Birds of Prey by M.E. Braddon

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At this inn I was fain to take up my abode for the night, and was
conducted to a little whitewashed bedchamber, draperied with scanty
dimity and smelling of apples--the humblest, commonest cottage chamber,
but clean and decent, and with a certain countrified aspect which was
pleasing to me. I fancied myself the host of such an inn, with
Charlotte for my wife; and it seemed to me that it would be nice to
live in that remote and unknown village, "the world forgetting, by the
world forgot." I beguiled myself by such foolish fancies--I, who have
been reared amidst the clamour and riot of the Strand!

Should I be happy with that dear girl if she were mine? Alas! I doubt
it. A man who has led a disreputable life up to the age of
seven-and-twenty is very likely to have lost all capacity for such
pure and perfect happiness as that which good men find in the tranquil
haven of a home.

Should I not hear the rattle of the billiard-balls, or the voice of the
_croupier_ calling the main, as I sat by my quiet fireside? Should I
not yearn for the glitter and confusion of West-end dancing-rooms, or
the mad excitement of the ring, while my innocent young wife was
sitting by my side and asking me to look at the blue eyes of my
first-born?

No; Charlotte is not for me. There must be always the two classes--the
sheep and the goats; and my lot has been cast among the goats.

And yet there are some people who laugh to scorn the doctrines of
Calvin, and say there is no such thing as predestination.

Is there not predestination? Was not I predestined to be born in a gaol
and reared in a gutter, educated among swindlers and scoundrels, fed
upon stolen victuals, and clad in garments never to be paid for? Did no
Eumenides preside over the birth of Richard Savage, so set apart for
misery that the laws of nature were reversed, and even his mother hated
him? Did no dismal fatality follow the footsteps of Chatterton? Has no
mysterious ban been laid upon the men who have been called Dukes of
Buckingham?

What foolish lamentations am I scribbling in this diary, which is
intended to be only the baldest record of events! It is so natural to
mankind to complain, that, having no ear in which to utter his
discontent, a man is fain to resort to pen and ink.

I devoted my evening to conversation with the landlord and his wife,
but found that the name of Haygarth was as strange to them as if it had
been taken from an inscription in the tomb of the Pharaohs. I inquired
about the few inhabitants of the village, and ascertained that the
oldest man in the place is the sexton, native-born, and supposed by
mine host never to have travelled twenty miles from his birthplace. His
name is Peter Drabbles. What extraordinary names that class of people
contrive to have! My first business to-morrow morning will be to find
my friend Drabbles--another ancient mariner, no doubt--and to examine
the parish registers.

_Oct. 7th_. A misty morning, and a perpetual drizzle--to say nothing of
a damp, penetrating cold, which creeps through the thickest overcoat,
and chills one to the bone. I do not think Spotswold can have much
brightness or prettiness even on the fairest summer morning that ever
beautified the earth. I know that, seen as I see it to-day, the place
is the very archetype of all that is darksome, dull, desolate, dismal,
and dreary. (How odd, by the way, that all that family of epithets
should have the same initial!) A wide stretch of moorland lies around
and about the little village, which crouches in a hollow, like some
poor dejected animal that seeks to shelter itself from the bitter
blast. On the edge of the moorland, and above the straggling cottages
and the little inn, rises the massive square tower of an old church, so
far out of proportion to the pitiful cluster of houses, that I imagine
it must be the remnant of some monastic settlement.

Towards this church I made my way, under the dispiriting drip, drip of
the rain, and accompanied by a feeble old man, who is sexton, clerk,
gravedigger, and anything or everything of an official nature.

We went into the church after my ancient mariner No. 2 had fumbled a
good deal with a bunch of ghostly-looking keys. The door opened with a
dismal scroop, and shut with an appalling bang. Grim and dark as the
church is without, it is grimmer and darker within, and damp and
vault-like, _a faire fremir_. There are all the mysterious cupboards
and corners peculiar to such edifices; an organ-loft, from which weird
noises issue at every opening or closing of a door; a vaulted roof,
which echoes one's footsteps with a moan, as of some outraged spirit
hovering in empty space, and ejaculating piteously, "Another impious
intruder after the sacramental plate! another plebeian sole trampling
on the brasses of the De Montacutes, lords of the manor!"

