Queen of Hearts — Brother Griffith's Story of a Plot in Private Life - Chapter VI, part 2
I could hardly realize it when I found myself walking back to Darrock a free man again.
In a quarter of an hour’s time Mr. Dark joined me, and drank to my health, happiness and prosperity in three separate tumblers.
After performing this ceremony, he wagged his head and chuckled with an appearance of such excessive enjoyment that I could not avoid remarking on his high spirits.
“It’s the case, William—it’s the beautiful neatness of the case that quite intoxicates me.
Oh, Lord, what a happiness it is to be concerned in such a job as this!
” cries Mr. Dark, slapping his stumpy hands on his fat knees in a sort of ecstasy.
I had a very different opinion of the case for my own part, but I did not venture on expressing it.
I was too anxious to know how Mr. James Smith had been discovered and produced at the examination to enter into any arguments.
Mr. Dark guessed what was passing in my mind, and, telling me to sit down and make myself comfortable, volunteered of his own accord to inform me of all that I wanted to know.
“When I got my instructions and my statement of particulars,” he began, “I was not at all surprised to hear that Mr. James Smith had come back.
(I prophesied that, if you remember, William, the last time we met?
) But I was a good deal astonished, nevertheless, at the turn things had taken, and I can’t say I felt very hopeful about finding our man.
However, I followed my master’s directions, and put the advertisement in the papers.
It addressed Mr. James Smith by name, but it was very carefully worded as to what was wanted of him.
Two days after it appeared, a letter came to our office in a woman’s handwriting.
It was my business to open the letters, and I opened that.
The writer was short and mysterious.
She requested that somebody would call from our office at a certain address, between the hours of two and four that afternoon, in reference to the advertisement which we had inserted in the newspapers.
Of course, I was the somebody who went.
I kept myself from building up hopes by the way, knowing what a lot of Mr. James Smiths there were in London.
On getting to the house, I was shown into the drawing-room, and there, dressed in a wrapper and lying on a sofa, was an uncommonly pretty woman, who looked as if she was just recovering from an illness.
She had a newspaper by her side, and came to the point at once: ‘My husband’s name is James Smith,’ she says, ‘and I have my reasons for wanting to know if he is the person you are in search of.
’ I described our man as Mr. James Smith, of Darrock Hall, Cumberland.
‘I know no such person,’ says she—” “What!
was it not the second wife, after all?
” I broke out.
“Wait a bit,” says Mr. Dark.
“I mentioned the name of the yacht next, and she started up on the sofa as if she had been shot.
‘I think you were married in Scotland, ma’am,’ says I. She turns as pale as ashes, and drops back on the sofa, and says, faintly: ‘It is my husband.
Oh, sir, what has happened?
What do you want with him?
Is he in debt?
’ I took a minute to think, and then made up my mind to tell her everything, feeling that she would keep her husband (as she called him) out of the way if I frightened her by any mysteries.
A nice job I had, William, as you may suppose, when she knew about the bigamy business.
What with screaming, fainting, crying, and blowing me up (as if _I_ was to blame!
), she kept me by that sofa of hers the best part of an hour—kept me there, in short, till Mr. James Smith himself came back.
I
leave you to judge if that mended matters.
He found me mopping the poor woman’s temples with scent and water; and he would have pitched me out of the window, as sure as I sit here, if I had not met him and staggered him at once with the charge of murder against his wife.
That stopped him when he was in full cry, I can promise you.
‘Go and wait in the next room,’ says he, ‘and I’ll come in and speak to you directly.
’” “And did you go?
” I asked.
“Of course I did,” said Mr. Dark.
“I knew he couldn’t get out by the drawing-room windows, and I knew I could watch the door; so away I went, leaving him alone with the lady, who didn’t spare him by any manner of means, as I could easily hear in the next room.
However, all rows in this world come to an end sooner or later, and a man with any brains in his head may do what he pleases with a woman who is fond of him.
Before long I heard her crying and kissing him.
‘I can’t go home,’ she says, after this.
‘You have behaved like a villain and a monster to me—but oh, Jemmy, I can’t give you up to anybody!
