Paul Gosslett's Confessions in Love, Law, and The Civil Service Part 9

Although my contention with the company still continued, and some new menace of law was sure to reach me by every second post, and my own counsel feelingly warned me that I had n't an inch of ground to stand on, and my costs when "cast" would be something overwhelming, I had steeled myself so thoroughly to all consequences, had so resolved to make the most of the present, that I read these minatory doc.u.ments with an unmoved heart, and a degree of placid composure that now strikes me as something heroic.

I was sitting one evening in study, thinking over these things,--not depressively, not desperately; for, strangely enough, since misfortune had befallen me, I had acquired a most wonderful stock of equanimity; but I was canva.s.sing with myself what was to come next, when the fatal hour struck, as strike it must, that sounded my expulsion from Eden, when a gentle tap came to my door. I said, "Come in;" and Virginie, Mrs. Dacre's French maid, entered. She was profuse of apologies for "deranging" me. She was in despair at the bare thought of interrupting I do not know what or which of my learned occupations, but her mistress had had an accident!

"An accident!" I started as I repeated the word.

"Oh! it was not serious," she said, with a sweet smile. "It was only troublesome, as occurring in a remote spot, and to a person who, like Madame, was of such refined delicacy, and who could not bear consulting a strange physician,--her own doctor was on his way from India,"--she went on rambling thus, so that it was with difficulty I learned at last, that Madame, when feeding the gold-fish in the pond of the garden, had stepped on the rock-work and turned her ankle. The pain was very great, and Virginie feared something had been broken, though Madame was certain it was a mere sprain; and now, as the doctor had been dismissed, Madame wished to know where medical advice could be soonest obtained. I at once declared I was fully competent to treat such an injury. I had studied surgery, and could certainly p.r.o.nounce whether the case was a grave one or a mere pa.s.sing accident. Virginie smiled dubiously.

"Monsieur was very young. Madame never consulted a doctor under fifty-five or sixty."

"Possibly," suggested I, "in an ordinary case, and where there were time and opportunity to choose; but here, and with an accident,--an accident that, if neglected or improperly treated--"

"Ah, _mon Dieu!_" cried she, "don't say it! Don't say there might be unhappy results; come at once and see her!" She almost dragged me along, such was her impatience, to her mistress's room; and in less than a minute I was standing beside a sofa in a half-darkened room, where a lady lay, her face closely veiled, and a large shawl so enveloping her that all guess as to her figure or probable age was impossible. A light cambric handkerchief was spread over one foot, which rested on a cus.h.i.+on, and this kerchief the maid hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed away as I approached, saying,--"Monsieur is a doctor himself, Madame, and will cure you immediately."

"La!" cried she, pointing to the foot. "La!"

And certainly I needed no more formal invitation to gaze on a foot and ankle of such faultless mould and symmetry as never, even in the Greek statues, had I seen equalled. Whether there had not been time for the process of inflammation to have set up swelling or disfigurement, or whether the injury itself had been less grave than might have been apprehended, I am not able to say; but the beautiful proportions of that rounded instep, the tapering of the foot, the hollowing of the sole, the slightly mottled marble of the flesh, the blue veins swelling through the transparent skin, were all uninjured and unmarred. Ivory itself could not have been more smoothly turned than the ankle, nor of a more dazzling whiteness. To have been permitted to kneel down and kiss that foot, I would have sworn myself her slave forever. I suppose I must have shown some signs of the rapture that was consuming me, for the maid said,--"What does the man mean? has he lost his senses?"

"I must examine the part," said I; and, kneeling down, I proceeded with what I imagined to be a most chirurgical air, to investigate the injury.

As a wors.h.i.+pper might have touched a holy relic, I suffered my hand to glide over that beautifully rounded instep, but all so delicately and gently that I could not say whether the thrill that touch sent through me was not the act of my own nerves. She seemed, however, to tremble; her foot moved slightly, and a gentle action of her shoulders, like a shudder, bespoke pain. It was the sort of movement that one might make in being tickled; and as great agony causes this movement occasionally, I said, "I trust I have not hurt you? I 'd not have done so for worlds."

She took her handkerchief and pressed it to her face, and I thought she sobbed; but she never said a word.

"Alors!" cried the maid. "What do you say is to be done?"

"Ice," said I. "Iced water and perfect repose."

"And where are we to get ice in this barbarous place?"

