Blind Love, Wilkie Collins [ebook reader 8 inch TXT] 📗

Sir Giles had anticipated the appearance of fear, and the reality of humble apologies. She had answered him indignantly, with a heightened colour, and with tears in her eyes. His sense of his own social importance was wounded to the quick. “Who is the man you are speaking of?” he asked loftily. “And what is your excuse for having gone to the milestone to save him—hidden under my cloak, disguised in my hat?”

“Don’t waste precious time in asking questions!” was the desperate reply. “Undo the harm that you have done already. Your help—oh, I mean what I say!—may yet preserve Arthur’s life. Go to the farm, and save him.”

Sir Giles’s anger assumed a new form, it indulged in an elaborate mockery of respect. He took his watch from his pocket, and consulted it satirically. “Must I make an excuse?” he asked with a clumsy assumption of humility.

“No! you must go.”

“Permit me to inform you, Miss Henley, that the last train started more than two hours since.”

“What does that matter? You are rich enough to hire a train.”

Sir Giles, the actor, could endure it no longer; he dropped the mask, and revealed Sir Giles, the man. His clerk was summoned by a peremptory ring of the bell. “Attend Miss Henley to the house,” he said. “You may come to your senses after a night’s rest,” he continued, turning sternly to Iris. “I will receive your excuses in the morning.”

In the morning, the breakfast was ready as usual at nine o’clock. Sir Giles found himself alone at the table.

He sent an order to one of the women-servants to knock at Miss Henley’s door. There was a long delay. The housekeeper presented herself in a state of alarm; she had gone upstairs to make the necessary investigation in her own person. Miss Henley was not in her room; the maid was not in her room; the beds had not been slept in; the heavy luggage was labelled—“To be called for from the hotel.” And there was an end of the evidence which the absent Iris had left behind her.

Inquiries were made at the hotel. The young lady had called there, with her maid, early on that morning. They had their travelling-bags with them; and Miss Henley had left directions that the luggage was to be placed under care of the landlord until her return. To what destination she had betaken herself nobody knew.

Sir Giles was too angry to remember what she had said to him on the previous night, or he might have guessed at the motive which had led to her departure. “Her father has done with her already,” he said; “and I have done with her now.” The servants received orders not to admit Miss Henley, if her audacity contemplated a return to her godfather’s house.

VIII

ON the afternoon of the same day, Iris arrived at the village situated in the near neighbourhood of Arthur Mountjoy’s farm.

The infection of political excitement (otherwise the hatred of England) had spread even to this remote place. On the steps of his little chapel, the priest, a peasant himself, was haranguing his brethren of the soil. An Irishman who paid his landlord was a traitor to his country; an Irishman who asserted his free birthright in the land that he walked on was an enlightened patriot. Such was the new law which the reverend gentleman expounded to his attentive audience. If his brethren there would like him to tell them how they might apply the law, this exemplary Christian would point to the faithless Irishman, Arthur Mountjoy. “Buy not of him, sell not to him; avoid him if he approaches you; starve him out of the place. I might say more, boys—you know what I mean.”

To hear the latter part of this effort of oratory, without uttering a word of protest, was a trial of endurance under which Iris trembled. The secondary effect of the priest’s address was to root the conviction of Arthur’s danger with tenfold tenacity in her mind. After what she had just heard, even the slightest delay in securing his safety might be productive of deplorable results. She astonished a barefooted boy, on the outskirts of the crowd, by a gift of sixpence, and asked her way to the farm. The little Irishman ran on before her, eager to show the generous lady how useful he could be. In less than half an hour, Iris and her maid were at the door of the farmhouse. No such civilsed inventions appeared as a knocker or a bell. The boy used his knuckles instead—and ran away when he heard the lock of the door turned on the inner side. He was afraid to be seen speaking to any living creature who inhabited the “evicted farm.”

A decent old woman appeared, and inquired suspiciously “what the ladies wanted.” The accent in which she spoke was unmistakably English. When Iris asked for Mr. Arthur Mountjoy the reply was: “Not at home.” The housekeeper inhospitably attempted to close the door. “Wait one moment,” Iris said. “Years have changed you; but there is something in your face which is not quite strange to me. Are you Mrs. Lewson?”

The woman admitted that this was her name. “But how is it that you are a stranger to me?” she asked distrustfully.

“If you have been long in Mr. Mountjoy’s service,” Iris replied, “you may perhaps have heard him speak of Miss Henley?”

Mrs. Lewson’s face brightened in an instant; she threw the door wide open with a glad cry of recognition.