The vestry is, if anything, more ghostly than the general run of
vestries; but the business mind is compelled to waive all
considerations of a supernatural character. For the moment there
flashed across my brain the shadows of all the Christmas stories I had
ever read or heard concerning vestries; the phantom bridal, in which
the bride's beautiful white hand changed to the bony fingers of a
skeleton as she signed the register; the unearthly christening, in
which all at once, after the ceremony having been conducted with the
utmost respectability, to the edification of the unauthorised intruder
hiding behind a pillar, the godfathers and godmothers, nurse and baby,
priest and clerk, became in a moment dilapidated corpses; whereon the
appalled intruder fell prone at the foot of his pillar, there to be
discovered the next morning by his friends, and the public generally,
with his hair blanched to an awful whiteness, or his noble intellect
degraded to idiocy. For a moment, the memory of about a hundred
Christmas stories was too much for me--so weird of aspect and earthy of
atmosphere was the vestry at Spotswold. And then "being gone" the
shadows of the Christmas stories, I was a man and a lawyer's clerk
again, and set myself assiduously to search the registers and
interrogate my ancient.

I found that individual a creature of mental fogginess compared with
whom my oldest inhabitant of Ullerton would have been a Pitt, Earl of
Chatham. But I questioned and cross-questioned him until I had in a
manner turned his poor old wits the seamy side without, and had
discovered, first, that he had never known any one called Haygarth in
the whole course of those seventy-five years' vegetation which
politeness compelled me to speak of as his "life;" secondly, that he
had never known any one who knew a Haygarth; thirdly, that he was
intimately acquainted with every creature in the village, and that he
knew that no one of the inhabitants could give me the smallest shred of
such information as I required.

Having extorted so much as this from my ancient with unutterable
expenditure of time and trouble, I next set to work upon the registers.

If the ink manufactured in the present century is of no more durable
nature than that abominable fluid employed in the penmanship of a
hundred years ago, I profoundly pity the generations that are to come
after us. The registers of Spotswold might puzzle a Bunsen. However,
bearing in mind the incontrovertible fact that three thousand pounds is
a very agreeable sum of money, I stuck to my work for upwards of two
hours, and obtained as a result the following entries:--

"1. Matthew Haygarthe, aged foure yeares, berrid in this churcheyarde,
over against ye tombe off Mrs. Marttha Stileman, about 10 fete fromm ye
olde yue tre. Febevarie 6th, 1753."

"2. Mary Haygarthe, aged twentie sevene yeers, berrid under ye yue
tree, Nov. 21, 1754."

After copying these two entries, I went out into the churchyard to look
for Mary Haygarth's grave.

Under a fine old yew--which had been old a hundred years ago, it seems--
I found huddled amongst other headstones one so incrusted with moss,
that it was only after scraping the parasite verdure from the stone
with my penknife that I was able to discover the letters that had been
cut upon it. I found at last a brief inscription:

"Here lieth ye body of MARY HAYGARTH, aged 27. Born 1727. Died 1754.
This stone has been set up by one who sorroweth without hope of
consolation." A strange epitaph: no scrap of Latin, no text from
Scripture, no conventional testimony to the virtues and accomplishments
of the departed, no word to tell whether the dead woman had been maid,
wife, or widow. It was the most provoking inscription for a lawyer or a
genealogist, but such as might have pleased a poet.

I fancy this Mary Haygarth must have been some quiet creature, with
very few friends to sorrow for her loss; perhaps only that one person
who sorrowed without hope of consolation.

Such a tombstone might have been set above the grave of that simple
maid who dwelt "beside the banks of Dove."

This is the uttermost that my patience or ingenuity can do for me at
Spotswold. I have exhausted every possibility of obtaining further
information. So, having written and posted my report to Sheldon, I have
no more to do but to return to Ullerton. I take back with me nothing
but the copy of the two entries in the register of burials. Who this
Matthew Haygarth or this Mary Haygarth was, and how related to the
Matthew, is an enigma not to be solved at Spotswold.

Here the story of the Haygarths ends with the grave under the yew-tree.

BOOK THE FIFTH.

RELICS OF THE DEAD.

CHAPTER I.

BETRAYED BY A BLOTTING-PAD.

At an early hour upon the day on which Valentine Hawkehurst telegraphed
to his employer, Philip Sheldon presented himself again at the dingy
door of the office in Gray's Inn.