Don’t go back to your wife!
Oh, don’t, don’t go back to your wife!
’ ‘No fear of that,’ says he.
‘My wife wouldn’t have me if I did go back to her.
’ After that I heard the door open, and went out to meet him on the landing.
He began swearing the moment he saw me, as if that was any good.
‘Business first, if you please, sir,’ says I, ‘and any pleasure you like, in the way of swearing, afterward.
’ With that beginning, I mentioned our terms to him, and asked the pleasure of his company to Cumberland in return, he was uncommonly suspicious at first, but I promised to draw out a legal document (mere waste paper, of no earthly use except to pacify him), engaging to hold him harmless throughout the proceedings; and what with that, and telling him of the frightful danger his wife was in, I managed, at last, to carry my point.
” “But did the second wife make no objection to his going away with you?
” I inquired.
“Not she,” said Mr. Dark.
“I stated the case to her just as it stood, and soon satisfied her that there was no danger of Mr. James Smith’s first wife laying any claim to him.
After hearing that, she joined me in persuading him to do his duty, and said she pitied your mistress from the bottom of her heart.
With her influence to back me, I had no great fear of our man changing his mind.
I had the door watched that night, however, so as to make quite sure of him.
The next morning he was ready to time when I called, and a quarter of an hour after that we were off together for the north road.
We made the journey with post-horses, being afraid of chance passengers, you know, in public conveyances.
On the way down, Mr. James Smith and I got on as comfortably together as if we had been a pair of old friends.
I told the story of our tracing him to the north of Scotland, and he gave me the particulars, in return, of his bolting from Darrock Hall.
They are rather amusing, William; would you like to hear them?
” I told Mr. Dark that he had anticipated the very question I was about to ask him.
“Well,” he said, “this is how it was: To begin at the beginning, our man really took Mrs. Smith, Number Two, to the Mediterranean, as we heard.
He sailed up the Spanish coast, and, after short trips ashore, stopped at a seaside place in France called Cannes.
There he saw a house and grounds to be sold which took his fancy as a nice retired place to keep Number Two in.
Nothing particular was wanted but the money to buy it; and, not having the little amount in his own possession, Mr. James Smith makes a virtue of necessity, and goes back overland to his wife with private designs on her purse-strings.
Number Two, who objects to be left behind, goes with him as far as London.
There he trumps up the first story that comes into his head about rents in the country, and a house in Lincolnshire that is too damp for her to trust herself in; and so, leaving her for a few days in London, starts boldly for Darrock Hall.
His notion was to wheedle your mistress out of the money by good behavior; but it seems he started badly by quarreling with her about a fiddle-playing parson—” “Yes, yes, I know all about that part of the story,” I broke in, seeing by Mr. Dark’s manner that he was likely to speak both ignorantly and impertinently of my mistress’s unlucky friendship for Mr. Meeke.
“Go on to the time when I left my master alone in the Red Room, and tell me what he did between midnight and nine the next morning.
” “Did?
” said Mr. Dark.
“Why, he went to bed with the unpleasant conviction on his mind that your mistress had found him out, and with no comfort to speak of except what he could get out of the brandy bottle.
He couldn’t sleep; and the more he tossed and tumbled, the more certain he felt that his wife intended to have him tried for bigamy.
At last, toward the gray of the morning, he could stand it no longer, and he made up his mind to give the law the slip while he had the chance.
As soon as he was dressed, it struck him that there might be a reward offered for catching him, and he determined to make that slight change in his personal appearance which puzzled the witnesses so much before the magistrate to-day.
So he opens his dressing-case and crops his hair in no time, and takes off his whiskers next.
The fire was out, and he had to shave in cold water.
What with that, and what with the flurry of his mind, naturally enough he cut himself—” “And dried the blood with his nightgown?
” says I. “With his nightgown,” repeated Mr. Dark.
“It was the first thing that lay handy, and he snatched it up.
Wait a bit, though; the cream of the thing is to come.
When he had done being his own barber, he couldn’t for the life of him hit on a way of getting rid of the loose hair.
