A Little World Part 60

For the visitor was already in the room.

"Oh yes! Ah, to be sure!" stammered Richard, striving hard to recover himself, with a miserable mask-like smile overspreading his features.

"Glad to see you--sit down. That will do, Bailly; I'm engaged if any one should call."

The clerk left the office, and closed the door, walking back to his stool with a prominence in one cheek which drew forth sundry winks from fellow-labourers in Pellet and Company's money-mill. But the door of Richard Pellet's private office was thick and baize-lined, and no inkling of the scene within reached the ears of the clerks.

No sooner had the door closed upon them, than the smile was driven from Richard's face by a bitter scowl, and rising from his chair, he took two or three strides to where his visitor stood, hissing between his teeth--"Curse you! what brings you here?" Such a fierce aspect, accompanied as it was by threatening gestures, would have made many recoil; but Richard's visitor stepped towards him, and caught him by the breast, exclaiming--

"I have been unhappy lately; I could not rest there. I want my child!"

"Curse your child!" cried Richard, in an angry whisper, and then, with a cowardly, back-handed blow, he sent the poor creature staggering against the wall; but her countenance hardly underwent a change, as, starting forward again, she caught him once more by the coat, repeating her words--

"I want my child!"

"How dare you come here?" he exclaimed, in a low, angry voice. "How dare you come here to disgrace and annoy me? How came you away from-- from your lodging that I got for you?"

"I came away--I want my child!" was the only reply.

"There! hus.h.!.+ Don't speak so loud!" said Richard, in an angry whisper, as he glanced uneasily at the door, and stepping to it, slipped into its socket a little bra.s.s bolt. "Did I not tell you never to come here? and did you not promise?"

"Yes, yes!" was the hoa.r.s.e answer; "but I want, I will have, our little one. I have been to the man who had it--I found him out; but he would not give it to me. You have told him not. I could not rest for thinking about it. I want my child, and then we will go far away together."

"Go and seek it where it has gone," said Richard, brutally, almost beside himself with suppressed rage;--"it is dead!"

"It is a lie--a lie!" cried the woman, excitedly, her pale face flus.h.i.+ng with anger. "That man told me the same; but he is in your pay, and you have hidden it from me."

She clung to him now fiercely, clutching the ostentatiously-displayed smoothly-plaited s.h.i.+rt-front, and turning it into a crumpled rag.

"Hus.h.!.+ hus.h.!.+ For G.o.d's sake, be still!" he exclaimed. "They will hear you in the outer office. I have not got the child; it died months ago."

"It is a lie!" exclaimed the woman, more angrily. "You drove me mad once with your ill-treatment, but you shall not do it again." Then, raising her voice--"I will have my child!"

As Richard Pellet's face turned of a ghastly muddy hue, he glanced again and again at the door, his hands trembling with the cowardly rage that, under different circ.u.mstances, might have made the life of the woman before him--his wife--not worth a moment's purchase. The coa.r.s.e, heavy, insolent smile was gone; for he was attacked in his weakest point, and already in imagination he could see the side looks and laughter of his clerks, and hear the sneering innuendoes of fellow-men of his own stamp when there was a public _expose_, and Richard Pellet, the wealthy banker, who for the sake of money had kept his weak insane wife in obscurity for years, that he might commit bigamy for the fortune of the Widow Clayton, was arraigned for his offence against his country's laws, and the story of his wife's wrongs came forth.

What was he to do? He must get her away quietly--by subterfuge--he could lead her in one way he knew, and she would not believe the truth.

The scandal, after so many years lying hidden, would now most certainly be bruited abroad. Some men would have laughed it to scorn, and faced it with brazen effrontery; but Richard Pellet was a religious man--a patron of philanthropic societies--even now upon his table lay half-a-dozen annual reports with his name thereon as steward or committee-man, for all men to read. Why, his very sober beneficent look carried weight, and he was always placed in the front rank upon the platform at Exeter Hall meetings. In fact, in May, during the meetings, he adopted white cravats and frills. And now, in spite of money, care, secrecy, this matter would be spread abroad. He could hear it already; and to hide this example of his cruel love of greed, had he dared, and could have hidden the crime, he would have struck down the patient sufferer whom he had treated with such a mingling of cruelty and neglect, dead at his feet, with as little compunction as he had already shown in sending her staggering to the wall.

But the wife of long ago, whose reason had gone astray years before, the soft eyes, the pale face, and trembling lips were here no more; and Richard Pellet, as he shrank from her, felt himself to be almost helpless in the hands of one whose strength was augmented by her position, for he dared not raise his voice. He knew, too, that now the time had gone when he could command, and he must try subterfuge, and get her away abroad, where she would be safely kept. He blamed himself now that he had not placed her in an asylum, but he recalled his reason--it would have been too public a proceeding; and in these fleeting moments the question came, were the gold and position he had won worth the price that he had paid?

