Henry Dunbar by M. E. Braddon

M >> M. E. Braddon >> Henry Dunbar

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He had thought this, and the knowledge that strangers had been busy on
that spot, dragging the water--the dreadful water that had so often
flowed through his dreams--with, not one, but a thousand dead faces
looking up and grinning at him through the stream--the tidings that a
search had been made there, came upon him like a thunderbolt.

"Why did they drag the water?" he cried again.

His daughter was standing at a little distance from him. She had never
gone close up to him, and she had receded a little--involuntarily, as a
woman shrinks away from some animal she is frightened of--whenever he
had approached her. He knew this--yes, amidst every other conflicting
thought, this man was conscious that his daughter avoided him.

"They dragged the water," Margaret said; "I walked about--that
place--under the elms--all the day--only one day--but it seemed to last
for ever and ever. I was obliged to hide myself--and to keep at a
distance, for Clement was there all day; but as it grew dusk I ventured
nearer, and found out what they were doing, and that they had not found
what they were searching for; but I did not know yet what it was they
wanted to find."

"But they found it!" gasped the girl's father; "did they find it? Come
to that."

"Yes, they found it by-and-by. A bundle of rags, a boy told me--a boy
who had been about with the men all day--'a bundle of rags, it looked
like,' he said; but he heard the constable say that those rags were the
clothes that had belonged to the murdered man."

"What then? What next?"

"I waited to hear no more, father; I ran all the way to Winchester to
the station--I was in time for a train, which brought me to London--I
came on by the mail to Rugby--and----"

"Yes, yes; I know--and you are a brave girl, a noble girl. Ah! my poor
Margaret, I don't think I should have hated that man so much if it
hadn't been for the thought of you--your lonely girlhood--your hopeless,
joyless existence--and all through him--all through the man who ruined
me at the outset of my life. But I won't talk--I daren't talk: they have
found the clothes; they know that the man who was murdered was Henry
Dunbar--they will be here--let me think--let me think how I can get
away!"

He clasped both his hands upon his head, as if by force of their iron
grip he could steady his mind, and clear away the confusion of his
brain.

From the first day on which he had taken possession of the dead man's
property until this moment he had lived in perpetual terror of the
crisis which had now arrived. There was no possible form or manner in
which he had not imagined the situation. There was no preparation in his
power to make that he had left unmade. But he had hoped to anticipate
the dreaded hour. He had planned his flight, and meant to have left
Maudesley Abbey for ever, in the first hour that found him capable of
travelling. He had planned his flight, and had started on that wintry
afternoon, when the Sabbath bells had a muffled sound, as their solemn
peals floated across the snow--he had started on his journey with the
intention of never again returning to Maudesley Abbey. He had meant to
leave England, and wander far away, through all manner of unfrequented
districts, choosing places that were most difficult of approach, and
least affected by English travellers.

He had meant to do this, and had calculated that his conduct would be,
at the worst, considered eccentric; or perhaps it would be thought
scarcely unnatural in a lonely man, whose only child had married into a
higher sphere than his own. He had meant to do this, and by-and-by, when
he had been lost sight of by the world, to hide himself under a new name
and a new nationality, so that if ever, by some strange fatality, by
some awful interposition of Providence, the secret of Henry Dunbar's
death should come to light, the murderer would be as entirely removed
from human knowledge as if the grave had closed over him and hidden him
for ever.

This is the course that Joseph Wilmot had planned for himself. There had
been plenty of time for him to think and plot in the long nights that he
had spent in those splendid rooms--those noble chambers, whose grandeur
had been more hideous to him than the blank walls of a condemned cell;
whose atmosphere had seemed more suffocating than the foetid vapours of
a fever-tainted den in St. Giles's. The passionate, revengeful yearning
of a man who has been cruelly injured and betrayed, the common greed of
wealth engendered out of poverty's slow torture, had arisen rampant in
this man's breast at the sight of Henry Dunbar. By one hideous deed both
passions were gratified; and Joseph Wilmot, the bank-messenger, the
confidential valet, the forger, the convict, the ticket-of-leave man,
the penniless reprobate, became master of a million of money.

Yes, he had done this. He had entered Winchester upon that August
afternoon, with a few sovereigns and a handful of silver in his pocket,
and with a life of poverty and degradation, before him. He had left the
same town chief partner in the firm of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby, and
sole owner of Maudesley Abbey, the Yorkshire estates, and the house in
Portland Place.

