Henry Dunbar by M. E. Braddon

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At first Margaret Wilmot's only answer was a choking sob; but she grew
calmer presently, and said, in a low voice,--

"Yes, you have guessed rightly, Mr. Austin; I was related to that most
unhappy man. I will tell you everything, but not here," she added,
looking back at the cottage windows, in which lights were glimmering;
"the people about me are inquisitive, and I don't want to be overheard."

She wrapped her shawl more closely round her, and went out of the little
garden. She walked by Clement's side down to the pathway by the river,
which was lonely enough at this time of the night.

Here she told him her story. She carefully suppressed all vehement
emotion; and in few and simple words related the story of her life.

"Joseph Wilmot was my father," she said. "Perhaps he may not have been
what the world calls a good father; but I know that he loved me, and he
was very dear to me. My mother was the daughter of a gentleman, a
post-captain in the Royal Navy, whose name was Talbot. She met my father
at the house of a lady from whom she used to receive music-lessons. She
did not know who he was, or what he was. She only knew that he called
himself James Wentworth; but he loved her, and she returned his
affection. She was very young--a mere child, who had not long emerged
from a boarding-school--and she married my poor father in defiance of
the advice of her friends. She ran away from her home one morning, was
married by stealth in an obscure little church in the City, and then
went home with my father to confess what she had done. Her father never
forgave her for that secret marriage. He swore that he would never look
upon her face after that day: and he never did, until he saw it in her
coffin. At my mother's death Captain Talbot's heart was touched: he came
for the first time to my father's house, and offered to take me away
with him, and to have me brought up amongst his younger children. But my
father refused to allow this. He grieved passionately for my poor
mother: though I have heard him say that he had much to regret in his
conduct towards her. But I can scarcely remember that sad time. From
that period our life became a wandering and wretched one. Sometimes, for
a little while, we seemed better off. My father got some employment; he
worked steadily; and we lived amongst respectable people. But soon--ah,
cruelly soon!--the new chance of an honest life was taken away from him.
His employers heard something: a breath, a whisper, perhaps: but it was
enough. He was not a man to be trusted. He promised well: so far he had
kept his promise: but there was a risk in employing him. My father never
met any good Christian who was willing to run that risk, in the hope of
saving a human soul. My father never met any one noble enough to stretch
out his hand to the outcast and say, 'I know that you have done wrong; I
know that you are without a character: but I will forget the blot upon
the past, and help you to achieve redemption in the future.' If my
father had met such a friend, such a benefactor, all might have been
different."

Then Margaret Wilmot related the substance of the last conversation
between herself and her father. She told Clement Austin what her father
had said about Henry Dunbar; and she showed him the letter which was
directed to Norfolk Island--that letter in which the old clerk alluded
to the power that his brother possessed over his late master. She also
told Mr. Austin how Henry Dunbar had avoided her at Winchester and in
Portland Place, and of the letter which he had written to her,--a letter
in which he had tried to bribe her to silence.

"Since that night," she added, "I have received two anonymous
enclosures--two envelopes containing notes to the amount of a hundred
pounds, with the words 'From a True Friend' written across the flap of
the envelope. I returned both the enclosures; for I knew whence they had
come. I returned them in two envelopes directed to Henry Dunbar, at the
office in St. Gundolph's Lane."

Clement Austin listened with a grave face. All this certainly seemed to
hint at the guilt of Mr. Dunbar. No clue pointing to any other person
had been as yet discovered, though the police had been indefatigable in
their search.

Mr. Austin was silent for some minutes; then he said, quietly,--

"I am very glad you have confided in me, Miss Wilmot, and, believe me,
you shall not find me slow to help you whenever my services can be of
any avail. If you will come and drink tea with my mother at eight
o'clock to-morrow evening, I will be at home; and we can talk this
matter over seriously. My mother is a clever woman, and I know that she
has a most sincere regard for you. You will trust her, will you not?"

"Willingly, with my whole heart."

"You will find her a true friend."

They had returned to the little garden-gate by this time. Clement Austin
stretched out his hand.

"Good night, Miss Wilmot."

"Good night."

Margaret opened the gate and went into the garden. Mr. Austin walked
slowly homewards, past pleasant cottages nestling in suburban gardens,
and pretentious villas with, campanello towers and gothic porches. The
lighted windows shone out upon the darkness. Here and there he heard the
sound of a piano, or a girlish voice stealing softly out upon the cool
night air.

The sight of pleasant homes made the cashier think very mournfully of
the girl he had just left.

