Run to Earth, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [classic literature books txt] 📗

absolute poverty. I have, therefore, ordered my solicitors to prepare a deed by which an income of two hundred a year will be secured to you for life, unconditionally. After the execution of that deed I shall have no further interest in your fate. You will go your own way, Mr. Eversleigh, and choose your own companions, without remonstrance or interference from the foolish kinsman who has loved you too well."

"But, my dear uncle--Sir Oswald--what have I done that you should treat me so severely?"

The young man was deadly pale. His uncle's manner had taken him by surprise; but even in this desperate moment, when he felt that all was lost, he attempted to assume the aspect of injured innocence.

"What have you done!" cried the baronet, passionately.

"Shall I show you two letters, Reginald Eversleigh--two letters which, by a strange combination of circumstances, have reached my hands; and in each of which there is the clue to a shameful story--a cruel and disgraceful story, of which you are the hero?"

"What letters?"

"You shall read them," replied Sir Oswald. "They are addressed to you, and have been in your possession; but to so fine a gentleman such letters were of little importance. Another person, however, thought them worth preserving, and sent them to me."

The baronet took up two envelopes from the table, and handed them to his nephew.

At the sight of the address of the uppermost envelope, Reginald Eversleigh's face grew livid. He looked at the lower, and then returned both documents to his uncle, with a hand that trembled in spite of himself.

"I know nothing of the letters," he faltered, huskily.

"You do not!" said his uncle; "then it will be necessary for me to enlighten you."

Sir Oswald took a letter from one of the envelopes, but before reading it he looked at his nephew with a grave and mournful countenance, from which all traces of scorn had vanished.

"Before I heard the history of this letter, I fully believed that, in spite of all your follies and extravagances, you were at least honourable and generous-hearted. After hearing the story of this letter, I knew you to be base and heartless. You say you know nothing of the letter? Perhaps you will tell me that you have forgotten the name of the writer. And yet you can scarcely have so soon forgotten Mary Goodwin."

The young man bent his head. A terrible rage possessed him, for he knew that one of the darkest secrets of his life had been revealed to his uncle.

"I will tell you the history of Mary Goodwin," said the baronet, "since you have so poor a memory. She was the favourite and foster-sister of Jane Stukely, a noble and beautiful woman, to whom you were engaged. You met Jane Stukely in London, fell in love with her as it seemed, and preferred your suit. You were accepted by her--approved by her father. No alliance could have been more advantageous. I was never better pleased than when you announced to me your engagement. The influence of a good wife will cure him of all his follies, I thought, and I shall yet have reason to be proud of my nephew."

"Spare me, sir, for pity's sake," murmured Reginald, hoarsely.

"When did you spare others, Mr. Reginald Eversleigh? When did you consider others, if they stood in the way of your base pleasures, your selfish gratifications? Never! Nor will I spare you. As Jane's engaged lover, you were invited to Stukely Park. There you saw Mary Goodwin. Accident threw you across this girl's pathway very often in the course of your visit; but the time came when you ceased to meet by accident. There were secret meetings in the park. The poor, weak, deluded girl could not resist the fascinations of the fine gentleman--who lured her to destruction by means of lying promises. In due time you left Stukely Park, unsuspected. Within a few days of your departure, the girl, Mary Goodwin, disappeared.

"For six months nothing was heard of the missing Mary Goodwin; but at the end of that time a gentleman, who remembered her in the days of her beauty and innocence at Stukely Park, recognized the features of Miss Stukely's _protégée_ in the face of a suicide, whose body was exhibited in the Morgue at Paris. The girl had been found drowned. The Englishman paid the charges of a decent funeral, and took back to the Stukelys the intelligence of their _protégée's_ fate; but no one knew the secret of her destruction. That secret was, however, suspected by Jane Stukely, who broke her engagement with you on the strength of the dark suspicion.

"It was to you she fled when she left Stukely Park--in your companionship she went abroad, where she passed as your wife, you assuming a false name--under which you were recognized, nevertheless. The day came when you grew weary of your victim. When your funds were exhausted, when the girl's tears and penitence grew troublesome--in the hour when she was most helpless and miserable, and had most need of your pity and protection, you abandoned her, leaving her alone in Paris, with a few pounds to pay for her journey home, if she should have courage to go back to the friends who had sheltered her. In this hour of abandonment and shame, she chose death rather than such an ordeal, and drowned herself."

"I give you my honour, Sir Oswald, I meant to act liberally. I meant,"--the young man interrupted; but his uncle did not notice the interruption.

