Phantom Fortune, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [free e novels .txt] 📗

almost as terrible as that which Lord Hartfield heard in the summer midnight just a year ago. But this time the sound came from the old part of the house.

'Something has happened,' exclaimed Hartfield, rushing to the door of communication.

It was bolted inside. He knocked vehemently; but there was no answer. He ran downstairs, followed by Mary, breathless, in an agony of fear. Just as they approached the lower door, leading to the old house, it was flung open, and Steadman's wife stood before them pale with terror.

'The doctor,' she cried; 'send for Mr. Horton, somebody, for God's sake. Oh, my lord,' with a sudden burst of sobbing, 'I'm afraid he's dead.'

'Mary, despatch some one for Horton,' said Lord Hartfield. Keeping his wife back with one hand, he closed the door against her, and then followed Mrs. Steadman through the long low corridor to her husband's sitting-room.

James Steadman was lying upon his back upon the hearth, near the spot were Lord Hartfield had seen him sleeping in his arm-chair a month ago.

One look at the distorted face, dark with injected blood, the dreadful glassy glare of the eyes, the foam-stained lips, told that all was over. The faithful servant had died at his post. Whatever his charge had been, his term of service was ended. There was a vacancy in Lady Maulevrier's household.


CHAPTER XLVI.


THE DAY OF RECKONING.

Lord Hartfield stayed with the frightened wife while she knelt beside that awful figure on the hearth, wringing her hands with piteous bewailings and lamentations over the unconscious clay. He had always been a good husband to her, she murmured; hard and stern perhaps, but a good man. And she had obeyed him without a question. Whatever he did or said she had counted right.

'We have not had a happy life, though there are many who have envied us her ladyship's favour,' she said in the midst of her lamentations. 'No one knows where the shoe pinches but those who have to wear it. Poor James! Early and late, early and late, studying her ladyship's interests, caring and thinking, in order to keep trouble away from her. Always on the watch always on the listen. That's what wore him out, poor fellow!'

'My good soul, your husband was an old man,' argued Lord Hartfield, in a consolatory tone, 'and the end must come to all of us somehow.'

'He might have lived to be a much older man if he had had less worry,' said the wife, bending her face to kiss the cold dead brow. 'His days were full of care. We should have been happier in the poorest cottage in Grasmere than we ever were in this big grand house.'

Thus, in broken fragments of speech, Mrs. Steadman lamented over her dead, while the heavy pendulum of the eight-day clock in the hall sounded the slowly-passing moments, until the coming of the doctor broke upon the quiet of the house, with the noise of opening doors and approaching footsteps.

James Steadman was dead. Medicine could do nothing for that lifeless clay, lying on the hearth by which he had sat on so many winter nights, for so many years of faithful unquestioning service. There was nothing to be done for that stiffening form, save the last offices for the dead; and Lord Hartfield left Mr. Horton to arrange with the weeping woman as to the doing of these. He was anxious to go to Lady Maulevrier, to break to her, as gently as might be, the news of her servant's death.

And what of that strange old man in the upper rooms? Who was to attend upon him, now that the caretaker was laid low?

While Lord Hartfield lingered on the threshold of the door that led from the old house to the new, pondering this question, there came the sound of wheels on the carriage drive, and then a loud ring at the hall door.

It was Maulevrier, just arrived from Scotland, smelling of autumn rain and cool fresh air.

'Dreadfully bored on the moors,' he said, as they shook hands. 'No birds--nobody to talk to--couldn't stand it any longer. How are the sisters? Lesbia better? Why, man alive, how queer you look! Nothing amiss, I hope?'

'Yes, there is something very much amiss. Steadman is dead.'

'Steadman! Her ladyship's right hand. That's rather bad. But you will drop into his stewardship. She'll trust your long head, I know. Much better that she should look to her granddaughter's husband for advice in all business matters than to a servant When did it happen?'

'Half an hour ago. I was just going to Lady Maulevrier's room when you rang the bell. Take off your Inverness, and come with me.'

'The poor grandmother,' muttered Maulevrier. 'I'm afraid it will be a blow.'

He had much less cause for fear than Lord Hartfield, who knew of deep and secret reasons why Steadman's death should be a calamity of dire import for his mistress, Maulevrier had been told nothing of that scene with the strange old man--the hidden treasures--the Anglo-Indian phrases--which had filled Lord Hartfield's mind with the darkest doubts.

If that half-lunatic old man, described by Lady Maulevrier as a kinsman of Steadman's, were verily the person Lord Hartfield believed, his presence under that roof, unguarded by a trust-worthy attendant, was fraught with danger. It would be for Lady Maulevrier, helpless, a prisoner to her sofa, at death's door, to face that danger. The very thought of it might kill her. And yet it was imperative that the truth should be told her without delay.

The two young men went to her ladyship's sitting room. She was alone, a volume of her favourite Schopenhauer open before her, under the light of the shaded reading-lamp. Sorry comfort in the hour of trouble!