"Poor, desolate girl," he thought, "poor, lonely, orphan girl!" But he
thought still more about that which he had heard of Henry Dunbar; and
the evidence against the rich man seemed to grow in importance as he
reflected upon it. It was not one thing, but many things, that hinted at
the guilt of the millionaire.

The secret possessed, and no doubt traded upon, by Joseph Wilmot; Mr.
Dunbar's agitation in the cathedral; his determined refusal to see the
murdered man's daughter; his attempt to bribe her--these were strong
points: and by the time Clement Austin reached home, he--like Margaret
Wilmot, and like Arthur Lovell--suspected the millionaire. So now there
were three people who believed Mr. Dunbar to be the murderer of his old
servant.

CHAPTER XIX.

LAURA DUNBAR'S DISAPPOINTMENT.

Arthur Lovell went often to Maudesley Abbey. Henry Dunbar welcomed him
freely, and the young man had not the power to resist temptation. He
went to his doom as the foolish moth flies to the candle. He went, he
saw Laura Dunbar, and spent hour after hour in her society: for his
presence was always agreeable to the impetuous girl. To her he seemed,
indeed, that which he had promised to be, a brother--kind, devoted,
affectionate: but no more. He was endeared to Laura by the memory of a
happy childhood. She was grateful to him, and she loved him: but only as
she would have loved him had he been indeed her brother. Whatever deeper
feeling lay beneath the playful gaiety of her manner had yet to be
awakened.

So, day after day, the young man bowed down before the goddess of his
life, and was happy--ah, fatally happy!--in her society. He forgot
everything except the beautiful face that smiled on him. He forgot even
those dark doubts which he had felt as to the secret of the Winchester
murder.

Perhaps he would scarcely have forgotten the suspicions that had entered
his mind after the first interview between the banker and his daughter,
had he seen much of Henry Dunbar. But he saw very little of the master
of Maudesley Abbey. The rich man took possession of the suite of
apartments that had been prepared for him, and rarely left his own
rooms: except to wander alone amongst the shady avenues of the park: or
to ride out upon the powerful horse he had chosen from the stud
purchased by Percival Dunbar.

This horse was a magnificent creature; the colt of a thorough-bred sire,
but of a stronger and larger build than a purely thorough-bred animal.
He was a chestnut horse, with a coat that shone like satin, and not a
white hair about him. His nose was small, his eyes large, his ears and
neck long. He had all the points which an Arab prizes in his favourite
barb.

To this horse Henry Dunbar became singularly attached. He had a loose
box built on purpose for the animal in a private garden adjoining his
own dressing-room, which, Like the rest of his apartments, was situated
upon the ground-floor of the abbey. Mr. Dunbar's groom slept in a part
of the house near this loose box: and horse and man were at the service
of the banker at any hour of the day or night.

Henry Dunbar generally rode either early in the morning, or in the grey
twilight after his dinner-hour. He was a proud man, and he was not a
sociable man. When the county gentry came to welcome him to England, he
received them, and thanked them for their courtesy. But there was
something in his manner that repelled rather than invited friendship. He
gave one great dinner-party soon after his arrival at Maudesley, a ball,
at which Laura floated about in a cloud of white gauze, and with
diamonds in her hair; and a breakfast and morning concert on the lawn,
in compliance with the urgent entreaties of the same young lady. But
when invitations came flooding in upon Mr. Dunbar, he declined them one
after another, on the ground of his weak health. Laura might go where
she liked, always provided that she went under the care of a suitable
chaperone; but the banker declared that the state of his health
altogether unfitted him for society. His constitution had been much
impaired, he said, by his long residence in Calcutta. And yet he looked
a strong man. Tall, broad-chested, and powerful, it was very difficult
to perceive in Henry Dunbar's appearance any one of the usual evidences
of ill-health. He was very pale: but that unchanging pallor was the only
sign of the malady from which he suffered.

He rose early, rode for a couple of hours upon his chestnut horse
Dragon, and then breakfasted. After breakfast he sat in his luxurious
sitting-room, sometimes reading, sometimes writing, sometimes sitting
for hours together brooding silently over the low embers in the roomy
fireplace. At six o'clock he dined, still keeping to his own room--for
he was not well enough to dine with his daughter, he said: and he sat
alone late into the night, drinking heavily, according to the report
current in the servants' hall.

He was respected and he was feared in his household: but he was not
liked. His silent and reserved manner had a gloomy influence upon the
servants who came in contact with him: and they compared him very
disadvantageously with his predecessor, Percival Dunbar; the genial,
kind, old master, who had always had a cheerful, friendly word for every
one of his dependants: from the stately housekeeper in rustling silken
robes, to the smallest boy employed in the stables.