"Madame," said I, "the place is less savage than you deem, and ice shall be procured. There is a monastery at Offenbach where they have ice throughout the year. I will despatch an estafette there at once."

The lady bent forward, and whispered something in the maid's ear.

"Madame desires to thank you sincerely," said the maid. "She is much impressed by your consideration and kindness."

"I will return in a couple of hours," said I, with a most doctorial sententiousness, and in reality eagerly desiring to be alone, and in the privacy of my own room, before I should break out in those wild ecstasies which I felt were struggling within me for utterance.

I sat down to make a clean breast of it in these confessions, but I must ask my reader to let me pa.s.s over unrecorded the extravagances I gave way to when once more alone.

There are men--I am one of them--who require, const.i.tutionally require, to be in love. That necessity which Don Quixote proclaimed to be a condition of knightly existence,--the devotion to a mistress,--is an essential to certain natures. This species of temperament pertained to me in my boyhood. It has followed me through life with many pains and suffering, but also with great compensations. I have ever been a poor man,--my friends can tell that I have not been a lucky one,--and yet to be rich and fortunate together, I would not resign that ecstasy, that sentiment of love, which, though its object may have changed, has still power to warm up the embers of my heart, and send through me a glow that revives the days of my hot youth and my high hopes.

I was now in love, and cared as little for Boards of Directors and resolutions pa.s.sed in committee as for the ordinances of the Grand Lama.

It might rain mandamuses and warrants, they had no power to trouble me.

As I wended my way to No. 4 with my bowl of ice, I felt like a votary bearing his offering to the shrine of his patron saint. My gift might lie on the altar, but the incense of my devotion soared up to heaven.

I would gladly have visited her every hour, but she would only permit me to come twice a day. I was also timid, and when Virginie said my ten minutes was up I was dismissed. I tried to bribe Virginie, but the unworthy creature imagined, with the levity of her nation, I had designs on her own affections, and threatened to denounce me to her mistress,--a menace which cost me much mortification and more money.

I don't know that the cure made great progress,--perhaps I have learned since why this was so; at all events, I pursued my treatment with a.s.siduity, and was rewarded with a few soft-voiced words, as thus: "How kind you are!" "What a gentle hand you have!" "How pleasant that ice is!" At length she was able to move about the room. I wished to offer my arm, but she declined. Virginie was strong enough to support her. How I detested that woman! But for her, how many more opportunities had I enjoyed of offering small services and attentions! Her very presence was a perpetual restraint. She never took her eyes off me while I was in the room with her mistress,--black-beady, inexpressive eyes for the most part, but with something devilish in their inscrutability that always frightened me. That she saw the pa.s.sion that was consuming me, that she read me in my alternate paroxysm of delight or despair, was plain enough to me; but I could not make her my friend. She would take my presents freely, but always with the air of one whose silence was worth buying at any price, but whose co-operation or a.s.sistance no sum could compa.s.s.

Her very mode of accepting my gifts had something that smote terror into me. She never thanked me, nor even affected grat.i.tude. She would shake her head mournfully and gloomily, as though matters had come to a pretty pa.s.s between us, and as though some dreadful reckoning must one day be expected to account for all this corruption. "Ah, Monsieur Gosslett,"

said she one day with a sigh, "what a precipice we are all standing beside! Have you thought of the ruin you are leading us to?" These were very strange words; and though I took my watch and chain from my pocket, and gave them to her in order to induce her to explain her meaning, she only burst into tears and rushed out of the room. Was I then the happiest of mortals or the most wretched? Such was the problem that drove sleep that long night from my eyelids, and found me still trying to solve it when the day broke.

Days would often pa.s.s now without Mrs. Dacre permitting me to visit her, and then Virginie significantly hinted that she was right in this,--that it was for my good as well as her own, and so on. I mourned over my banishment and bewailed it bitterly. "One would think, sir, you forget my mistress was married," said Virginie to me one day; and I protest it was no more than the truth. I had completely, utterly forgotten it; and the stern fact thus abruptly announced almost felled me to the earth.

Mrs. Dacre had promised to take a drive with me as soon as she felt able to bear the motion of a carriage; but though I often recalled the pledge, she found excuses of one kind or other to defer performance, and as I now rarely saw her, she would write me a line, sometimes two lines, on a sc.r.a.p of paper, which Virginie would lay open on my table and generally shake her head very meaningly as I read it.