"I will read you this wretched girl's letter," continued the baronet; "it is her last, and was left at the hotel where you deserted her, and whence it was forwarded to you. It is a very simple letter; but it bears in every line the testimony of a broken heart:--

"'_You have left me, Reginald, and in so doing have proved to me most fully that the love you once felt for me has indeed perished. For the sake of that love I have sacrificed every principle and broken every tie. I have disgraced the name of an honest family, and have betrayed the dearest and kindest friend who ever protected a poor girl. And now you leave me, and tell me to return to my old friends, who will no doubt forgive me, you say, and shelter me in this bitter time of my disgrace. Oh, Reginald, do you know me so little that you think I could go back, could lift my eyes once more to the dear faces that used to smile upon me, but which now would turn from me with loathing and aversion? You know that I cannot go back. You leave me in this great city, so strange and unknown to me, and you do not care to ask yourself any questions as to my probable fate. Shall I tell you what I am going to do, Reginald? You, who were once so fond and passionate a lover-- you, whom I have seen kneeling at my feet, humbly born and penniless though I was--it is only right that you should know the fate of your abandoned mistress. When I have finished this letter it will be dark-- the shadows are closing in already, and I can scarcely see to write. I shall creep quietly from the house, and shall make my way over to that river which I have crossed so often, seated by your side in a carriage. Once on the bridge, under cover of the blessed darkness, all my troubles will be ended; you will be burdened with me no longer, and I shall not cost you even the ten-pound note which you so generously left for me, and which I shall enclose in this letter. Forgive me if there is some bitterness in my heart. I try to forgive you--I do forgive you! May a merciful heaven pardon my sins, as I pardon your desertion of me_! M.G.'"

There was a pause after the reading of the letter--a silence which Mr. Eversleigh did not attempt to break. "The second letter I need scarcely read to you," said the baronet; "it is from a young man whom you were pleased to patronize some twelve months back--a young man in a banking office, aspiring and ambitious, whose chief weakness was the desire to penetrate the mystic circle of fashionable society. You were good enough to indulge that weakness at your own price, and for your own profit. You initiated the banker's clerk into the mysteries of card-playing and billiards. You won money of him--more than he had to lose; and after being the kindest and most indulgent of friends, you became all at once a stern and pitiless creditor. You threatened the bank-clerk with disgrace if he did not pay his losses. He wrote you pleading letters; but you laughed to scorn his prayers for mercy, and at last, maddened by shame, he helped himself to the money entrusted to him by his employers, in order to pay you. Discovery came, as discovery always does come, sooner or later, in these cases, and your friend and victim was transported. Before leaving England he wrote you a letter, imploring you to have some compassion on his widowed mother, whom his disgrace had deprived of all support. I wonder how much heed you took of that letter, Mr. Eversleigh? I wonder what you did towards the consolation of the helpless and afflicted woman who owed her misfortunes to you?"

The young officer dared not lift his eyes to his uncle's face; the consciousness of guilt rendered him powerless to utter a word in his defence.

"I have little more to say to you," resumed the baronet. "I have loved you as a man rarely loves his nephew. I have loved you for the sake of the brother who died in my arms, and for the sake of one who was even dearer to me than that only brother--for the sake of the woman whom we both loved, and who made her choice between us--choosing the younger and poorer brother, and retaining to her dying day the affection and esteem of the elder. I loved your mother, Reginald Eversleigh, and when she died, within one short year of her husband's death, I swore that her only child should be as dear to me as a son. I have kept that promise. Few parents can find patience to forgive such follies as I have forgiven. But my endurance is exhausted; my affection has been worn out by your heartlessness: henceforward we are strangers."

"You cannot mean this, sir?" murmured Reginald Eversleigh.

There was a terrible fear at his heart--an inward conviction that his uncle was in earnest.

"My solicitors will furnish you with all particulars of the deed I spoke of," said Sir Oswald, without noticing his nephew's appealing tones. "That deed will secure to you two hundred a year. You have a soldier's career before you, and you are young enough to redeem the past--at any rate, in the eyes of the world, if not before the sight of heaven. If you find your regiment too expensive for your altered means, I would recommend you to exchange into the line. And now, Mr. Eversleigh, I wish you good morning."

"But, Sir Oswald--uncle--my dear uncle--you cannot surely cast me off thus coldly--you--"

The baronet rang the bell.

"The door--for Mr. Eversleigh," he said to the servant who answered his summons.

The young man rose, looking at his kinsman with an incredulous gaze. He could not believe that all his hopes were utterly ruined; that he was, indeed, cast off with a pittance which to him seemed positively