Surely this was the very triumph of crime, a master-stroke of villany.
But had the villain ever known one moment's happiness since the
commission of that deed--one moment's peace--one moment's freedom from a
slow, torturing anguish that was like the gnawing of a ravenous beast
for ever preying on his entrails? The author of the _Opium-Eater_
suffered so cruelly from some internal agony that he grew at last to
fancy there was indeed some living creature inside him, for ever
torturing and tormenting him. This doubtless was only the fancy of an
invalid: but what of that undying serpent called Remorse, which coils
itself about the heart of the murderer and holds it for ever in a deadly
grip--never to beat freely again, never to know a painless throb, or
feel a sweet emotion?

In a few minutes--while the rooks were cawing in the elms, and the green
leaves fluttering in the drowsy summer air, and the blue waters rippling
in the sunshine and flecked by the shadows--Joseph Wilmot had done a
deed which had given him the richest reward that a murderer ever hoped
to win; and had so transformed his life, so changed the very current of
his being, that he went away out of that wood, not alone, but dogged
step by step by a gaunt, stalking creature, a hideous monster that
echoed his every breath, and followed at his shoulder, and clung about
him, and grappled his throat, and weighed him down; a horrid thing,
which had neither shape nor name, and yet wore every shape, and took
every name, and was the ghost of the deed that he had done.

Joseph Wilmot stood for a few moments with his hands clasped upon his
head, and then the shadows faded from his face, which suddenly became
fixed and resolute-looking. The first thrill of terror, the first shock
of surprise, were over. This man never had been and never could be a
coward. He was ready now for the worst. It may be that he was glad the
worst had come. He had suffered such unutterable anguish, such
indescribable tortures, during the time in which his guilt had been
unsuspected, that it may have been a kind of relief to know that his
secret was discovered, and that he was free to drop the mask.

While he paused, thinking what he was to do, some lucky thought came to
him, for his face brightened suddenly with a triumphant smile.

"The horse!" he said. "I may ride, though I can't walk."

He took up his cane, and went to the next room, where there was a door
that opened into the quadrangle, in which the master of the Abbey had
caused a loose box to be built for his favourite horse. Margaret
followed her father, not closely, but at a little distance, watching him
with anxious, wondering eyes.

He unfastened the half-glass door, opened it, and went out into the
quadrangular garden, the quaint old-fashioned garden, where the
flower-beds were primly dotted on the smooth grass-plot, in the centre
of which there was a marble basin, and the machinery of a little
fountain that had never played within the memory of living man.

"Go back for the lamp, Margaret," Joseph Wilmot whispered. "I must have
light."

The girl obeyed. She had left off trembling now, and carried the shaded
lamp as steadily as if she had been bent on some simple womanly errand.
She followed her father into the garden, and went with him to the loose
box where the horse was to be found.

The animal knew his master, even in that uncertain light. There was gas
laid on in the millionaire's stables, and a low jet had been left
burning by the groom.

The horse plunged his head about his master's shoulders, and shook his
mane, and reared, and disported himself in his delight at seeing his old
friend once more, and it was only Joseph Wilmot's soothing hand and
voice that subdued the animal's exuberant spirits.

"Steady, boy, steady! quiet, old fellow!" Joseph said, in a whisper.

Three or four saddles and bridles hung upon a rack in one corner of the
small stable. Joseph Wilmot selected the things he wanted, and began to
saddle the horse, supporting himself on his cane as he did so.

The groom slept in the house now, by his master's orders, and there was
no one within hearing.

The horse was saddled and bridled in five minutes, and Joseph Wilmot led
him out of the stable, followed by Margaret, who still carried the lamp.
There was a low iron gate leading out of the quadrangle into the
grounds. Joseph led the horse to this gate.

"Go back and get me my coat," he said to Margaret; "you'll go faster
than I can. You'll find a coat lined with fur on a chair in the
bedroom."

His daughter obeyed, silently and quietly, as she had done before. The
rooms all opened one into the other. She saw the bedroom with the tall,
gloomy bedstead, the light of the fire flickering here and there. She
set the lamp down upon a table in this room, and found the fur-lined
coat her father had sent her to fetch. There was a purse lying on a
dressing-table, with sovereigns glittering through the silken network,
and the girl snatched it up as she hurried away, thinking, in her
innocent simplicity, that her father might have nothing but those few
sovereigns to help him in his flight. She went back to him, carrying the
bulky overcoat, and helped him to put it on in place of the
dressing-grown he had been wearing. He had taken his hat before going to
the stable.