The fire was out, and he had no matches; so he couldn’t burn it.
As for throwing it away, he didn’t dare do that in the house or about the house, for fear of its being found, and betraying what he had done.
So he wraps it all up in paper, crams it into his pocket to be disposed of when he is at a safe distance from the Hall, takes his bag, gets out at the window, shuts it softly after him, and makes for the road as fast as his long legs will carry him.
There he walks on till a coach overtakes him, and so travels back to London to find himself in a fresh scrape as soon as he gets there.
An interesting situation, William, and hard traveling from one end of France to the other, had not agreed together in the case of Number Two.
Mr. James Smith found her in bed, with doctor’s orders that she was not to be moved.
There was nothing for it after that but to lie by in London till the lady got better.
Luckily for us, she didn’t hurry herself; so that, after all, your mistress has to thank the very woman who supplanted her for clearing her character by helping us to find Mr. James Smith.
” “And, pray, how did you come by that loose hair of his which you showed before the justice to-day?
” I asked.
“Thank Number Two again,” says Mr. Dark.
“I was put up to asking after it by what she told me.
While we were talking about the advertisement, I made so bold as to inquire what first set her thinking that her husband and the Mr. James Smith whom we wanted might be one and the same man.
‘Nothing,’ says she, ‘but seeing him come home with his hair cut short and his whiskers shaved off, and finding that he could not give me any good reason for disfiguring himself in that way.
I had my suspicions that something was wrong, and the sight of your advertisement strengthened them directly.
’ The hearing her say that suggested to my mind that there might be a difficulty in identifying him after the change in his looks, and I asked him what he had done with the loose hair before we left London.
It was found in the pocket of his traveling coat just as he had huddled it up there on leaving the Hall, worry, and fright, and vexation, having caused him to forget all about it.
Of course I took charge of the parcel, and you know what good it did as well as I do.
So to speak, William, it just completed this beautifully neat case.
Looking at the matter in a professional point of view, I don’t hesitate to say that we have managed our business with Mr. James Smith to perfection.
We have produced him at the right time, and we are going to get rid of him at the right time.
By to-night he will be on his way to foreign parts with Number Two, and he won’t show his nose in England again if he lives to the age of Methuselah.
” It was a relief to hear that and it was almost as great a comfort to find, from what Mr. Dark said next, that my mistress need fear nothing that Josephine could do for the future.
The charge of theft, on which she was about to be tried, did not afford the shadow of an excuse in law any more than in logic for alluding to the crime which her master had committed.
If she meant to talk about it she might do so in her place of transportation, but she would not have the slightest chance of being listened to previously in a court of law.
“In short,” said Mr. Dark, rising to take his leave, “as I have told you already, William, it’s checkmate for marmzelle.
She didn’t manage the business of the robbery half as sharply as I should have expected.
She certainly began well enough by staying modestly at a lodging in the village to give her attendance at the examinations, as it might be required; nothing could look more innocent and respectable so far; but her hiding the property between the mattresses of her bed—the very first place that any experienced man would think of looking in—was such an amazingly stupid thing to do, that I really can’t account for it, unless her mind had more weighing on it than it was able to bear, which, considering the heavy stakes she played for, is likely enough.
Anyhow, her hands are tied now, and her tongue too, for the matter of that.
Give my respects to your mistress, and tell her that her runaway husband and her lying maid will never either of them harm her again as long as they live.
She has nothing to do now but to pluck up her spirits and live happy.
Here’s long life to her and to you, William, in the last glass of ale; and here’s the same toast to myself in the bottom of the jug.
” With those words Mr. Dark pocketed his large snuff-box, gave a last wink with his bright eye, and walked rapidly away, whistling, to catch the London coach.
From that time to this he and I have never met again.
A few last words relating to my mistress and to the other persons chiefly concerned in this narrative will conclude all that it is now necessary for me to say.
For some months the relatives and friends, and I myself, felt sad misgivings on my poor mistress’s account.
We doubted if it was possible, with such a quick, sensitive nature as hers, that she could support the shock which had been inflicted on her.
