Читать книгу One Night's Mystery - May Agnes Fleming - Страница 14

Table of Contents

ll is still when they enter; the pensionnaires are safely in their rooms and in bed. Mademoiselle Stephanie, looking like a snuff-colored spectre, in a loose white wrapper, awaits them. A few questions, a recognized formula, are asked and answered, then they are dismissed with "bon nuit, mes chéries," and bedroom lamps.

"In twenty minutes, young ladies, I will come for the lights," is Miss Jones's valedictory, as she mounts up to her own room.

"Good-night, Cy," Sydney Owenson cries, gayly; "don't dream of that pretty little Mr. Carew if you can help. His mad passion for Miss Jones is patent to the dullest observer."

"Bonne nuit et bonnes rêves, ma belle," Cyrilla answers, with rather a forced smile, "we would all be happier if we never dreamed of Mr. Carew or any other of his kind."

'Toinette goes virtuously and sleepily to bed at once, gaping audibly. Miss Hendrick throws off her hat and jacket, draws a volume of Dante, in the original, toward her, with a book of Italian exercises, and sets to work translating. So, the twenty minutes up, Miss Jones finds her.

"Industrious, upon my word!" sneers Miss Jones. She is generally worsted in the fray, but she can never by any chance let her enemy pass without a cut-and-thrust.

"Yes, Miss Jones," Cyrilla replies; "and if I continue to be industrious until I am—well, nine and twenty, say—I may hope to attain the elevated position of fourth-rate teacher in a second-rate Canadian school; I may even aspire to entertain military men, six or seven years my junior, by an hour's dissertation on the art of making maple sugar."

She rises, with a short, contemptuous laugh, and begins to unlace her boots. Another instant, and the door closes behind Miss Jones, and she is alone.

It is a vividly, brilliantly bright night. The yellow moonshine floods the room as Cyrilla raises the window, wraps a shawl around her, and sits down. 'Toinette's watch, lying on the dressing-table, points to ten. Another hour and she and Fred Carew will be together once more. Her pulses thrill at the thought. She loves this man; she has loved him since she was ten years old—of all the bliss life holds it holds none greater than his presence for her. The mystery and danger of the adventure, too, have their charm. Life has gone on, for the past three years, so flat, stale, and unprofitable that to-night's excitement and wrong-doing, if you will, possess an irresistible fascination. If it is ever discovered, if it ever reaches Miss Dormer's ears, all is up with her forever—her last hope of Miss Dormer's fortune is gone. And she longs for and covets Miss Dormer's fortune, this school-girl of nineteen, as the blind desire sight. Miss Dormer hates Fred Carew, and all of his name, with a hatred as intense as—even Cyrilla must own—in a retributive light it is just. The story is this—told with what passionate intensity and vivid fierceness by Miss Dormer herself, the girl remembers well.

Forty years before, the father of Phillis Dormer had died, leaving a fortune, a widow, and a daughter of eight. Two years passed, and the widow was a widow no longer—she had taken for her second husband good-looking, good-for-nothing Tom Hendrick. Of that marriage came Jack, the father of Cyrilla. If Mr. Tom Hendrick had expected to possess the late Mr. Dormer's fortune, as well as his widow, he was doomed to be disappointed—the sixty thousand pounds were tightly tied up on Phillis. And Phillis, even as a child, was not easily to be wronged.

She endured the reckless, riotous life of her step-father's house, the daily insolence of her bold, handsome, half-brother Jack, for a dozen years or more; then her mother died, and Miss Phillis Dormer separated herself entirely from her disreputable relations, and engaging a dame de compagnie, set up for herself as an heiress. The wife of the member for her native county brought her out, one or two fine ladies took her up, she was presented at court, ran the round of the season, and finished by finding herself engaged to Frederic Dunraith Carew, nephew of the Earl of Dunraith.

