Run to Earth, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [epub ebook reader .TXT] 📗
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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the lights in the bar, and shut the back-door.”
Mr. Milsom then returned to the apartment where his sleeping guest
reposed.
The coachman’s capacious overcoat hung on a chair near where its owner
slept.
Mr. Milsom deliberately put on this coat, and the hat which Mr. Brook
had worn with it. There was a thick woollen scarf of the coachman’s
lying on the floor near the chair, and this Black Milsom also put on,
twisting it several times round his neck, so as to completely muffle
the lower part of his face.
He was of about the same height as Matthew, and the thick coat gave him
bulk.
Thus attired he might, in an uncertain light, have been very easily
mistaken for the man whose clothes he wore.
Mr. Milsom gave one last scrutinizing look at the sleeping coachman,
and then extinguished the candle.
The fire he had allowed to die out while he sat smoking: the room was,
therefore, now in perfect darkness.
He paused by the door to look about him. All was alike still and
lonely. The village street could have been no more silent and empty if
the two rows of houses had been so many vaults in a cemetery.
Black Milsom walked rapidly up the village street, and entered the
gardens of the castle by a little iron gate, of which Matthew Brook,
the reprobate and offender, had a key. This key Black Milsom had often
heard of, and knew that it was always carried by Brook in a small
breast-pocket of his overcoat.
From the garden he made his way quickly, silently, to the quadrangle on
which Stephen Plumpton’s bedchamber opened.
Here all was dark and silent.
Milsom went straight to the little half-glass door which served both as
door and window for the small sleeping-chamber of Stephen Plumpton.
He opened this door with a cautious hand, and stepped softly into the
room. Stephen lay with his head half covered with the bed-clothes, and
his loud snoring resounded through the chamber.
“The rum-punch has done the trick for you, my friend,” Mr. Milsom said
to himself.
He crossed the room with slow and stealthy footsteps, opened the door
communicating with the rest of the house, and went along the passage
leading to the hall.
With cautious steps he groped his way to the door opening on the
secondary staircase, and ascended the thickly carpeted staircase
within.
Here a lamp was left dimly burning all night, and this lamp showed him
another cloth-covered door at the top of the first flight of stairs.
Black Milsom tried this door, and found it also unfastened.
This door, which Black Milsom opened, communicated with the little
passage that had been made across the room usually tenanted by Captain
Copplestone. Within this room there was a still smaller chamber—little
more, indeed, than a spacious closet—in which slept the faithful old
servant, Solomon Grundy.
Both the doors were open, and Black Milsom heard the heavy breathing of
the old man—the breathing of a sound sleeper.
Beyond the short passage was the door opening into the sitting-room
used by the young heiress of Raynham.
Black Milsom had only to push it open. The intruder crept softly across
the room, drew aside a curtain, and opened the massive oak door which
divided the sitting-room from the bedroom.
Mr. Milsom had taken care to make himself familiar with the smallest
details of the castle household, and he had even heard of Mrs. Morden’s
habit of sleeping within closely drawn curtains, from his general
informant, James Harwood, the groom, who had received his information
from one of the housemaids, in that temple of gossip—the servants’
hall.
Gertrude Eversleigh slept in a white-curtained cot, by the side of Mrs.
Morden’s bed.
Black Milsom lifted the coverlet, threw it over the face of the
sleeping child, and with one strong hand lifted her from her cot, her
face still shrouded by the thick down coverlet, which must effectually
prevent her cries. With the other hand he snatched up a blanket, and
threw it round the struggling form, and then, bundled in coverlet and
blanket, he carried the little girl away.
Only when his feet were on the turf, and the castle stood up black
behind him, did he withdraw the coverlet from the mouth of the half-suffocated child.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CAUGHT IN THE TOILS.
Captain Copplestone did not waste half an hour on the road between
London and Raynham.
No words can paint his agony of terror, the torture of mind which he
endured, as he sat in the post-chaise, watching every landmark of the
journey, counting every minute of the tedious hours, and continually
putting his head out of the front window, and urging the postillions to
greater speed.
He hated himself for having been duped by that forged letter.
“I had no business to leave the child,” he kept repeating to himself;
“not even to obey her mother. My place was by little Gertrude, and I
have been a fool to desert my post. If any harm has come to her in my
absence, by the heaven above me, I think I shall be tempted to blow out
my brains.”
Once having decided that the letter, purporting to be written by Lady
Eversleigh, was a forgery, he could not doubt that it formed part of
some plot against the household of Raynham Castle.
To Captain Copplestone, who knew that the life of his friend had been
sacrificed to the dark plottings of a traitor, this idea was terrible.
“I knew the wretches I had to deal with; I was forewarned that
treachery and cunning would be on the watch to do that child wrong,” he
said to himself, during those hours of self-reproach; “and yet I
allowed myself to be duped by the first trick of those hidden foes. Oh,
great heaven! grant that I may reach Raynham before they can have taken
any fatal advantage of my absence.”
