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

>hoped, so effectively. Joyce had never been able to bring his

suspicions concerning Black Milsom to the test of proof. Unwearied

search had been made for the old man who had played the part of

grandfather to the beautiful ballad-singer; but it had been wholly

ineffectual. All that could be ascertained concerning him was, that he

had died in a hospital, in a country town on the great northern road,

and that the girl had wandered away from there, and never more been

heard of. Of Black Milsom, Joyce Harker had never lost sight, until his

career received a temporary check by the sentence of transportation,

which had sent the ruffian out of the country. But all efforts of the

faithful watcher had failed to discover the missing link in the

evidence which connected Black Milsom with Valentine Jernam’s death.

All his watching and questioning—all his silent noting of the idle

talk around him—all his eager endeavour to take Dennis Wayman

unawares, failed to enable him to obtain evidence of that one fact of

which he was convinced—the fact that Valentine Jernam had been at the

public-house in Ratcliff Highway on the day of his death.

 

When the inutility of his endeavours became clear to Joyce Harker, he

gave up his lodging in Wayman’s house, and located himself in modest

apartments at Poplar, where he transacted a great deal of business for

George Jernam, and maintained a constant, though unprofitable,

communication with the detective officer to whom he had confided the

task of investigation, and who was no other than Mr. Andrew Larkspur.

 

In one of the earliest of the numerous letters which George Jernam

addressed to Harker, after the death of Valentine, the merchant-captain

had given his zealous friend and assistant certain instructions

concerning the old aunt to whom the two desolate boys had owed so much

in their ill-treated childhood, and whom they had so well and

constantly requited in their prosperous manhood. These instructions

included a request that Joyce Harker would visit Susan Jernam in

person, and furnish George with details relative to that venerable

lady’s requirements, looks, health, and general circumstances.

 

“I should have seen the good old soul, you know,” wrote George, “when I

was to have seen poor Val; but it didn’t please God that the one thing

should come off any more than the other, and it can’t be helped. But I

should like you to run down to Allanbay and look her up, and let her

know that she is neither neglected nor forgotten by her vagabond

nephew.”

 

So Joyce Harker went down to the Devonshire village, and introduced

himself to George Jernam’s aunt. The old lady was much altered since

she had last welcomed a visitor to her pretty, cheerful cottage, and

had listened with simple surprise and pleasure to her nephew

Valentine’s tales of the sea, and they had talked together over the

troublous days of his unhappy childhood. The untimely and tragic death

of the merchant-captain had afflicted her deeply, and had filled her

mind with sentiments which, though they differed in degree, closely

resembled in their nature those of Joyce Harker. The determination to

be revenged upon the murderers of “her boy” which Harker expressed,

found a ready echo in the breast of his hearer, and she thanked him

warmly for his devotion to the master he had lost. Strong mutual liking

grew up between these two, and when her visitor left her—after having

carried out all George’s wishes in respect to her, on the scale of

liberality which the grateful nephew had dictated—Susan Jernam gave

him a cordial invitation to pass any leisure time he might have at the

cottage, though, as she remarked—

 

“I am not very lively company, Mr. Harker, for you or anybody, for I

can’t talk of anything but George and poor Valentine.”

 

“And I don’t care to talk of much else either, Mrs. Jernam,” said

Harker, in reply; “so, you see, we couldn’t possibly be better company

for each other.”

 

Thus it happened that a second tie between George Jernam and Joyce

Harker arose, in the person of the sole surviving relative of the

former, and that Joyce had made three visits to the pretty sea-side

village in which the childhood of his dead friend and his living patron

had been passed, before he and George Jernam met again on English

ground.

 

When at length that long-deferred meeting took place, Valentine

Jernam’s murder was a mystery rather more than five years old, and Mr.

Andrew Larkspur had made no progress towards its solution. He had been

obliged to acknowledge to Joyce Harker that he had not struck the right

trail, and to confess that he had begun to despond. The disappearance

of Black Milsom from among the congenial society of thieves and

ruffians which he frequented was, of course, easily accounted for by

Mr. Larkspur, and the absence of any, even the slightest, additional

clue to the fate of Jernam, confirmed that astute person in the

conviction, which he had reached early in the course of his

confabulations with Harker, that the convict was the guilty man. There

was, on this hypothesis, nothing for it but to wait until the worthy

exile should have worked out his time and once more returned to grace

his mother-country, and then to resume the close watch which, though

hitherto ineffectual, might in time bring some of his former deeds to

light.

 

Such was the state of affairs when Captain Duncombe bought the deserted

house which had had such undesirable tenants, first in the person of

old Screwton, the miser, and, secondly, of Black Milsom. Joyce Harker

was aware of the transaction, and had watched with some interest the

transformation of the dreary, dismal, doomed place, into the cheery,

comfortable, middle-class residence it had now become. If he had known

that the last hours of Valentine Jernam’s life had been passed on that

spot, that there his beloved master had met with a violent and cruel

death, with what different feelings he would have watched the work! But

though, as the former dwelling of Black Milsom, the cottage had a

dreary attraction for him, he was far from imagining that within its

walls lay hidden one infallible clue to the secret for which he had

sought so long and so vainly.