"Here is your purse, father," she said, thrusting it into his hand;
"there is something in it, but I'm afraid there's not very much. How
will you manage for money where you art going?"

"Oh, I shall manage very well."

He had got into the saddle by this time, not without considerable
difficulty; but though the fresh air made him feel faint and dizzy, he
felt himself a new man now that the horse was under him--the brave
horse, the creature that loved him, whose powerful stride could carry
him almost to the other end of the world; as it seemed to Joseph Wilmot
in the first triumph of being astride the animal once more. He put his
hand involuntarily to the belt that was strapped round him, as Margaret
asked that question about the money.

"Oh, yes," he said, "I've money enough--I am all right."

"But where are you going?" she asked, eagerly.

The horse was tearing up the wet gravel, and making furious champing
noises in his impatience of all this delay.

"I don't know," Joseph Wilmot answered; "that will depend upon--I don't
know. Good night, Margaret. God bless you! I don't suppose He listens to
the prayers of such as me. If He did, it might have been all different
long ago--when I tried to be honest!"

Yes, this was true; the murderer of Henry Dunbar had once tried to be
honest, and had prayed God to prosper his honesty; but then he only
tried to do right in a spasmodic, fitful kind of way, and expected his
prayers to be granted as soon as they were asked, and was indignant with
a Providence that seemed to be deaf to his entreaties. He had always
lacked that sublime quality of patience, which endures the evil day, and
calmly breasts the storm.

"Let me go with you, father," Margaret said, in an entreating voice,
"let me go with you. There is nothing in all the world for me, except
the hope of God's forgiveness for you. I want to be with you. I don't
want you to be amongst bad men, who will harden your heart. I want to be
with you--far away--where----"

"_You_ with me?" said Joseph Wilmot, slowly; "you wish it?"

"With all my heart!"

"And you're true," he cried, bending down to grasp his daughter's
shoulder and look her in the face, "you're true, Margaret, eh?--true as
steel; ready for anything, no flinching, no quailing or trembling when
the danger comes. You've stood a good deal, and stood it nobly. Can you
stand still more, eh?"

"For your sake, father, for your sake! yes, yes, I will brave anything
in the world, do anything to save you from----"

She shuddered as she remembered what the danger was that assailed him,
the horror from which flight alone could save him. No, no, no! _that_
could never be endured at any cost; at any sacrifice he must be saved
from _that_. No strength of womanly fortitude, no trust in the mercy of
God, could even make her resigned as to _that_.

"I'll trust you, Margaret," said Joseph Wilmot, loosening his grasp upon
the girl's shoulder; "I'll trust you. Haven't I reason to trust you?
Didn't I see your mother, on the day when she found out what my history
was; didn't I see the colour fade out of her face till she was whiter
than the linen collar round her neck, and in the next moment her arms
were about me, and her honest eyes looking up in my face, as she cried,
'I shall never love you less, dear; there's nothing in this world can
make me love you less!'"

He paused for a moment. His voice had grown thick and husky; but he
broke out violently in the next instant.

"Great Heaven! why do I stop talking like this? Listen to me, Margaret;
if you want to see the last of me, you must find your way, somehow or
other, to Woodbine Cottage, near Lisford--on the Lisford Road, I think.
Find your way there--I'm going there now, and shall be there long before
you--you understand?"

"Yes; Woodbine Cottage, Lisford--I shan't forget! God speed you,
father!--God help you!"

"He is the God of sinners," thought the wretched girl. "He gave Cain a
long lifetime in which to repent of his sins."

Margaret thought this as she stood at the gate, listening to the horse's
hoofs upon the gravel road that wound through the grounds away into the
park.

She was very, very tired, but had little sense of her fatigue, and her
journey was by no means finished yet. She did not once look back at
Maudesley Abbey--that stately and splendid mansion, in which a miserable
wretch had acted his part, and endured the penalty of his guilt, for
many wearisome months She went away--hurrying along the lonely pathways,
with the night breezes blowing her loose hair across her eyes, and
half-blinding her as she went--to find the gate by which she had entered
the park.

She went out at this gateway because it was the only point of egress by
which she could leave the park without being seen by the keeper of a
lodge. The dim morning light was grey in the sky before she met any one
whom she could ask to direct her to Woodbine Cottage; but at last a man
came out of a farmyard with a couple of milk-pails, and directed her to
the Lisford Road.

