CHAPTER XII
WITH Mr. Pouncet’s letter in his pocket – that self-betraying document, which he had estimated at once at its due value – Horace set out the next day for Kenlisle. Yet not for Kenlisle direct: the young man, with the oddest, uncharacteristic trifling, stopped half-way, to visit a remarkable cathedral town which lay in his road. What did Horace Scarsdale care for cathedrals? Yet he paused, in that most anxious and exciting moment, to inspect this one, and marched doggedly round and about it, as if to persuade himself that he was interested. In his progress he paused before an apothecary’s shop – but did not enter there, nor till hours after, when he rushed in on his way to the railway, and made certain purchases. In haste to get his train, he did not permit himself time to look at the things he had bought, but hurried them into his pocket, and rushed on again as though it had been only a sudden thought which moved him. Yet he had never looked so darkly pale and dangerous as when, seated in the railway-carriage, he felt in his pockets these little sealed packets. That day was a Mayday, warm and bright; but Horace shivered in his corner with a chill that went to his heart. For a moment the colour went out of his face, and the light out of his eye; he gave a stealthy glance round – a glance full of the intolerable terrors of guilt. Did any one guess what he had in his pocket? Could any one tell what he had in his heart?
The next morning he presented himself to the troubled eyes of Mr. Pouncet, an image of conscious power. That unfortunate man of character knew by this time of the death of Stenhouse, and had spent a day or two of agony wondering into whose hands his letter was likely to fall. The advent of Horace was a relief for the moment: here he had, at least, an assistant, who could do any further lying that might be necessary, without burdening Mr. Pouncet’s personal conscience. That was a great point gained. But the answer to his first eager question was far from satisfactory.
“Your letter was put into my hands by Mrs. Stenhouse,” said Horace; “and you know who she is – Roger Musgrave’s mother.”
Mr. Pouncet scratched his head in dismay. “She could not understand two words of it!” he exclaimed, at last, endeavouring to re-assure himself.
“Perhaps not – but one word, most likely, is enough. She is alarmed, and curious, and knows very well that something is wrong, though she cannot tell what; and that to expose you is for the interest of her son.”
“To expose me!” cried Mr. Pouncet, with a gasp of rage and mortification.
“Yes,” said Horace, coolly; “but,” he added, producing that document out of his pocket, “I managed, fortunately, to bring away your letter.”
Mr. Pouncet writhed silently under this persecution, which he dared not resent; for it was quite true that the story of that past transaction, once laid open to the world, would empty those solemn boxes labelled with his clients’ names, which made his private office look so important, and would banish him at once from Armitage Park, and many another great house. The unfortunate lawyer was at his wit’s end. That secret would have died with Stenhouse but for the discovery of this cold-blooded and unmanageable young man; and Mr. Pouncet cursed the day when, in defiance of all accustomed rules, he admitted Horace to his office. What was a romance of possible expectations to him?
“Have you ever learnt anything more of your own circumstances and the fortune,” said Mr. Pouncet, with a slight sneer, “which you expected when I saw you last?”
But when Horace answered – as he did at once, having previously resolved upon it – with a very succinct account, quite unencumbered by any reflections or exhibitions of feeling, of what he had discovered, the lawyer opened his eyes. The heir of such a heap of money, penniless though he was at the present moment, was a very different individual from the poor Horace Scarsdale, with nothing but his cunning wits and unscrupulous mind to help him on in the world. The revelation reconciled Mr. Pouncet even to himself. It was no longer so sadly humiliating to acknowledge himself in the young man’s power.
“And what will you do?” he asked, breathlessly, with already a difference in his tone. One does not speak to an attorney’s clerk, even when he knows one’s cherished secret, as one speaks to the heir of a good many thousands a-year.
“What can I do?” said Horace, rising in due proportion, and tasting the first sweetness of his wealth. “Forbidden to borrow – debarred from all ordinary means of reaping some present advantage; unless – I can be of use to you, if you make it worth my while – unless you can help me, Pouncet. You can if you please.”
