Run to Earth, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [epub ebook reader .TXT] 📗

from the mantel-piece. He

crushed it into his breast-pocket with the seal unbroken—

 

“Time enough to discover what new falsehood she has tried to palm upon

me,” he thought.

 

He looked round the empty room—which she was never more to occupy. Her

books, her music, were scattered on every side. The sound of her rich

voice seemed still to vibrate through the room. And she was gone—for

ever! Well, she was a base and guilty creature, and it was better so—

infinitely better that her polluting presence should no longer

dishonour those ancient chambers, within which generations of proud and

pure women had lived and died. But to see the rooms empty, and to know

that she was gone, gave him nevertheless a pang.

 

“What will become of her?” thought Sir Oswald. “She will return to her

lover, of course, and he will console her for the sacrifice she has

made by her mad folly. Let her prize him while he still lives to

console her; for she may not have him long. Why do I think of her?—why

do I trouble myself about her? I have my affairs to arrange—a new will

to make—before I think of vengeance. And those matters once settled,

vengeance shall be my only thought. I have done for ever with love!”

 

Sir Oswald returned to the library. A lamp burned on the table at which

he was accustomed to write. It was a shaded reading-lamp, which made a

wide circle of vivid light around the spot where it stood, but left the

rest of the room in shadow.

 

The night was oppressively hot—an August rather than a September

night; and, before beginning his work, Sir Oswald flung open one of the

broad windows leading out upon the terrace. Then he unlocked a carved

oak bureau, and took out a packet of papers. He seated himself at the

table, and began to examine these papers.

 

Among them was the will which he had executed since his marriage. He

read this, and then laid it aside. As he did so, a figure approached

the wide-open window; an eager face, illuminated by glittering eyes,

peered into the room. It was the face of Victor Carrington, hidden

beneath the disguise of assumed age, and completely metamorphosed by

the dark skin and grizzled beard. Had Sir Oswald looked up and seen

that face, he would not have recognized its owner.

 

After laying aside the document he had read, Sir Oswald began to write.

He wrote slowly, meditating upon every word; and after having written

for about half an hour, he rose and left the room. The surgeon had

never stirred from his post by the window; and as Sir Oswald closed the

door behind him, he crept stealthily into the apartment, and to the

table where the papers lay. His footstep, light always, made no sound

upon the thick velvet pile. He glanced at the contents of the paper, on

which the ink was still wet. It was a will, leaving the bulk of Sir

Oswald’s fortune to his nephew, Reginald, unconditionally. Victor

Carrington did not linger a moment longer than was necessary to

convince him of this fact. He hurried back to his post by the window:

nor was he an instant too soon. The door opened before he had fairly

stepped from the apartment.

 

Sir Oswald re-entered, followed by two men. One was the butler, the

other was the valet, Joseph Millard. The will was executed in the

presence of these men, who affixed their signatures to it as witnesses.

 

“I have no wish to keep the nature of this will a secret from my

household,” said Sir Oswald. “It restores my nephew, Mr. Reginald

Eversleigh, to his position as heir to this estate. You will henceforth

respect him as my successor.”

 

The two men bowed and retired. Sir Oswald walked towards the window:

and Victor Carrington drew back into the shadow cast by a massive

abutment of stonework.

 

It was not very easy for a man to conceal himself on the terrace in

that broad moonlight.

 

Voices sounded presently, near one of the windows; and a group of

ladies and gentlemen emerged from the drawing-room.

 

“It is the hottest night we have had this summer,” said one of them.

“The house is really oppressive.”

 

Miss Graham had enchanted her viscount once more, and she and that

gentleman walked side by side on the terrace.

 

“They will discover me if they come this way,” muttered Victor, as he

shrank back into the shadow. “I have seen all that I want to see for

the present, and had better make my escape while I am safe.”

 

He stole quietly along by the front of the castle, lurking always in

the shadow of the masonry, and descended the terrace steps. From

thence he went to the court-yard, on which the servants’ hall opened;

and in a few minutes he was comfortably seated in that apartment,

listening to the gossip of the servants, who could only speak upon the

one subject of Lady Eversleigh’s elopement.

 

*

 

The baronet sat with the newly-made will before him, gazing at the open

leaves with fixed and dreamy eyes.

 

Now that the document was signed, a feeling of doubt had taken

possession of him. He remembered how deliberately he had pondered over

the step before he had disinherited his nephew; and now that work,

which had cost him so much pain and thought, had been undone on the

impulse of a moment.

 

“Have I done right, I wonder?” he asked himself.

 

The papers which had been tied in the packet containing the old will

had been scattered on the table when the baronet unfastened the band

that secured them. He took one of these documents up in sheer absence

of mind, and opened it.

