Henry Dunbar, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [reading list txt] 📗

found the reward of her devotion; for Margaret, this penniless, friendless girl, had become very dear to her--a real daughter, not in law, but bound by the sweet ties of gratitude and affection.

"And I was such a silly old creature, my dear," the widow said to Margaret, as they sat in the bow-window looking out into the quiet street; "I was so worldly-minded that I wanted Clement to marry a rich woman, so that I might have some stuck-up daughter-in-law, who would despise her husband's mother, and estrange my boy from me, and make my old age miserable. That's what I wanted, Madge, and what I might have had, perhaps, if Clem hadn't been wiser than his silly old mother. And, thanks to him, I've got the sweetest, truest, brightest girl that ever lived; though you are not as bright as usual to-day, Madge," Mrs. Austin added, thoughtfully. "You haven't smiled once this morning, my dear, and you seem as if you'd something on your mind."

"I've been thinking of my poor father," Margaret answered, quietly.

"To be sure, my dear; and I might have known as much, my poor tender-hearted lamb. I know how unhappy those thoughts always make you."

Clement Austin had not been at Shorncliffe for three years. He had visited Maudesley Abbey several times during the lifetime of Percival Dunbar, for he had been a favourite with the old man; and he had been four years at a boarding-school kept by a clergyman of the Church of England in a fine old brick mansion on the Lisford Road.

The town of Shorncliffe was therefore familiar to Mr. Austin; and he looked neither to the right nor to the left as he walked towards the archway of St. Gwendoline's Church, near which Mr. Lovell's house was situated.

He found Arthur at home, and very delighted to see his old schoolfellow. The two young men went into a little panelled room, looting into the garden, a cosy little room which Arthur Lovell called his study; and here they sat together for upwards of an hour, discussing the circumstances of the murder at Winchester, and the conduct of Mr. Dunbar since that event.

In the course of that interview, Clement Austin plainly perceived that Arthur Lovell had come to the same conclusion as himself, though the young lawyer was slow to express his opinion.

"I cannot bear to think it," he said; "I know Laura Dunbar--that is to say, Lady Jocelyn--and it is too horrible to me to imagine that her father is guilty of this crime. What would be that innocent girl's feelings if it should be so, and if her father's guilt should be brought home to him!"

"Yes, it would be very terrible for Lady Jocelyn, no doubt," Clement answered; "but that consideration must not hinder the course of justice. I think this man's position has served him as a shield from the very first. People have thought it next to impossible that Henry Dunbar could be guilty of a crime, while they would have been ready enough to suspect some penniless vagabond of any iniquity."

Arthur Lovell told Clement that the banker was still at Maudesley, bound a prisoner by his broken leg, which was going on favourably enough, but very slowly.

Mr. Dunbar had expressed a wish to go abroad, in spite of his broken leg, and had only desisted from his design of being conveyed somehow or other from place to place, when he was told that any such imprudence might result in permanent lameness.

"Keep yourself quiet, and submit to the necessities of your accident, and you'll recover quickly," the surgeon told his patient. "Try to hurry the work of nature, and you'll have cause to repent your impatience for the remainder of your life."

So Henry Dunbar had been obliged to submit himself to the decrees of Fate, and to lie day after day, and night after night, upon his bed in the tapestried chamber, staring at the fire, or the figure of his valet and attendant; nodding in the easy-chair by the hearth; or listening to the cinders falling from the grate, and the moaning of the winter wind amongst the bare branches of the elms.

The banker was getting better and stronger every day, Arthur Lovell said. His attendants were able to remove him from one chamber to another; a pair of crutches had been made for him, but he had not yet been able to make his first feeble trial of them. He was fain to content himself with being carried to an easy-chair, to sit for a few hours, wrapped in blankets, with the leopard-skin rug about his legs. No man could have been more completely a prisoner than this man had become by the result of the fatal accident near Rugby.

"Providence has thrown him into my power," Margaret said, when Clement repeated to her the information which he had received from Arthur Lovell,--"Providence has thrown this man into my power; for he can no longer escape, and, surrounded by his own servants, he will scarcely dare to refuse to see me; he will surely never be so unwise as to betray his terror of me."

"And if he does refuse----"

"If he does, I'll invent some stratagem by which I may see him. But he will not refuse. When he finds that I am so resolute as to follow him here, he will not refuse to see me."

This conversation took place during a brief walk which the lovers took in the wintry dusk, while Mrs. Austin nodded by the fire in that comfortable half-hour which precedes dinner.


CHAPTER XXXII.


WHAT HAPPENED AT MAUDESLEY ABBEY.