“Come in, Miss, come in! Who would have thought of seeing you in this horrible place? Yes; I was the nurse who looked after you all three—when you and Mr. Arthur and Mr. Hugh were playfellows together.” Her eyes rested longingly on her favourite of bygone days. The sensitive sympathies of Iris interpreted that look. She prettily touched her cheek, inviting the nurse to kiss her. At this act of kindness the poor old woman broke down; she apologised quaintly for her tears: “Think, Miss, how I must remember that happy time—when you have not forgotten it.”

Shown into the parlour, the first object which the visitor noticed was the letter that she had written to Arthur lying unopened on the table.

“Then he is really out of the house?” she said with a feeling of relief.

He had been away from the farm for a week or more. Had he received a warning from some other quarter? and had he wisely sought refuge in flight? The amazement in the housekeeper’s face, when she heard these questions, pleaded for a word of explanation. Iris acknowledged without reserve the motives which had suggested her journey, and asked eagerly if she had been mistaken in assuming that Arthur was in danger of assassination.

Mrs. Lewson shook her head. Beyond all doubt the young master was in danger. But Miss Iris ought to have known his nature better than to suppose that he would beat a retreat, if all the land-leaguers in Ireland threatened him together. No! It was his bold way to laugh at danger. He had left his farm to visit a friend in the next county; and it was shrewdly guessed that a young lady who was staying in the house was the attraction which had kept him so long away. “Anyhow, he means to come back to-morrow,” Mrs. Lewson said. “I wish he would think better of it, and make his escape to England while he has the chance. If the savages in these parts must shoot somebody, I’m here—an old woman that can’t last much longer. Let them shoot me.”

Iris asked if Arthur’s safety was assured in the next county, and in the house of his friend.

“I can’t say, Miss; I have never been to the house. He is in danger if he persists in coming back to the farm. There are chances of shooting him all along his road home. Oh, yes; he knows it, poor dear, as well as I do. But, there!—men like him are such perverse creatures. He takes his rides just as usual. No; he won’t listen to an old woman like me; and, as for friends to advise him, the only one of them that has darkened our doors is a scamp who had better have kept away. You may have heard tell of him. The old Earl, his wicked father, used to be called by a bad name. And the wild young lord is his father’s true son.”

“Not Lord Harry?” Iris exclaimed.

The outbreak of agitation in her tone and manner was silently noticed by her maid. The housekeeper did not attempt to conceal the impression that had been produced upon her. “I hope you don’t know such a vagabond as that?” she said very seriously. “Perhaps you are thinking of his brother—the eldest son—a respectable man, as I have been told?”

Miss Henley passed over these questions without notice. Urged by the interest in her lover, which was now more than ever an interest beyond her control, she said: “Is Lord Harry in danger, on account of his friend?”

“He has nothing to fear from the wretches who infest our part of the country,” Mrs. Lewson replied. “Report says he’s one of themselves. The police—there’s what his young lordship has to be afraid of, if all’s true that is said about him. Anyhow, when he paid his visit to my master, he came secretly like a thief in the night. And I heard Mr. Arthur, while they were together here in the parlour, loud in blaming him for something that he had done. No more, Miss, of Lord Harry! I have something particular to say to you. Suppose I promise to make you comfortable—will you please wait here till to-morrow, and see Mr. Arthur and speak to him? If there’s a person living who can persuade him to take better care of himself, I do believe it will be you.”

Iris readily consented to wait for Arthur Mountjoy’s return. Left together, while Mrs. Lewson was attending to her domestic duties, the mistress noticed an appearance of preoccupation in the maid’s face.

“Are you beginning to wish, Rhoda,” she said, “that I had not brought you to this strange place, among these wild people?”

The maid was a quiet amiable girl, evidently in delicate health. She smiled faintly. “I was thinking, Miss, of another nobleman besides the one Mrs. Lewson mentioned just now, who seems to have led a reckless life. It was printed in a newspaper that I read before we left London.”

“Was his name mentioned?” Iris asked.

“No, Miss; I suppose they were afraid of giving offence. He tried so many strange ways of getting a living—it was almost like reading a story-book.”

The suppression of the name suggested a suspicion from which Iris recoiled. Was it possible that her maid could be ignorantly alluding to Lord Harry?

“Do you remember this hero’s adventures?” she said.

“I can try, Miss, if you wish to hear about him.”

The newspaper narrative appeared to have produced a vivid impression on Rhoda’s mind. Making allowance for natural hesitations and mistakes, and difficulties in expressing herself correctly, she repeated with a singularly clear recollection the substance of what she had read.

IX

THE principal characters in the story were an old Irish nobleman, who was called the Earl, and the youngest of his two sons, mysteriously distinguished as “the wild lord.”

It was said of the Earl that he had not been a good father; he had cruelly neglected both his sons. The younger one, badly treated at school, and left to himself in the holidays, began his adventurous career by running away. He got employment (under an assumed name) as a ship’s boy. At the outset, he did well; learning his work, and