Works of Ellen Wood, page 436
Crossing the room, she stirred the fire into a blaze, rang for the lamp, and turned to Laura; speaking sharply.
“Why are you in the dark, Laura?”
“Because Pompey did not bring in the lamp, I suppose,” returned Laura, in tones breathing somewhat of incipient defiance.
Jane pressed down her anger, her fear, and composed her manner to calmness. “I did not know you had returned, Mr. Carlton,” she said. “Have you been here long?”
“Long enough to talk secrets to Laura,” he laughingly replied, in a bold spirit. “And now I will go up to Captain Chesney.”
He met the black servant carrying the lamp in as he quitted the room. Pompey was getting to be quite an old man now; he had been in Captain Chesney’s service for many years.
“Leave the shutters for the present, Pompey,” said his mistress; “come in again by-and-by. What is all this, Laura?” she added impatiently, as the man left the room.
Laura Chesney remained at the window, looking out into the darkness, her heart full of rebellion. “What is what?” she asked.
“What did Mr. Carlton mean — that he had been talking secrets to you?”
“It was a foolish remark to make.”
“And he presumed to speak of you by your Christian name!”
“Did he?”
“Did he! Did you not notice it? Laura, I — I thought — I thought I saw your head leaning upon him,” returned Jane, speaking as if the very utterance of the words choked her.
“You are fanciful,” answered the younger sister. “You always were so.”
Were the words spoken in subterfuge? Jane feared so. “Oh, Laura!” she exclaimed in agitation, “I have heard of young ladies allowing themselves to be on these familiar terms with men, receiving homage from them in their vanity, caresses even in their love! Surely nothing of the sort is arising between you and Mr. Carlton?”
Laura made no reply.
“Laura,” continued Jane in a sharp, ringing tone of pain, “do you like him? Oh, take care what you are about! You know you could never marry Mr. Carlton.”
“I do not tell you that I like him,” faltered Laura, some of her courage beginning to forsake her, “But why could I not marry him?”
“Marry him! You! The daughter of Captain Chesney marry a common country apothecary! The niece—”
“There! don’t go on, Jane; that’s enough,” — and the young lady stamped her foot passionately.
“But I must speak. You are Miss Laura Chesney—”
“I tell you, Jane, I won’t listen to it. I am tired of hearing who we are and what we are. What though we have great and grand connections, — do they do us any good? Does it bring plenty to our home? — does it bring us the amusement and society we have a right to expect? Jane! I am tired of it all. There are moments when I feel tempted to go and do as Clarice has done.”
There was a long pause — a pause of pain; for Laura had alluded to the one painful subject of the Chesneys’ later life. Jane at length broke the silence.
“It would be better for you, even that, than marrying Mr. Carlton,” she said in a hushed voice. “Laura, were Mr. Carlton our equal, I could not see you marry him.”
Laura turned from the window now, turned in her surprise. “Why?”
“I do not know how it is that I have taken so great a dislike to Mr. Carlton,” continued Miss Chesney in a dreamy tone, not so much answering Laura as communing with herself. “Laura, I cannot bear Mr. Carlton. It seems to me that I would rather see you in your grave than united to him, were he the first match in England.”
“But I ask you why.”
“I cannot explain it. For one thing — but I don’t care to speak of that. You have accused me before now, Laura, of taking prejudices without apparent reason; I have taken one against Mr, Carlton.”
Laura tossed her head.
“But — in speaking with reference to yourself — we have been supposing for argument’s sake that he was your equal,” resumed Jane. “He is not so; he never can be; therefore we may let the subject drop.”
“What were you going to urge against him, the one thing that you would not speak of?” returned Laura.
“It may be as well not to mention it.”
“But I shall be very much obliged to you to mention it, Jane. I think you ought to do so.”
“Well then — but you will think me foolish — Mr. Carlton was so mixed up, and unfavourably, with that dreadful dream I had of Clarice on Monday night. I never liked Mr. Carlton, but since that night I seem to have had a horror of him. I cannot help this, Laura; I dare say it is very foolish; but — we cannot account for these things.”
