Works of Ellen Wood, page 88
“Fire! fire! fire!” shouted Wilson; “we are all being burnt up together!”
Poor Mrs. Carlyle, thus wildly aroused from sleep, sprang out of bed and into the corridor in her night-dress. Everybody else was in a night-dress — when folks are flying for dear life, they don’t stop to look for their dress-coats and best blonde caps. Out came Mr. Carlyle, who had hastily assumed his pantaloons.
He cast a rapid glance down to the hall, and saw that the stairs were perfectly free for escape; therefore to hurry was not so violent. Every soul around him was shrieking in concert, making the confusion and din terrific. The bright moonlight streamed in at the corridor windows, but there was no other light; shadowy and indistinct enough looked the white figures.
“Where is the fire?” he exclaimed. “I don’t smell any. Who gave the first alarm?”
The bell answered him. The hall-bell, which rang out ten times louder and longer than before. He opened one of the windows and leaned from it. “Who’s there?” Madame Vine caught up Archie.
“It’s me, sir,” responded a voice, which he at once recognized to be that of one of Mr. Hare’s men-servants. “Master has been took in a fit, sir, and mistress sent me for you and Miss Barbara. You must please make haste, sir, if you want to see him alive.”
Miss Barbara! It was more familiar to Jasper, in a moment of excitement, than the new name.
“You, Jasper! Is the house on fire — this house?”
“Well, I don’t know, sir. I can hear a dreadful deal of screeching in it.”
Mr. Carlyle closed the window. He began to suspect that the danger lay in fear alone. “Who told you there was fire?” he demanded of Wilson.
“That man ringing at the door,” sobbed Wilson. “Thank goodness I have saved the children!”
Mr. Carlyle felt somewhat exasperated at the mistake. His wife was trembling from head to foot, her face of a deadly whiteness, and he knew that she was not in a condition to be alarmed, necessarily or unnecessarily. She clung to him in terror, asking if they could escape.
“My darling, be calm! There’s no fire; it’s a stupid mistake. You may all go back to bed and sleep in peace,” he added to the rest, “and the next time that you alarm the house in the night, Wilson, have the goodness to make yourself sure, first of all, that there’s cause for it.”
Barbara, frightened still, bewildered and uncertain, escaped to the window and threw it open. But Mr. Carlyle was nearly as quick as she; he caught her to him with one hand, and drew the window down with the other. To have these tidings told to her abruptly would be worse than all. By this time some of the servants had descended the other staircase with a light, being in various stages of costume, and hastened to open the hall-door. Jasper entered. The man had probably waited to help to put out the “fire.” Barbara caught sight of him ere Mr. Carlyle could prevent it, and grew sick with fear, believing some ill had happened to her mother.
Drawing her inside their chamber, he broke the news to her soothingly and tenderly, making light of it.
She burst into tears. “You are not deceiving me, Archibald? Papa is not dead?”
“Dead!” cheerfully echoed Mr. Carlyle, in the same tone he might have used had Barbara wondered whether the justice was taking a night airing for pleasure in a balloon. “Wilson has indeed frightened you, love. Dress yourself, and we will go and see him.”
At that moment Barbara recollected William. Strange that she should have been the first to do so — before Lady Isabel — before Mr. Carlyle. She ran out again to the corridors, where the boy stood shivering. “He may have caught his death!” she uttered, snatching him up in her arms. “Oh, Wilson! What have you done? His night-gown is damp and cold.”
Unfit as she was for the burden, she bore him to her own bed. Wilson was not at leisure to attend to reproaches just then. She was engaged in a wordy war with Jasper, leaning over the balustrades to carry it on.
“I never told you there was a fire!” indignantly denied Jasper.
“You did. I opened the nursery window and called out ‘Is it fire?’ and you answered ‘Yes.’”
“You called out ‘Is it Jasper?’ What else should I say but ‘Yes,’ to that? Fire? Where was the fire likely to be — in the park?”
“Wilson take the children back to bed,” authoritatively spoke Mr. Carlyle, as he advanced to look down into the hall. “John, are you there? The close carriage, instantly — look sharp. Madame Vine, pray don’t continue to hold that heavy boy; Joyce can’t you relieve madame?”
