It was a clear autumn night, still and cloudless. The mists of evening had rolled away from moorland and meadow,—from the dark brown fields where the plough had been busy, and the long line of rippling water. The moon was as bright and full as on that first night of Maurice Clissold’s sojourn at Borcel. He had been told that on such a night as this Muriel was wont to be restless.
‘Now if that poor ghost of days departed will but haunt my room to-night, I may gather some shred of information from her disjointed talk,’ he said to himself.
But the night wore away while he lay awake and watchful, and there was no sound of slippered footfall in the corridor, no opening of the creaking old door. Mr. Clissold fell asleep at last, when the moon had vanished, and did not wake till ever so long after the Borcel End breakfast-hour.
This was disappointing, but he waited another day, and watched another night, with the same result.
‘If she doesn’t come to-night I give it up,’ he said to himself. ‘After all, there can be but little for me to gather from her rambling self-communion.’
He slept for an hour or two on the third afternoon, and thus on the third night of his watch was more wakeful than before. The nights were moon-light still, but the moon rose later, and had lost her full brightness.
He lay awake for three hours on this particular night, and heard not a sound, save the occasional scufflings, patterings, and squealings of mice behind the wainscot. But a few minutes after the eight-day clock in the hall had struck two, the watcher heard the sound that had startled him at his first coming—the slipshod footfall—the slow, ghost-like tread on the uncarpeted floor of the corridor.
Muriel was approaching.
She entered slowly—quietly—as before, and went straight to the window, which she opened noiselessly, taking infinite pains to avoid all sound. Then, kneeling on the window-seat, she put her head out of the window, and looked downward, as if she were watching some one below.
‘Be careful, love,’ she exclaimed, in a whisper just loud enough to reach Maurice’s attentive ear, ‘that root of ivy is loose. I’m afraid your foot will slip. Be careful!’
For some time she remained thus, holding imaginary communion with some one below. Then all at once she awoke to a sense of her solitude, and knew that she had been talking to a phantom. She drew back into the room, and began to walk up and down rapidly, with a distracted air, her hands clasped upon her head, as if by that pressure upon her temples she would have stilled the trouble within her brain.
‘They told me he was dead,’ she said to herself; ‘murdered, barbarously murdered. But there was no truth in it. They have told me other lies as well as that. They are all false, all cruel. My mother has made them so. She has taken away my husband. She has taken away my child. She has left me nothing but memory. Why did she not take that away? I should be happy—yes, quite happy, sitting by the fire and singing all day long, or roaming about among the hazel bushes, and the old apple-trees in the wilderness, if I did not remember. But I look down at my empty arms and remember that my blessed child ought to be lying in them, and then I hate her. Yes, I hate the mother that bore me.’
All this was said in disjointed gushes of quick, eager speech, divided by intervals of silence.
Suddenly she burst into a shrill laugh.
‘Who says he is dead?’ she cried. ‘Don’t I see him every moonlight night when I can come here? They shut me up mostly, lock all their doors, and keep me prisoner. Cruel—cruel—cruel. But he is standing under the window all the same, whenever the moon shines. He is there, waiting for me to open my window, like Romeo. Yes, that’s what he said, “like Romeo.”’
Then with an entire change of tone, a change to deepest tenderness, mingled with a remorseful fear, she went on, as if speaking to her lover.
‘Love, it was very wrong of us to break our promise. I fear that harm will come of it. My mind is full of fear.’
After this came a long silence. She went back to the window, knelt upon the broad wooden seat laid her head upon the sill, and remained motionless, speechless.
Maurice fancied she was weeping.
This continued for nearly an hour; then with a sudden movement—all her movements were sudden—she started up and looked about the room, as if in quest of something.
Maurice had left his extinguished candle on the dressing-table, with a box of matches in the candlestick. Quick as thought, Muriel seized the box, struck a match, and lighted the candle, and then hurried from the room.
The watcher sprang from the bed where he had been lying hidden by the shadow of the curtains, and followed that retiring figure, full of apprehension.
A confirmed lunatic rushing about an old timber house with a lighted candle was not the safest of people, and Maurice held himself responsible for any harm that might happen in consequence of Muriel’s liberty.
When he emerged from his room the corridor was empty, but the gleam of the candle in the distance guided his hurried steps. At the end of the corridor there was a winding stair—a stair which he had never ascended—but which he understood to lead to certain disused garrets in the roof.
It was from this narrow stair that the light came, and hither Maurice hastened. He was just in time to see the edge of Muriel’s white drapery flutter for an instant on the topmost stair before it vanished, and the light with it.