The dingy door was opened by the still more dingy boy; and Mr. Sheldon
the elder--who lived in a state of chronic hurry, and had a hansom cab
in attendance upon him at almost every step of his progress through
life--was aggravated by the discovery that his brother was out.

"Out!" he repeated, with supreme disgust; "he always _is_ out, I think.
Where is he to be found?"

The boy replied that his master would be back in half an hour, if Mr.
Sheldon would like to wait.

"Like to wait!" cried the stockbroker; "when will lawyers' clerks have
sense enough to know that nobody on this earth ever _liked_ to wait?
Where's your master gone?"

"I think he's just slipped round into Holborn, sir," the boy replied,
with some slight hesitation. He was very well aware that George had
secrets from his brother, and that it was not judicious to be too free
in his communications to the elder gentleman. But the black eyes and
white teeth of the stockbroker seemed very awful to him; and if Philip
chose to question him, he must needs answer the truth, not having been
provided by his master with any convenient falsehood in case of
inquiry.

"What part of Holborn?" asked Philip sharply.

"I did hear tell as it was the telegraph office."

"Good!" exclaimed Mr. Sheldon; and then he dashed downstairs, leaving
the lad on the threshold of the door staring after him with eyes of
wonder.

The telegraph office meant business; and any business of his brother's
was a matter of interest to Mr. Sheldon at this particular period. He
had meditated the meaning of George's triumphant smile in the secluded
calm of his own office; and the longer he had meditated, the more
deeply rooted had become his conviction that his brother was engaged in
some very deep and very profitable scheme, the nature of which it was
his bounden duty to discover.

Impressed by this idea, Mr. Sheldon returned to the hansom-cab, which
was waiting for him at the end of Warwick-court, and made his way to
the telegraph office. The ostensible motive of his call in Gray's Inn
was sufficient excuse for this following up of his brother's footsteps.
It was one of those waifs and strays of rather disreputable business
which the elder man sometimes threw in the way of the younger.

As the wheel of the hansom ground against the kerbstone in front of the
telegraph office, the figure of George Sheldon vanished in a little
court to the left of that establishment. Instead of pursuing this
receding figure, Philip Sheldon walked straight into the office.

It was empty. There was no one in any of the shaded compartments, so
painfully suggestive of pecuniary distress and the stealthy
hypothecation of portable property. A sound of rattling and bumping in
an inner office betrayed the neighbourhood of a clerk; but in the
office Mr. Sheldon was alone.

Upon the blotting-pad on the counter of the central partition the
stockbroker perceived one great blot of ink, still moist. Ha laid the
tip of his square forefinger upon it, to assure himself of that fact,
and then set himself deliberately to scrutinise the blotting-paper. He
was a man who seldom hesitated. His greatest _coups_ on the
money-market had been in a great measure the result of this faculty of
prompt decision. To-day he possessed himself of the blotting-pad, and
examined the half-formed syllables stamped upon it with as much coolness
and self-possession as if he had been seated in his own office reading
his own newspaper. A man given to hesitation would have looked to the
right and the left and watched for his opportunity--and lost it. Philip
Sheldon knew better than to waste his chances by needless precaution;
and he made himself master of all the intelligence the blotting-pad
could afford him before the clerk emerged from the inner den where the
rattling and stamping was going forward.

"I thought as much," muttered the stockbroker, as he recognised traces
of his brother's sprawling penmanship upon the pad. The message had
been written with a heavy hand and a spongy quill pen, and had left a
tolerably clear impression of its contents on the blotting-paper.

Here and there the words stood out bold and clear; here and there,
again, there was only one decipherable letter amongst a few broken
hieroglyphics. Mr. Sheldon was accustomed to the examination of very
illegible documents, and he was able to master the substance of that
random impression. If he could not decipher the whole, he made out
sufficient for his purpose. Money was to be offered to a man called
Goodge for certain letters. He knew his brother's affairs well enough
to know that these letters for which money was to be offered must needs
be letters of importance in some search for an heir-at-law. So far all
was clear and simple; but beyond this point he found himself at fault.
Where was this Goodge to be found? and who was the person that was to
offer him money for the letters? The names and address, which had been
written first, had left no impression on the blotting-pad, or an
impression so faint as to be useless for any practical purpose.

Mr. Sheldon put down the pad and lingered by the door of the office
deliberating, when the rattling and hammering came to an abrupt
termination, and the clerk emerged from the interior den.

