Читать книгу The Master of the Ceremonies - George Manville Fenn - Страница 17

The “ghastly serenade” it was called at Saltinville as the facts became known.

That night Richard Linnell was standing with his teeth set, his throat dry, and a feeling of despair making his heart seem to sink, watching the white hand that was waved as soon as the sash was opened. Half blind with the blood that seemed to rush to his eyes, he glared at the window. Then a sudden revulsion of feeling came over him as a familiar voice that was not Claire’s cried, “Help!—a doctor!” and then the speaker seemed to stagger away.

The rest was to Richard Linnell like some dream of horror, regarding which he recalled the next morning that he had thundered at the door, that he had helped to carry Claire to her room, and that he had afterwards been one of the group who stood waiting in the dining-room until the doctor came down to announce that Miss Denville was better—that Lady Teigne was quite dead.

Then they had stolen out on tiptoe, and in the stillness of the early morning shaken hands all round and separated, the Major remaining with them, and walking with Colonel Mellersh and Richard Linnell to their door.

“What a horror!” he said hoarsely. “I would not for the world have taken you two there had I known. Good-night—good-morning, I should say;” and he, too, said those words—perhaps originated the saying—“What a ghastly serenade!”

Nine days—they could spare no more in Saltinville, for it would have spoiled the season—nine days’ wonder, and then the news that a certain royal person was coming down, news blown by the trumpet of Fame with her attendants, raised up enough wind to sweep away the memory of the horror on the Parade.

“She was eighty if she was a day,” said Sir Matthew Bray: “and it was quite time the old wretch did die.”

“Nice way of speaking of a lady whose relative you are seeking to be,” said Sir Harry Payne. “Sweet old nymph. How do you make it fit, Matt?”

“Fit? Some scoundrel of a London tramp scaled the balcony, they say. Fine plunder, the rascal! All those diamonds.”

“Which she might have left her sister, and then perhaps they would have come to you, Matt.”

“Don’t talk stuff.”

“Stuff? Why, you are besieging the belle. But, I say, I have my own theory about that murder.”

“Eh, have you?” cried the great dragoon, staring open-mouthed.

“Egad! yes, Matt. It was not a contemptible robbery.”

“Wasn’t it? You don’t say so.”

“But I do,” cried Sir Harry seriously. “Case of serious jealousy on the part of some lover of the bewitching creature. He came in the dead o’ night and smothered the Desdemona with a pillow. What do you say, Rockley?”

The Major had strolled across the mess-room and heard these words.

“Bah! Don’t ridicule the matter,” he said. “Change the subject.”

“As you like, but the feeble flame only wanted a momentary touch of the extinguisher and it was gone.”

At the house on the Parade there had been terrible anguish, and Claire Denville suffered painfully as she passed through the ordeal of the examination that ensued.

But everything was very straightforward and plain. There were the marks of some one having climbed up the pillar—an easy enough task. The window opened without difficulty from without, a pot or two lay overturned in the balcony, a chair in the drawing-room, evidently the work of some stranger, and the valuable suite of diamonds was gone.

The constable arrested three men of the street tumbler and wandering vagrant type, who were examined, proved easily that they were elsewhere; and after the vote of condolence to our esteemed fellow-townsman, Stuart Denville, Esq, which followed the inquest, there seemed nothing more to be done but to bury Lady Teigne, which was accordingly done, and the principal undertaker cleared a hundred pounds by the grand funeral that took place, though it was quite a year before Lady Drelincourt would pay the whole of his bill.

So with Lady Teigne the horror was buried too, and in a fortnight the event that at one time threatened to interfere with the shopkeepers’ and lodging-letters’ season was forgotten.

For that space of time, too, the familiar figure of the Master of the Ceremonies was not seen upon the Parade. Miss Denville was very ill, it was said, and after the funeral Isaac had to work hard at answering the door to receive the many cards that were left by fashionable people, till there was quite a heap in the old china bowl that stood in the narrow hall.