In crossing back to his room, Mr. Carlyle had brushed past madame, and noticed that she appeared to be shaking, as with the weight of Archibald. In reality she was still alarmed, not understanding yet the cause of the commotion. Joyce, who comprehended it as little, and had stood with her arms round Lucy, advanced to take Archibald, and Mr. Carlyle disappeared. Barbara had taken off her own warm night-gown then, and put it upon William in place of his cold one — had struck a light and was busily dressing herself.
“Just feel his night-gown Archibald! Wilson—”
A shrill cry of awful terror interrupted the words, and Mr. Carlyle made one bound out again. Barbara followed; the least she thought was that Wilson had dropped the baby in the hall.
That was not the catastrophe. Wilson, with the baby and Lucy, had already disappeared up the staircase, and Madame Vine was disappearing. Archibald lay on the soft carpet of the corridor, where madame had stood; for Joyce, in the act of taking him, had let him slip to the ground — let him fall from sheer terror. She held on to the balustrades, her face ghastly, her mouth open, her eyes fixed in horror — altogether an object to look upon. Archie gathered himself on his sturdy legs, and stood staring.
“Why, Joyce! What is the matter with you?” cried Mr. Carlyle. “You look as if you had seen a spectre.”
“Oh, master!” she wailed, “I have seen one.”
“Are you all going deranged together?” retorted he, wondering what had come to the house. “Seen a spectre, Joyce?”
Joyce fell on her knees, as if unable to support herself, and crossed her shaking hands upon her chest. Had she seen ten spectres she could not have betrayed more dire distress. She was a sensible and faithful servant, one not given to flights of fancy, and Mr. Carlyle gazed at her in very amazement.
“Joyce, what is this?” he asked, bending down and speaking kindly.
“Oh, my dear master! Heaven have mercy upon us all!” was the inexplicable answer.
“Joyce I ask you what is this?”
She made no reply. She rose up shaking; and, taking Archie’s hand, slowly proceeded toward the upper stairs, low moans breaking from her, and the boy’s naked feet pattering on the carpet.
“What can ail her?” whispered Barbara, following Joyce with her eyes. “What did she mean about a spectre?”
“She must have been reading a ghost-book,” said Carlyle. “Wilson’s folly has turned the house topsy-turvy. Make your haste, Barbara.”
Spring waned. Summer came, and would soon be waning, too, for the hot days of July were now in. What had the months brought forth, since the election of Mr. Carlyle in April? Be you very sure they had not been without their events.
Mr. Justice Hare’s illness had turned out to be a stroke of paralysis. People cannot act with unnatural harshness toward a child, and then discover they have been in the wrong, with impunity. Thus it proved with Mr. Justice Hare. He was recovering, but would never again be the man he had been. The fright, when Jasper had gone to tell of his illness at East Lynne, and was mistaken for fire, had done nobody any damage, save William and Joyce. William had caught a cold, which brought increased malady to the lungs; and Joyce seemed to have caught fear. She went about, more like one in a dream than awake, would be buried in a reverie for an hour at a time, and if suddenly spoken to, would start and shiver.
Mr. Carlyle and his wife departed for London immediately that Mr. Hare was pronounced out of danger; which was in about a week from the time of his seizure. William accompanied them, partly for the benefit of London advice, partly that Mr. Carlyle would not be parted from him. Joyce went, in attendance with some of the servants.
They found London ringing with the news of Sir Francis Levison’s arrest. London could not understand it; and the most wild and improbable tales were in circulation. The season was at its height; the excitement in proportion; it was more than a nine days’ wonder. On the very evening of their arrival a lady, young and beautiful, was shown in to the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. She had declined to give her name, but there arose to Mr. Carlyle’s memory, when he looked upon her, one whom he had seen in earlier days as the friend of his first wife — Blanche Challoner. It was not Blanche, however.
The stranger looked keenly at Mr. Carlyle. He was standing with his hat in his hand, on the point of going out. “Will you pardon this intrusion?” she asked. “I have come to you as one human being in need comes to crave help of another. I am Lady Levison.”
Barbara’s face flushed. Mr. Carlyle courteously invited the stranger to a chair, remaining standing himself. She sat for a moment, and then rose, evidently in an excess of agitation.