How foolish Laura Chesney thought it, the haughty contempt of her countenance fully told. She would not condescend to answer it; it was altogether beneath her notice; or she deemed it so.
Jane Chesney took her work-basket and sat down near the lamp. She was looking at some work, when a violent rapping overhead of Captain Chesney’s stick was heard, and Lucy came flying downstairs and burst into the room.
“Oh, Jane!” she exclaimed, “Lady Oakburn’s dead.”
Jane dropped her work; Laura moved to the table, aroused to excitement.
“Dead!” repeated Jane. “And when she wrote to me last week she was so well!”
“Jane, Jane, you don’t understand,” said the child. “It is young Lady Oakburn; not our old aunt the dowager. And a little baby has died with her.”
The rapping stick overhead had never ceased. Jane, recovering her scattered senses, ran upstairs, the others following her. Captain Chesney was on his couch, all turmoil and impatience, rapping incessantly; and Mr. Carlton sat near him, evidently at a loss to comprehend what caused the tumult. A shaded candle was on the table, but the blaze of the fire fell full on the surgeon’s impassive face, curious and inquiring now. It appeared that he had been conversing with his patient when Lucy saw something in the Times newspaper, which was lying partly folded on the table, having only recently been brought in, and she read it out aloud to her father.
Captain Chesney lifted his stick and brought it down on the table after his own fashion, as they entered. “Take up that newspaper, Jane,” he exclaimed, “and see what it is that Lucy has stumbled upon in the deaths.”
Jane Chesney ran her eyes downwards from the top of the column and caught sight of something in the notice of births, which she read aloud.
“On the 12th instant, in South Audley Street, the Countess of Oakburn of a daughter.”
Then in the deaths: —
“On the 14th instant, in South Audley Street, aged twenty-one, Maria, the beloved wife of the Earl of Oakburn.”
“On the 14th instant, in South Audley Street, Clarice, the infant child of the Earl of Oakburn.”
Jane’s voice ceased, and the captain brought his stick on the floor with one melancholy thump, as did Uncle Toby his staff, in the colloquy with Corporal Trim.
“Gone! “ uttered he. “The young wife gone before the old grandmother!”
“Did you know the parties, sir?” asked Mr. Carlton.
“Know them, sir!” returned the choleric captain, angry at having, as he deemed, so foolish a question put to him. “I ought to know them, for they are my blood relations.”
“I was not aware of it,” said Mr. Carlton.
“No, sir, perhaps you were not aware of it, but it’s true, for all that. My father, sir, was the Honourable Frank Chesney, the second son of the ninth Earl of Oakburn and brother to the tenth earl; and the late earl, eleventh in succession, and father of the present earl, was my own cousin. It’s a shame that it should be true,” continued the captain, his stick noisily enforcing every other word: “a shame that I should be so near to the peerage of England, and yet be a poor half-pay navy captain! Merit goes for nothing in this world, and relationship goes for less. If the late earl had chosen to exert himself, I should have been an admiral long ago. There have been Admiral Chesneys who distinguished themselves in their day, and perhaps I should have made no exception,” he concluded, with a violent accession of the stick accompaniment.
“They named the little child ‘Clarice,’ you see, papa,” observed Jane, after a pause.
“As if the old dowager would let them name her anything else!” cried the captain. “You don’t know the Dowager Countess of Oakburn, probably, Mr. Carlton; the present earl’s grandmother?”
“No, sir, I do not.”
“You have lost nothing. She is his grandmother, and my aunt; and of all the pig-headed, selfish, opinionated old women, she’s the worst. When Jane was born” — nodding towards his daughter— “she says to me, ‘You’ll name her Clarice, Frank.’ ‘No, I won’t,’ I said, ‘I shall call her by her mother’s name,’ — which was Jane. The same thing over again when Laura was born. You’ll name her Clarice, Frank, and I’ll stand godmother,’ cries the countess. ‘No, I won’t,’ I said, ‘I shall name her after my sister Laura’ — who had died. And then my lady and I had a lasting quarrel. Her own name’s Clarice, you see. Yes! I am as near as that to the great Oakburns (who are as poor as church mice for their rank, all the whole lot), and I’m a half-pay captain, hard up for a shilling.”