But our powers of endurance are, as I have learned to believe, more often equal to the burdens laid upon us than we are apt to imagine.
I have seen many surprising recoveries from illness after all hope had been lost, and I have lived to see my mistress recover from the grief and terror which we once thought would prove fatal to her.
It was long before she began to hold up her head again; but care and kindness, and time and change wrought their effect on her at last.
She is not now, and never will be again, the woman she was once; her manner is altered, and she looks older by many a year than she really is.
But her health causes us no anxiety now; her spirits are calm and equal, and I have good hope that many quiet years of service in her house are left for me still.
I
myself have married during the long interval of time which I am now passing over in a few words.
This change in my life is, perhaps, not worth mentioning, but I am reminded of my two little children when I speak of my mistress in her present position.
I really think they make the great happiness, and interest, and amusement of her life, and prevent her from feeling lonely and dried up at heart.
It is a pleasant reflection to me to remember this, and perhaps it may be the same to you, for which reason only I speak of it.
As for the other persons connected with the troubles at Darrock Hall, I may mention the vile woman Josephine first, so as to have the sooner done with her.
Mr. Dark’s guess, when he tried to account for her want of cunning in hiding the stolen property, by saying that her mind might have had more weighing on it than she was able to bear, turned out to be nothing less than the plain and awful truth.
After she had been found guilty of the robbery, and had been condemned to seven years’ transportation, a worse sentence fell upon her from a higher tribunal than any in this world.
While she was still in the county jail, previous to her removal, her mind gave way, the madness breaking out in an attempt to set fire to the prison.
Her case was pronounced to be hopeless from the first.
The lawful asylum received her, and the lawful asylum will keep her to the end of her days.
Mr. James Smith, who, in my humble opinion, deserved hanging by law, or drowning by accident at least, lived quietly abroad with his Scotch wife (or no wife) for two years, and then died in the most quiet and customary manner, in his bed, after a short illness.
His end was described to me as a “highly edifying one.
” But as he was also reported to have sent his forgiveness to his wife—which was as much as to say that _he_ was the injured person of the two—I take leave to consider that he was the same impudent vagabond in his last moments that he had been all his life.
His Scotch widow has married again, and is now settled in London.
I hope her husband is all her own property this time.
Mr. Meeke must not be forgotten, although he has dropped out of the latter part of my story because he had nothing to do with the serious events which followed Josephine’s perjury.
In the confusion and wretchedness of that time, he was treated with very little ceremony, and was quite passed over when we left the neighborhood.
After pining and fretting some time, as we afterward heard, in his lonely parsonage, he resigned his living at the first chance he got, and took a sort of under-chaplain’s place in an English chapel abroad.
He writes to my mistress once or twice a year to ask after her health and well-being, and she writes back to him.
That is all the communication they are ever likely to have with each other.
The music they once played together will never sound again.
Its last notes have long since faded away and the last words of this story, trembling on the lips of the teller, may now fade with them.
THE NINTH DAY.
A little change in the weather.
The rain still continues, but the wind is not quite so high.
Have I any reason to believe, because it is calmer on land, that it is also calmer at sea?
Perhaps not.
But my mind is scarcely so uneasy to-day, nevertheless.
I had looked over the newspaper with the usual result, and had laid it down with the customary sense of disappointment, when Jessie handed me a letter which she had received that morning.
It was written by her aunt, and it upbraided her in the highly exaggerated terms which ladies love to employ, where any tender interests of their own are concerned, for her long silence and her long absence from home.
Home!
I thought of my poor boy and of the one hope on which all his happiness rested, and I felt jealous of the word when I saw it used persuasively in a letter to our guest.
What right had any one to mention “home” to her until George had spoken first?
“I must answer it by return of post,” said Jessie, with a tone of sorrow in her voice for which my heart warmed to her.
“You have been very kind to me; you have taken more pains to interest and amuse me than I am worth.
I can laugh about most things, but I can’t laugh about going away.
I am honestly and sincerely too grateful for that.
