Works of Ellen Wood, page 887
“Mamma,” pleaded a little voice, “there’s no butter on my bread.”
“There’s as much as I can afford to put, Kitty,” was Mrs. Yorke’s answer. “I must keep some for the morning. Suppose your papa should find no butter for breakfast, if he comes home to sleep to-night! My goodness!”
“Bread and scrape’s not good, is it Kitty?” said Roland.
“No,” plaintively answered the child.
Roland clattered out, taking the stairs at a leap. Mrs. Yorke supposed he had left without the ceremony of saying good-night.
“Just like his manners!” she fractiously cried. “But oh! don’t I wish Gerald was like him in temper!”
Roland had not gone for the night. He happened to have a shilling in his pocket, and went to buy a sixpenny pot of marmalade. As he was skimming back with it, his eye fell on some small shrimps, exposed for sale on a fishmonger’s board. The temptation (with the loose sixpence in his hand) was not to be resisted.
He carried in the treasures. But that the three little ones were very meek spirited, they would have shouted at the sight. Roland lavishly spread the marmalade on the bread-and-scrape, and began pulling out shrimps for the company round, while he talked of Hamish.
“They are saying that those reviews that were so harsh upon his book, have helped to kill him,” said Mrs. Yorke, in a low tone, turning from the table to face Roland.
“But for those reviews he’d not have died,” answered Roland. “I never will believe it. Illness might have come on, but he’d have had the spirit to throw it off again.”
“Yes. When I sit and look at him, Roland, it seems as if I and Gerald were wretches that ought to hide ourselves. I say to myself, it was not my fault; but I feel it for all that.”
“Why what do you mean?” asked Roland.
“About the reviews. I can’t bear to go there now.”
“What about the reviews?”
“It was Gerald who wrote them.”
Roland, for convenience sake, had the plate of shrimps on his knee during the picking process. He rested from his work and stared in a kind of puzzle. Winny continued.
“Those reviews were all Gerald’s doings. That dreadful one in the Snarler he wrote himself, here, and was two days over it, getting to it at times as ideas and strong words occurred to him to make it worse and worse — just as he wrote the one of praise on his own book. The other reviews, that were every bit as bad, he got written. I read every word of the one in the Snarler in manuscript. I wanted to tell him it was wicked, but he might have shaken me. He said he owed Hamish Channing a grudge, and should get his book damned. That’s not my word, you know, Roland. And, all the while, it was Hamish who was doing so much for me and the poor children; finding us in food when Gerald did not.”
No whiter could Hamish Channing’s face look when the marble paleness of death should have overshadowed it, than Roland’s was now. For a short while it seemed as though the communication were too astounding to find admittance to his mind. Suddenly he rose up with a great cry. Down went shrimps, and plate, and all; and he was standing upright before Mrs. Yorke.
“Is it true? Is it true?”
“Why of course it’s true,” she fractiously answered, for the movement had stardled her. “Gerald did it all. I’d not tell anybody but you, Roland.”
Throwing his hat on his head, hind part before, away dashed Roland. Panting, wild, his breath escaping him in great sobs, like unto one who has received some strong mental shock, he arrived at Mr. Channing’s in a frantic state. Vague ideas of praying at Hamish’s feet for forgiveness, were surging through his brain — for it seemed to Roland that he, as Gerald’s brother, must be in a degree responsible for this terrible thing.
The door opened, he turned into the dining-room, and found himself in the presence of — Gerald. Hamish, feeling unusually weak, had gone up to bed, and Gerald was waiting the signal to go to him. As he supposed he must call to see Hamish before it should be too late — for Ellen had told him how it was, that afternoon — he had come at once to get the visit over.
Of all the torrents of reproach ever flung at a man, Gerald found himself astounded by about the worst. It was not loud; loudness might have carried off somewhat of the sting; but painfully sad and bitter. Roland stood on the hearth-rug in front of Gerald as he had but now stood before Gerald’s wife; with the same white and stricken face; with the same agitation shaking him from head to foot. The sobbing words broke from him in jerks; the voice was a wail.
