Dilemmas of Pride Volume III Part 7

There chanced to be advancing at the moment, along the said foot-path, a decrepid old man, a sort of village miser; who, though suspected of possessing secret h.o.a.rds, lived alone in a hovel--denied himself the necessaries of life--and looked like a beggar. This man had enjoyed for many years, as a sort of privilege, the almost exclusive sale, at the moderate charge, as he expressed it, of one halfpenny each, of all murders, trials, last dying speeches, ballads, valentines, &c. &c. &c.

"A full and true account of the trial and conviction of Sir Alfred Arden, for the cruel and most unnatural murder of his brother, the late Sir Willoughby Arden;" and also of his miraculous escape from prison on the morning on which he was to have been executed, had been prepared for this species of sale; but from respect to the feelings of the family had not hitherto been publicly hawked about. As all its members, however, with the exception of Geoffery, whose sentiments were tolerably well understood, had that morning taken their departure, such delicacy was no longer deemed necessary. Accordingly, the ancient ballad-monger, fearful of being antic.i.p.ated in his market, was commencing operations. He had just vociferated, "Interesting account, &c. &c." and at the precise moment that Geoffery, in making way for the waggon rode close to the foot-path, was in the act of raising his arm to display on high his large-lettered merchandize, when his hand coming in contact with the nose of Geoffery's horse the glaring white appearance, and sudden rustling noise of the unfurled paper so startled the animal, that he backed, plunged, and reared up against the waggon, entangling Geoffery amongst the legs and arms of the tables and chairs with which it was heaped, and which, lifting him from his saddle, let him down so close to one of the wheels, that it went over his head and crushed it to atoms.

He was taken up and carried into an adjacent public house, of course quite dead; while almost every one who had been in the street at the time of the accident, crowded immediately into the common room where he was laid.

It so happened that the master of the house had once incurred very ugly suspicions respecting picking of pockets; this was a point therefore on which he was now particularly jealous of his honour. When the spectators therefore had satisfied themselves as to the nature and extent of the injuries received by the deceased, and were about to disperse, mine host uplifted his voice, and requested that some one would remain to examine the contents of the gentleman's pockets, that his house might come to no discredit in the business.

Accordingly, two persons consented to do so, one an apothecary, who had been called in to p.r.o.nounce whether or not a person who had been guillotined by a waggon wheel, were quite dead; the other, Mr. Danvers, High Sheriff for the county. He had attended the funeral, and was pa.s.sing through the town on his way home. He was the warm friend of Lady Arden, and felt a strong persuasion of Alfred's innocence.

The money in Geoffery's purse was counted, and a pocket-book found which was opened, to ascertain whether it contained bank-notes; Here Mr.

Danvers perceived a letter, the address and memoranda on the outer fold of which rivetted his whole attention. They were in the late Sir Willoughby Arden's hand-writing, and ran thus--"To my dear brother, Alfred Arden, containing my dying requests to him, together with my reasons for having resolved to put a period to my existence."

It was very evident that this letter, though open, had never reached Sir Alfred's hands, or it must have been brought forward on the trial; there seemed therefore to be no doubt that Geoffery Arden, however it had come into his possession, had suppressed it with the most diabolical intentions. To hasten therefore immediately with the precious doc.u.ment, in pursuit of Lady Arden, and lay the affair in due form before the Secretary of State for the Home Department, seemed to be the obvious course, and was accordingly adopted by Mr. Danvers with all possible speed.

CHAPTER XX.

The packet found by Mr. Danvers was the same which, it may be remembered, was lifted from a table in Willoughby's apartment by Geoffery, while Alfred, to meet whose eye it had been thus conspicuously placed by his poor brother, was too much absorbed in grief to notice what was pa.s.sing.

The peculiar circ.u.mstances attendant on the death-scene, and the certain knowledge thus obtained, that poison had been taken, and would, therefore, on opening the body be found, suggested to Geoffery's evil mind the first faint glimpses of the diabolical scheme which so many after circ.u.mstances so unexpectedly favoured. Had there been a fire in his apartment that night, he would for security have certainly burnt the packet; but it fortunately happened that there was not, and so agitated and occupied was his mind in the contemplation of the very possibility of compa.s.sing at once the hideous crime and enormous gain, which he was balancing one against the other, that the idea of destroying the dangerous doc.u.ment by means of his candle never once occurred to him.

Accordingly, when he had sufficiently considered its contents, he placed it in his pocket-book. After this, he more than once took it out, with the intention of consigning it to the flames, but when in the very act his hand was stayed by more than one consideration. In the first place, there was a kind of bequest to himself; and if the accusations against Alfred came to nothing, he should want the sum very much; then he sometimes felt a dread, that by a bare possibility, he might himself,--as having a remote contingent interest in the death of Willoughby, and having arrived too that very night at Arden,--be accused of being an accomplice of Alfred's; and in either case this packet laid down in some of the apartments, would be picked up, and being supposed to have hitherto merely lain unnoticed, both clear himself of all suspicion and secure his bequest; for though this bequest was not left in a binding form, he had no doubt that Alfred would religiously make it good. No place, however, seemed safe enough for keeping this important doc.u.ment but about his own person, and accordingly he so disposed of it; which serves to account for its being found in the manner described.