Mr. Pouncet winced a little at this familiar address. “Had you not better try,” he suggested, “to make some arrangement with your father?”
“Arrangement with my father? What for? He has less power than you have: the will is expressly constructed so as to make arrangement impossible, and shut him out entirely,” cried Horace, with a certain suppressed exultation of enmity. “Besides, he hates me, and I’d much rather arrange with you. Look here, Pouncet – I want to get married. Give me a thousand a-year, and I’ll give you my best services, and my word of honour to pay you a reasonable sum, by way of acknowledgment, when I come into my property. Will you? There is no use lingering over it – say Yes or No.”
“A thousand a-year!” cried Mr. Pouncet, in dismay.
“Less would be useless,” said Horace, in his high-flying arrogance. “Besides, I could earn half as much anywhere, without asking any favour from you.”
Poor Mr. Pouncet took his hand out of his pocket, and grinned at the young man with a helpless spite and disdain. Words were so incapable of expressing all the mingled mockery and mortification with which he heard that last speech, that the unfortunate lawyer would have made derisive faces at him had he dared. As it was, he turned away to his desk, and growled under his breath, “Catch me giving you fifty if you hadn’t known,” by way of relieving his feelings. Stifled as it was, the expression did him good. He turned round again with only some spasmodic remains of that grin agitating the corners of his mouth.
“And you’re going to marry? Any money – eh?” he said.
“I don’t think it,” said Horace – “but I should like to know your decision at once, for I have some arrangements to make.”
“A thousand a-year for the whole term of your father’s life? Why, I suppose he is no older than I am? – he may live for twenty years,” said the unhappy lawyer, rubbing up the scanty hair upon his head.
“He may,” said Horace, briefly; but, as he spoke, a terrible throb convulsed, in spite of himself, the young man’s heart, upon which those deadly packets seemed to press like an intolerable weight.
“He may! And you ask me, a man in my senses, to undertake paying you an income of a thousand a-year for, perhaps, twenty years!”
“I ask you only to consider the matter, and what I might be able to do for you at the end of my probation,” said Horace, loftily – “not to say my services for the present time. Don’t do anything against your will. A lawsuit promoted by young Musgrave – by that time most likely my brother-in-law – would, I have no doubt, be quite as profitable to me.”
The lawyer gave a gasp of rage and derision beyond words. “You could conduct it, you suppose?” he cried aloud – “you!” – which was very imprudent, but a burst of nature. Then he cooled himself down, with a little shiver of passion: he dared not irritate this remorseless, immovable boy.
“I could, easily, with all these facts in my possession,” said Horace, with a careless gesture; and Mr. Pouncet saw his whole substance, his business, and, worst of all, his reputation, falling like so many card-houses at the touch of that unpitying hand.
But the interview did not end so. Mr. Pouncet consented at last, with many a grudge and inward compunction, to pay Horace the large stipend he claimed, on the tacit understanding that one-half of it was to be repaid to him when the young man came to his fortune; and the lawyer, though he had guessed rightly when he judged Mr. Scarsdale to be about his own age, notwithstanding, with the reckless boldness of humanity, began to reckon in his mind all the chances against the recluse’s life. The wonder seemed to be that such a man, in such circumstances, could last so long: there could not be much vigour of existence left in him. A very short time now should surely make an end of these deplorable, hopeless years. So reckoned the lawyer, who cared nothing about Mr. Scarsdale; while that unhappy hermit’s son, with all the desperation of an unnatural enmity, cherished a darker kind of speculation in his hard heart.
The conclusion of all was, however, that Mr. Pouncet wrote a placid business letter to Sir John Armitage, informing him that he had just dispatched a confidential clerk, in whom he could place the most perfect reliance, to make the fullest investigation throughout the district. Mr. Pouncet very much regretted that Sir John could not furnish him with particulars, or indeed any clue whatever to the name and residence of the suspected old man; but had every confidence, if there was any such person, in the abilities of his clerk, who would leave no means untried for finding him out.
