Charlotte's Inheritance, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [dar e dil novel online reading .TXT] 📗

to the ground with a crash, and sat, statue-like, staring at the speaker. All other names given to mortal man he might forget; but this one never. Valentine saw the sudden horror in his face, before he could recompose his features into something of their conventional aspect.

"Yes," he said, looking down at the fallen drawer with its scattered papers and case-books, "yes, I have some recollection of the name of Halliday."

"Some very strange and agitating recollection it would seem by your manner, Mr. Burkham," said Valentine, at once assured that there was something more than common in the surgeon's look and gesture; and determined to fathom the mystery, let it be what it might.

"O dear no," said the surgeon nervously; "I was not agitated, only surprised. It was surprising to me to hear the name of a patient so long forgotten. And so the lady to whom you are engaged is a daughter of Mr. Halliday's? The wife--Mrs. Halliday--is still living, I suppose?"

"Yes; but the lady who was then Mrs. Halliday is now Mrs. Sheldon."

"Of course; he married her," said Mr. Burkham. "Yes; I remember hearing of the marriage."

He had tried in vain to recover his old composure. He was white to the lips, and his hand shook as he tried to arrange his scattered papers.

"What does it mean?" thought Valentine. "Mrs. Sheldon talked of this man's inexperience. Can it be that his incompetency lost the life of his patient, and that he knows it was so?"

"Mrs. Halliday is now Mrs. Sheldon," repeated the surgeon, in a feeble manner. "Yes, I remember; and Mr. Sheldon--the dentist, who at that time resided in Fitzgeorge Street--is he still living?"

"He is still living. It was he who called in Dr. Doddleson to attend upon Miss Halliday. As her stepfather, he has some amount of authority, you see; not legal authority--for my dear girl is of age--but social authority. He called in Doddleson, and appears to place confidence in him; and as he is something of a medical man himself, and pretends to understand Miss Halliday's case thoroughly--"

"Stop!" cried Mr. Burkham, suddenly abandoning all pretence of calmness. "Has he--Sheldon--any interest in his stepdaughter's death?"

"No, certainly not. All her father's money went to him upon his marriage with her mother. He can gain nothing by her death; on the contrary, he may lose a good deal, for she is the heir-at-law to a large fortune."

"And if she dies, that fortune will go--"

"I really don't know where it will go," Valentine answered carelessly: he thought the subject was altogether beside the question of Mr. Burkham's agitation, and it was the cause of that agitation which he was anxious to discover.

"If Mr. Sheldon can gain by his stepdaughter's death, fear him!" exclaimed the surgeon, with sudden passion; "fear him as you would fear death itself--worse than death, for death is neither so stealthy nor so treacherous as he is!"

"What in Heaven's name do you mean?"

"That which I thought my lips would never utter to mortal hearing--that which I dare not publicly proclaim, at the hazard of taking the bread out of the mouths of my wife and children. I have kept this hateful secret for eleven years--through many a sleepless night and dreary day. I will tell it to you; for if there is another life in peril, that life shall be lost through no cowardice of mine."

"What secret?" cried Valentine.

"The secret of that poor fellow's death. My God! I can remember the clasp of his hand, and the friendly look of his eyes, the day before he died. He was poisoned by Philip Sheldon!"

"You must be mad!" gasped Valentine, in a faint voice.

For one moment of astonishment and incredulity he thought this man must needs be a fool or a lunatic, so wildly improbable did the accusation seem. But in the next instant the curtain was lifted, and he knew that Philip Sheldon was a villain, and knew that he had never wholly trusted him.

"Never until to-day have I told this secret," said the surgeon; "not even to my wife."

"I thank you," answered Valentine, in the same faint voice; "with all my heart, I thank you."

Yes, the curtain was lifted. This mysterious illness, this slow silent decay of bloom and beauty, by a process inscrutable as the devilry of medieval poisoner or Hecate-serving witch--this was murder. Murder! The disease, which had hitherto been nameless, had found its name at last. It was all clear now. Philip Sheldon's anxiety; the selection of an utterly incompetent adviser; certain looks and tones that had for a moment mystified him, and had been forgotten in the next, came back to him with a strange distinctness, with all their hidden meaning made clear and plain as the broad light of day.

But the motive? What motive could prompt the slow destruction of that innocent life? A fortune was at stake, it is true; but that fortune, as Valentine understood the business, depended on the life of Charlotte Halliday. Beyond this point he had never looked. In all his consideration of the circumstances relating to the Haygarthian estate, he had never thought of what might happen in the event of Charlotte's decease.

"It is a diabolical mystery," he said to himself. "There can be no motive--_none_. To destroy Thomas Halliday was to clear his way to fortune; to destroy Charlotte is to destroy his chance of fortune."

