Читать книгу Under False Pretences - Sergeant Adeline - Страница 6

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It was in the year 1854 that an English gentleman named Edward Luttrell took up his abode in a white-walled, green-shuttered villa on the slopes of the western Apennines. He was accompanied by his wife (a Scotchwoman and an heiress), his son (a fine little fellow, five years old), and a couple of English servants. The party had been travelling in Italy for some months, and it was the heat of the approaching summer, as well as the delicate state of health in which Mrs. Luttrell found herself, that induced Mr. Luttrell to seek out some pleasant house amongst the hills where his wife and child might enjoy cool breezes and perfect repose. For he had lately had reason to be seriously concerned about Mrs. Luttrell's health.

The husband and wife were as unlike each other as they well could be. Edward Luttrell was a broad-shouldered, genial, hearty man, warmly affectionate, hasty in word, generous in deed. Mrs. Luttrell was a woman of peculiarly cold manners; but she was capable, as many members of her household knew, of violent fits of temper and also of implacable resentment. She was not an easy woman to get on with, and if her husband had not been a man of very sweet and pliable nature, he might not have lived with her on such peaceful terms as was generally the case. She had inherited a great Scotch estate from her father, and Edward Luttrell was almost entirely dependent upon her; but it was not a dependence which seemed to gall him in the very least. Perhaps he would have been unreasonable if it had done so; for his wife, in spite of all her faults, was tenderly attached to him, and never loved him better than when he asserted his authority over her and her possessions.

Mr. and Mrs. Luttrell had not been at their pretty white villa for more than two months when a second son was born to them. He was baptized almost immediately by an English clergyman then passing through the place, and received the name of Brian. He was a delicate-looking baby, but seemed likely to live and do well. Mrs. Luttrell's recovery was unusually rapid; the soft Italian air suited her constitution, and she declared her intention of nursing the child herself.

Edward Luttrell was in high spirits. He had been decidedly nervous before the event took place, but now that it was safely over he was like a boy in his joyous sense of security. He romped with his little son, he talked patois with the inhabitants of the neighbouring village of San Stefano, he gossiped with the monks of the Benedictine foundation, whose settlement occupied a delightful site on the hillside, and no premonition of coming evil disturbed his heart. He thought himself the most fortunate of men. He adored his wife; he worshipped the baby. His whole heart was bound up in his handsome little Dick, who, at five years old, was as nearly the image of his father as a child could be. What had he left to wish for?

There had been a good deal of fever at San Stefano throughout the summer. When the little Brian was barely six weeks old, it became only too evident that Mrs. Luttrell was sickening of some illness—probably the same fever that had caused so much mortality in the village. The baby was hastily taken away from her, and a nurse provided. This nurse was a healthy young woman with very thick, black eyebrows and a bright colour; handsome, perhaps, but not prepossessing. She was the wife of a gardener employed at the villa, and had been recommended by one of the Fathers at the monastery—a certain Padre Cristoforo, who seemed to know the history of every man, woman and child in San Stefano. She was the mother of twins, but this was a fact which the Luttrells did not know.

This woman, Vincenza Vasari by name, was at first domiciled in the villa itself with her charge; but as more dangerous symptoms declared themselves in Mrs. Luttrell's case, it was thought better that she should take the baby to her own home, which was a fairly clean and respectable cottage close to the gates of the villa. Here Mr. Luttrell could visit the child from time to time; but as his wife's illness became more serious he saw less and less of the baby, and left it more than ever to Vincenza's care.

Vincenza's own children were with their grandmother at a hamlet three miles from San Stefano. The grandmother, generally known as old Assunta, used to bring one or another of them sometimes to see Vincenza. Perhaps they took the infection of fever in the course of these visits; at any rate one of them was soon reported to be seriously ill, and Vincenza was cautioned against taking the Luttrells' baby into the village. It was the little Lippo Vasari who was ill; his twin-brother Dino was reported perfectly well.

Some days afterwards Mr. Luttrell, on calling at the cottage as usual, noticed that Vincenza's eyes were red, and her manner odd and abrupt. Old Assunta was there, with the baby upon her knee. Mr. Luttrell asked what was the matter. Vincenza turned away and burst into tears.

"She has lost her baby, signor," the old woman explained. "The little one died last night at the village, and Vincenza could not see it. The doctor will tell you about it all," she said, nodding significantly, and lowering her voice. "He knows."

Mr. Luttrell questioned the doctor, and received his assurance that Vincenza's child (one of the twins) had been kept strictly apart from the little Brian Luttrell; and that there could be no danger of infection. In which assurance the doctor was perfectly sincere, not knowing that Vincenza's habit had been to spend a portion of almost every evening at her mother's house, in order to see her own children, to whom, however, she did not seem to be passionately attached.

It is to be noted that the Luttrells still learned nothing of the existence of the other baby; they fancied that all Vincenza's children were dead. Vincenza had thought that the English lady would be prejudiced against her if she knew that she was the mother of twins, and had left them both to old Assunta's care; so, even when Lippo was laid to rest in the churchyard at San Stefano, the little Dino was carefully kept in the background and not suffered to appear. Neither Mr. Luttrell nor Mrs. Luttrell (until long afterwards) knew that Vincenza had another child.

Two months passed before Mrs. Luttrell was sufficiently restored to health to be able to see her children. The day came at last when little Richard was summoned to her room to kiss a pale woman with great, dark eyes, at whom he gazed solemnly, wonderingly, but with a profound conviction that his own mamma had gone away and left her place to be filled up by somebody else. In point of fact, Mrs. Luttrell's expression was curiously changed; and the boy's instinct discovered the change at once. There was a restless, wandering look in her large, dark eyes which had never been visible in them before her illness, except in moments of strong excitement. She did not look like herself.