"O," he exclaimed, "it's all right. Your message shall go directly."

The stockbroker, whose face was half averted from the clerk, and who
stood between that functionary and the light from the open doorway, at
once comprehended the error that had arisen. The clerk had mistaken him
for his brother.

"I'm not quite clear as to whether I gave the right address," he said
promptly, with his face still averted, and his attention apparently
occupied by a paper in his hand. "Just see how I wrote it, there's a
good fellow."

The clerk withdrew for a few minutes, and returned with the message in
his hand.

"From George Sheldon to Valentine Hawkehurst, Black Swan Inn,
Ullerton," he read aloud from the document.

"All right, and thanks," cried the stockbroker.

He gave one momentary glance at the clerk, and had just time to see
that individual's look of bewilderment as some difference in his voice
and person from the voice and person of the black-whiskered man who had
just left the office dawned upon his troubled senses. After that one
glance Mr. Sheldon darted across the pavement, sprang into his cab, and
called to the driver, "Literary Institution, Burton-street, as fast as
you can go."

"I'll try my luck in the second column of the _Times_," he said to
himself. "If George's scheme is what I take it to be, I shall get some
clue to it there." He took a little oblong memorandum-book from his
pocket, and looked at his memoranda of the past week. Among those
careless jottings he found one memorandum scrawled in pencil, amongst
notes and addresses in ink, "_Haygarth--intestate. G.S. to see
after._"

"That's it," he exclaimed; "Haygarth--intestate; Valentine Hawkehurst
_not_ at Dorking, but working for my brother; Goodge--letters to be
paid for. It's all like the bits of mosaic that those antiquarian
fellows are always finding in the ruins of Somebody's Baths; a few
handfuls of coloured chips that look like rubbish, and can yet be
patched into a perfect geometric design. I'll hunt up a file of the
_Times_ at the Burton Institution, and find out this Haygarth, if he
is to be found there."

The Burton Institution was a somewhat dingy temple devoted to the
interests of science and literature, and next door to some baths that
were very popular among the denizens of Bloomsbury. People in quest of
the baths were apt to ascend the classic flight of steps leading to the
Institution, when they should have descended to a lowlier threshold
lurking modestly by the side of that edifice. The Baths and the
Institution had both been familiar to Mr. Sheldon in that period of
probation which he had spent in Fitzgeorge-street. He was sufficiently
acquainted with the librarian of the Institution to go in and out
uninterrogated, and to make any use he pleased of the reading-room. He
went in to-day, asked to see the latest bound volumes of the _Times_
and the latest files of unbound papers, and began his investigation,
working backwards. Rapidly and dexterously as he turned the big leaves
of the journals, the investigation occupied nearly three-quarters of an
hour; but at the expiration of that time he had alighted on the
advertisement published in the March of the preceding year.

He gave a very low whistle--a kind of phantom whistle--as he read this
advertisement. "John Haygarth!--a hundred thousand pounds!"

The fortune for which a claimant was lacking amounted to a hundred
thousand pounds! Mr. Sheldon knew commercial despots who counted their
wealth by millions, and whose fiat could sway the exchanges of Europe;
but a hundred thousand pounds seemed to him a very nice thing
nevertheless, and he was ready to dispute the prize the anticipation
whereof had rendered his brother so triumphant.

"He has rejected me as a coadjutor," he thought, as he went back to his
cab after having copied the advertisement; "he shall have me as an
antagonist."

"Omega-street, Chelsea, next call," he cried to the driver; and was
soon beyond the confines of Bloomsbury, and rattling away towards the
border-land of Belgravia. He had completed his search of the newspapers
at ten minutes past twelve, and at twenty minutes to one he presented
himself at the lodging-house in Omega-street, where he found Captain
Paget, in whose "promoting" business there happened to be a lull just
now. With this gentleman he had a long interview; and the result of
that interview was the departure of the Captain by the two o'clock
express for Ullerton. Thus had it happened that Valentine Hawkehurst
and his patron encountered each other on the platform of Ullerton
station.

CHAPTER II.

VALENTINE INVOKES THE PHANTOMS OF THE PAST.