But the outside world knew nothing of the agonies of mind endured by the two principal occupants of that house—of the nights of sleepless horror passed by Claire as she knelt and prayed for guidance, and of the hours during which the Master of the Ceremonies sat alone, staring blankly before him as if at some scene which he was ever witnessing, and which seemed to wither him, mind and body, at one stroke.

For that fortnight, save at the inquest, father and daughter had not met, but passed their time in their rooms. But the time was gliding on, and they had to meet—the question occurring to each—how was it to be?

“I must leave it to chance,” thought the Master of the Ceremonies, with a shiver; and after a fierce struggle to master the agony he felt, he knew that in future he must lead two lives. So putting on his mask, he one morning walked down to the breakfast-room, and took his accustomed place.

Outwardly he seemed perfectly calm, and, save that the lines about his temples and the corners of his lips seemed deeper, he was little changed; but as he walked he was conscious of a tremulous feeling in the knees, and even when seated, that the curious palsied sensation went on.

On the previous night Morton had come in from a secret fishing excursion, to find the house dark and still, and he had stood with his hands in his pockets hesitating as to whether he should go and take a lesson in smoking with Isaac in the pantry, steal down to the beach, or creep upstairs.

He finally decided on the latter course, and going up to the top of the house on tiptoe, he tapped softly at Claire’s bedroom door.

It was opened directly by his sister, who had evidently just risen from an old dimity-covered easy-chair. She was in a long white dressing-gown, and, seen by the light of the one tallow candle on the table, she looked so pale and ghastly that the lad uttered an ejaculation and caught hold of her thin, cold hands.

“Claire!—Sis!”

They were the first warm words of sympathy she had heard since that horrible night; and in a moment the icy horror upon her face broke up, her lips quivered, and, throwing her arms around her brother’s neck, she burst into such a passion of hysterical sobbing that, as he held her to his breast, he grew alarmed.

He had stepped into the little white room where the flower screen stood out against the night sky, and as the door swung to, he had felt Claire sinking upon her knees, and imitating her action, he had held her there for some time till the attitude grew irksome, and then sank lower till he was seated on the carpet, holding his sister half-reclining across his breast.

“Oh! don’t—don’t, Claire—Sis,” he whispered from time to time, as he kissed the quivering lips, and strove in his boyish way to soothe her. “Sis dear, you’ll give yourself such a jolly headache. Oh, I say, what’s the good of crying like that?”

For answer she only clung the tighter, the pent-up agony escaping in her tears, though she kissed him passionately again and again, and nestled to his breast.

“You’ll make yourself ill, you know,” he whispered. “I say, don’t. The dad’s ill, and you’ll upset him more.”

Still she sobbed on and wept, the outburst saving her from some more terrible mental strain.

“I wanted to come and comfort you,” he said. “I did not know you’d go on like this.”

She could not tell him that he was comforting her; that she had been tossed by a horrible life-storm that threatened to wreck her reason, and that when she had lain longing for the sympathy of the sister who now kept away, saying it was too horrible to come there now, she had found no life-buoy to which to cling. And now her younger brother had come—the elder forbidden the house—and the intensity of the relief she felt was extreme.

“Here, I can’t stand this,” he said at last, almost roughly. “I shall go down and send Ike for the doctor.”

She clung to him in an agony of dread lest he should go, and her sobs grew less frequent.

“Come, that’s better,” he said, and he went on in his rough boyish selfishness, talking of his troubles and ignoring those of others, unconsciously strengthening Claire, as he awakened her to a sense of the duties she owed him, and giving her mental force for the terrible meeting and struggle that was to come.

For she dared not think. She shrank from mentally arguing out those two questions of duty—to society and to her father.

Was she to speak and tell all she knew?

Was she to be silent?

All she could do was to shrink within herself, and try to make everything pass out of her thoughts while she was sinking into the icy chains of idiocy.