If Mrs. Dacre's notes were very brief, they were not less enigmatical,--she was the strangest writer that ever put pen to paper.

Thus, to give an instance: the ice application she always referred to as "my coldness," and she would say, "How long is your coldness to continue? have I not had enough of it yet? This coldness is becoming tiresome, and if it be continued, how am I to go out with you?" In another note, referring to our intended drive, she says, "If it is a question of running away, I must have a word to say first; for though I believe you have no fears on that score, I am not so courageous."

Virginie had been telling stories about my ponies; they were frisky, it is true, and it was thus her mistress alluded to them. Some disparagement of me as a whip provoked this remark from her: "As the time draws nearer, I ask myself, Shall I trust myself to your guidance?

Who can say what may come of it?"

At last came this one line: "I have summoned up all my courage, and I will go with you this evening. Come up at eight, and I will be ready."

I ought to have mentioned before this that for nigh three weeks a vulgar-looking man, middle-aged and robust, had come to take the waters; and though he only spoke a few words of bad French, being English, had continued to put himself on terms of intimacy with all the subordinates of the household, and was constantly seen laughing with the boatmen and trying to converse with the gardeners.

Deechworth had conceived suspicion about him from the first; he connected him with the law proceedings that the company had inst.i.tuted against me, and warned me to be cautious of the man. His opinion was that he belonged to the "Force." "I know it, sir," said he, "by his walk and his laugh." The detectives, according to Deechworth, have a laugh quite peculiar to themselves; it never takes them off what they are saying or thinking about In fact, it is like the ba.s.soon in a band; it serves just to mark the time while the air is being played by the other instruments.

"I don't like that Mr. Bracken, sir," Deechworth would say; "he ain't here for no good, you'll see, sir;" and it is not improbable that I should have perfectly agreed with this opinion if I had ever troubled my head about him at all, but the fact was my mind was very differently occupied. All Scotland Yard and Sir Richard himself might have been domiciled at the establishment without their ever giving me a moment of uneasy reflection.

Whether Mrs. Dacre's scruples were those of prudery or cowardice, whether she dreaded me as a companion or feared me as a coachman, I cannot say; but she constantly put off our intended drive, and though occasionally the few words in which she made her apologies set my heart half wild with delight, simply because I pleased to read them in a sense of my own invention, yet I grew feverish and uneasy at these delays. At last there came the one line in pencil, "I have made up my mind I will go with you to-morrow evening." It is in no extravagance or mock rapture I say it, but in plain homely truth, I would not have changed that sc.r.a.p of paper for a check of ten thousand on Coutts.

It was my habit to lay all the little notes I received from her before me on my writing-table, and as I pa.s.sed them under review, to weave out for myself a story of the progress of my love. The servants who waited on me, and who alone entered my study, were foreigners, and ignorant of English, so that I could permit myself this indulgence without fear. Now, on the afternoon on which I had received the latest of her despatches, I sauntered out into the wood to be alone with my own thoughts, unmolested and undisturbed. I wandered on for hours, too happy to count the time, and too deeply lost in my imaginings to remember anything but my own fancies. What was to come of this strange imbroglio in which I now stood; how was Fate about to deal with me? I had clearly arrived at a point where the roads led right and left Which was I to take, and which was the right one?

Thus canva.s.sing and discussing with myself, it was very late ere I got back to the castle; but I carried the key of a small portal gate that admitted me to my own quarters un.o.bserved, and I could enter or pa.s.s out unnoticed. As I found myself in my study and lit my lamp, I turned to my writing-table. I started with amazement on discovering that the little notes and sc.r.a.ps of paper which bore Mrs. Dacre's writing had disappeared. These, and a small notebook, a sort of diary of my own, had been taken away; and that the act was not that of a common thief was clear, from the fact that a valuable silver inkstand and an onyx seal mounted in gold, and some other small objects of value lay about untouched. A cold sweat broke over me as I stood there overwhelmed and panic-stricken by this discovery. The terrors of a vague and undefined danger loom over a man with an intensity far greater than the fears of a known and palpable peril. I examined the fastenings of the door and the windows to see whether force had been used, but there was no sign of such. And as I had locked the door when leaving and found it locked on my return, how had this thief found entrance except by a key? I rung the bell; but the servants were all in bed, and it was long before any one replied to my summons. Of course, servant-like, they had seen nothing, heard nothing. I sent for Deechworth; he was asleep, and came unwillingly and angry at being routed out of bed. He, too, knew nothing.