She was three and twenty years old, slightly lame, and most pathetically ugly. Fred Carew of the Blues was handsome of face, graceful of figure, elegant of dress and manner, all that his son was to-day, and more. He was poor—a beggar absolutely, over head and ears in debt—a rich wife his one earthly hope of salvation from Queen's Bench for life. The ugly, the rich Miss Dormer fell in love with him. Mr. Carew was told so, pulled his long blonde whiskers perplexedly, thought the matter over, "more in sorrow than in anger," faced the worst like a man, and went and proposed to Miss Dormer.

She was intensely, infatuatedly, insanely almost, in love with him. Like many very plain people, she had a morbid adoration of beauty in others. Mr. Carew had fascinated her at sight—he continued so to fascinate her to the end. If anything could have made plain Phillis Dormer lovely it would surely have been the perfect, the intense joy, that filled her when Frederic Carew asked her to be his wife. Hers was the perfect love that casteth out fear. She accepted him, she trusted him—in one word, she bowed down and idolized him.

The noble relatives of Mr. Carew were delighted, and made most friendly advances toward the bride-elect at once. It is true the sixty thousand pounds had been made in coal, but the coal-dust did not dim their golden glitter in the least. There had been talk of some penniless girl down in Berkshire, with two blue eyes and a pink-and-pearl face alone to recommend her; but that was all at an end, no doubt. Fred had come to his senses, and realized that love is all very well in theory—a pretty girl well enough to waltz with, but when a wife is in the question the thing to be looked at is her bank account. Frederic had done his duty; his noble relatives were quite prepared to do theirs, and accept the coal merchant's heiress as one of the family. The season ended, they invited her down to their country place in Sussex, the accepted suitor dutifully playing cavalier servante to a by no means exacting mistress. She gave so much and was satisfied to receive so little, that it was really pathetic to watch them. Frederic was perpetually running up to town, and staying away days at a time, even when the wedding day was not two weeks off. But Miss Dormer asked no questions, gave him wistful glances and smiles at parting, joyful glances and smiles at coming—come when and how he might. In secret she had made over her whole fortune to be his indisputably in the hour that made him her husband. A fool you think her, perhaps. Well, very likely, but a folly none need quarrel with, since it is very far from common.

Three days before the wedding-day there was a dinner-party, given by the Earl and Countess of Dunraith, in honor of the approaching nuptials. Mr. Carew had run up to town as usual, two days before, but had promised to be in time for the dinner. He failed, however, and, to the chagrin and annoyance of host and hostess did not put in an appearance at all. The bride-elect bore it bravely—something had detained Fred; she missed him sorely, but in all things his lordly will was her law, "The king could do no wrong."

One hour after dinner, as she sat in the drawing-room, listening to the song Lady Dunraith was softly singing, looking out at the tremulous beauty of the summer twilight, gemmed with golden stars, and wondering wistfully whereabouts her darling might be, a note was presented to her by a servant. It was from him—her heart gave a glad bound. This was to explain satisfactorily his absence, no doubt. With a smile she opened the note; from that hour until the hour she died no smile like that ever softened the hard face of Phillis Dormer.

"Dover, September 18th,——.

"My Dear Miss Dormer:—While waiting for the Calais boat I drop you a line. I am awfully sorry to disappoint you; but really, when it came to the point, I was not equal to it. I mean my marriage with you. Besides, I was engaged to another young lady before I ever knew you, and my honor was seriously compromised. She is poor, but we must make up our minds to that, I suppose, somehow. 'Better is a dinner of herbs where love abideth than a stalled ox and contention.' I was married this morning, and we are now on our way to Paris to spend the honeymoon. Regretting once more any little disappointment I may have caused you, I remain, dear Miss Dormer, very truly yours,

Frederic Dunraith Carew."

"Love not! love not! Oh, warning vainly said," sang Lady Dunraith at the piano. Phillis Dormer crushed the note—the curiously heartless note—in her hand, and listened to the song. To the last day of her life the words, the air, the look of the violet-twilight landscape would remain photographed on brain and heart. She had loved him, words are weak and poor to tell how greatly. She had trusted him with her whole soul. From that hour she loved no one, trusted no one, to the end of her life.