He rushed up the stairs, knocking his head against a heavy cross-beam in the course of his swift ascent, and almost stunning himself; but even that blow did not make him pause. He staggered on to the last step, and found himself in a kind of cavern, which in the dim light of the waning moon looked to him like the hold of a ship turned upside down. Ponderous beams crossed each other in every direction—the faint moonshine streamed through a broken skylight—cobwebs and dust hung all around, and in one corner of this deserted loft a few articles of furniture were crowded together, shrouded from the dust by some old patchwork coverlets. Even this loft had doubtless been kept in good order so long as that vigilant housewife, Bridget Trevanard had been able to attend to her domestic duties.
Muriel was kneeling near this shrouded heap of discarded furniture—kneeling by an old-fashioned basket-work cradle. She held the candlestick in one hand, and seemed to be searching for something in the cradle with the other hand. Her head was bent, her brow contracted, and she was muttering to herself as she groped among the tumbled blankets and discoloured linen which had once made the warm nest of some idolized infant. Her own nest, most likely.
Maurice stopped short. To startle her in such a moment might be dangerous. Better for him to hold his peace, and keep a watch upon her movements, ready to rush to the rescue, should there be peril.
Presently she seemed to have found what she wanted. It was a letter, in a sealed envelope, which she looked at and kissed, but made no attempt to open. She replaced this presently in the cradle, and took out more letters, two or three together, open, and these she kissed, looking long and fixedly at the written lines, as if she were trying to read them, but could not.
‘My love, my love,’ she murmured. ‘Your own true words—nothing but death could part us. Death has parted us. Yes, death! They told me you were dead. And yet that can’t be true. The dead are spirits. If you were dead you would hover near me. I should see your blessed shade. I should——’
Her eyes, wandering slowly from the letter, penetrated that dusky corner where Maurice stood watching her. She saw him—gave one long, wild shriek—and sprang towards him.
To her excited imagination that dark and silent form seemed the ghost of her dead lover.
She had thrown the candlestick from her as she sprang to her feet. The candle rolled from its socket and fell upon her long night-dress. A moment, and she stood before Maurice’s affrighted sight a pillar of flame.
He flew to her, clasped her in his arms, and trampled on the candle, dragged one of the loose coverings from the furniture, and rolled her in it tightly, firmly, extinguishing the flames in his vigorous grasp. The peril, the horror, had been but momentary, yet he feared the shock might be fatal. The frail form shivered in his arms. The tender flesh had been scorched.
Even in that moment of terror she still believed him to be her lover.
‘Not a spirit!’ she murmured. ‘Not the shadow of the dead, but living, and returned to me, to rescue, to cherish! Oh, George, is it really you?’
It was the first time he had heard her utter George Penwyn’s name.
‘It is one who will protect and cherish you,’ Maurice said, tenderly. ‘One whom you may trust and cling to in all confidence, one who will restore your daughter to you.’
‘My daughter, my baby girl!’ she cried. ‘No? you can never do that on earth; in heaven we shall meet again, perhaps, and know each other, but never in this life. She was taken away from me, and they murdered her.’
‘No; she was given into safe hands, she was loved and cared for. Years have passed since then, and she has grown up into a beautiful young woman. You shall see her again, live with her, and she will love and honour you.’
‘I don’t want her, I want my lovely baby, the little child they took away from me. The baby that lay in my arms, and clung to my breast for one short hour before it was taken away.’
She shuddered, and a faint moan broke from her lips.
‘You are in pain,’ said Maurice.
‘Yes, the fire is burning still. It scorches me to the heart.’
He took her up in his arms with infinite tenderness, and carried her across the loft, and down the narrow stair, making his way amidst those massive cross-beams, and by those steep steps with extreme caution, lighted only by the pale glimmer of a fading moon.
Once at the bottom of the stairs, and in the broad corridor, his way was easy enough. He carried his light burden through the silent house, across the empty hall, to old Mrs. Trevanard’s room. Here he laid her gently on the sofa before awaking the blind grandmother. He found a candle on the table, and a match-box on the mantelpiece, and was soon provided with a light.
His first look was at Muriel. She had fainted, and lay motionless where he had placed her—white and death-like.
He went to Mrs. Trevanard’s bedside, and woke her gently.
‘Dear Mrs. Trevanard, there has been an accident. Your granddaughter is hurt; not seriously, I trust, but the shock has made her faint. Will you give her some kind of restorative, while I go and call the servants?’
He left the room for this purpose, hurried to the end of the house where he had been told the servants slept, in a room over the kitchen, knocked at the door of this room, and told one of the girls to get up and dress herself as fast as she could, and come to Mrs. Trevanard’s room without a moment’s loss of time. This done, he hastened back to Muriel, and found the blind grandmother administering to her—holding a glass containing some cordial of her own concoction to the white lips of the sufferer.
‘Why did you persuade me to leave my door open?’ exclaimed Mrs. Trevanard, reproachfully. ‘See what harm has come of it.’