As he stood there in her grasp, his mind was made up, and he said quietly, "Sit down."

"No--no--no!" was the hasty reply, as if she dreaded his influence. "I want my child: give me my child, and let me go."

"But, Ellen, this is madness and folly," he whispered. "You know it is not here. He told you that it was dead, did he?"

"Yes," she cried, angrily; "but it was not true. You told him to say so. Where is she now?"

"Look here!" said Richard, writing an address upon a card--that of one of the boarding--houses in the neighbourhood. "Take this and go and wait there till I come, and we will go and see about it. But, for my sake, do not make a disturbance here--it would be ruin to me."

The poor creature, half reft of her senses, gazed earnestly in his face for a few moments, while the angry light faded from her eye. In her tigress-like rage for her lost little one, if met by anger she was ready to dare, urged by her maternal instinct; but these gentle words disarmed her resentment, and falling on her knees at Richard Pellet's feet, she burst into tears, sobbing as she begged of him to let her have her child.

"Yes, yes! you shall; only get up," said Richard. "It shall all be made right, only go now."

"Then you will give her to me?" she said, imploringly. "I will not say a word to any one about being your wife if you will give me my child. I know now why you shut me up there with Mrs Walls. I have thought it out: it was that you might marry some one rich; for I, when my head went, was not fit to be your wife. But I could not help it."

"Well, well; go now," cried Richard, impatiently; "and we will talk about that afterwards."

She rose to her feet slowly, clasping his hand in both her own, and gazing earnestly in his face, as if trying to read his thoughts; and they must have been plain to read, for, as if she saw in his face cruelty, treachery, and a repet.i.tion of her long sufferings, she dashed the hand away, and stood defying him once more, the former rage flas.h.i.+ng in her eyes as she repeated her demand--"Give me my child!"

"Go and wait for me there, then," said Richard, sullenly.

"I will never leave you till I have my child," she exclaimed.

Again the cruel, malignant look came into his face as Richard Pellet cursed laws, protection, everything that stayed him from crus.h.i.+ng out the life that now rose in rebellion against him. He cursed his own hypocrisy, which now fettered him with chains such as stayed him from setting this burden at defiance and casting it off for ever.

"I told you before that she was dead," he now said, throwing himself back in his chair.

"Dead--dead--dead!" echoed his wife, "and I told you it was a lie--a cruel lie--like those you have told me before. But she is not dead.

She was too young, too beautiful to die. Why, I tried to die a hundred times there, in that cold, bare room, in the bitter winters, and I could not. She could not die. You have taken her away, and I will not be cheated again. She is not yours, but mine--mine--my very own. Give me my little one!" she cried, raising her voice.

"Here! come with me, then, and you shall have her!" cried Richard, desperately; and s.n.a.t.c.hing up an overcoat, and b.u.t.toning it closely over his breast, he led the way into the outer office. "Back in an hour," he said abruptly; and then, closely followed by his unwelcome visitor, he pa.s.sed into the street, called the first cab he encountered, and, after giving some instructions to the driver, he motioned to his wife to enter; but she refused until he had set the example, when, following him, she took the opposite seat, and the door was slammed, and the vehicle driven off.

The clerks in the outer office suspended work as soon as the heavy door swung to, and began to give due attention to this strange visit, which was on all sides declared to be "a rum go," when the door again opened, and Harry Clayton entered.

"Mr Pellet returned?" he asked.

"Been at the office again, sir; but he has just gone out with a lady.

Said he would be back in an hour."

"I'll wait," said Harry, and he sat for an hour, and then for another, but still Richard did not return, so he left, and slowly sauntered towards London Bridge.

"I don't want to give him the opportunity of saying I avoided him,"

thought Harry, and then his thoughts turned towards money matters, and the possibility of Richard being compelled to disgorge a portion of the money that should by rights have been Mrs Clayton's son's--he did not know that it was in his power to make him give up all. Then he began to wonder what sort of a reception he should meet with. The last encounter had been far from cordial, and since his mother's funeral, Harry's letters had been but few and far between.

"I will see him, though," said Harry, "if I follow him for a week."

Volume 3, Chapter XX.

BEATING THE BARS.

"Now!" exclaimed Richard Pellet, as soon as he and his unwelcome visitor were in the cab, "will you wait patiently, if I take you somewhere, till I can place you where you will see your little one?"

She gazed long and earnestly in his face before answering.

"Will you keep your word?"

"I will!" he said, and she bent her head, when, lowering the front window, Richard gave fresh instructions to the driver, who drew up at the end of a long busy street.