But now, when she had been giving up completely, and at times gazing out to sea with horrible thoughts assailing her, and suggestions like temptations to seek for oblivion as the only escape from the agony she suffered, the life-raft had reached her hands, and she clung to it with all the tenacity of one mentally drowning fast.

There was something soothing in the very sound of her brother’s rough voice speaking in a hoarse whisper; and his selfish repinings over the petty discomforts he had suffered came like words of comfort and rest.

“It has been so jolly blank and miserable downstairs,” he went on as he held her, and involuntarily rocked himself to and fro. “Ike and Eliza have been always gossiping at the back and sneaking out to take dinner or tea or supper with somebody’s servants, so as to palaver about what’s gone on here.”

A pause.

“There’s been scarcely anything to eat. I’ve been half-starved.”

“Oh, Morton, my poor boy!”

Those were the first words Claire had uttered since the inquest, and they were followed by a fresh burst of sobs.

“Oh, come, come. Do leave off,” he cried pettishly. “I say it’s all very well for the old man to growl at me for fishing, but if I hadn’t gone catching dabs and a little conger or two, I should have been starved.”

She raised her face and kissed him. Some one else was suffering, and her woman’s instinct to help was beginning to work.

“What do you think I did, Sis? Oh, you don’t know. I’d been up to Burnett’s to see May, but the beggars had sneaked off and gone to London. Just like Franky Sneerums and wax-doll May. Pretty sort of a sister to keep away when we’re in trouble.”

“Oh, don’t, my dear boy,” whispered Claire in a choking voice.

“Oh, yes, I shall. They’re ashamed of me and of all of us. Just as if we could help the old girl being killed here.”

A horrible spasm ran through Claire.

“Don’t jump like that, stupid,” said Morton roughly. “You didn’t kill her.”

“Hush! hush!”

“No, I shan’t hush. It’ll do you good to talk and hear what people say, my pretty old darling Sis. There, there hush-a-bye, baby. Cuddle up close, and let’s comfort you. What’s the matter now?”

Claire had struggled up, with her hands upon his shoulders, and was gazing wildly into his eyes.

“What—what do people say?” she panted.

“Be still, little goose—no; pretty little white pigeon,” he said, more softly, as he tried to draw her towards him.

“What—do they say?” she cried, in a hoarse whisper, and she trembled violently.

“Why, that it is a jolly good job the old woman is dead, for she was no use to anyone.”

Claire groaned as she yielded once more to his embrace.

“Fisherman Dick says—I say, he is a close old nut there’s no getting anything out of him!—says he don’t see that people like Lady Teigne are any use in the world.”

“Morton!”

“Oh, it’s all right. I’m only telling you what he said. He says too that the chap who did it—I say, don’t kick out like that, Sis. Yes, I shall go on: I’m doing you good. Fisherman Dick, and Mrs Miggles too, said that I ought to try and rouse you up, and I’m doing it. You’re ever so much better already. Why, your hands were like dabs when I came up, and now they are nice and warm.”

She caressed his cheek with them, and he kissed her as she laid her head on his shoulder.

“Dick Miggles said that the diamonds would never do the chap any good who stole ’em.”

Once more that hysterical start, but the boy only clasped his sister more tightly, and went on:

“Dick says he never knew anyone prosper who robbed or murdered, or did anything wrong, except those who smuggled. I say, Sis, I do feel sometimes as if I should go in for a bit of smuggling. There are some rare games going on.”

Claire clung to him as if exhausted by her emotion.

“Dick’s been in for lots of it, I know, only he’s too close to speak. I don’t know what I should have done if it hadn’t been for them. I’ve taken the fish I’ve caught up there, and Polly Miggles has cooked them, and we’ve had regular feeds.”

“You have been up there, Morton?” said Claire wildly.

“Yes; you needn’t tell the old man. What was I to do? I couldn’t get anything to eat here. I nursed the little girl for Mrs Miggles while she cooked, and Dick has laughed at me to see me nurse the little thing, and said it was rum. But I don’t mind; she’s a pretty little tit, and Dick has taught her to call me uncle.”