No, the new master of the abbey was not liked. Day after day he lived
secluded and alone. At first, his daughter had broken in upon his
solitude, and, with bright, caressing ways, had tried to win him from
his loneliness: but she found that all her efforts to do this were worse
than useless: they were even disagreeable to her father: and, by
degrees, her light footstep was heard less and less often in that lonely
wing of the house where Henry Dunbar had taken up his abode.

Maudesley Abbey was a large and rambling old mansion, which had been
built in half-a-dozen different reigns. The most ancient part of the
building was that very northern wing which Mr. Dunbar had chosen for
himself. Here the architecture belonged to the early Plantagenet era;
the stone walls were thick and massive, the lancet-headed windows were
long and narrow, and the arms of the early benefactors of the monastery
were emblazoned here and there upon the richly stained glass. The walls
were covered with faded tapestry, from which grim faces scowled upon the
lonely inhabitant of the chambers. The groined ceiling was of oak, that
had grown black with age. The windows of Mr. Dunbar's bedroom and
dressing-room opened into a cloistered court, beneath whose solemn
shadow the hooded monks had slowly paced, in days that were long gone.
The centre of this quadrangular court had been made into a garden, where
tall hollyhocks and prim dahlias flaunted in the autumn sunshine. And
within this cloistered courtway Mr. Dunbar had erected the loose box for
his favourite horse.

The southern wing of Maudesley Abbey owed its origin to a much later
period. The windows and fireplaces at this end of the house were in the
Tudor style; the polished oak wainscoting was very beautiful; the rooms
were smaller and snugger than the tapestried chambers occupied by the
banker; Venetian glasses and old crystal chandeliers glimmered and
glittered against the sombre woodwork: and elegant modern furniture
contrasted pleasantly with the Elizabethan casements and carved oaken
chimney-pieces. Everything that unlimited wealth can do to make a house
beautiful had been done for this part of the mansion by Percival Dunbar;
and had been done with considerable success. The doting grandfather had
taken a delight in beautifying the apartments occupied by his girlish
companion: and Miss Dunbar had walked upon velvet pile, and slept
beneath the shadow of satin curtains, from a very early period of her
existence.

She was used to luxury and elegance: she was accustomed to be surrounded
by all that is refined and beautiful: but she had that inexhaustible
power of enjoyment which is perhaps one of the brightest gifts of a
fresh young nature: and she did not grow tired of the pleasant home that
had been made for her. Laura Dunbar was a pampered child of fortune: but
there are some natures that it seems very difficult to spoil: and I
think hers must have been one of these.

She knew no weariness of the "rolling hours." To her the world seemed a
paradise of beauty. Remember, she had never seen real misery: she had
never endured that sick feeling of despair, which creeps over the most
callous of us when we discover the amount of hopeless misery that is,
and has been, and is to be, for ever and ever upon this weary earth. She
had seen sick cottagers, and orphan children, and desolate widows, in
her pilgrimages amongst the dwellings of the poor: but she had always
been able to relieve these afflicted ones, and to comfort them more or
less.

It is the sight of sorrows which we cannot alleviate that sends a
palpable stab home to our hearts, and for a time almost sickens us with
a universe which cannot go upon its course _without_ such miseries as
these.

To Laura Dunbar the world was still entirely beautiful, for the darker
secrets of life had not been revealed to her.

Only once had affliction come near her; and then it had come in a calm
and solemn shape, in the death of an old man, who ended a good and
prosperous life peacefully upon the breast of his beloved granddaughter.

Perhaps her first real trouble came to her now in the bitter
disappointment which had succeeded her father's return to England.
Heaven only knows with what a tender yearning the girl had looked
forward to Henry Dunbar's return. They had been separated for the best
part of her brief lifetime; but what of that? He would love her all the
more tenderly because of those long years during which they had been
divided. She meant to be the same to her father that she had been to her
grandfather--a loving companion, a ministering angel.

But it was never to be. Her father, by a hundred tacit signs, rejected
her affection. He had shunned her presence from the first: and she had
grown now to shun him. She told Arthur Lovell of this unlooked-for
sorrow.