It was broad daylight when she reached the little garden-gate before
Major Vernon's abode. It was broad daylight, and the door leading into
the prim little hall was ajar. The girl pushed it open, and fell into
the arms of a man, who caught her as she fainted.

"Poor girl, poor child!" said Joseph Wilmot; "to think what she has
suffered. And I thought that she would profit by that crime; I thought
that she would take the money, and be content to leave the mystery
unravelled. My poor child! my poor, unhappy child!"

The man who had murdered Henry Dunbar wept aloud over the white face of
his unconscious daughter.

"Don't let's have any of that fooling," cried a harsh voice from the
little parlour; "we've no time to waste on snivelling!"

CHAPTER XLI.

AT MAUDESLEY ABBEY.

Mr. Carter the detective lost no time about his work; but he did not
employ the telegraph, by which means he might perhaps have expedited the
arrest of Henry Dunbar's murderer. He did not avail himself of the
facilities offered by that wonderful electric telegraph, which was once
facetiously called the rope that hung Tawell the Quaker, because in so
doing he must have taken the local police into his confidence, and he
wished to do his work quietly, only aided by a companion and humble
follower, whom he was in the habit of employing.

He went up to London by the mail-train after parting from Clement
Austin; took a cab at the Waterloo station, and drove straight off to
the habitation of his humble assistant, whom he most unceremoniously
roused from his bed. But there was no train for Warwickshire before the
six-o'clock parliamentary, and there was a seven-o'clock express, which
would reach Rugby ten minutes after that miserably slow conveyance; so
Mr. Carter naturally elected to sacrifice the ten minutes, and travel by
the express. Meanwhile he took a hearty breakfast, which had been
hastily prepared by the wife of his friend and follower, and explained
the nature of the business before them.

It must be confessed that, in making these explanations to his humble
friend, Mr. Carter employed a tone that implied no little superiority,
and that the friendliness of his manner was tempered by condescension.

The friend was a middle-aged and most respectable-looking individual,
with a turnip-hued skin relieved by freckles, dark-red eyes, and
pale-red hair. He was not a very prepossessing person, and had a habit
of working about his lips and jaws when he was neither eating nor
talking, which was far from pleasant to behold. He was very much
esteemed by Mr. Carter, nevertheless; not so much because he was clever,
as because he looked so eminently stupid. This last characteristic had
won for him the _sobriquet_ of Sawney Tom, and he was considered worth
his weight in sovereigns on certain occasions, when a simple country lad
or a verdant-looking linen-draper's apprentice was required to enact
some little part in the detective drama.

"You'll bring some of your traps with you, Sawney," said Mr.
Carter.--"I'll take another, ma'am, if you please. Three minutes and a
half this time, and let the white set tolerably firm." This last remark
was addressed to Mrs. Sawney Tom, or rather Mrs. Thomas Tibbles--Sawney
Tom's name was Tibbles--who was standing by the fire, boiling eggs and
toasting bread for her husband's patron. "You'll bring your traps,
Sawney," continued the detective, with his mouth full of buttered toast;
"there's no knowing how much trouble this chap may give us; because you
see a chap that can play the bold game he has played, and keep it up for
nigh upon a twelvemonth, could play any game. There's nothing out that
he need look upon as beyond him. So, though I've every reason to think
we shall take my friend at Maudesley as quietly as ever a child in arms
was took out of its cradle, still we may as well be prepared for the
worst."

Mr. Tibbles, who was of a taciturn disposition, and who had been busily
chewing nothing while listening to his superior, merely gave a jerk of
acquiescence in answer to the detective's speech.

"We start as solicitor and clerk," said Mr. Carter. "You'll carry a blue
bag. You'd better go and dress: the time's getting on. Respectable black
and a clean shave, you know, Sawney. We're going to an old gentleman in
the neighbourhood of Shorncliffe, that wants his will altered all of a
hurry, having quarrelled with his three daughters; that's what _we're_
goin' to do, if anybody's curious about our business."

Mr. Tibbles nodded, and retired to an inner apartment, whence he emerged
by-and-by dressed in a shabby-genteel costume of somewhat funereal
aspect, and with the lower part of his face rasped like a French roll,
and somewhat resembling that edible in colour.