 

The new occupant of River View Cottage was acquainted with Joyce

Harker, and held the solitary old man in some esteem. Captain Joe

Duncombe and the prot�g� of the Jernams had nothing whatever in

common in character, disposition, or manners, and the distance in the

social scale which divided the prosperous merchant-captain from the

poor, though clever, dependent, was considerable, even according to the

not very strict standard of manners observed by persons of their

respective classes. But Joe Duncombe knew and heartily liked George

Jernam. He had been in England at the time of Valentine’s murder, and

he had then learned the faithful and active part played by Harker. He

had lost sight of the man for some time, but when he had bought the

cottage, and during the progress of the changes and improvements he had

made in that unprepossessing dwelling, accident had thrown Harker in

his way, and they had found much to discuss in George Jernam’s

prosperity, in his generous treatment of Harker, in the general

condition of the merchant service, which the two men declared to be

going to the dogs, after the manner of all professions, trades, and

institutions of every age and every clime, when contemplated from a

conversational point of view; and in the honest captain’s plans, hopes,

and prospects concerning his daughter.

 

Joyce Harker had seen Rosamond Duncombe occasionally, but had not taken

much notice of her. Nor had Miss Duncombe been much impressed by that

gentleman. Joyce was not a lady’s man, and Rosamond, who entertained a

rather disrespectful notion of her father’s acquaintances in general,

classing them collectively as “old fogies,” contented herself with

distinguishing Mr. Harker as the ugliest and grimmest of the lot. Joyce

came and went, not very often indeed, but very freely to River View

Cottage, and there was much confidence and good-fellowship between the

bluff old seaman and the more acute, but not less honest, adventurer.

 

There was, however, one circumstance which Captain Duncombe never

mentioned to Harker. That circumstance was the apparition of old

Screwton’s ghost. Joe Duncombe was, to tell the truth, a little ashamed

of his credulity on that occasion. He entertained no doubt that he had

been victimized by a clever practical joke, and while he chuckled over

the recollection that it had been an expensive jest to the perpetrator,

who had lost a valuable gold coin by the transaction, he had no fancy

for exposing himself to any further ridicule on the occasion. So the

bluff, imperious, soft-hearted captain issued an ukase commanding

silence on the subject; and silence was observed, not in the least

because Rosamond Duncombe or Susan Trott were afraid of him, but

because Rosamond loved her father, and Susan Trott respected her master

too much to disobey his lightest wish.

 

There was also one circumstance which Joyce Harker never mentioned to

Captain Duncombe. This circumstance was the identity of the former

occupant of the cottage with the man whom he believed to be the

murderer of Valentine Jernam.

 

“It is bad enough to live in a place that’s said to be haunted,” said

Harker to himself, when he visited the cottage for the first time;

“without my telling him that he comes after a man who is certainly a

convict, and probably a murderer.”

 

*

 

CHAPTER XVII.

 

DOUBTFUL SOCIETY.

 

Victor Carrington still lived in the little cottage on the outskirts of

London. Here, with his mother for his only companion, he led a simple,

studious life, which, to any one ignorant of his character, would have

seemed the life of a good and honourable man.

 

The few neighbours who passed to and fro beneath the wall which

surrounded the cottage, knew nothing of the inner life of its

occupants. They knew only that of all the houses in the neighbourhood

this was the quietest. Yet those who happened to pass the house late at

night always saw a glimmer of light in an upper chamber, and the blue

vapour of smoke rising from one particular chimney.

 

Those who had occasion to pass the house frequently after dark

perceived that the smoke from this chimney was different from the

common smoke of common chimneys. Sometimes vivid sparks glittered and

flashed upon the darkness. At other times a semi-luminous, green vapour

was seen to issue from the mouth of the chimney.

 

These facts were spoken about by the neighbours; and by and by people

discovered that the smoke issued from the chimney of Victor

Carrington’s laboratory, where the surgeon was frequently employed,

long after midnight, making experiments in the science of chemistry.

 

The nature of these experiments was known to no one. The few neighbours

who had ever conversed with the French surgeon had heard him declare

that he was a student of the mysteries of electricity. It was,

therefore, supposed that all his experiments were in some manner

connected with that wondrous science.

 

No one for a moment suspected evil of a young man whose life was sober,

respectable, and laborious, and who went to the little Catholic chapel

every Sunday, with his mother leaning on his arm.

 

Those who really knew Victor Carrington knew that he was without one

ray of belief in a Divine Ruler, and that he laughed to scorn those

terrors of heavenly vengeance which will sometimes restrain the hand of

the most hardened criminal. He was a wretch who seemed to have been

created without those natural qualities which, in some degree, redeem

the worst