“Was it not enough that I brought disgrace on Arthur Channing in the years gone by, but you, another of us ill-doing Yorkes, must destroy Hamish?” panted Roland. “Good Lord! why did heaven suffer us two to live! As true as we are standing together here, Gerald, had I known at the time those false reviews were yours, I should have broken your bones for you.
“You shut up,” retorted Gerald. “It’s nothing to you.”
“Nothing to me! Nothing to me — when one of the best men that ever lived on earth has been wilfully sent to his grave? Yes; I don’t care how you may salve-over your conscience, Gerald Yorke; it is murder, and nothing less. What had he done to you? He was a true friend, a true, good friend to you and to me: what crime against us had he committed, that you should treat him like this?”
“If you don’t go out of the house, I will,” said Gerald. But Roland never seemed to so much as hear it “Who do you suppose has been helping you all this year?” demanded Roland. “When you were afraid of the county-court over a boot bill, somebody paid the money and sent you the receipt anonymously: who has kept your wife and children in rent and clothes and food and all kinds of comforts, while you gave wine parties in your chambers, and went starring it over the seas for weeks in people’s yachts? Hamish Channing. He deprived himself of his holiday, that your wife and children might be fed, you abandoning them: he has lived sparingly in spite of his failing health, that you and yours might profit. You and he were brought up in the same place, boys together, and he could not see your children want. They’ve never had a fraction of help but what it came from Hamish and his wife.”
“It is a lie,” said Gerald. But he was staggered, and he half felt that it was not.
“It is the truth, as heaven knows,” cried Roland, breaking down with a burst. “Ask Winny, she told me. I’d have given my own poor worthless life freely, to save the pain of those false and cruel reviews to Hamish.”
Sheer emotion stopped Roland’s tongue. Mrs. Channing, entering, found the room in silence; the storm was over. Roland escaped. Gerald, amazingly uncomfortable, had a mind to run away there and then.
“Will you come up, Gerald?” she said.
Hamish lay in bed in his large cheerful chamber, bright with fire and light. His head was raised; one hand was thrown over the white coverlid; and a cup of tea waited on a stand by the bed-side. Roland stood by the fire, his chest heaving.
“But what is it, old fellow?” demanded Hamish. “What has put you out?”
“It is this, Hamish — that I wish I could have died instead of you,” came the answer at last, with a burst of grief.
He sat down in the shade in a quiet comer, for his brother’s step was heard. As Gerald approached the bed, he visibly recoiled. It was some time since he had seen Hamish, and he verily believed he stood in the presence of death. Hamish held out his hand with a cheering smile, and his face grew bright.
“Dear old friend! I thought you were never coming to see me.”
Gerald Yorke was not wholly bad, not quite devoid of feeling. With the dying man before him, with the truths he had just heard beating their refrain in his ears, he nearly broke down as Roland had done. Oh, that he could undo his work! that he could recall life to the fading spirit as easily as he had done his best to take it away! These regrets always come rather late, Mr. Gerald Yorke.
“I did not think you were so ill as this Hamish. Can nothing be done?”
“Don’t let it grieve you, Gerald. Our turns must all come, sooner or later. Don’t, old fellow,” he added in a whisper. “I must keep up for Ellen’s sake. God is helping me to do it: oh, so wonderfully.”
Gerald bent over him: he thought they were alone. “Will you forgive me?”
“Forgive you!” repeated Hamish, not understanding what there was to forgive.
And Gerald, striving against his miserably pricking conscience, could not bring himself to say. No, though it had been to save his own life, he dared not confess to his cowardly sin.
“I have not always been the good friend to you I might, Hamish. Do say you forgive me, for Heaven’s sake!”
Hamish took his hand, a sweet smile upon his face. “If there is anything you want my forgiveness for, Gerald, take it. Take it freely. Oh Gerald, when we begin to realize the great fact that our sins are forgiven, forgiven and washed out, you cannot think how glad we are to forgive others who may have offended us. But I don’t know what I have to forgive in you.” Gerald’s chest heaved. Roland’s, in his distant chair in the shade, heaved rebelliously.