Her song ended, the countess came over to her, as she stood in the bay looking fixedly out at the rising harvest moon.

"Was that note from Fred, tiresome boy? Why was he not here?"

"It was from Fred," Miss Dormer answered. "He could not come."

Lady Dunraith looked at her curiously. What a livid color her face was! what a black, dilated look there was in her eyes! "Fred is well?" she anxiously asked.

"He is quite well, I think, Lady Dunraith."

Her ladyship moved away, too well-bred to ask further questions. An hour later—without one farewell, without taking a single one of all her trunks or boxes—Phillis Dormer vanished from Dunraith Park forever.

She went straight to London, packed a few things with her own hands, wrote a brief letter to her man of business, sent for a cab, drove to Euston Square Station, and disappeared for all time from London, from England, from all who had ever known her.

Two days after, the truth came out, and all London was laughing over the last good joke. Fred Carew's pluck had failed at the eleventh hour; he had shown the white feather, and fled from the clutches of the ugly heiress. He had run away with a penniless little country lassie, pretty as a rosebud, and poor as a church mouse. His noble relations cast him off forever. He sold out, and with the proceeds lived abroad, and from thenceforth became as socially extinct as Phillis Dormer herself.

Of Miss Dormer no one knew anything. The ground might have opened and swallowed her for all trace she had left behind. Her solicitor knew, no doubt, but he held his professional tongue. Her half-brother, Jack Hendrick, was the only being on earth interested in her, and his interest was chiefly of a pecuniary nature.

"She usen't to be half a bad sort before she fell in with that duffer, Carew," Jack was wont to say. "Would pay a fellow's debts as quick as look, but with the devil's own temper all the time."

A few years later Jack's own little romance came off. The daughter of a baronet eloped with him, of which elopement Cyrilla was, in due time, the result. Then, sixteen years after, came that letter dated "Montreal," and signed "Phillis Dormer," asking curtly enough that her niece should be sent out to her to be educated and decently brought up. "If she pleases me, I may leave her all I possess one day. If she does not, she can go back to you, the better at least for a few years in a good school."

Phillis Dormer had gone straight to Montreal, where some of her property lay, and there buried herself, so to speak, alive. One year after her coming she read in the Times this announcement:

"At Brussels, the wife of Frederic D. Carew, Esquire, of a son."

The old wound, not even yet seared over was torn open afresh. In a paroxysm of fury she tore the paper to shreds and trampled it under her feet, cursing, in her mad rage, the man who had betrayed her, the wife he had wedded, and the son who was born to him.

Fifteen years after, and in the same paper, at the same place, she read the death of Frederic Dunraith Carew. In all these years no softening had ever taken place in her bitter, desperate heart. In all these years that moment perhaps was the happiest. Now he was as lost to her rival at least as to herself—the grave held him. Bitter, lonely, wicked, most wretched, most unrepentant, she lived alone, served in fear and dislike by all. Suddenly the resolve seized her to send for her niece. Jack Hendrick's daughter could be no good, but she was the only creature on earth, except her worthless father, whom she could call kin. Old age was upon her—a most unlovely old age—and desolate and forsaken her heart cried out for some one. At least this girl would serve her faithfully in the hope of a future fortune, and ask no wages. For avarice had been added to her other infirmities, and Miss Dormer, once generous, had grown a miser.

Cyrilla came—a slim slip of a girl, with Jack Hendrick's dark, thin face, and bold, black eyes, her mother's aquiline nose, as Miss Dormer said, and that way she liked of holding her pauper head well up. Cyrilla came, and with the intense curiosity of a woman hungry for news of that world which had once been hers, Phillis Dormer plied her with questions—questions of her father, of her father's friends, of her mother's family, and their bearing toward herself.