"Of all the things I ever thought of, Arthur, this never entered my
head," she said, in a low, pensive voice, as she stood one evening in
the deep embrasure of the Tudor window, looking thoughtfully out at the
wide-spreading lawn, where the shadows of the low cedar branches made
patches of darkness on the moonlit surface of the grass; "I thought that
papa might fall ill on the voyage home, and die, and that the ship for
whose safe course I prayed night and day, might bring me nothing but the
sacred remains of the dead. I have thought this, Arthur, and I have lain
awake at night, torturing myself with the thought: till my mind has
grown so full of the dark picture, that I have seen the little cabin in
the cruel, restless ship, and my father lying helpless on a narrow bed,
with only strangers to watch his death-hour. I cannot tell you how many
different things I have feared: but I never, never thought that he would
not love me. I have even thought that it was just possible he might be
unlike my grandfather, and a little unkind to me sometimes when I vexed
or troubled him: but I thought his heart would be true to me through
all, and that even in his harshest moments he would love me dearly, for
the sake of my dead mother."

Her voice broke, and she sobbed aloud: but the man who stood by her side
had no word of comfort to say to her. Her complaint awoke that old
suspicion which had lately slumbered in his breast--the horrible fear
that Mr. Dunbar was guilty of the murder of his old servant.

The young lawyer was bound to say something, however. It was too cruel
to stand by and utter no word of comfort to this sobbing girl.

"Laura, dear Laura," he said, "this is foolish, believe me. You must
have patience, and still hope for the best. How _can_ your father do
otherwise than love you, when he grows to know you well? You may have
expected too much of him. Remember, that people who have lived long in
the East Indies are apt to become cold and languid in their manners.
When Mr. Dunbar has seen more of you, when he has become better
accustomed to your society----"

"That he will never be," Laura answered, impetuously. "How can he ever
know me better when he scrupulously avoids me? Sometimes whole days pass
during which I do not see him. Then I summon up courage and go to his
dreary rooms. He receives me graciously enough, and treats me with
politeness. With politeness! when I am yearning for his affection: and I
linger a little, perhaps, asking him about his health, and trying to get
more at home in his presence. But there is always a nervous restlessness
in his manner: which tells me,--oh, too plainly!--that my presence is
unwelcome to him. So I go away at last, half heart-broken. I remember,
now, how cold and brief his letters from India always seemed: but then
he need to excuse himself to me on account of the hurry of business: and
he seldom finished his letter without saying that he looked joyfully
forward to our meeting. It was very cruel of him to deceive me!"

Arthur Lovell was a sorry comforter. From the first he had tried in vain
to like Henry Dunbar. Since that strange scene in Portland Place, he had
suspected the banker of a foul and treacherous murder,--that worst and
darkest crime, which for ever separates a man from the sympathy of his
fellow-men, and brands him as an accursed and abhorred creature, beyond
the pale of human compassion. Ah, how blessed is that Divine and
illimitable compassion which can find pity for those whom sinful man
rejects!

CHAPTER XX.

NEW HOPES MAY BLOOM.

Jocelyn's Rock was ten miles from Maudesley Abbey, and only one mile
from the town of Shorncliffe. It was a noble place, and had been in the
possession of the same family ever since the days of the Plantagenets.

The house stood upon a rocky cliff, beneath which rushed a cascade that
leapt from crag to crag, and fell into the bosom of a deep stream, that
formed an arm of the river Avon. This cascade was forty feet below the
edge of the cliff upon which the mansion stood.

It was not a very large house, for most of the older part of it had
fallen into ruin long ago, and the ruined towers and shattered walls had
been cleared away; but it was a noble mansion notwithstanding.

One octagonal tower, with a battlemented roof, still stood almost as
firmly as it had stood in the days of the early Plantagenets, when rebel
soldiers had tried the strength of their battering-rams against the grim
stone walls. The house was built entirely of stone; the Gothic porch was
ponderous as the porch of a church. Within all was splendour; but
splendour that was very different from the modern elegance that was to
be seen in the rooms of Maudesley Abbey.

At Jocelyn's Rock the stamp of age was upon every decoration, on every
ornament. Square-topped helmets that had been hacked by the scimitars of
Saracen kings, spiked chamfronts that had been worn by the fiery barbs
of haughty English crusaders, fluted armour from Milan, hung against the
blackened wainscoting in the shadowy hall; Scottish hackbuts, primitive
arquebuses that had done service on Bosworth field, Homeric bucklers and
brazen greaves, javelins, crossbows, steel-pointed lances, and
two-handed swords, were in symmetrical design upon the dark and polished
panels; while here and there hung the antlers of a giant red-deer, or
the skin of a fox, in testimony to the triumphs of long-departed
sportsmen of the house of Jocelyn.