The packet itself presented a melancholy picture of poor Willoughby's disordered state of mind, brought down somewhat in the form of a journal, and with a kind of method mingled with its wildness to the very evening of his death. In proof of the strange blending of rational considerations, there was a sort of distribution of his personal property; for besides the bequest to Geoffery, already alluded to, there were kind gifts to his sisters, his mother, his aunt Dorothea, and to several old servants and pensioners.

Alfred, however, was his main object; the tenor of the whole letter breathed the most devoted tenderness towards him, mingled with a madman's notion, that he was about to perform an heroic act, in removing the obstacles to his happiness. It entreated Alfred not to grieve for him--he was only flying a misery he could not endure; seeking a resting place he longed to find. Why should not all those who remained behind be happy--quite happy, and never think of him who could so well be spared--who never should have been born--who seemed to have been called into existence but to stand in the way of others, and be himself wretched!

"Yet I know that you will grieve for me, Alfred," it continued, "and the thought of how much you will grieve sometimes makes me shrink from seeking the rest I long for. But it will be for a time only, and then you too will be happy. Yes, you must be happy, Alfred!"

Caroline's letter was inclosed in the packet, and some comments made, in a strain of forced, unnatural calmness, on Lady Palliser's cruel policy.

While the whole, which seemed to have been written at many different periods, concluded with a sort of separate part, dated the day of the evening of his death; detailing minutely how he had at length possessed himself of some a.r.s.enic, and declaring his intention of that very evening putting an end to the harra.s.sing struggles of his mind, which he here describe wildly, as pursuing him every where--goading him on--hunting him down--making rest or peace on earth impossible.

"Forgive me, then, dear Alfred," he concluded; "forgive my quitting you thus; for I am weary, and long to sleep, though it were in the grave!

Except that short moment when I closed my eyes on your kind bosom, I have not slept I know not when."

This, the dying memorial of poor Willoughby, was but a melancholy vehicle for joyful intelligence to Lady Arden. In her mind, however, at such a moment, there was room but for one idea--Alfred was safe! Even her pride in him, which had mingled with despair, was forgotten in tenderness.

She left all the care of his public justification, with the necessary forms for his restoration to his right, in the hands of Mr. Danvers and Lord Darlingford; and though, as a precaution lest Alfred should lose one moment of the relief of mind such intelligence was calculated to bestow, she had dispatched, at the first instant, an express, bearing in her own writing the three words, "You are justified." Nevertheless she had followed her own messenger with so much expedition, that she overtook him at the gates of Geneva, awaiting their being opened; and thus became, as we have seen, the first to announce to her exiled son the happy change which had taken place in his circ.u.mstances.

While her ladys.h.i.+p was thus occupied, the townspeople of Arden, impatient to display the returning tide of their affection and respect towards their young landlord, were illuminating every pane of gla.s.s they possessed, and lighting bonfires on every rising ground in the neighbourhood, in honour of his acquittal; while at the same time their indignation against Geoffery knew no bounds. His motive in suppressing and concealing Alfred's letter spoke for itself; and so strong was the general feeling of abhorrence which it excited, that the night after he was buried, his body was disinterred by the mob, and placed on a gibbet on the road-side, between Arden and Arden Park. His coadjutor, too, Mr.

Fips, was blamed even more than he deserved, if that indeed were possible: that is to say, he was universally believed to have been a party to the suppression of Willoughby's packet; a belief engendered, and, in a great measure justified, by his being Geoffery's right-hand man on all occasions, and still more by the active part he had taken previously to and on the trial, as well as by his own general villany of character.

Accordingly, during the illuminations for Alfred's acquittal, the mob began by smas.h.i.+ng every window in Fips's house; and hatred of Gripe, as he was called, being a common cause, those who had commenced the attack were soon joined by so many who had a personal feeling of revenge, founded on a lively remembrance of ruin entailed on themselves and their families by his means, that before morning they literally left not one stone, or rather one brick, upon another of Fips's dwelling; while himself and his daughter narrowly escaped with their lives, without being able to carry with them a single paper, or a vestige of property of any kind. What was of value found plenty of customers, who thought it no robbery to take back a little of their own; and as to the parchments, &c., a sagacious ringleader proposed that they should all be emptied out at the foot of the market cross; that so, when there was light in the morning, every one might come and choose his own. Thus did many a man get back his doc.u.ments without being compelled to pay the unjust and enormous bill for which they were held as security; whilst every thing in the shape of bill, book, or account standing against any individual, was carefully consigned to the flames. All the town, in short, felt it more or less a blessing that the hornet's nest had been destroyed. As to the authorities, they had themselves, some of them, felt the gripe of Mr. Fips in their day: after, therefore, every step _they_ judged proper was duly taken to discover who had been the perpetrators of the late riots, it was decided, at a public meeting held for the purpose--"That the very _unjustifiable_ outrages which had been committed on the night of the -- of ----, 18--, could not be _brought home to any particular individuals_."