"I know nothing about them," Cyrilla answered. "I desire to know nothing. My mother's relations have never noticed me in any way, although my father wrote to them at her death, and since that time again and again."

"I am quite sure of it," said Miss Dormer, grimly. "Jack Hendrick is not the man to let any one, who has the misfortune to be connected with him, alone on the subject of money. If he had known my address I should have had begging letters from him by the bushel."

"Please don't say anything unkind about papa, Aunt Phillis," the girl cried, imperiously. "I am very fond of papa, and he was always very good to me. And he always spoke well of you."

Miss Dormer found her niece unpleasantly reticent for a girl of sixteen. Of the life she had led before coming here Cyrilla seemed able to give but the most meagre details.

"Who had given her this very expensive ruby set? Who had given her all these handsome books of poetry, marked with the initials 'F. D. C.'? Oh, a friend of papa's—papa had so many friends, and they all made her presents." The girl of sixteen had heard the history of her aunt's exile, and was on guard. But in an evil hour Miss Dormer swooped down upon her quarry, and learned all.

It was an album that told the story—a gorgeous affair of ivory, purple velvet, and gilt clasps, that her niece kept always jealously locked up, filled with cabinet-sized photographs of her Bohemian friends. The first picture in the book—a finely-tinted vignette of a boyish head and face—made Miss Dormer start and change color. She glanced at the fly-leaf. The murder was out! There was the tell-tale inscription:

"Beauty Hendrick, on her Fifteenth Birthday, from the most Devoted of her Adorers.

Frederic Dunraith Carew."

The old woman uttered a shrill, hissing sort of cry, as though she had been struck, her yellow face turned green, her wicked old eyes absolutely glared with fury. After all these years, when the man was dead and rotten in his grave, to be stung by that name! It was winter time; a large coal fire glowed in the grate. Miss Dormer sprang from her chair, and in the twinkling of an eye Cyrilla's elegant album was on the bed of coals.

The girl darted forward to the rescue with a scream of dismay, but warding her off with one hand, Phillis Dormer held it down with her stick, not speaking a word, and glaring, as Cyrilla ever afterward said, like old Hecate over her witches' cauldron. So she stood, holding it mercilessly, until it crumbled upon the coals, a handful of black, charred ashes. And then the storm burst—a very tempest of fury and invective hurled against Cyrilla—"the viper she had warmed only to sting her"—against her father, against the Carews, sire and son. It was a most horrible scene. Even the girl's strong young nerves shrank with a shudder of disgust. But outwardly she stood like a rock, her lips compressed, her eyes flashing black lightning. At last, exhausted, the old woman paused from sheer want of breath.

"This is the sort of ingrate I have taken into my house, is it? This is the sort of friends you and your father have made. My curse upon them—the living and the dead!"

She shook her stick in the air more like one of Macbeth's witches than ever. Cyrilla Hendrick spoke for the first time, her short, scornful upper lip curling.

"You forget, Aunt Phillis, that curses, like chickens, come home to roost," was what she said. "I don't think your anathemas will hurt Freddy Carew very greatly. You are a bad old woman, Aunt Phillis Dormer, and you may send me back to England as soon as you like."

Then she walked out of the room, with her pauper chin higher than ever, and the air of an outraged grande dame. But in her own room, with the door locked, she flung herself on her bed, and cried passionately, cried herself sick, for the loss of Freddy's portrait.

Miss Dormer did not send her home. The first outburst past, even her warped sense of justice showed her that the girl was not so much to blame. She could not be expected to feel the wrongs of the aunt she had never seen very deeply, and no doubt the son was as fatally fascinating as the father had been. Only her mind, up to this time undecided concerning the disposal of her fortune (nearly doubled by judicious investments during a quarter of a century), was made up. She would educate her niece, she would select a husband for her. If her niece married the man of her choice she would bestow her fortune upon her. If not, it would go to found an asylum for maiden ladies of fifty. In any case she must so secure it that by no possible means could any fraction of it ever come to Frederic Carew's son. On their next interview Miss Dormer, quite calm by this time, proposed to her niece the oath of which Cyrilla had spoken to Sydney Owenson—the oath never to marry Fred Carew. Miss Hendrick promptly and resolutely declined.