“Yes, I am Lady Levison, forced to call that man husband. That he has been a wicked man, I have long known; but now I hear he is a criminal. I hear it, I say, but I can get the truth from none. I went to Lord Mount Severn; he declined to give me particulars. I heard that Mr. Carlyle would be in town to-day, and I resolved to come and ask them of him.”
She delivered the sentences in a jerking, abrupt tone, betraying her inward emotion. Mr. Carlyle, looking somewhat unapproachable, made no immediate reply.
“You and I have both been deeply wronged by him, Mr. Carlyle, but I brought my wrong upon myself, you did not. My sister, Blanche, whom he had cruelly treated — and if I speak of it, I only speak of what is known to the world — warned me against him. Mrs. Levison, his grandmother, that ancient lady who must now be bordering upon ninety, she warned me. The night before my wedding day, she came on purpose to tell me that if I married Francis Levison I should rue it for life. There was yet time to retract she said. Yes; there would have been time; but there was no will. I would not listen to either. I was led away by vanity, by folly, by something worse — the triumphing over my own sister. Poor Blanche! But which has the best of the bargain now, she or I? And I have a child,” she continued, dropping her voice, “a boy who inherits his father’s name. Mr. Carlyle, will they condemn him?”
“Nothing, as yet, is positively proved against him,” replied Mr. Carlyle, compassionating the unhappy lady.
“If I could but get a divorce!” she passionately uttered, apparently losing all self-control. “I might have got one, over and over again, since we married, but there would have been the expose and the scandal. If I could but change my child’s name! Tell me — does any chance of redress remain for me?”
There was none, and Mr. Carlyle did not attempt to speak of any. He offered a few kind words of sympathy, very generally expressed, and then prepared to go out. She moved, and stood in his way.
“You will not leave until you have given me the particulars! I pray you, do not! I came trustingly to you, hoping to know them.”
“I am waited for, to keep an important engagement,” he answered. “And were my time at liberty, I should decline to tell them to you, on my own account, as well as on yours. Lay not discourtesy to my charge, Lady Levison. Were I to speak of the man, even to you, his name would blister my lips.”
“In every word of hate spoken by you I would sympathize; every contemptuous expression of scorn, cast upon him from your heart, I would join in, tenfold.”
Barbara was shocked. “He is your husband, after all,” she took leave to whisper.
“My husband!” broke forth Lady Levison, in agitation, seemingly. “Yes! there’s the wrong. Why did he, knowing what he was, delude me into becoming his wife? You ought to feel for me, Mrs. Carlyle; and you do feel for me, for you are a wife and mother. How dare these base men marry — take to themselves an innocent, inexperienced girl, vowing, before God, to love and honor and cherish her? Were not his other sins impediment enough but he must have crime, also, and woo me! He has done me deep and irredeemable wrong, and has entailed upon his child an inheritance of shame. What had he or I done to deserve it, I ask?”
Barbara felt half frightened at her vehemence; and Barbara might be thankful not to understand it. All her native gentleness, all her reticence of feeling, as a wife and a gentlewoman, had been goaded out of her. The process had been going on for some time, but this last revelation was the crowning point; and Alice, Lady Levison, turned round upon the world in her helpless resentment, as any poor wife, working in a garret, might have done. There are certain wrongs which bring out human nature in the high-born, as well as in the low. “Still he is your husband,” was all Barbara could, with deprecation, again plead.
“He made himself my husband by deceit, and I will throw him off in the face of day,” returned Lady Levison. “There is no moral obligation why I should not. He has worked ill and ruin — ill and ruin upon me and my child, and the world shall never be allowed to think I have borne my share in it. How was it you kept your hands off him, when he reappeared, to brave you, in West Lynne?” she added, in a changed tone, turning to Mr. Carlyle.
“I cannot tell. I was a marvel oftentimes to myself.”
He quitted the room as he spoke, adding a few civil words about her with Mrs. Carlyle. Barbara, not possessing the scruples of her husband, yielded to Lady Levison’s request, and gave her the outline of the dark tale. Its outline only; and generously suppressing Afy’s name beyond the evening of the fatal event. Lady Levison listened without interruption.