CHAPTER XXI.

It was evening; a cheerful mixture of twilight and firelight filled the apartment in which our hero lay, slowly recovering from a brain fever of many weeks duration.

He had been long delirious, and as yet had not recognised the friends who were around him, or been conscious of any event which had occurred since the morning on which Lady Arden had arrived at Geneva. But his crisis was now past, and much was expected from the peaceful and profound sleep he had enjoyed for nearly the whole, both of the last night and of the last day. A group of itinerant musicians had stopped beneath his window, and were performing some simple strain, which, though possibly conducive to his awaking just at that moment, fell on his half conscious ear with indescribable sweetness. Gradually his eyes began to open: at first but in an imperceptible degree; yet, through the still veiling lashes he now saw confusedly, visions, as of angels, hovering around his pillow. While a countenance which bent over his, watching, as it were, his slumbers, seemed to grow each moment brighter and brighter, till, for one second, he distinctly beheld (or did he dream), the face of Caroline! It disappeared instantly, and was succeeded by that of his sister Madeline; but the shadow of a form glided round the curtain which the eye of Alfred anxiously followed.

It was Caroline; she had gone to announce to Lady Arden Alfred's awaking.

Lady Arden had been also ill herself, and was not yet able to bear much fatigue: she had, therefore, lain down while Caroline and Madeline cheered each other's watch in the sick chamber. The music in the street had alarmed our youthful nursetenders, lest it should awake their charge: they had raised their taper fingers, and thus asked each other by signal, whether they should send to have it stopped; while, as a preliminary movement, Caroline had glided to the bedside to note its effect upon the sleeper. She had stood a few seconds, marking as well as the imperfect light would permit, that his eyeb.a.l.l.s seemed to move tremulously beneath their lids. Anxious to ascertain the point, she had bent closer and closer to the pillow; when, Alfred's eyes opening as we have described, she had disappeared.

Madeline, as she took the place of the apparition, which had thus quickly vanished, found Alfred making a feeble effort to draw aside the opposite curtain. But he was quite unequal to the task.

"It was--it was she--" he faintly murmured, "Was it not? tell me, Madeline!"

"Yes it was, dear Alfred, but you must not speak! she is quite well."

Fortunately, his extreme bodily weakness did not admit of any very violent paroxysm of feeling. His recollections of the past too, were as yet but confused; so that the overpowering intelligence that Caroline was still living--was near him--was kindly attending him in sickness, came not upon him at once in its full force, but grew with his growing perceptions.

"Where is she gone, Madeline?" he at length breathed, in a scarcely audible whisper.

"Only to my mother's room," replied Madeline, in accents scarcely louder.

"And tell me where we are?" he added, after another pause.

"At Geneva, dearest Alfred. But you must not speak."

"At Geneva!" he repeated, then lay still a very long time, as if endeavouring to recall past events: and she noted with alarm, that pale though he was, after his long illness, a faint flush, was overspreading his brow. He feebly grasped her arm, and looked in her face with an earnestness of expression which she perfectly understood.

"No! no!" she replied, "she was only ill--faint--but she is now quite well, but indeed, you must not speak, dearest Alfred."

"Madeline! is all this true?"

"Yes, quite true: and now, dear Alfred, you must lay still till the doctor comes."

He tried to obey her for a time.

"I cannot, Madeline," he at length whispered, and then, though much exhausted, he continued in broken accents, "the desire--to know--how--it has all happened--will hurt me more--than listening to your--sweet--voice.--So tell me all--and then--I will be composed."

Madeline, judging that of the two it was better he should listen to her than persist in endeavouring to speak himself, replied in the softest of whispers, shading the light of the fire from his face:

"Why, when my mother saw that she had both you and Caroline to nurse, she wrote to us to come here. But, by the time we came, we found dear Caroline so much recovered, that she was nursing both you and my mother, who had then become ill herself from fatigue. But she is now quite well again," she added, seeing Alfred look around. "And she has written to Lady Palliser, and obtained her permission for Caroline to stay with us while we remain abroad, that she may travel home with our party. And now, indeed, I will not speak another word, so you must lay still."

Here the appearance of Lady Arden, and Aunt Dorothea, and soon after of the doctor, relieved Madeline from the difficult task of keeping her refractory patient in order.

CHAPTER XXII.