Sir John thought this epistle so completely satisfactory, that he forwarded it to Colonel Sutherland, with some uncomplimentary suggestions about a “cock-and-a-bull story,” and feminine powers of imagination, which the Colonel did not read to Susan; and all the parties concerned were comfortably lulled out of their anxiety by the prospect of so complete an investigation. What might not be hoped from the researches of Mr. Pouncet’s confidential clerk?
CHAPTER XIII
WHILE the simple household at Milnehill felicitated itself on the reality of the search about to be made, Mr. Pouncet’s confidential clerk left Kenlisle. Horace went slowly through the country, though he was not looking for any one. He did his journey on foot, and did it by very slow and gradual degrees – perhaps to favour slightly his worthy employer’s fiction of a search, but in reality playing with, resisting by fits, yet always entertaining, the horrible attraction which drew him to Marchmain. He had nothing to do there which could give him a pretence of a lawful visit. The last time he had gone like a thief into his father’s house, anxious to search into the secrets there; this time how was he going? – in pretended friendship, or in open war? He could not tell. He only knew that a fascination too strong for him drew him on and on, though he fluttered in many a circle, prolonging his way, like a charmed bird, towards that house which contained the father of his life and the obstacle to his happiness. As he walked sullenly through these well-remembered paths, hovering round the borders of that moor which in May, sunshine, and daylight, a man with such black thoughts might well have feared to enter, he seemed to see perpetually before him, as in a picture, that pale spare figure in the dressing-gown – that formal attenuated man who sat by the polished dining-table, with his glass of purple claret, his two tall candles, and his reading-desk. Was that dismal existence life? Was there any pleasure in it to the forlorn endurer of all these nights and days? Would there be any cruelty in hastening his withdrawal from this bitter and impoverished existence? The questions formed dimly, and died away without articulate answer in the mind of his son. He wanted to persuade himself, as he gradually neared the climax of his temptation and of his fate, that he came with no object, but simply because curiosity drew him to the old house, to see how things were going on there.
Horace came upon Marchmain from behind, on an afternoon of May. The moor was no wilderness at that season. The whins were burning under the sunshine, the heather blooming purple and fragrant, thrusting its flowery spires against the foot that disturbed their growth; and the young seedlings, sown here and there in little clumps, waved their delicate young leaves to the soft air, and glittered in the light with a genial spring triumph over the intractable soil. Even the dark moorburns and rivulets of water in the deep cuttings caught a grace from the sky, and brightened over their brown surface with a gleam of the blue heavens and white clouds above. Everything was sweet, and bright, and hopeful in that dull waste of unproductive soil, which at other times could look so dreary. The clump of firs on the hill-top looked down wistfully, no longer weird spies, but gentle gazers upon the changed scene. But no change had passed upon Marchmain. The house, if any thing, was a little more lonely than of old, betraying unconsciously that some of the little life it had, had ebbed out of it. Susan’s flowerpots stood naked in the window, with withered stalks of plants, long since dead, standing up dead and dismal from the dry mould in which they had once grown; left here by Peggy as a grim reminder to her master of the daughter – the only chance of love and kindness which he had remaining in the world – whom he had thrust remorselessly away; and with that calm sky declining towards evening, the sun slanting westward, the home-going hour lengthening its shadows over the long stretches of moorland, where by-and-bye a few labouring men should cross the sunlight to cottages clustered somewhere on the road, hid in the lower nooks of the hills, few objects more desolate and solitary than the house of Marchmain could have been imagined. Human step or human shadow was not near. The undisturbed heather almost brushed against the step of the door. In most of the windows the blinds were down, as though the heart within was too sick to bear the light. This was how Horace found the house which had nursed his childhood and imprisoned his youth.