“Do you and Mr. Carlyle believe him to have been guilty?”
“Yes; but Mr. Carlyle will not express his opinion to the world. He does not repay wrong with revenge. I have heard him say that if the lifting of his finger would send the man to his punishment, he would tie down his hand rather than lift it.”
“Was his first wife, Isabel Vane, mad?” she presently asked.
“Mad!” echoed Barbara, in surprise.
“When she quitted him for the other. It could have been nothing else than madness. I could understand a woman’s flying from him for love of Mr. Carlyle; but now that I have seen your husband, I cannot understand the reverse side of the picture. I thank you for your courtesy, Mrs. Carlyle.”
And, without another word, Alice Levison quitted the room as abruptly as she had entered it.
Well, the London visit came to an end. It was of little more than three weeks’ duration, for Barbara must be safe at home again. Mr. Carlyle remained for the rest of the season alone, but he varied it with journeys to East Lynne. He had returned home for good now, July, although the session had not quite terminated. There was another baby at East Lynne, a lovely little baby, pretty as Barbara herself had been at a month old. William was fading rapidly. The London physicians had but confirmed the opinion of Dr. Martin, and it was evident to all that the close would not be long protracted.
Somebody else was fading — Lady Isabel. The cross had been too heavy, and she was sinking under its weight. Can you wonder at it?
An intensely hot day it was under the July sun. Afy Hallijohn was sailing up the street in its beams, finer and vainer than ever. She encountered Mr. Carlyle.
“So, Afy, you are really going to be married at last?”
“Jiffin fancies so, sir. I am not sure yet but what I shall change my mind. Jiffin thinks there’s nobody like me. If I could eat gold and silver, he’d provide it; and he’s as fond as fond can be. But then you know, sir, he’s half soft.”
“Soft as to you, perhaps,” laughed Mr. Carlyle. “I consider him a very civil, respectable man, Afy.”
“And then, I never did think to marry a shopkeeper,” grumbled Afy; “I looked a little higher than that. Only fancy, sir, having a husband who wears a white apron tied round him!”
“Terrible!” responded Mr. Carlyle, with a grave face.
“Not but what it will be a tolerable settlement,” rejoined Afy, veering round a point. “He’s having his house done up in style, and I shall keep two good servants, and do nothing myself but dress and subscribe to the library. He makes plenty of money.”
“A very tolerable settlement, I should say,” returned Mr. Carlyle; and Afy’s face fell before the glance of his eye, merry though it was. “Take care you don’t spend all his money for him, Afy.”
“I’ll take care of that,” nodded Afy, significantly. “Sir,” she somewhat abruptly added, “what is it that’s the matter with Joyce?”
“I do not know,” said Mr. Carlyle, becoming serious. “There does appear to be something the matter with her, for she is much changed.”
“I never saw anybody so changed in my life,” exclaimed Afy. “I told her the other day that she was just like one who had got some dreadful secret upon their mind.”
“It is really more like that than anything else,” observed Mr. Carlyle.
“But she is one of the close ones, is Joyce,” continued Afy. “No fear that she’ll give out a clue, if it does not suit her to do so. She told me, in answer, to mind my own business, and not to take absurd fancies in my head. How is the baby, sir, and Mrs. Carlyle?”
“All well. Good day, Afy.”
CHAPTER XLII.
THE TRIAL.
Spacious courts were the assize courts of Lynneborough; and it was well they were so, otherwise more people had been disappointed, and numbers were, of hearing the noted trial of Sir Francis Levison for the murder of George Hallijohn.
The circumstances attending the case caused it to bear for the public an unparalleled interest. The rank of the accused, and his antecedents, more especially that particular local antecedent touching the Lady Isabel Carlyle; the verdict still out against Richard Hare; the length of time which had elapsed since; the part played in it by Afy; the intense curiosity as to the part taken in it by Otway Bethel; the speculation as to what had been the exact details, and the doubt of a conviction — all contributed to fan the curiosity of the public. People came from far and near to be present — friends of Mr. Carlyle, friends of the Hares, friends of the Challoner family, friends of the prisoner, besides the general public. Colonel Bethel and Mr. Justice Hare had conspicuous seats.