‘Not much harm, I trust in Providence. There has been a shock, but I hope no real injury.’
‘What was it? Did she fall?’
‘No, it was worse than a fall.’
He told how the flame had caught Muriel’s thin night-gear, and how rapidly it had been extinguished.
‘If you will tell me where to find your doctor, I will saddle one of the farm horses and ride over to fetch him, however far it may be,’ said Maurice.
‘You ride!’ cried Mrs. Trevanard, contemptuously, ‘and how are you to find your way from here to Seacomb before daybreak?’
‘I am not afraid. I have driven the road often with Martin.’
‘Let Martin go. He has known the way from childhood.’
This seemed a reasonable suggestion, and Maurice hurried off to wake Martin, just as Ph?be the housemaid arrived on the scene, sleepy, but sympathetic. She had expected to find old Mrs. Trevanard ill; in fact, had made up her mind that the old lady had had ‘a stroke,’ and was at her last gasp. She was therefore surprised to find the blind woman keen and active, only needing the aid of some one with eyes, to carry out her instructions.
Maurice was not sorry to remain on the spot while Martin went for the doctor, feeling that coolness and nerve might be needful.
Martin was up and dressed in the briefest possible space of time, and ran out to the stables to saddle the useful hack which was kept for the dog-cart. Day was beginning to show faint and pale in the east as he galloped away by the road that led to Seacomb, the same road by which Matthew Elgood and his wife had gone in the chill March morning, twenty years before, with Muriel’s child in their custody.
Maurice walked up and down the hall, listening for any sound from that inner room, and in half an hour had the satisfaction of hearing that she was sleeping tranquilly, and that she had been very little burned.
‘Thank God!’ he ejaculated fervently. ‘If this accident had been fatal I should have deemed myself her murderer.’
At seven o’clock the doctor arrived, an old man with a wise, kind face. He had assisted at Muriel’s birth, and had been in some measure familiar with the various stages of her life, though never entrusted with the fatal family secret.
He made light of the accident.
‘A shock to the system, undoubtedly,’ he said, ‘but I trust not involving any danger. Indeed, I am not without hope that it may have a beneficial effect in subduing that restlessness which Mrs. Trevanard tells me is the worst feature of the case. Anything which would induce repose would be favourable, and, by and by, perhaps, change of air and scene—a total change of surroundings—might do good in weaning the mind from old impressions, introducing, if I may say so, a new colour into the patient’s life. I have often suggested this to our worthy friend the late Mrs. Trevanard, but without effect. She had her prejudices, good soul, and she thought her daughter could only be properly cared for at home.’
‘And do you think your patient might soon be moved?’ asked Maurice, who had a scheme for bringing mother and daughter together.
‘Well, not immediately. Under present circumstances rest is most to be desired, but when strength returns I feel assured that change would be advantageous.’
When he had heard all the doctor had to say and eaten a hasty breakfast, Maurice went quietly upstairs, and having reconnoitred the corridor, and assured himself that there was nobody about to watch his movements, ascended that upper staircase leading to the loft.
It was broad daylight now in that chaotic cavern formed by the roof of the old house. The sunshine streamed in through the broken skylight, revealing every cobweb which festooned the old oak rafters. Maurice stepped cautiously across the creaking timbers which roughly floored the chamber, and approached the pile of disused furniture, in front of which stood the little wicker cradle where Muriel had hidden her letters.
Were they actual letters, Maurice wondered, or only scraps of worthless paper which her distraught fancy had invested with meaning and importance? Had she hidden her lover’s letters here in the days when her mind was bright and clear, or had she strayed hither in the cunning of madness, to secrete the maniac’s treasures of straws and shreds and discarded scraps of paper? He knelt beside the cradle as she had knelt, and turned out the little sheets and blankets, the small down pillows. Yes; there were letters under the mattress, a small packet of letters written in rusty ink on discoloured paper, tied with a faded ribbon.
‘These may be worth something in the way of evidence,’ he said to himself.
He read them one after another as he knelt there. They told the old story of deathless love doomed to die, of bright hopes never to blossom into reality. They all began ‘My beloved wife,’ they were all signed ‘Your devoted husband, George Penwyn.’ They were all addressed on the cover, which was an integral part of each letter, ‘Miss Muriel Trevanard, Borcel End, near Seacomb.’
There could be no doubt as to the identity of the person to whom the letters had been written. There could be no doubt as to the writer’s recognition of that person as his lawful wife. ‘My Muriel, my darling wife,’ occurred many times in the letters. Nor was this all—in these letters, written in all love and confidence, George Penwyn made frequent allusion to the motives which had led to his secret marriage. His whole mind was here laid bare, his hope of the Squire’s relenting in time to come, his plans for the future, his intention to declare his marriage at any hazard, immediately upon his return to England, his willingness to face poverty, if need were, with Muriel.