When the young man essayed to enter at the kitchen door, he found even that entrance, once hospitably ajar, now closed and bolted. He had scarcely courage to seek admittance boldly. He hovered about, making a faint noise among the rustling herbage and broken stones, enough in that solitude to bring Peggy peering to the kitchen window. Peggy had changed for the worse, like the house. She looked, at last, as if patience and strength were being exhausted out of her: her eyes were peevish and dilated, with dark rings round them; and she looked out with a keen, suspicious glance, as if even confidence in her own powers – that last stronghold – was failing her. When she saw Horace, a softening sentiment came over Peggy’s face: she came softly to open the door to him, and brought him into the kitchen, without a word either of welcome or comment. Then she wheeled her own cushioned chair out of the immediate range of the fire, and half led, half forced him into it. “You’ll be tired,” said Peggy, under her breath, with a tear twinkling bright in the corner of her eye. The surprise overcame her for the moment, and made her forget the sad difference between Susan’s brother and Susan herself.
And Horace, too, for that instant was not like the Horace of old times. He was subdued by his own thoughts. An involuntary tremor seized him, to think of the dark purpose in his mind, and of why he had obtruded himself into this melancholy-familiar house. He could have supposed that his dreadful secret impulse – the horrible secret instruments he carried about with him – were betrayed and visible to any eye that looked keenly at him. But Peggy did not look keenly; she faltered with a real emotion at the sight of him, and he trembled before her salutation with an intense anguish and remorse, of which he could not have supposed himself capable. Warnings sharp and terrible, of the remorse not to be removed, which should cling for ever to the traces of the deed done; but Horace shut his eyes to that consideration. In another moment he was fully himself – recovered from his rare and strange qualm of feebleness – pleased to find, in Peggy’s softened mood, no suspicion of him or his intentions, and resolved to make the most of that unusual grace.
“I came to see how you were. How is he, Peggy?” said Horace, pointing to the door which opened into the hall.
“Speak low! – oh! speak low, for your life!” cried Peggy, in a whisper. “If he knowed I let you into this house he would murder me!”
“I should like to see him try,” said Horace, grimly, with a smile over the fantastic idea; that, indeed, would be a better mode of removing this hindrance than any expedient he could devise. “He hates me so, does he?” he added, with a white smile of enmity. He was glad to hear of it – it spurred him to a passionate emulation in that unnatural art.
“’Tis himsel’ he hates and mortifies – the Lord forgive him!” cried Peggy. “Eyeh, Master Horry, if you knowed the wreck and the ruin that the devil, and pride, and ill-will have made of that man!”
“I daresay he has not much pleasure in his life?” said Horace, half interrogatively.
“Pleasure! I’m the auldest friend he has in this world, though I’m but a servant,” said Peggy, her eyes dilating still more with tears, which did not flow, but only reddened and expanded the limits which they filled; “but there’s scarce an hour in the day, nor a day in the year, but I would see him die sooner than live as he’s living now.”
“You speak,” said Horace, playing with his own self-terror, and turning a pale, ominous look upon her, before which she shrank instinctively, “as if you thought it would be a charity to rid him of his life.”
“Eh, Mr. Horry? – the Lord forgive ye! Would you put such an accursed thought on me?” cried Peggy, with an ebullition of violence as tearful and faltering as her kindness. “God help us, master and servant, two lone people, without comfort in this world! But it would be a new sight, and a strange sight, to see comfort come from you.”
“Why, Peggy, you said as much,” said Horace, with momentary weakness.
“Then, I tell you, sir, murder’s no charity,” said Peggy, sharply. “I’ve little pleasure in my life by what I had in my young days, but I would have died more cheerful then nor now; and the master takes grit care, moor care nor I ever knew him take before, of his health and strength, as behoves a man at his time of life. He’s aye at his medicine-chest off and on; and has the doors bolted and pistols in his room, for fear of robbers, though I’m aye saying there’s no robbers like to come here. He’s afflicted his flesh in the times that are past, but he’s a careful liver now.”
“That he may keep me a little longer out of my inheritance,” said Horace, between his teeth.