 

It was the letter written by the wretched girl who drowned herself in

the Seine—the letter of Reginald Eversleigh’s victim—the very letter

on the evidence of which Sir Oswald had decided that his nephew was no

fitting heir to a great fortune.

 

The baronet’s brow contracted as he read.

 

“And it is to the man who could abandon a wretched woman to despair and

death, that I am about to leave wealth and power,” he exclaimed. “No;

the decision which I arrived at in Arlington Street was a just and wise

decision. I have been mad to-day—maddened by anger and despair; but it

is not too late to repent my folly. The seducer of Mary Goodwin shall

never be the master of Raynham Castle.”

 

Sir Oswald folded the sheet of foolscap on which the will was written,

and held it over the flame of the lamp. He carried it over to the fireplace, and threw it blazing on the empty hearth. He watched it

thoughtfully until the greater part of the paper was consumed by the

flame, and then went back to his seat.

 

“My nephews, Lionel and Douglas Dale, shall divide the estate between

them,” he thought. “I will send for my solicitor to-morrow, and make a

new will.”

 

*

 

Victor Carrington sat in the servants’ hall at Raynham until past

eleven o’clock. He had made himself quite at home with the domestics in

his assumed character. The women were delighted with the showy goods

which he carried in his pack, and which he sold them at prices far

below those of the best bargains they had ever made before.

 

At a few minutes after eleven he rose to bid them good night.

 

“I suppose I shall find the gates open?” he said.

 

“Yes; the gates of the court-yard are never locked till half-past

eleven,” answered a sturdy old coachman.

 

The pedlar took his leave; but he did not go out by the court-yard. He

went straight to the terrace, along which he crept with stealthy

footsteps. Many lights twinkled in the upper windows of the terrace

front, for at this hour the greater number of Sir Oswald’s guests had

retired to their rooms.

 

The broad window of the library was still open; but a curtain had been

drawn before it, on one side of which there remained a crevice. Through

this crevice Victor Carrington could watch the interior of the chamber

with very little risk of being discovered.

 

The baronet was still sitting by the writing-table, with the light of

the library-lamp shining full upon him. An open letter was in his hand.

It was the letter his wife had left for him. It was not like the letter

of a guilty woman. It was quiet, subdued; full of sadness and

resignation, rather than of passionate despair.

 

“I know now that I ought never to have married you, Oswald,” wrote

Lady Eversleigh. “_The sacrifice which you made for my sake was too

great a one. No happiness could well come of such an unequal bargain.

You gave me everything, and I could give you so little. The cloud upon

my past life was black and impenetrable. You took me nameless,

friendless, unknown; and I can scarcely wonder if, at the first breath

of suspicion, your faith wavered and your love failed. Farewell,

dearest and best of men! You never can know how truly I have loved you;

how I have reverenced your noble nature. In all that has come to pass

between us since the first hour of our miserable estrangement, nothing

has grieved me so deeply as to see your generous soul overclouded by

suspicions and doubts, as unworthy of you as they are needless and

unfounded. Farewell! I go back to the obscurity from whence you took

me. You need not fear for my future. The musical education which I owe

to your generous help will enable me to live; and I have no wish to

live otherwise than humbly. May heaven bless you_!”

 

HONORIA.

 

This was all. There were no complaints, no entreaties. The letter

seemed instinct with the dignity of truth.

 

“And she has gone forth alone, unprotected. She has gone back to her

lonely and desolate life,” thought the baronet, inclined, for a moment

at least, to believe in his wife’s words.

 

But in the next instant he remembered the evidence of Lydia Graham—the

wild and improbable story by which Honoria had tried to account for her

absence.

 

“No no,” he exclaimed; “it is all treachery from first to last. She is

hiding herself somewhere near at hand, no doubt to wait the result of

this artful letter. And when she finds that her artifices are thrown

away—when she discovers that my heart has been changed to adamant by

her infamy—she will go back to her lover, if he still lives to shelter

her.”

 

A hundred conflicting ideas confused Sir Oswald’s brain. But one

thought was paramount—and that was the thought of revenge. He resolved

to send for his lawyer early the next morning, to make a new will in

favour of his sister’s two sons, and then to start in search of the man

who had robbed him of his wife’s affection. Reginald would, of course,

be able to assist him in finding Victor Carrington.

 

While Sir Oswald mused thus, the man of whom he was thinking watched

him through the narrow space between the curtains.

 

“Shall it be to-night?” thought Carrington. “It cannot be too soon. He

might change his mind about his will at any moment; and if it should

happen to-night, people will say the shock of his wife’s flight has

killed him.”

 

Sir Oswald’s folded arms rested on the table; his head sank forward on

his arms. The passionate emotions of the day, the previous night of

agony, had at last