There is little need to dwell upon the details of that most bitter time.
People get over these sort of things somehow; and grief and shame are very rarely fatal, even to the most sensitive natures. "Alas, sweet friend," says Sh.e.l.ley"s Helen, "you must believe this heart is stone; it did not break!" There seems to be a good deal of the stony element in all our hearts, so seldom are the arrows of affliction fatal. To Isabel the horror of being a forger"s daughter was something very terrible; but even in its terror there was just the faintest flavour of romance: and if she could have smuggled her father out of Newgate in a woman"s cap and gown, like Lady Nithisdale, she might have forgiven him the crimes that had helped to make her a heroine. The boys, after the first shock of the revelation, took a very lenient view of their father"s case, and were inclined to attribute his shortcomings to the tyranny and prejudice of society.
"If a rich cove has a jolly lot of money in the bank, and poor coves are starving, the rich cove must expect to have it forged away from him,"
Horace Sleaford remarked, moodily, when debating the question of his father"s guilt. Nor did the hobbledehoy"s sympathy end here; for he borrowed a dirty and dilapidated copy of Mr. Ainsworth"s delightful romance from a circulating library, and minutely studied that gentleman"s description of Newgate in the days of Jack Sheppard, with a view to Mr. Sleaford"s evasion of his jailers.
It was not so very bad to bear, after all; for of course Jack the Scribe was not so imprudent as to make any admission of his guilt. He represented himself as the victim of circ.u.mstances, the innocent a.s.sociate of wicked men, entrapped into the folly of signing other people"s names by a conspiracy on the part of his companions. Hardened as he was by the experiences of a long and doubtful career, he felt some natural shame; and he did all in his power to keep his wife and children dissociated from himself and his crimes. Bitterly though the cynic may bewail the time-serving and mercenary nature of his race, a man can generally find some one to help him in the supreme crisis of his fate.
Mr. Sleaford found friends, obscure and vulgar people, by whose a.s.sistance he was enabled to get his family out of the way before his trial came on at the Old Bailey. The boys, ever athirst for information of the Jack-Sheppard order, perused the daily record of that Old Bailey ordeal by stealth in the attic where they slept; but Isabel saw nothing of the newspapers, which set forth the story of her father"s guilt, and only knew at the last, when all was decided, what Mr. Sleaford"s fate was to be. Thus it was that she never saw Mr. Lansdell"s name amongst those of the witnesses against her father; and even if she had seen that name, it is doubtful whether it would have lived in her memory until the day when she met the master of Mordred Priory.
No language can describe the horror that she felt on her father"s sudden appearance in Midlandshire. Utterly ignorant of the practices of prison life, and the privileges of a ticket-of-leave, she had regarded Mr.
Sleaford"s dismal habitation as a kind of tomb in which he was to be buried alive for the full term of his imprisonment. Vaguely and afar off she saw the shadow of danger to Roland, in the ultimate release of his enemy; but the shadow seemed so very far away, that after the first shock of Mr. Lansdell"s story, it had almost faded from her mind, blotted out by nearer joys and sorrows. It was only when her father stood before her, fierce and exacting, hardened and brutalized by prison-life, a wretch for ever at war with the laws he had outraged,--it was only then that the full measure of Roland Lansdell"s danger was revealed to her.
"If ever I come out of prison alive, I will kill you!"
Never had she forgotten the words of that threat. But she might hope that it was only an empty threat, the harmless thunder of a moment"s pa.s.sion; not a deliberate promise, to be fulfilled whenever the chance of its fulfilment arose. She did hope this; and in her first stolen interview with her father, she led him to talk of his trial, and contrived to ascertain his present sentiments regarding the man who had so materially helped to convict him. The dusky shadows of the summer evening hid the pallor of her earnest face, as she walked by Mr.
Sleaford"s side in the sheltered hollow; and that gentleman was too much absorbed by the sense of his own wrongs to be very observant of his daughter"s agitation.
Isabel Gilbert heard enough during that interview to convince her that Roland Lansdell"s danger was very real and near. Mr. Sleaford"s vengeful pa.s.sions had fed and battened upon the solitude of the past years. Every privation and hardship endured in his prison life had been a fresh item in his long indictment against Mr. Lansdell, the "languid swell," whom he had never wronged to the extent of a halfpenny, but who, for the mere amus.e.m.e.nt of the chase, had hunted him down. This was what he could not forgive. He _could not_ recognize the right of an amateur detective, who bore witness against a criminal for the general benefit of society.