It was daybreak when the captain’s post-chaise dashed into the village
street of Raynham. He murmured a thanksgiving and a prayer, almost in
the same breath, as he saw the castle-turrets dark against the chill
gray sky.
The vehicle ascended the hill, and stopped before the arched entrance
to the castle. An old woman, who acted as portress, opened the carved
iron gates. He glanced at her, but did not stop to question her. One
word from her would have put an end to all suspense; but in this last
moment the soldier had not courage to utter the question which he so
dreaded to have answered—Was Gertrude safe?
In another moment that question was answered for Captain Copplestone—
answered completely, without the utterance of a word.
The principal door of the castle was open, and in the doorway stood two
men.
One was Mr. Ashburne, the magistrate; the other was Christopher Dimond,
the constable of Raynham.
The sight of these two men told Captain Copplestone that his fears were
but too surely realized. Something had happened amiss—something of
importance—or Gilbert Ashburne, the magistrate, would not be there.
“The child!” gasped the captain; “is she dead—murdered?”
“No, no, not dead,” answered Mr. Ashburne.
“Not dead! Thank God!” exclaimed the soldier, in a devout whisper.
“What then? What has happened?” he asked, scarcely able to command
himself so far as to utter these few words with distinctness. “For
pity’s sake speak plainly. Can’t you see that you are keeping me in
torture? What has happened to the child?”
“She has disappeared.”
“She has disappeared!” echoed the captain. “I left strict orders that
she should not be permitted to stir beyond the castle walls. Who dared
to disobey those orders?”
“No one,” answered Mr. Ashburne. “Miss Eversleigh was not allowed to
quit her own apartments. She disappeared in the night from her own cot,
while that cot was in its usual place, beside Mrs. Morden’s bed.”
“But who could penetrate into that room in the night, when the castle
doors are secured against every one? Where is Mrs. Morden? Let me see
her; and let every servant of the house be assembled in the great
dining-room.”
Captain Copplestone gave this order to the butler, who had come out to
the hall on hearing the arrival of the post-chaise. The man bowed, and
departed on his errand.
“I fear you will gain nothing by questioning the household,” said Mr.
Ashburne. “I have already made all possible inquiries, assisted by
Christopher Dimond here, but can obtain no information that throws the
smallest ray of light upon this most mysterious business.”
“I thank you,” replied the captain; “I am sure you have done all that
friendship could suggest; but I should like to question those people
myself. This business is a matter of life and death for me.”
He went into the great dining-room—the room in which the inquiry had
been held respecting the cause of Sir Oswald’s death. Mr. Ashburne and
Christopher Dimond accompanied him, and the servants of the household
came in quietly, two and three at a time, until the lower end of the
room was full. Mrs. Morden was the last to come. She made no
protestations of her grief—her self-reproach—for she never for a
moment imagined that any one could doubt the intensity of her feelings.
She stood before the captain, calm, collected, ready to answer his
questions promptly and conscientiously.
He questioned the servants one by one, beginning with Mrs. Smithson,
the housekeeper, who was ready to declare that no living creature,
except the members of the household, could have been within the castle
walls on the night of Gertrude Eversleigh’s disappearance.
“That anybody could have come into this house and gone out of it in a
night, unknown to me, is a moral impossibility,” said the housekeeper;
“the doors were locked at half-past ten, and the keys were brought in a
basket to my room. So, you see it’s quite impossible that any one could
have come in or gone out before the doors were open in the morning.”
“What time was the child’s disappearance discovered?”
“At a quarter to five in the morning,” answered Mrs. Morden; “before
any one in the house was a-stir. My darling has always been in the
habit of waking at that hour, to take a little milk, which is left in a
glass by her bedside. I woke at the usual time, and rose, in order to
give her the milk, and when I looked at her cot, I saw that it was
empty. The child was gone. The silk coverlet and one blanket had
disappeared with her. I gave the alarm immediately, and in a quarter of
an hour the whole household was a-stir.”
“And did you hear nothing during that night?” asked the captain,
turning suddenly to address Solomon Grundy, who had entered amongst the
rest of the servants.
“Nothing, captain.”
“Humph,” muttered the old soldier, “a sorry watch-dog.”
“There is only one entrance to the castle which is at all weakly
guarded,” said the magistrate, presently; “and that is a small door
belonging to the bedroom occupied by one of the footmen. But this man
tells me that he was in his room that night at his usual hour, and that
the door was locked and bolted in the usual way.”
As he said this, the magistrate looked towards the end of the
apartment, where Stephen Plumpton stood amongst his fellow servants.
The young man had been weak enough, or guilty enough, to commit himself
to a false statement; first, because he did not want to betray the
misdoings of
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