Peggy stopped short in the middle of the kitchen, where she had been hastily laying out a rapidly prepared meal for her master’s son.
“Keepin’ ye out of what?” she said solemnly, and with a scared look in her eyes.
“Of my inheritance – it’s no use humbugging me any longer,” said Horace – “I know it all.”
Peggy set down the dish she had in her hands, dropped upon the stool before the fire, and throwing her apron over her head, rocked herself for a few moments back and forward, in silence.
“Amen! it ought to have comed sooner; it must have comed some time,” said Peggy at last to herself; “but the Lord forgive me, didn’t I say and prophesy that when wance the bairns knowed it the end would come? Oh, Mr. Horry! for the love of God and your mother, if you have any love in you, go your ways, and tarry not a moment in this doomed house.”
“You are not very charitable, Peggy,” said Horace, who, by some diabolical impulse, began to recover his spirits at this stage of the interview; “especially as I presume your preparations were for me – and I’m rather hungry. You can’t surely refuse me a dinner, if it is in the kitchen, in my father’s house?”
Peggy rose without a word, and placed bread and ale on the table beside the little dish of meat which she had abstracted from her master’s dinner for his son’s benefit.
“Eat, if ye can eat in this house and with sitch thoughts,” said Peggy; “but I crave of ye to give God thanks ere ye break the bread.”
As Peggy stood over him, severe and disapproving, the remembrance of many such scenes in his childhood came to the memory of Horace; scenes in which Susan appeared, sweetly saying her child’s grace, and he himself rebelling and refusing, with Peggy standing by exactly as she did now – her judicial eye fixed sternly on him. He was a man now, and had bigger rebellions in hand. With a little sneer and levity in that momentary diabolical exhilaration of spirits, he said the child’s grace which Peggy herself had taught him nearly twenty years ago. When he had repeated the amen, his father’s faithful servant turned away from him to go about her needful business, for it was drawing near to Mr. Scarsdale’s dinner hour. But Horace put down his knife and fork upon his plate with a shudder of self-horror – the food choked him – he could not swallow the bread on which his lips, without any help from his heart, had dared at that terrible moment to ask God’s blessing. The time of opportunity, which he tried to persuade himself he did not premeditate, but which was forcing itself upon him, approached moment by moment. He got up from the table with a nervous, imperceptible trembling, and went to stand by the fire where Peggy was busy, and then to wander through the apartment, always restlessly returning to that bright spot. An impulse of flight seized him at one moment – at another, a wild thought of thrusting himself into his father’s very presence, by way of escaping the devil within him, and rather getting into hot words and a violent contest than this miserable guilt. But while he was at the height of his horrible excitement, Peggy, calmly doing her usual business, went out of the kitchen to spread the table in her master’s lonely dining-room. Horace, wild as in a fever, drew with trembling hands out of his pocket one of his mysterious packets. He burst the paper open clumsily, awkwardly, with fingers which seemed made of lead. A great shower of white powder fell upon the floor at his feet, but none reached the dish to which he supposed he had directed it. Trying to remedy this failure, he was startled by a sound, as of Peggy’s return. With a great start, which spilt still more of that fatal dust, he thrust it back into his breast, and in a horror of discovery snatched at something near him, he could not see what it was, and swept into the fire that evidence of his purpose. Having done, or thinking that he had done this, he threw the cloth out of his hands into the fire, and rushed out of the room and the house. As he escaped he saw somehow, by virtue of his passion and fever of overpowering excitement, Peggy coming quietly with a napkin over her arm, and her great white apron shining through the obscurity of the narrow passage, into the kitchen. That home figure, in its everyday occupation, struck him bitterly in his own tremor; he had failed, but he was guilty. No harm to his father had the parricide left behind him, but he was his father’s murderer in his own heart; and all the world and all its riches could never make of him again the same Horace Scarsdale who scowled sullen but innocent upon that same Peggy, before the baleful knowledge for which he thirsted had scorched all nature out of his heart.