After this first meeting in Nessborough Hollow, the Doctor"s Wife had but one thought, one purpose and desire; and that was, to keep her father in ignorance of his enemy"s near neighbourhood, and to get him away before mischief arose between the two men. But this was not such an easy matter. Mr. Sleaford refused to leave his quarters at the Leicester Arms until he obtained that which he had come to Midlandshire to seek--money enough for a new start in life. He had made his way to Jersey immediately after getting his release, and had there seen his wife and the boys. From them he heard of Isabel"s marriage. She had married well, they said: a doctor at a place called Graybridge-on-the -Wayverne--an important man, no doubt; and she had not been unkind to them upon the whole, writing nice long letters to her step-mother now and then, and sending post-office orders for occasional sovereigns.
Heaven only knows with what difficulty the poor girl had contrived to save those occasional sovereigns. Mr. Sleaford demanded money of his daughter. He had made all manner of inquiries about George Gilbert"s position, and had received very satisfactory answers to those inquiries.
The young doctor was a "warm" man, the gossips in the little parlour at the Leicester Arms told Jack the Scribe; a prudent young man, who had inherited a nice little nest-egg--perpetually being hatched at a moderate rate of interest in the Wareham bank--from his father, and had saved money himself, no doubt. And then the gossips entered into calculations as to the value of Mr. Gilbert"s practice, and the simple eeonomy of his domestic arrangements; all favourable to the idea that the young surgeon had a few thousands snugly invested in the county bank.
Under these circ.u.mstances, Mr. Sleaford considered himself entirely justified in standing out for what he called his rights, namely, a sum of money--say fifty or a hundred pounds--from his daughter; and Isabel, with the thought of Roland"s danger perpetually in her mind, felt that the money must be obtained at any price. Had her husband been well enough to talk of business matters, she might have made her appeal to him; but as it was, there was an easier and more speedy method of getting the money. Roland, Roland himself, who was rich, and to whom fifty pounds,--large as the sum seemed to this girl, who had never had an unbroken ten-pound note in her life,--must be a very small matter; he was the only person who could give her immediate help. It was to him therefore she appealed. Ah, with what bitter shame and anguish! And it was to deliver up the money thus obtained that she met her father in Nessborough Hollow on the night of that dismal dinner at Lowlands. The idea of telling Roland of his danger never for a moment entered her mind. Was he not a hero, and would he not inevitably have courted that or any other peril?
She thought of his position with all a weak woman"s illogical terror; and the only course that presented itself to her mind was that which she pursued. She wanted to get her father away before any chance allusion upon a stranger"s lips told him that the man he so bitterly hated was within his reach.
CHAPTER x.x.xV.
""TWERE BEST AT ONCE TO SINK TO PEACE."
After that farewell meeting with Mr. Sleaford in Nessborough Hollow, a sense of peace came upon Isabel Gilbert. She had questioned her father about his plans, and he had told her that he should leave Midlandshire by the seven o"clock train from Wareham on the following morning. He should be heartily rejoiced to get to London, he said, and to leave a place where he felt like a fox in a hole. The sentimental element was by no means powerfully developed in the nature of Jack the Scribe, to whom the crowded pavements of Fleet Street and the Strand were infinitely more agreeable than the wild roses and branching fern of Midlandshire.
His daughter slept tranquilly that night for the first time after Mr.
Sleaford"s appearance before the surgeon"s door. She slept in peace, worn out by the fatigue and anxiety of the last fortnight; and no evil dream disturbed her slumbers. The odic forces must be worth very little after all, for there was no consciousness in the sleeper"s mind of that quiet figure lying among the broken fern; no shadow, however dim, of the scene that had been enacted in the tranquil, summer moonlight, while she was hurrying homeward through the dewy lanes, triumphant in the thought that her difficult task was accomplished. Only once in a century does the vision of Maria Martin appear to an anxious dreamer; only so often as to shake the formal boundary-wall of common sense which we have so rigidly erected between the visible and invisible, and to show us that there are more things in heaven and earth than our dull philosophy is prepared to recognize.