“I had ambitious views for you, Gerald. I meant to do you good if I could. I thought when my book was out and had brought funds to me, I would put you straight, I was so foolishly sanguine as to fancy the returns would be large. I thought of you nearly as much as I thought of myself: one of my dear old friends of dear old Helstonleigh. The world is fading from me, Gerald; but the old scenes and times will be with me to the last, Yes, I had hoped to benefit you, Gerald, but it was otherwise ordained. God bless you, dear friend. God love and prosper you, and bring you home to Him!”
Gerald could not stand it any longer. As he left the room and the house, Roland went up to the bed with a burst, and confessed all. To have kept in the secret would have choked him.
Gerald was the enemy who had done it all; Gerald Yorke had been the one to sow the tares amid wheat in his neighbour’s field.
A moment of exquisite pain for Hamish; a slight, short struggle with the human passions, not yet quite dead within his aching breast; and then his loving kindness resumed its sway, never again to quit him.
“Bring him back to me, dear Roland; bring him back that I may send him on his way with words of better comfort,” he whispered, with his ineffable smile of peace.
CHAPTER XL.
Godfrey Pitman’s Tale.
SHUT in with closed doors, George Winter told his tale. Not quite all he could tell; and not the truth in one very important particular. If that single item of fact might be kept secret to the end, the speaker’s will was good for it.
They were all standing. Not one sat. And the room seemed filled with the six men in it, most of whom were tall. The crimson curtain, that Annabel Channing had mended, was drawn before the bookcase: on the table-cover lay pens and ink and paper, for Mr. Greatorex sometimes wrote at night in his own room. He and Judge Kene were near each other; the clergyman was almost within the shadow of the window-curtain; Bede a little further behind. On the opposite side of the table, telling his tale, with the light of the bright winter’s day falling full upon him, illumining every turn of his face, and, so to say, every word he uttered, was George Winter. And, at right angles with the whole assemblage, his keen eyes and ears taking in every word and look in silence, stood the detective, Jonas Butterby.
Mr. Greatorex, in spite of his son Bede’s protestations, had refused to sanction any steps for the release of Alletha Rye from custody. As for Butterby, in that matter he seemed more inexorably hard than a granite stone. “Show us that the young woman is innocent before you talk about it,” said they both with reason.
And so George Winter was had in to relate what he knew; and Mr. Greatorex — not to speak of some of the rest — felt that his senses were temporarily struck out of him, when he discovered that his efficient and trusted clerk, Brown, was the long-sought after and ill-reputed Godfrey Pitman.
With a brief summary of the circumstances which had led him, disguised, and under the false name of Pitman, to Mrs. Jones’s house at Helstonleigh, George Winter passed on to the night of the tragedy, and to the events which had taken him back to the house after his departure from it in the afternoon. If ever Mr. Butterby’s silent eyes wore an eager light, it was then: not the faintest turn of a look, not the smallest syllable was lost upon him.
“When I had been a week at Mrs. Jones’s, I began to think it might be unsafe to remain longer,” he said; “and I resolved to take my departure on the Monday. I let it transpire in the house that I was going to Birmingham by the five o’clock train. This was to put people off the scent, for I did not mean to go by that train at all, but by a later one in an opposite direction — in fact, by the eight o’clock train for Oxford: and I had thought to wait about, near the station, until that hour. At half-past four I said Good day to Mrs. Jones, and went out: but I had not gone many yards from the door, when I saw one of the Birmingham police, who knew me personally. I had my disguises on, the spectacles and the false hair, but I feared he might recognize me in spite of them. I turned my back for some minutes, apparently looking close into a shop window, and when the officer had disappeared, stole back to Mrs. Jones’s again. The door was open, and I went up-stairs without being seen, intending to wait until dusk.”
“A moment, if you please,” interrupted Mr. Greatorex. “It would seem that this was about the time that Mr. Ollivera returned to Mrs. Jones’s. Did you see him?”
“I did not, sir; I saw no one.”
“Go on.”