Maulevrier went over to her and kissed her; and then dropped silently into a chair near at hand, his face in shadow. Hartfield seated himself nearer the sofa, and nearer the lamp.

'Dear Lady Maulevrier, I have come to tell you some very bad news--'

'Lesbia?' exclaimed her ladyship, with a frightened look.

'No, there is nothing wrong with Lesbia. It is about your old servant Steadman.'

'Dead?' faltered Lady Maulevrier, ashy pale, as she looked at him in the lamplight.

He bent his head affirmatively.

'Yes. He was seized with apoplexy--fell from his chair to the hearth, and never spoke or stirred again.'

Lady Maulevrier uttered no word of sorrow or surprise. She lay, looking straight before her into vacancy, the pale attenuated features rigid as if they had been marble. What was to be done--what must be told--whom could she trust? Those were the questions repeating themselves in her mind as she stared into space. And no answer came to them.

No answer came, except the opening of the door opposite her couch. The handle turned slowly, hesitatingly, as if moved by feeble fingers; and then the door was pushed slowly open, and an old man came with shuffling footsteps towards the one lighted spot in the middle of the room.

It was the old man Lord Hartfield had last seen gloating over his treasury of gold and jewels--the man whom Maulevrier had never seen--whose existence for forty years had been hidden from every creature in that house, except Lady Maulevrier and the Steadmans, until Mary found her way into the old garden.

He came close up to the little table in front of Lady Maulevrier's couch, and looked down at her, a strange, uncanny being, withered and bent, with pale, faded eyes in which there was a glimmer of unholy light.

'Good-evening to you, Lady Maulevrier,' he said in a mocking voice. 'I shouldn't have known you if we had met anywhere else. I think, of the two of us, you are more changed than I.'

She looked up at him, her features quivering, her haughty head drawn back; as a bird shrinks from the gaze of a snake, recoiling, but too fascinated to fly. Her eyes met his with a look of unutterable horror. For some moments she was speechless, and then, looking at Lord Hartfield, she said, piteously--

'Why did you let him come here? He ought to be taken care of--shut up. It is Steadman's old uncle--a lunatic--I sheltered. Why is he allowed to come to my room?'

'I am Lord Maulevrier,' said the old man, drawing himself up and planting his crutch stick upon the floor; 'I am Lord Maulevrier, and this woman is my wife. Yes, I am mad sometimes, but not always, I have my bad fits, but not often. But I never forget who and what I am, Algernon, Earl of Maulevrier, Governor of Madras.'

'Lady Maulevrier, is this horrible thing true?' cried her grandson, vehemently.

'He is mad, Maulevrier. Don't you see that he is mad?' she exclaimed, looking from Hartfield to her grandson, and then with a look of loathing and horror at her accuser.

'I tell you, young man, I am Maulevrier,' said the accuser; 'there is no one else who has a right to be called by that name, while I live. They have shut me up--she and her accomplice--denied my name--hidden me from the world. He is dead, and she lies there--stricken for her sins.'

'My grandfather died at the inn at Great Langdale, faltered Maulevrier.

'Your grandfather was brought to this house--ill--out of his wits. All cloud and darkness here,' said the old man, touching his forehead. 'How long has it been? Who can tell? A weary time--long, dark nights, full of ghosts. Yes, I have seen him--the Rajah, that copper-faced scoundrel, seen him as she told me he looked when she gave the signal to her slaves to strangle him, there in the hall, where the grave was dug ready for the traitor's carcass. She too--yes, she has haunted me, calling upon me to give up her treasure, to restore her son.'

'Yes,' cried the paralytic woman, suddenly lifted out of herself, as it were, in a paroxysm of fury, every feature convulsed, every nerve strained to its utmost tension; 'yes, this is Lord Maulevrier. You have heard the truth, and from his own lips. You, his only son's only son. You his granddaughter's husband. You hear him avow himself the instigator of a diabolical murder; you hear him confess how his paramour's husband was strangled at his false wife's bidding, in his own palace, buried under the Moorish pavement in the hall of many arches. You hear how he inherited the Rajah's treasures from a mistress who died strangely, swiftly, conveniently, as soon so he had wearied of her, and a new favourite had begun to exercise her influence. Such things are done in the East--dynasties annihilated, kingdoms overthrown, poison or bowstring used at will, to gratify a profligate's passion, or pay for a spendthrift's extravagances. Such things were done when that man was Governor of Madras as were never done by an Englishman in India before his time. He went there fettered by no prejudices--he was more Mussulman than the Mussulmen themselves--a deeper, darker traitor. And it was to hide such crimes as these--to interpose the great peacemaker Death between him and the Government which was resolved upon punishing him--to save the honour, the fortune of my son, and the children who were to come after him, the name of a noble race, a name that was ever stainless until he defiled it--it was for this great end I took steps to hide that feeble, useless life of his from the world he had offended; it was for this end that I caused a peasant