Isabel woke upon the morning after that interview in the Hollow, with a feeling of relief still in her mind. Her father was gone, and all was well. He was not likely to return; for she had told him, with most solemn protestations, that she had obtained the money with extreme difficulty, and would never be able to obtain more. She had told him this, and he had promised never again to a.s.sail her with any demands. It was a very easy thing for Jack the Scribe to make that or any other promise; but even if he broke his word, Isabel thought, there was every chance that Roland Lansdell would leave Midlandshire very speedily, and become once more an alien and a wanderer.
The Doctor"s Wife was at peace, therefore; the dreadful terror of the past fortnight was lifted away from her mind, and she was prepared to do her duty; to be true to Mr. Colborne"s solemn teaching, and to watch dutifully, undistracted by any secret fear and anguish, by George Gilbert"s sick bed.
Very dismal faces greeted her beside that bed. Mr. Jeffson never left his post now at the pillow of his young master. The weeds grew unheeded in the garden; and Brown Molly missed her customary grooming. The gardener had thrown half a load of straw in the lane, below the doctor"s window, so that no rumbling of the waggon-wheels carrying home the new-mown hay should disturb George Gilbert"s feverish sleep, if the brief fitful dozes into which he fell now and then could be called by so sweet a name.
Mr. Pawlkatt sat looking at his patient longer than usual that morning.
George Gilbert lay in a kind of stupor, and did not recognize his medical attendant, and sometime rival. He had long since ceased to be anxious about his poor patients in the lanes behind the church, or about anything else upon this earth, as it seemed; and now that her great terror had been lifted from her mind, Isabel saw a new and formless horror gliding swiftly towards her, like a great iceberg sailing fast upon an arctic sea. She followed Mr. Pawlkatt out of the room, and down the little staircase, and clung to his arm as he was about to leave her.
"Oh, do you think he will die?" she said. "I did not know until this morning that he was so very ill. Do you think he will die?"
The surgeon looked inquisitively into the earnest face lifted to his--looked with some expression of surprise upon his countenance.
"I am very anxious, Mrs. Gilbert," he answered, gravely. "I will not conceal from you that I am growing very anxious. The pulse is feeble and intermittent; and these low fevers--there, there, don"t cry. I"ll drive over to Wareham, as soon as I"ve seen the most important of my cases; and I"ll ask Dr. Herstett to come and look at your husband. Pray try to be calm."
"I am so frightened," murmured Isabel, between her low half-stifled sobs. "I never saw any one ill--like that--before."
Mr. Pawlkatt watched her gravely as he drew on his gloves.
"I am not sorry to see this anxiety on your part, Mrs. Gilbert," he remarked sententiously. "As the friend and brother-professional of your husband, and as a man who is--ahem!--old enough to be your father, I will go so far as to say that I am gratified to find that you--I may say, your heart is in the right place. There have been some very awkward reports about you, Mrs. Gilbert, during the last few days. I--I--of course should not presume to allude to those reports, if I did not believe them to be erroneous," the surgeon added, rather hastily, not feeling exactly secure as to the extent and bearing of the law of libel.
But Isabel only looked at him with bewilderment and distress in her face.
"Reports about me!" she repeated. "What reports?"
"There has been a person--a stranger--staying at a little inn down in Nessborough Hollow; and you,--in fact, I really have no right to interfere in this matter, but my very great respect for your husband,-and, in short----"
"Oh, that person is gone now," Isabel answered frankly. "It was very unkind of people to say anything against him, or against me. He was a relation,-a very near relation,--and I could not do otherwise than see him now and then while he was in the neighbourhood. I went late in the evening, because I did not wish to leave my husband at any other time. I did not think that the Graybridge people watched me so closely, or were so ready to think that what I do must be wrong."
Mr. Pawlkatt patted her hand soothingly.
"A relation, my dear Mrs. Gilbert?" he exclaimed. "That, of course, quite alters the case. I always said that you were no doubt perfectly justified in doing as you did; though it would have been better to invite the person here. Country people will talk, you know. As a medical man, with rather a large field of experience, I see all these little provincial weaknesses. They will talk; but keep up your courage, Mrs.
Gilbert. We shall do our best for our poor friend. We shall do our very best."
He gave Isabel"s tremulous hand a little rea.s.suring squeeze, and departed complacently.
The Doctor"s Wife stood absently watching him as he walked away, and then turned and went slowly into the parlour--the empty, miserable-looking parlour, which had not been used now for more than a week. The dust lay thick upon the shabby old furniture, and the atmosphere was hot and oppressive.