He brought a small portmanteau with him, and then departed to fetch a
cab, in which vehicle the two gentlemen drove away to the Euston-Square
station.

It was one o'clock in the day when they reached the great iron gates of
Maudesley Abbey in a fly which they had chartered at Shorncliffe. It was
one o'clock on a bright sunshiny day, and the heart of Mr. Carter the
detective beat high with expectation of a great triumph.

He descended from the fly himself, in order to question the woman at the
lodge.

"You'd better get out, Sawney," he said, putting his head in at the
window, in order to speak to his companion; "I shan't take the vehicle
into the park. It'll be quieter and safer for us to walk up to the
house."

Mr. Tibbles, with his blue-bag on his arm, got out of the fly, prepared
to attend his superior whithersoever that luminary chose to lead him.

The woman at the lodge was not alone; a little group of gossips were
gathered in the primly-furnished parlour, and the talk was loud and
animated.

"Which I was that took aback like, you might have knocked me down with a
feather," said the proprietress of the little parlour, as she went out
of the rustic porch to open the gate for Mr. Carter and his companion.

"I want to see Mr. Dunbar," he said, "on particular business. You can
tell him I come from the banking-house in St. Gundolph Lane. I've got a
letter from the junior partner there, and I'm to deliver it to Mr.
Dunbar himself!"

The keeper of the lodge threw up her hands and eyes in token of utter
bewilderment.

"Begging your pardon, sir," she said, "but I've been that upset, I don't
know scarcely what I'm a-doing of. Mr. Dunbar have gone, sir, and nobody
in that house don't know why he went, or when he went, or where he's
gone. The man-servant as waited on him found the rooms all empty the
first thing this morning; and the groom as had charge of Mr. Dunbar's
horse, and slep' at the back of the house, not far from the stables,
fancied as how he heard a trampling last night where the horse was kep',
but put it down to the animal bein' restless on account of the change in
the weather; and this morning the horse was gone, and the gravel all
trampled up, and Mr. Dunbar's gold-headed cane (which the poor gentleman
was still so lame it was as much as he could do to walk from one room to
another) was lying by the garden-gate; and how he ever managed to get
out and about and saddle his horse and ride away like that without bein'
ever heard by a creetur, nobody hasn't the slightest notion; and
everybody this morning was distracted like, searchin' 'igh and low; but
not a sign of Mr. Dunbar were found nowhere."

Mr. Carter turned pale, and stamped his foot upon the gravel-drive. Two
hundred pounds is a large stake to a poor man; and Mr. Carter's
reputation was also trembling in the balance. The very man he wanted
gone--gone away in the dead of the night, while all the household was
sleeping!

"But he was lame," he cried. "How about that?--the railway accident--the
broken leg----"

"Yes, sir," the woman answered, eagerly, "that's the very thing, sir;
which they're all talkin' about it at the house, sir, and how a poor
invalid gentleman, what could scarce stir hand or foot, should get up in
the middle of the night and saddle his own horse, and ride away at a
rampageous rate; which the groom says he _have_ rode rampageous, or the
gravel wouldn't be tore up as it is. And they do say, sir, as Mr. Dunbar
must have been took mad all of a sudden, and the doctor was in an awful
way when he heard it; and there's been people riding right and left
lookin' for him, sir. And Miss Dunbar--leastways Lady Jocelyn--was sent
for early this morning, and she's at the house now, sir, with her
husband Sir Philip; and if your business is so very important, perhaps
you'd like to see her----"

"I should," answered the detective, briskly. "You stop here, Sawney," he
added, aside to his attendant; "you stop here, and pick up what you can.
I'll go up to the house and see the lady."

Mr. Carter found the door open, and a group of servants clustered in the
gothic porch. Lady Jocelyn was in Mr. Dunbar's rooms, a footman told
him. The detective sent this man to ask if Mr. Dunbar's daughter would
receive a stranger from London, on most important business.

The man came back in five minutes to say yes, Lady Jocelyn would see the
strange gentleman.

The detective was ushered through the two outer rooms leading to that
tapestried apartment in which the missing man had spent so many
miserable days, so many dismal nights. He found Laura standing in one of
the windows looking out across the smooth lawn, looking anxiously out
towards the winding gravel-drive that led from the principal lodge to
the house.

She turned away from the window as Mr. Carter approached her, and passed
her hand across her forehead. Her eyelids trembled, and she had the look
of a person whose senses had been dazed by excitement and confusion.

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