"I am thousands of miles from poor Freddy," she said. "I may never see him again. I never expect to see him again—all the same, Aunt Phil, I won't take the oath. I never took an oath in my life, and I never mean to. Fred is as poor as a rat, and always will be. I don't suppose, if it comes to that, he will ever be able to marry anybody unless he falls foul of an heiress. For my own part, Aunt Dormer, find me a rich man, a millionaire, please, and I will marry him to-morrow."

With this Miss Dormer had to be content—the niece had a will of her own as well as the aunt. It was true the ocean rolled between them, it was impossible for them to correspond at Mlle. Chateauroy's pensionnat—there was really no present danger. He was poor, as Cyrilla had said, and Cyrilla was not the kind of girl to throw herself away upon a poor man, let her girlish fancy for him be ever so great—not the sort of girl whose heart is stronger than her head—a sort, indeed, that is pretty nearly obsolete—latter-day young ladies having a much more appreciative eye for the main chance than for the exploded "love in a cottage."

Last midsummer vacation Cyrilla had met at her aunt's house a middle-aged, sandy-haired, high-cheek-boned gentleman, introduced to her as Mr. Donald McKelpin. Mr. Donald McKelpin had expressed his pleasure in a pompous and ponderous way, set to a fine Glasgow accent, at making her acquaintance, accompanied by a look of broad, undisguised admiration. Upon his departure Miss Dormer informed her niece that this was the gentleman upon whom she designed her to bestow her hand and fortune, a gentleman in the soap-and-candle line, at whose Midas-touch all things turned to gold.

"Very well, Aunt Phil," had been the young lady's submissive answer, "just as you please. One might wish him twenty years this side of fifty, and with tresses a trifle less obnoxiously fiery, but after all one doesn't marry a man to sit and look at him. Whenever it is Sultan McKelpin's pleasure to throw the handkerchief his grateful slave will pick it up. Whenever he is ready to make me, I am ready to become"—mimicking to the life the broad Scotch accent—"Mistress Donald McKelpin."

The clock in the steeple of St. James-the-Less, striking loudly eleven, awakes Cyrilla from her reverie. All is still. Moonlight floods the heavens and the earth; the trees stand up black and nearly lifeless in the crystal light. It is cold, too, but her shawl protects her. As the last sonorous chime sounds a head rises over the wooden wall, directly opposite to where she sits. Her heart gives a leap. It is Carew. The head pauses a moment, reconnoitres, sees that all is safe, and then the remainder of Mr. Fred Carew follows. He poises himself for an instant on the top of the wall, unguarded, in this peaceful town, by wicked spikes or broken bottles, then lightly drops upon the turf beneath. Cyrilla waves her handkerchief to him, and he approaches, takes his stand under the tree beneath her window, and waits. She rises to her feet and listens. The silence is profound—all are in bed, no doubt, and asleep. 'Toinette's deep, regular breathing is like clockwork. A momentary pause, then Cyrilla prepares to descend. Her window is about fifteen feet from the ground—three feet beneath it a leaden spout runs round the house. She lowers herself upon this precarious footing, and then, without much difficulty, swings into the strong branches of a huge hemlock near. It is not the first time Miss Hendrick has, for a freak, reached the playground in this tom-boy fashion. Here she rests a moment to poise securely.

"For goodness sake, Beauty, take care," says Mr. Carew's anxious voice below.

She smiles. "All right, Freddy," she answers.

Branch by branch she descends, with wonderful agility for a girl—the lowest limb is reached. She frees her dress, and leaps lightly to the ground and to the side of Fred Carew.