“I waited in my room at the top of the house, and when night set in, began to watch for an opportunity of getting away unseen by the household, and so avoid questionings as to what had brought me back. It seemed not too easy of accomplishment: the servant girl was at the street door, and Alfred Jones (as I had learnt his name to be) came in and began to ascend the stairs. When half-way up, he turned back with some gentleman who came out of the drawing-room — whom I know now, but did not then, to be Mr. Bede Greatorex. Alfred Jones saw him to the front door, and then ran up again. I escaped to my room, and locked myself in. He went to his own, and soon I heard him go down and quit the house. In a few minutes I went out of my room again with my blue bag, ready for departure, and stood on the stairs to reconnoitre—”
“Can you explain the cause of those grease spots that we have heard of?” interrupted Bede Greatorex at this juncture. And it might almost have seemed from the fluttering emotion of his tone, which could not be wholly suppressed, that he dreaded the revelation he knew must be coming, and put the question only to delay it.
“Yes, sir. While Alfred Jones was in his room, I dropped my silver pencil-case, and had to light a candle to seek it. I suppose that, in searching, I must have held the candle aside and let the drops of tallow fall on the carpet.”
“Go on,” again interposed Mr. Greatorex, impatiently. “You went out on the stairs with your bag. What next?”
The witness — if he may be termed such — passed his hand slowly over his forehead before answering. It appeared as though he were recalling the past.
“As I stood there, on the top of the first flight, the sound of voices in what seemed like angry dispute, came from the drawing-room. One in particular was raised in passionate fury; the other was less loud. I did not hear what was said; the door was shut — —”
“Were they both men’s voices?” interrupted Mr. Ollivera — and it was the first question he had put.
“Yes,” came the answer; but it was given in a low tone, and with somewhat of hesitation. “At least, I think so.”
“Well.”
“The next thing that I heard was the report of a pistol, followed by a cry of pain. Another cry succeeded to it in a different voice, a cry of horror; and then silence supervened.”
“And you did not go in?” exclaimed Mr. Ollivera in agitation, taking a step forward.
“No. I am aware it is what I ought to have done; and I have reproached myself later for not having done it; but I felt afraid to disclose to any one that I was yet in the house. It might have led to the discovery of who and what I was. Besides, I thought there was no great harm done; I declare it, upon my honour. I could still hear sounds within the room as of some one, or more, moving about, and I certainly heard one voice speaking low and softly. I thought I saw my opportunity for slipping away, and had crept down nearly to the drawing-room door, when it suddenly opened, very quietly, and a face looked out. Whoever it might be, I suppose the sight of me scared them, for they retreated, and the door was reclosed softly. It scared me also, sending me back up-stairs; and I remained up until the same person (as I supposed) came out again, descended the stairs, and left the house. I got out myself then, gained the railway station by a circuitous route, and got safely away from Helstonleigh.”
As the words died upon the ear, there ensued a pause of silence. The clergyman broke it. His mind seemed to be harping on one string.
“Mr. Brown, was that person a man or a woman?”
“Oh, it was a man,” answered Mr. Brown, looking down at his waistcoat, and brushing a speck off it with an air of carelessness. But something in his demeanour at that moment struck two people in the room as being peculiar — Judge Kene and Mr. Butterby.
“Should you recognise him again?” continued the clergyman.
“I cannot say. Perhaps I might.”
“And you can stand there, Mr. Brown, and deliberately avow that you did not know a murder had been committed?” interposed the sternly condemning voice of Mr. Greatorex.
“On my sacred word of honour, I declare to you, sir, that no suspicion of it at the time occurred to me,” answered the clerk, turning his eyes with fearless honesty on Mr. Greatorex. “When I got to learn what had really happened — which was not for some weeks — I wondered at myself. All I could suppose was, that the fear and apprehension I lay under on my own score, had rendered me callous to other impressions.”
“Was it you who went in, close upon the departing heels of Mr. Bede Greatorex, and did this cruel thing?” asked Judge Kene, with quiet emphasis, as he gazed in the face of the narrator.