And then he remembered the dark speeches of George Sheldon.

"My God! and this was what he meant, as plainly as he dared tell me! He did tell me that his brother was an unutterable scoundrel; and I turned a deaf ear to his warning, because it suited my own interest to believe that villain. For her dear sake I believed him. I would have believed in Beelzebub, if he had promised me her dear hand. And I let myself be duped by the lying promise, and left my darling in the power of Beelzebub!"

Thoughts followed each other swift as lightning through his overwrought brain. It seemed but a moment that he had been sitting with his clenched hands pressed against his forehead, when he turned suddenly upon the surgeon.

"For God's sake, help me, guide me!" he said. "You have struck a blow that has numbed my senses. What am I to do? My future wife is in that man's keeping--dying, as I believe. How am I to save her?"

"I cannot tell you. You may take the cleverest man in London to see her; but it is a question if that man will perceive the danger so clearly as to take prompt measures. In these cases there is always room for doubt; and a man would rather doubt his own perceptions than believe the hellish truth. It is by this natural hesitation so many lives are lost. While the doctor deliberates, the patient dies. And then, if the secret of the death transpires--by circumstantial evidence, perhaps, which never came to the doctor's knowledge,--there is a public outcry. The doctor's practice is ruined, and his heart broken. The outcry would have been still louder if he had told the truth in time to save the patient, and had not been able to prove his words. You think me a coward and a scoundrel because I dared not utter my suspicion when I saw Mr. Halliday dying. While it was only a suspicion it would have been certain ruin for me to give utterance to it. The day came when it was almost a conviction. I went back to that man Sheldon's house, determined to insist upon the calling in of a physician who would have made that conviction certainty. My resolution came too late. It is possible that Sheldon had perceived my suspicions, and had hastened matters. My patient was dead before I reached the house."

"How am I to save her?" repeated Valentine, with the same helpless manner. He could not bring himself to consider Tom Halliday's death. The subject was too far away from him--remote as the dim shadows of departed centuries. In all the universe there were but two figures standing out in lurid brightness against the dense night of chaos--a helpless girl held in the clutches of a secret assassin; and it was his work to rescue her.

"What am I to do?" he asked. "Tell me what I am to do."

"What it may be wisest to do I cannot tell you," answered Mr. Burkham, almost as helplessly as the other had asked the question. "I can give you the name of the best man to get to the bottom of such a case--a man who gave evidence on the Fryar trial--Jedd. You have heard of Jedd, I daresay. You had better go straight to Jedd, and take him down with you to Miss Halliday. His very name will frighten Sheldon."

"I will go at once. Stay--the address! Where am I to find Dr. Jedd?"

"In Burlington Row. But there is one thing to be considered."

"What?"

"The interference of Jedd may only make that man desperate. He may hasten matters now as he hastened matters before. If you had seen his coolness at that time; if you had seen him, as I saw him, standing by that poor fellow's deathbed, comforting him--yes, with friendly speeches--laughing and joking, watching the agonising pain and the miserable sickness, and all the dreary wretchedness of such a death, and _never_ swerving from his work; if you had seen him, you would understand why I am afraid to advise you. That man was as desperate as he was cool when he murdered his friend. He will be more reckless this time."

"Why?"

"Because he has reached a higher stage in the science of murder. The symptoms of that poor Yorkshireman were the symptoms of arsenical poisoning; the symptoms of which you have told me to-day denote a vegetable poison. _That_ affords very vague diagnosis, and leaves no trace. That was the agent which enabled the Borgias to decimate Rome. It is older than classic Greece, and simple as _a b c_, and will remain so until the medical expert is a recognized officer of the law, the faithful guardian of the bed over which the suspected poisoner loiters--past-master of the science in which the murderer is rarely more than an experimentalist, and protected from all the hazards of plain speaking by the nature of his office."

"Great Heaven, how am I to save her?" exclaimed Valentine. He could not contemplate the subject in its broad social aspect; he could only think of this one dear life at stake. "To send this Dr. Jedd might be to hasten her death; to send a less efficient man would be mere childishness. WHAT shall I do?"

He looked despairingly at the surgeon, and in that one glance perceived what a frail reed this was upon which he was leaning. And then, like the sudden gleam of lightning, a name flashed across his mind,--George Sheldon, the lawyer, the schemer, the man who of all the world best knew this vile enemy and assassin against whom he was matched; he it was of whom counsel should be asked in this crisis. Once perceiving this, Valentine was prompt to act. It was the first flash of light in the darkness.

"You mean to stand by me in this, don't you?" he asked Mr. Burkham.

"With all my heart and soul."

"Good. Then you must go to Dr. Jedd instantly. Tell him all you know--Tom Halliday's death; the symptoms of Charlotte's decline, as you have heard them from me--_everything_; and let him