It was a noble old house. Princes of the blood royal had sat in the
ponderous carved oak-chairs. A queen had slept in the state-bed, in the
blue-satin chamber. Loyal Jocelyns, fighting for their king against
low-born Roundhead soldiers, had hidden themselves in the spacious
chimneys, or had fled for their lives along the secret passages behind
the tapestry. There were old pictures and jewelled drinking-cups that
dead-and-gone Jocelyns had collected in the sunny land of the Medicis.
There were costly toys of fragile Sèvres china that had been received by
one of the earls from the hand of the lovely Pompadour herself in the
days when the manufacturers of Sèvres only worked for their king, and
were liable to fall a sacrifice to their art and their loyalty by the
inhalation of arsenicated vapours. There was golden plate that a king
had given to his proud young favourite in those feudal days when
favourites were powerful in England. There was scarcely any object of
value in the mansion that had not a special history attached to it,
redounding to the honour and glory of the ancient house of Jocelyn.

And this splendid dwelling-place, rendered almost sacred by legendary
associations and historical recollections, was now the property of a
certain Sir Philip Jocelyn--a dashing young baronet, who had been
endowed by nature with a handsome face, frank, fearless eyes that
generally had a smile in them, and the kind of manly figure which the
late Mr. G.P.R. James was wont to designate stalwart; and who was
moreover a crack shot, a reckless cross-country-going rider, and a very
tolerable amateur artist.

Sir Philip Jocelyn was not what is usually called an intellectual man.
He was more warmly interested in a steeplechase on Shorncliffe Common
than in a pamphlet on political economy, even though Mr. Stuart Mill
should himself be the author of the _brochure_. He thought John Scott a
greater man than Maculloch; and Manton the gunmaker only second to Dr.
Jenner as a benefactor of his race. He found the works of the late Mr.
Apperly more entertaining than the last new Idyl from the pen of the
Laureate; and was rather at a loss for small-talk when he found his
feminine neighbour at a dinner-table was "deeply, darkly, beautifully
blue." But the young baronet was by no means a fool, notwithstanding
these sportsmanlike proclivities. The Jocelyns had been hard riders for
half-a-dozen centuries or so, and crack shots ever since the invention
of firearms. Sir Philip was a sportsman, but he did not "hunt in
dreams," and he was prepared to hold his wife a great deal "higher than
his horse," whenever he should win that pleasant addition to his
household. As yet he had thought very little of the future Lady Jocelyn.
He had a vague idea that he should marry, as the rest of the Jocelyns
had married; and that he should live happily with his wife, as his
ancestors had lived with their wives: with the exception of one dreadful
man, called Hildebrande Jocelyn, who, at some remote and mediaeval
period, had been supposed to throw his liege lady out of an oriel window
that overhung the waterfall, upon the strength of an unfounded
suspicion; and who afterwards, according to the legend, dug, or rather
scooped, for himself a cave out of the cliff-side with no better tools
than his own finger-nails, which he never cut after the unfortunate
lady's foul murder. The legend went on further to state that the white
wraith of the innocent victim might be seen, on a certain night in the
year, rising out of the misty spray of the waterfall: but as nobody
except one very weak-witted female Jocelyn had ever seen the vision, the
inhabitants of the house upon the crag had taken so little heed of the
legend that the date of the anniversary had come at last to be
forgotten.

Sir Philip Jocelyn thought that he should marry "some of these days,"
and in the meantime troubled himself very little about the pretty
daughters of country gentlemen whom he met now and again at races, and
archery-meetings, and flower-shows, and dinner-parties, and
hunting-balls, in the queer old town-hall at Shorncliffe. He was
heart-whole; and looking out at life from the oriel window of his
dressing-room, whence he saw nothing but his own land, neatly enclosed
in a ring-fence, he thought the world, about which some people made such
dismal howling, was, upon the whole, an extremely pleasant place,
containing very little that "a fellow" need complain of. He built
himself a painting-room at Jocelyn's Rock; and-whistled to himself for
the hour together, as he stood before the easel, painting scenes in the
hunting-field, or Arab horsemen whom he had met on the great flat sandy
plains beyond Cairo, or brown-faced boys, or bright Italian
peasant-girls; all sorts of pleasant objects, under cloudless skies of
ultra-marine, with streaks of orange and vermilion to represent the
sunset. He was not a great painter, nor indeed was there any element of
greatness in his nature; but he painted as recklessly as he rode; his
subjects were bright and cheerful; and his pictures were altogether of
the order which unsophisticated people admire and call "pretty."

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