Here Isabel sat down beside the chiffonier, where her poor little collection of books was huddled untidily in a dusty corner. She sat down to think--trying to realize the nature of that terror which seemed so close to her, trying to understand the full significance of what Mr.
Pawlkatt had said of her husband.
The surgeon had given no hope that George Gilbert would recover; he had only made little conventional speeches about calmness and fort.i.tude.
She tried to think, but could not. She had only spoken the truth just now, when she cried out that she was frightened. This kind of terror was so utterly new to her that she could not understand the calm business-like aspect of the people who watched and waited on her husband. Could he be dying? That strong active man, whose rude health and hearty appet.i.te had once jarred so harshly upon all her schoolgirl notions of consumptive and blood-vessel-breaking heroes! Could he be dying?--dying as heroic a death as any she had ever read of in her novels: the death of a man who speculates his life for the benefit of his fellow-creatures, and loses by the venture. The memory of every wrong that she had ever done him--small wrongs of neglect, or contemptuous opinions regarding his merits--wrongs that had been quite impalpable to the honest unromantic doctor,--crowded upon her now, and made a dull remorseful anguish in her breast. The dark shadow brooding over George Gilbert--the dread gigantic shadow, growing darker day by day--made him a new creature in the mind of this weak girl. No thought of her own position had any place in her mind. She could not think; she could only wait, oppressed by a dread whose nature she dared not realize. She sat for a long time in the same forlornly listless att.i.tude, almost as helpless as the man who lay in the darkened chamber above her. Then, rousing herself with effort, she crept up-stairs to the room where the grave faces of the watchers greeted her, with very little sympathy in their gaze.
Had not Mr. and Mrs. Jeffson heard the reports current in Graybridge; and was it likely they could have any pity for a woman who crept stealthily at nightfall from her invalid husband"s house to meet a stranger?
Isabel would have whispered some anxious question about the patient; but Matilda Jeffson frowned sternly at her, commanding silence with an imperious forefinger; and she was fain to creep into a dark corner, where it had been her habit to sit since the Jeffsons had, in a manner, taken possession of her husband"s sick bed. She could not dispute their right to do so. What was she but a frivolous, helpless creature, fluttering and trembling like a leaf when she essayed to do any little service for the invalid?
The day seemed painfully long. The ticking of an old clock on the stairs, and the heavy troubled breathing of the sick man, were the only sounds that broke the painful silence of the house. Once or twice Isabel took an open Testament from a little table near her, and tried to take some comfort from its pages. But she could not feel the beauty of the words as she had in the little church at Hurstonleigh, when her mind had been exalted by all manner of vague spiritualistic yearnings; now it seemed deadened by the sense of dread and horror. She did not love her husband; and those tidings of heavenly love which have so subtle an affinity with earthly affection could not touch her very nearly in her present frame of mind. She did not love her husband well enough to pray that something little short of a miracle might be wrought for his sake.
She was only sorry for him; tenderly compa.s.sionate of his suffering; very fearful that he might die. She did pray for him; but there was no exaltation in her prayers, and she had a dull presentiment that her supplications would not be answered.
It was late in the afternoon when the physician from Wareham came with Mr. Pawlkatt; and when he did arrive, he seemed to do very little, Isabel thought. He was a grey-whiskered important-looking man, with creaking boots; he seated himself by the bedside, and felt the patient"s pulse, and listened to his breathing, and lifted his heavy eyelids, and peered into his dim blood-shot eyes. He asked a good many questions, and then went down-stairs with Mr. Pawlkatt, and the two medical men were closeted together some ten or twelve minutes in the little parlour.
Isabel did not follow Mr. Pawlkatt down-stairs this time. She was awed by the presence of the strange physician, and there was nothing in the manner of the two men that inspired hope or comfort. She sat quite still in her dusky corner; but Mrs. Jeffson stole out of the room soon after the medical men had quitted it, and went slowly down-stairs. George was asleep; in a very sound and heavy sleep this time; and his breathing was more regular than it had been--more regular, but still a laboured stertorous kind of respiration that was very painful to hear. In less than ten minutes Mrs. Jeffson came back, looking very pale, and with traces of tears upon her face. The good woman had been listening to the medical consultation in the little parlour below.
Perhaps Isabel dimly comprehended this; for she got up from her chair, and went a little way towards her husband"s housekeeper.
"Oh, tell me the truth," she whispered, imploringly; "do they think that he will die?"