” She paused, came round to where I was sitting, perched herself on the end of the table, and, resting her hands on my shoulders, added gently: “It must be the day after to-morrow, must it not?
” I could not trust myself to answer.
If I had spoken, I should have betrayed George’s secret in spite of myself.
“To-morrow is the tenth day,” she went on, softly.
“It looks so selfish and so ungrateful to go the moment I have heard the last of the stories, that I am quite distressed at being obliged to enter on the subject at all.
And yet, what choice is left me?
what can I do when my aunt writes to me in that way?
” She took up the letter again, and looked at it so ruefully that I drew her head a little nearer to me, and gratefully kissed the smooth white forehead.
“If your aunt is only half as anxious to see you again, my love, as I am to see my son, I must forgive her for taking you away from us.
” The words came from me without premeditation.
It was not calculation this time, but sheer instinct that impelled me to test her in this way, once more, by a direct reference to George.
She was so close to me that I felt her breath quiver on my cheek.
Her eyes had been fixed on my face a moment before, but they now wandered away from it constrainedly.
One of her hands trembled a little on my shoulder, and she took it off.
“Thank you for trying to make our parting easier to me,” she said, quickly, and in a lower tone than she had spoken in yet.
I made no answer, but still looked her anxiously in the face.
For a few seconds her nimble delicate fingers nervously folded and refolded the letter from her aunt, then she abruptly changed her position.
“The sooner I write, the sooner it will be over,” she said, and hurriedly turned away to the paper-case on the side-table.
How was the change in her manner to be rightly interpreted?
Was she hurt by what I had said, or was she secretly so much affected by it, in the impressionable state of her mind at that moment, as to be incapable of exerting a young girl’s customary self-control?
Her looks, actions, and language might bear either interpretation.
One striking omission had marked her conduct when I had referred to George’s return.
She had not inquired when I expected him back.
Was this indifference?
Surely not.
Surely indifference would have led her to ask the conventionally civil question which ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would have addressed to me as a matter of course.
Was she, on her side, afraid to trust herself to speak of George at a time when an unusual tenderness was aroused in her by the near prospect of saying farewell?
It might be—it might not be—it might be.
My feeble reason took the side of my inclination; and, after vibrating between Yes and No, I stopped where I had begun—at Yes.
She finished the letter in a few minutes, and dropped it into the post-bag the moment it was done.
“Not a word more,” she said, returning to me with a sigh of relief—“not a word about my aunt or my going away till the time comes.
We have two more days; let us make the most of them.
” Two more days!
Eight-and-forty hours still to pass; sixty minutes in each of those hours; and every minute long enough to bring with it an event fatal to George’s future!
The bare thought kept my mind in a fever.
For the remainder of the day I was as desultory and as restless as our Queen of Hearts herself.
Owen affectionately did his best to quiet me, but in vain.
Even Morgan, who whiled away the time by smoking incessantly, was struck by the wretched spectacle of nervous anxiety that I presented to him, and pitied me openly for being unable to compose myself with a pipe.
Wearily and uselessly the hours wore on till the sun set.
The clouds in the western heaven wore wild and tortured shapes when I looked out at them; and, as the gathering darkness fell on us, the fatal fearful wind rose once more.
When we assembled at eight, the drawing of the lots had no longer any interest or suspense, so far as I was concerned.
I had read my last story, and it now only remained for chance to decide the question of precedency between Owen and Morgan.
Of the two numbers left in the bowl, the one drawn was Nine.
This made it Morgan’s turn to read, and left it appropriately to Owen, as our eldest brother, to close the proceedings on the next night.
Morgan looked round the table when he had spread out his manuscript, and seemed half inclined to open fire, as usual, with a little preliminary sarcasm; but his eyes met mine; he saw the anxiety I was suffering; and his natural kindness, perversely as he might strive to hide it, got the better of him.
He looked down on his paper; growled out briefly, “No need for a preface; my little bit of writing explains itself; let’s go on and have done with it,” and so began to read without another word from himself or from any of us.
BROTHER MORGAN’S STORY of FAUNTLEROY.