He questioned me closely as to whether I had seen the papers on my table before I left home for my walk, and half vexed me by the pertinacity of his examination, and, finally, by the way in which he depreciated the value of my loss, and congratulated me on the circ.u.mstance that nothing of real worth had been abstracted. This was too much for my patience, and I declared that I had rather the thief had left me without a coat or without a s.h.i.+lling than taken these precious sc.r.a.ps of paper. "Oh," said he, with a sort of sneer, "I had not the slightest suspicion of the value you attached to them." "Well, sir," said I, losing all control over my pa.s.sion, "now that you see it, now that you hear it, now that you know it, will you tell me at what price you will restore them to me?"

"You mean that it was I who took them?" said he, quietly, and without any show of warmth.

"I don't suppose you will deny it," was my answer.

"That will do, Mr. Gosslett," said he; "that's quite enough. I hope to be able to teach you that it's one thing to defy a board of directors, and it's another to defame a respectable man. I'll make you smart for this, sir;" and with these words he turned away and left the room.

I don't know when or how the servants retired,--whether I dismissed them, or whether they went of their own accord. I was like a madman.

My temper, excited to the last limits of reason, impelled me to this or that act of insanity. At one moment I thought of hastening after Deechworth, and, with a revolver in my hand, compelling him to give up the stolen papers; and I shuddered as to what I should do if he refused.

At another, I determined to follow him, and offer him everything I had in the world for them; for, all this time, I had worked myself up to the conviction that he, and he alone, was the thief. Oh, thought I, if I had but the aid of one of those clever fellows of the detective order, whose skill wants but the faintest clew to trace out these mysteries! and, suddenly, I bethought me of Mr. Bracken, whom Deechworth himself had p.r.o.nounced to be "one of the Force."

I rung my bell, and desired Mr. Bracken might be sent to me. The messenger was a long time absent, and came, at last, to say that Mr.

Bracken had left the castle that evening, and taken all his luggage with him. The tidings struck me like a blow,--here, then, was the thief! And for what purpose could such a theft have been accomplished? "Tell Mr.

Deechworth I want him," cried I, being no less eager to make him my deepest apologies for my false accusation than to consult his strong common-sense in my difficulty.

The servant returned to say Mr. Deechworth had gone too. He had left the castle almost immediately after our stormy interview, and was already miles away on his road to the Rhine.

In my misery and desolation, in that abandonment to utter terror and confusion in which, with the drowning instinct, one s.n.a.t.c.hes at straws, I sent to know if I could speak to Mrs. Dacre, or even her maid. How shall I describe my horror as I heard that they also were gone! They had left soon after Mr. Bracken; in fact, the post-horses that took them away had pa.s.sed Mr. Bracken at the gate of the park.

I know no more how the rest of the night was pa.s.sed by me, how the hours were spent till daybreak, than I could recount the incidents of delirium in fever. I must have had something like a paroxysm of insanity, for I appear to have rushed from room to room, calling for different people, and in tones of heart-rending entreaty begging that I might not be deserted. Towards morning I slept,--slept so soundly that the noises of the house did not disturb me. It was late in the afternoon when I awoke.

The servant brought me my coffee and my letters; but I bade him leave me, and fell off to sleep again. In this way, and with only such sustenance as a cup of milk or coffee would afford, I pa.s.sed fourteen days, my state resembling that of a man laboring under concussion of the brain; indeed, so closely did the symptoms resemble those of this affection, that the doctor carefully examined my head to see whether I had not incurred some actual injury. It was five weeks before I could leave my bed, and crawl down with difficulty to my study. The table was covered with the acc.u.mulated letters of thirty-odd posts, and I turned over the envelopes, most of which indicated communications from the company. There was also one in my uncle's hand. This I opened and read.

It was in these words:--

"So, sir, not satisfied with a life of indolence and dependence, you have now added infamy to your worthlessness, and have not even spared the members of your own family the contagion of your vice. If you can give information as to the present abode of your wretched victim, do so, as the last amends in your power, and the last act of reparation, before you are consigned to that jail in which it is to be hoped you will end your days."

I read this till my head reeled. Who were the members of my family I had contaminated or corrupted? Who was my wretched victim? And why I was to die in prison I knew not. And the only conclusion I could draw from it all was that my uncle was hopelessly mad, and ought to be shut up.