"I want the baby," she said, when she had kissed little Richard and talked to him for a few moments. "Where is my baby?"

Mr. Luttrell came up to her side and answered her.

"The baby is coming, Margaret; Vincenza is bringing him." Then, after a pause—"Baby has been ill," he said. "You must be prepared to see a great change in him."

She looked at him as if she did not understand.

"What change shall I see?" she said. "Tell Vincenza to make haste, Edward. I must see my baby at once; the doctor said I might see him to-day."

"Don't excite yourself, Margaret; I'll fetch them," said Mr. Luttrell, easily. "Come along, Dick; let us find Vincenza and little brother Brian."

He quitted the room, with Dick at his heels. Mrs. Luttrell was left alone. But she had not long to wait. Vincenza entered, made a low reverence, uttered two or three sentences of congratulation on the English signora's recovery, and then placed the baby on Mrs. Luttrell's lap.

What happened next nobody ever precisely knew. But in another moment Vincenza fled from the room, with her hands to her ears, and her face as white as death.

"The signora is mad—mad!" she gasped, as she met Mr. Luttrell in the corridor. "She does not know her own child! She says that she will kill it! I dare not go to her; she says that her baby is dead, and that that one is mine! Mine! mine! Oh, Holy Virgin in Heaven! she says that the child is mine!"

Wherewith Vincenza went into strong hysterics, and Mr. Luttrell strode hastily towards his wife's room, from which the cries of a child could be heard. He found Mrs. Luttrell sitting with the baby on her knee, but although the poor little thing was screaming with all its might, she vouchsafed it no attention.

"Tell Vincenza to take her wretched child away," she said. "I want my own. This is her child; not mine."

Edward Luttrell stood aghast.

"Margaret, what do you mean?" he ejaculated. "Vincenza's child is dead. This is our little Brian. You are dreaming."

He did not know whether she understood him or not, but a wild light suddenly flashed into her great, dark eyes. She dashed the child down upon the bed with the fury of a mad woman.

"You are deceiving me," she cried; "I know that my child is dead. Tell me the truth; my child is dead!"

"No such, thing, Margaret," cried Mr. Luttrell, almost angrily; "how can you utter such folly?"

But his remonstrance passed unheeded. Mrs. Luttrell had, sunk insensible to the floor; and her swoon was followed by a long and serious relapse, during which it seemed very unlikely that she would ever awake again to consciousness.

The crisis approached. She passed it safely and recovered. Then came the tug of war. The little Brian was brought back to the house, with Vincenza as his nurse; but Mrs. Luttrell refused to see him. Doctors declared her dislike of the child to be a form of mania; her husband certainly believed it to be so. But the one fact remained. She would not acknowledge the child to be her own, and she would not consent to its being brought up as Edward Luttrell's son. Nothing would convince her that her own baby still lived, or that this child was not the offspring of the Vasari household. Mr. Luttrell expostulated. Vincenza protested and shed floods of tears, the doctor, the monks, the English nurse were all employed by turn, in the endeavour to soften her heart; but every effort was useless. Mrs. Luttrell declared that the baby which Vincenza had brought her was not her child, and that she should live and die in this conviction.

Was she mad? Or was some wonderful instinct of mother's love at the bottom of this obstinate adherence to her opinion?

Mr. Luttrell honestly thought that she was mad. And then, mild man as he was, he rose up and claimed his right as her husband to do as he thought fit. He sent for his solicitor, a Mr. Colquhoun, through whom he went so far even as to threaten his wife with severe measures if she did not yield. He would not live with her, he said—or Mr. Colquhoun reported that he said—unless she chose to bury her foolish fancy in oblivion. There was no doubt in his mind that the child was Brian Luttrell, not Lippo Vasari, whose name was recorded on a rough wooden cross in the churchyard of San Stefano. And he insisted upon it that his wife should receive the child as her own.

It was a long fight, but in the end Mrs. Luttrell had to yield. She dismissed Vincenza, and she returned to Scotland with the two children. Her husband exacted from her a promise that she would never again speak of the wild suspicion that had entered her mind; that under no circumstances would she ever let the poor little boy know of the painful doubt that had been thrown on his identity. Mrs. Luttrell promised, and for three-and-twenty years she kept her word. Perhaps she would not have broken it then but for a certain great trouble which fell upon her, and which caused a temporary revival of the strange madness which had led her to hate the child placed in her arms at San Stefano.

It was not to be wondered at that Edward Luttrell made a favourite of his second son in after life. A sense of the injustice done him by his mother made the father especially tender to the little Brian; he walked with him, talked with him, made a companion of him in every possible way. Mrs. Luttrell regained by degrees the cold composure of manner that had distinguished her in earlier life: but she could not command herself so far as to make a show of affection for her younger son. Brian was a very small boy indeed when he found that out. "Mother doesn't love me," he said once to his father, with grieving lips and tear-filled eyes; "I wonder why." What could his father do but press him passionately to his broad breast and assure him in words of tenderest affection that he loved his boy; and that if Brian were good, and true, and brave, his mother would love him too! "I will be very good then," said Brian, nestling close up to his father's shoulder—for he was a child with exceedingly winning ways and a very affectionate disposition—and putting one arm round Mr. Luttrell's neck. "But you know she loves Richard always—even when he is naughty. And you love me when I'm naughty, too." What could Mr. Luttrell say to that?

He died when Brian was fifteen years old; and the last words upon his tongue were an entreaty that his wife would never tell the boy of the suspicion that had turned her love to him into bitterness. He died, and part of the sting of his death to Mrs. Luttrell lay in the fact that he died thinking her mad on that one point. The doctors had called her conviction "a case of mania," and he had implicitly believed them.

But suppose she had not been mad all the time!