“Are there many standing between you and the title, sir?” asked Mr. Carlton.
“There’s not one between me and the title,” was the answer. “If the earl should die without children, I become Earl of Oakburn. What of that? He is a young man and I am an old one. He’ll soon be marrying again, and getting direct heirs about him.”
“I think if I were as near the British peerage as that, I should be speculating upon reaching it,” said Mr. Carlton, with a genial laugh.
“And prove yourself a fool for your pains,” retorted the blunt old sailor. “No; it’s bad enough looking after old men’s dead shoes; but it’s worse looking after young ones’. I thank goodness I have not been idiot enough for that. I never, sir, allowed myself to glance at the possibility of becoming Earl of Oakburn; never. There was also another heir before me, the young earl’s brother, Arthur Chesney, but he died. He got into a boating row at Cambridge a year or two back, and was drowned. Jane, you must see to the mourning.”
Jane’s heart sank with dismay at the prospect of the unexpected outlay. “Need we go to the expense, papa?” she faltered.
“Need we go to the expense!” roared the captain, his tongue and his stick going together, “what do you mean? You’d let the young countess go into her grave, and not put on mourning for her? You are out of your senses, Miss Chesney.”
Mr. Carlton rose. He buttoned his coat over his slender and very gentlemanly figure, and contrived to whisper a word to Laura as he was departing.
“Be at ease, my darling. You shall be mine. Should they deny you to me, I will steal you from them.”
Her hand was momentarily in his; his breath mingled with hers, so low had he bent to her; and Laura, with a crimson face and an apprehensive heart, glanced round to see if Jane was watching. But Jane had stooped over the gouty foot, in compliance with some sudden demand of Captain Chesney’s.
CHAPTER XVII.
MR. CARLTON’S DEMAND.
A SHORT time went by, just a week or two, and the excitement caused by Mrs. Crane’s death was beginning in some degree to subside. No discoveries had been made, no tidings obtained as to who she was or what she was; no light whatever had arisen to clear up the mystery of her death. It is just possible the police did not bestir themselves in the search so actively and perseveringly as they might have done; there were no distressed surviving relatives to urge them on; there was no reward offered as a spur to exertion: and the poor young lady, who had arrived so strangely at South Wennock, apparently friendless and unknown, seemed likely to remain unknown for ever.
Things were progressing at the house of Captain Chesney. Progressing to an issue that not one of its inmates as yet dreamed of. The captain himself was not progressing. Through some imprudence of his own he had been thrown back in his recovery, and was still a prisoner to his room. The crape band placed on his hat for the young Countess of Oakburn had not yet been worn, and Jane Chesney was already beginning to be in trouble over the bills sent in for the mourning of herself and her sisters. The disagreeable servant Rhode had departed, and Judith Ford had entered in her place.
So far, so good. But that was not all.
Captain Chesney’s relapse afforded an excuse for the more frequent visits of Mr. Carlton. The fractious invalid complacently set them down to anxiety for himself, and thought what an attentive doctor he possessed. Jane was half in doubt whether the two visits daily — the short one in the morning, snatched while Mr. Carlton was on his round to his other patients; the long, gossiping one in the evening — had their rise in any motive so praiseworthy: but as she saw no further reprehensible signs of intimacy between the surgeon and her sister, she hoped for the best.