Early the next day Clement Austin walked to Maudesley Abbey, in order to procure all the information likely to facilitate Margaret Wilmot's grand purpose. He stopped at the gate of the principal lodge. The woman who kept it was an old servant of the Dunbar family, and had known Clement Austin in Percival Dunbar's lifetime. She gave him a hearty welcome, and he had no difficulty whatever in setting her tongue in motion upon the subject of Henry Dunbar.

She told him a great deal; she told him that the present owner of the Abbey never had been liked, and never would be liked: for his stern and gloomy manner was so unlike his father's easy, affable good-nature, that people were always drawing comparisons between the dead man and the living.

This, in a few words, is the substance of what the worthy woman said in a good many words. Mrs. Grumbleton gave Clement all the information he required as to the banker's daily movements at the present time. Henry Dunbar was now in the habit of rising about two o'clock in the day, at which time he was assisted from his bedroom to his sitting-room, where he remained until seven or eight o'clock in the evening. He had no visitors, except the surgeon, Mr. Daphney, who lived in the Abbey, and a gentleman called Vernon, who had bought Woodbine Cottage, near Lisford, and who now and then was admitted to Mr. Dunbar's sitting-room.

This was all Clement Austin wanted to know. Surely it might be possible, with a little clever management, to throw the banker completely off his guard, and to bring about the long-delayed interview between him and Margaret Wilmot.

Clement returned to the Reindeer, had a brief conversation with Margaret, and made all arrangements.

At four o'clock that afternoon, Miss Wilmot and her lover left the Reindeer in a fly; at a quarter to five the fly stopped at the lodge-gates.

"I will walk to the house," Margaret said; "my coming will attract less notice. But I may be detained for some time, Clement. Pray, don't wait for me. Your dear mother will be alarmed if you are very long absent. Go back to her, and send the fly for me by-and-by."

"Nonsense, Madge. I shall wait for you, however long you may be. Do you think my heart is not as much engaged in anything that may influence your fate as even your own can be? I won't go with you to the Abbey; for it will be as well that Henry Dunbar should remain in ignorance of my presence in the neighbourhood. I will walk up and down the road here, and wait for you."

"But you may have to wait so long, Clement."

"No matter how long. I can wait patiently, but I could not endure to go home and leave you, Madge."

They were standing before the great iron gates as Clement said this. He pressed Margaret's cold hand; he could feel how cold it was, even through her glove; and then rang the bell. She looked at him as the gate was opened; she turned and looked at him with a strangely earnest gaze as she crossed the boundary of Henry Dunbar's domain, and then walked slowly along the broad avenue.

That last look had shown Clement Austin a pale resolute face, something like the countenance of a fair young martyr going quietly to the stake.

He walked away from the gates, and they shut behind him with a loud clanging noise. Then he went back to them, and watched Margaret's figure growing dim and distant in the gathering dusk as she approached the Abbey. A faint glow of crimson firelight reddened the gravel-drive before the windows of Mr. Dunbar's apartments, and there was a footman airing himself under the shadow of the porch, with a glimmer of light shining out of the hall behind him.

"I do not suppose I shall have to wait very long for my poor girl," Clement thought, as he left the gates, and walked briskly up and down the road. "Henry Dunbar is a resolute man; he will refuse to see her to-day, as he refused before."

Margaret found the footman lolling against the clustered pillars of the gothic porch, staring thoughtfully at the low evening light, yellow and red behind the brown trunks of the elms, and picking his teeth with a gold toothpick.

The sight of the open hall-door, and this languid footman lolling in the porch, suddenly inspired Margaret Wilmot with a new idea. Would it not be possible to slip quietly past this man, and walk straight to the apartments of Mr. Dunbar, unquestioned, uninterrupted?

Clement had pointed out to her the windows of the rooms occupied by the banker. They were on the left-hand side of the entrance-hall. It would be impossible for her to mistake the door leading to them. It was dusk, and she was very plainly dressed, with a black straw bonnet, and a veil over her face. Surely she might deceive this languid footman by affecting to be some hanger-on of the household, which of course was a large one.

In that case she had no right to present herself at the front door, certainly; but then, before the languid footman could recover from the first shock of indignation at her impertinence, she might slip past him and reach the door leading to those apartments in which the banker hid himself and his guilt.

Margaret lingered a little in the avenue, watching for a favourable opportunity in which she might hazard this attempt. She waited five minutes or so.

The curve of the avenue screened her, in some wise, from the man in the porch, who never happened to roll his languid eyes towards the spot where she was standing.

A flight of rooks came scudding through the sky presently, very much excited, and cawing and screeching as if they had been an ornithological fire brigade hurrying to extinguish the flames of