_Oct. 7th, Midnight_. I was so fortunate as to get away from Spotswold
this morning very soon after the completion of my researches in the
vestry, and at five o'clock in the afternoon I found myself once more
in the streets of Ullerton. Coming home in the train I meditated
seriously upon the unexpected appearance of Horatio Paget at the
head-quarters of this Haygarthian investigation; and the more I
considered that fact, the more I felt inclined to doubt my patron's
motives, and to fear his interference. Can his presence in Ullerton
have any relation to the business that has brought me here? That is the
question which I asked myself a hundred times during my journey from
Spotswold; that is the question which I ask myself still.

I have no doubt I give myself unnecessary trouble; but I know that old
man's Machiavellian cleverness only too well; and I am inclined to look
with suspicion upon every action of his. My first business on returning
to this house was to ascertain whether any one bearing his name, or
answering to my description of him, had arrived during my absence. I
was relieved by finding that no stranger whatever had put up at the inn
since the previous forenoon. Who may have used the coffee-room is
another question, not so easily set at rest. In the evening a great
many people come in and go out; and my friend and patron may have taken
his favourite brandy-and-soda, skimmed his newspaper, and picked up
whatever information was to be obtained as to _my_ movements without
attracting any particular attention.

In the words of the immortal lessee of the Globe Theatre, "Why I should
fear I know not ... and yet I feel I fear!"

I found a registered letter from George Sheldon, enclosing twenty
pounds in notes, and furnished therewith I went straight to my friend
Jonah, whom I found engaged in the agreeable occupation of taking tea.
I showed him the money; but my estimate of the reverend gentleman's
honour being of a very limited nature, I took care not to give it to
him till he had produced the letters. On finding that I was really
prepared to give him his price, he went to an old-fashioned bureau, and
opened one of those secret recesses which cannot for three minutes
remain a secret to any investigator possessed of a tolerably accurate
eye or a three-foot rule. From this hiding-place--which he evidently
considered a triumph of mechanical art, worthy the cabinet of a
D'Argenson or a Fouche--he produced a packet of faded yellow letters,
about which there lurked a faint odour of dried rose-leaves and
lavender, which seemed the very perfume of the past.

When my reverend friend had laid the packet on the table within reach
of my hand, and not till then, I gave him the bank-notes. His fat old
fingers closed upon them greedily, and his fishy old eyes were
illumined by a faint glimmer which I believe nothing but bank-notes
could have kindled in them.

After having assured himself that they were genuine acknowledgments of
indebtedness on the part of the old lady in Thread-needle-street, and
not the base simulacra of Birmingham at five-and-twenty shillings a
dozen--thirteen as twelve--Mr. Goodge obligingly consented to sign a
simple form of receipt which I had drawn up for the satisfaction of my
principal.

"I think you said there were forty-odd letters," I remarked, before I
proceeded to count the documents in the presence of Mr. Goodge.

That gentleman looked at me with an air of astonishment, which, had I
not known him to be the most consummate of hypocrites, would have
seemed to be simplicity itself.

"I said from thirty to forty," he exclaimed; "I never said there were
forty-odd letters."

I looked at him and he looked at me. His face told me plainly enough
that he was trying to deceive me, and my face told him plainly enough
that he had no chance of succeeding in that attempt. Whether he was
keeping back some of the letters with a view to extorting more money
from me hereafter, or whether he was keeping them with the idea of
making a better bargain with somebody else, I could not tell; but of
the main fact I was certain--he had cheated me.

I untied the red tape which held the letters together. Yes, there was a
piece of circumstantial evidence which might have helped to convict my
friend had he been on his trial in a criminal court. The red tape bore
the mark of the place in which it had been tied for half a century; and
a little way within this mark the trace of a very recent tying. Some of
the letters had been extracted, and the tape had been tied anew.

I had no doubt that this had been done while my negotiation with Mr.
Goodge had been pending. What was I to do? Refuse the letters, and
demand to have my principal's money returned to me? I knew my friend
well enough to know that such a proceeding would be about as useless as
it would be to request the ocean to restore a cup of water that had
been poured into it. The letters he had given me might or might not
afford some slight link in the chain I was trying to put together; and
the letters withheld from me might be more or less valuable than those
given to me. In any case the transaction was altogether a speculative
one; and George Sheldon's money was hazarded as completely as if it had
been put upon an outsider for the Derby.

Before bidding him a polite farewell, I was determined to make Mr.
Goodge thoroughly aware that he had not taken me in.

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