Unknown to Jane Chesney, however, Mr. Carlton and Laura did contrive to snatch occasionally sundry stolen moments of interview. In one of these, Mr. Carlton told her that the time had come for his speaking out to Captain Chesney. His father, who had been — he emphatically said it — a bad father to him for years, who had turned a resolutely deaf ear to any mention of his son’s possible marriage, who would never suffer a hint of such a future contingency to be mentioned in his presence, nay, who threatened to invoke all kinds of ill upon his head if he contracted one, had suddenly veered round to the opposite extreme. Nothing brings a bad or careless man to his senses sooner than to find himself struck down by unexpected or desperate sickness, where the grave is seen with its portals already opening. Such an illness had overtaken Mr. Carlton the elder, and perhaps had been the means of changing his policy. One thing it certainly effected: a reconciliation with his son. From his residence in the east of London, a handsome house in a bad district, where he lay, as he thought, dying, he sent forth a telegraphic summons to his son at South Wennock, as you have already heard; and though the immediate danger was soon over for the time, some of its penitential effects remained. Mr. Carlton urged marriage upon his son now, telling him it would keep him steady, and he made him a present of a good sum towards setting up his house for the reception of a wife.
The money was only too welcome to Lewis Carlton. No one but himself knew how he had been pushed, how pinched and straitened. He paid certain debts with some of it, and the rest he appropriated to its legitimate purpose — decorating and embellishing his house inside. Many articles of new and costly furniture were ordered in; and Mr. Carlton spared no pains, no money, to make it comfortable for her whom he loved so passionately — Laura Chesney.
It never occurred to him that he could be eventually refused. A demur at first he thought there might be, for Laura had confessed to him how exacting her family was on the score of birth, and Mr. Carlton had no birth to boast of, hardly knew what the word meant. But if Laura had birth, he had a good home, a rising practice, and the expectation of money at his father’s death; and he may be excused for believing that these advantages would finally weigh with Captain Chesney.
With Mr. Carlton, to determine upon a thing was to do it. He had no patience; he could not wait and watch his time; what he resolved to have, he must have at once. This acting upon impulse had cost him something in his life, and perhaps would do so again.
He did as he resolved. He spoke out boldly, and asked Captain Chesney for his daughter Laura. The captain received the offer — well, you had better hear how he received it.
It was proffered at an hour when Jane and Laura were out. Mr. Carlton had an instinctive conviction that Jane Chesney would be against him, and Laura had confirmed him in it; therefore he judged it well to speak when she was out of the way. The captain’s consent gained, he could metaphorically snap his fingers at Miss Chesney. He had paid his morning visit to the captain, and then gone further up the hill to see other patients, but he was not long in doing so, and as he was returning he saw the two Miss Chesneys go out of the gate, in their black silk dresses, and turn toward the town. They did not see him. A moment’s hesitation in his own mind, and Mr. Carlton entered. Lucy came looking from the drawing-room as he invaded the hall, and he went into the drawing-room with her, while Pompey went up to inquire if his master would allow Mr. Carlton five minutes’ private conversation.
“Are you drawing?” Mr. Carlton asked, as he saw signs of employment on the table.
“Yes,” replied Lucy. “I am very fond of drawing, especially landscapes. Jane draws beautifully, and she teaches me. Laura likes music better. See, I have to fill in these trees before Jane comes home; she set me the task.”
“You won’t half do it,” said Mr. Carlton, looking down at the cardboard at which Lucy was now working steadily. “You will want to run away to play, long before that’s done.”
“I may want, perhaps; but I shall not do it. I would not disobey Jane. Besides, it is my duty to attend to my studies.”
“Do you always do your duty?” inquired the surgeon, with a smile.
“Not always, I’m afraid. But I try to do it. Mr. Carlton, I want to ask you something.”
“Ask away, young lady,” said he.
Lucy Chesney laid down her pencil, and turned her sweet, earnest eyes on Mr. Carlton; they were beaming just now with saddened light.
“Was it really true that that poor sick lady was poisoned wilfully? — that some wicked man put the prussic acid in the draught?”
How his mood changed! The question appeared to excite his ire, and an impatient word escaped him.
“What have I done now?” exclaimed Lucy in excessive wonder. “Ought I not to have asked it?”
“I beg your pardon, Miss Lucy,” he said, recovering his equanimity. “The fact is, I have not had a moment’s peace since the inquest. South Wennock has done nothing but din these questions into my ears. I think sometimes I shall be turned into prussic acid myself.”