‘But I am not without the hope,’ he wrote in one of the later letters, ‘that my absence from England for two or three years will have a good effect upon my father’s feelings towards me. He is sore now on account of my having neglected what he was pleased to consider a grand opportunity of enlarging and consolidating the Penwyn Estate. But I know that in his heart he loves me best of all his sons, and that it would lacerate that heart to disinherit me. Time will blunt the edge of his angry feelings, and when I come back, perhaps with some little distinction as a soldier, he will be inclined to look leniently upon my choice.’
In another letter he hinted at the possible arising of circumstances which would oblige Muriel to leave her home.
‘I could not go away without being assured that you have a friend and counsellor ready to aid you in any difficulty,’ he wrote. ‘I have a staunch friend in Mr. Tomlin, the lawyer, of Seacomb, and I herewith enclose a letter which I have written to him, informing him of our marriage, and enlisting his sympathy and assistance for you, should you need them. He will do all that friendship and discretion, can inspire, both to secure your comfort and happiness, your safety and respectability of surroundings under all circumstances, and also to assure the preservation of our secret. Give your mind no trouble, darling, whatever may happen, but trust implicitly in Mr. Tomlin’s wisdom and kindness, and believe that, distant as I may be in the body, there is no hour of the day or night in which I am not near you in the spirit.’
The letter, addressed to William Tomlin, Esq., Solicitor, Seacomb, was here—the seal unbroken.
Maurice had no doubt that the possible difficulty foreseen by the young husband before he left England, was the difficulty which had actually arisen in the birth of Justina. But why had this letter been left undelivered? How came it that this unhappy wife—finding herself in the most miserable position a woman could be placed in—her honour doubted even by her own mother—should have refrained from applying to the friend and adviser to whom her husband had recommended her, and to whose allegiance he had confided her future?
Had she deliberately chosen to endure unmerited disgrace in her own home, rather than avail herself of Mr. Tomlin’s aid—or had her brain already begun to fail at the time when her trouble fell upon her, rendering her incapable of taking the most obvious as well as the most rational course?
This question sorely puzzled Maurice, and was for the time unanswerable. He put the letters in his breast pocket, feeling that with this documentary evidence to strengthen Justina’s case, there must be little doubt as to the issue. The only question open to dispute in the face of the marriage register, and of these letters, would be the identity of Justina. He went downstairs, and out of the house, and took a long ramble across the upland fields, with the Atlantic before him—his favourite walk at all times, these bleak fields of turnip or mangold, high above the roaring waves and wild romantic coast, with its jagged peaks and natural arches and obelisks of serpentine.
There were a family of cormorants disporting themselves among the rocks—one solitary herring-boat bobbing up and down in the distance, a man shovelling up seaweed into a cart on the beach; and this, save for the flash of a sea-gull’s silver wing now and then, was all the life visible from the turnip-field on the cliff. Here Martin came presently, refreshed by a couple of hours’ sleep after his long ride.
‘I thought I should find you here,’ he said, ‘when I missed you in the house. Poor Muriel is going on very comfortably. I was with her just now when she awoke. She knew me, for a wonder, and was more gentle than I have found her for a long time, but the shock seems to have weakened her very much.’
‘One could hardly expect it could be otherwise. A few days’ rest will restore her, I trust. Believe me, Martin, no one could be more anxious about her than I.’
‘I am sure of that, dear fellow.’
‘And now answer me a question. Did you ever hear the name of Tomlin?’
‘Yes, there is a solicitor of that name at Seacomb.’
‘An old man?’
‘No, middle-aged, at most. I should think him barely forty.’
‘Then he is not the man I want. He had a father before him, I suppose?’
‘Yes, old Mr. Tomlin was a wonderful fellow, I believe, universally respected. I never saw him to my knowledge, for he died when I was a youngster, but I have often heard my father talk of him.’
Half an hour afterwards, when they were seated at the farmer’s early dinner, Maurice took occasion to question Michael Trevanard on the same subject.
‘Old Mr. Tomlin?’ said the farmer. ‘Yes, I remember him well, though he never did any business for me. A very worthy man, everybody liked him; a lawyer in a thousand, a thoroughly honest man. He died suddenly, poor fellow. Left his house one morning in excellent health to attend the petty sessions, and was seized with a stroke of apoplexy in the court and never spoke again. His funeral was one of the grandest I ever saw in Seacomb.’
‘Do you happen to remember the year of his death?’
‘Yes, I remember it well, for it occurred in the winter, before Muriel’s long illness. He died in December, 1847. This explained Muriel’s conduct. Death had snatched away the one friend to whom she could have made her appeal.’