go to him. It is brutal, it is infamous of them. I have a right to be there.”
“By-and-by, my dear girl, when you are calmer.”
“I will be calm this instant if you will take me to him,” she said, commanding herself at once, with a tremendous effort, choking down those rising sobs, clasping her convulsed throat with constraining hands, tightening her tremulous lips.
“See,” she said, “I am quite calm now. I will not give way again. Take me to him. Let me see him—that I may be sure my happy life was not all a dream—a mad-woman’s dream—as it seems to have been now, when I cannot look upon his face.”
Mr. Dalbrook looked at his son interrogatively.
“Let her see him,” said Theodore, gently. “We cannot lessenher sorrow. It must have its way. Better perhaps that she should see him, and accustom herself to her grief; better for her brain, however it may torture her heart.”
He saw the risk of a further calamity in his cousin’s state—the fear that her mind would succumb under the burden of her sorrow. It seemed to him that there was more danger in thwarting her natural desire to look upon her beloved dead than in letting her have her way.
The housekeeper had followed her young mistress to the drawing-room door, and was waiting there. She shook her head, and murmured something about Mr. Dolby’s orders, but submitted to the authority of a kinsman and family solicitor, as even superior to the faculty.
She led the way silently to that upper chamber where the murdered man was lying. Matthew Dalbrook put his cousin’s icy hand through his arm and supported her steps as they slowly followed. Theodore remained in the drawing-room, walking up and down, in deepest thought, stopping now and then in his slow pacing to and fro to contemplate that stain upon the velvet pile, and the empty chair beside it.
In the room above Juanita knelt beside the bed where he who kissed her last night on the threshold of her chamber lay in his last slumber, a marble figure with calm dead face shrouded by the snowy sheet, with flowers—white waxen exotics—scattered about the bed. She lifted the sheet, and looked upon him, and kissed him with love’s last despairing kiss, and then she knelt beside the bed, with her face bent in her clasped hands, calmer than she had been at any moment since she found her murdered husband lying at her feet.
“It’s wonderful,” whispered the housekeeper to Mr. Dalbrook; “it seems to have soothed her, poor dear, to see him—and I was afraid she would have broke down worse than ever.”
“You must give way to her a little, Mrs. Morley. She has a powerful mind, and she must not be treated like a child. She will live through her trouble, and rise superior to it, be sure of that; terrible as it is.”
The door opened softly, and a woman came into the room, a woman of about five-and-forty, of middle height, slim and delicately made, with aquiline nose and fair complexion, and flaxen hair just touched with grey. She was deadly pale, but her eyes were tearless, and she came quietly to the bed, and fell on her knees by Juanita’s side and hid her face as Juanita’s was hidden, and the first sound that came from her lips was a long low moan—a sound of greater agony than Matthew Dalbrook had ever heard in his life until that moment.
“Good God,” he muttered to himself, as he moved to a distant window, “I had forgotten Lady Jane.”
It was Lady Jane, the gentle soul who had loved that poor claywith a love that had grown and strengthened with every year of his life, with a love that had won liberal response from the recipient. There had never been a cloud between them, never one moment of disagreement or doubt. Each had been secure in the certainty of the other’s affection. It had been a union such as is not often seen between mother and son; and it was ended—ended by the red hand of murder.
Matthew Dalbrook left the room in silence, beckoning to the housekeeper to follow him.
“Leave them together,” he said. “They will be more comfort to each other than anyone else in the world can be to either of them. Keep in the way—here, in the corridor, in case of anything going wrong—fainting, or hysterics, for instance,—but so long as they are tolerably calm let them be together, and undisturbed.”
He went back to his son, and they both left the house soon afterwards and drove off to find the Coroner and to confer with him. Later in the afternoon they saw the local policeman, whose discoveries, though he evidently thought them important, Mr. Dalbrook considerednil.
He had found out that a certain village freebooter—ostensibly an agricultural labourer, nocturnally a poacher—bore a grudge against Lord Cheriton, and had sworn to be even with him sooner or later. The constable opined that, being an ignorant man, this person might have mistaken Lord Cheriton’s son-in-law for Lord Cheriton himself.
He had discovered, in the second place, that two vans of gipsies had encamped just outside the Chase on the night after the arrival of the bridal pair. They were, in fact, the very gipsies who had provided Aunt Sally and the French shooting-gallery for the amusement of the populace, and he opined that some of these gipsies were “in it.”
Why they should be in it he did not take upon himself to explain, but he declared that his experience of the tribe justified his suspicions. He was also of opinion that the murderer had come with the intent to plunder the drawing-room, which was, in his own expression, “chock-full of valuables,” and that, being disappointed, and furthermore detected, in that intent, he had tried to make all things safe by a casual murder.
“But, man alive, Sir Godfrey was sitting in his arm-chair, absorbed in his book. There was nothing to prevent any intending burglar sneaking away unseen. You must find some better scent than that if you mean to track the murderer.”
“I hope, sir, with my experience of the district, I shall have a better chance of finding him than a stranger imported from the Metropolis,” said Constable Barber, severely. “I conclude there will be a reward offered, Mr. Dalbrook?”
“There will, and a large one. I must not take upon myself to name the figure. Lord Cheriton will be here to-morrow or nextday, and he will, no doubt, take immediate steps. You may consider yourself a very lucky man, Barber, if you can solve this mystery.”
Matthew Dalbrook turned from the eager face of the police-officer with a short, angry sigh. It was of the reward the man was thinking, no doubt—congratulating himself perhaps upon the good luck which had thrown such a murder in his way. And presently the man from Scotland Yard would be on the scene, keen and business-like, yet full of a sportsman’s ardour, intent on discovery, as on a game in which the stakes were worth winning. Little cared either of these for the one fair life cut short, for the other young life blighted.