"Before I answer that question, Mr.—Mr. Holbrook, as you choose to call yourself, I'll ask you another. By what right do you call yourself my daughter's husband? what evidence have you to produce to prove that you are not a bare-faced impostor? You don't carry your marriage-certificate about with you, I daresay; and in the absence of some kind of documentary evidence, what is to convince me that you are what you pretend to be—my daughter's husband?"

"The evidence of your daughter's own senses. Place me face to face with her; she will not deny my identity."

"But how, if my daughter declines to see you, as she does most positively? She has suffered enough at your hands, and is only too glad to be released from you."

"She has suffered—she is glad to be released! Why, you most consummate scoundrel!" cried John Saltram, "there never was an unkind word spoken between my wife and me! She was the best, most devoted of women; and nothing but the vilest treachery could have separated us. I know not what villanous slander you have made her believe, or by what means you lured her away from me; but I know that a few words between us would let in the light upon your plot. You had better make the best of a bad position, Mr. Nowell. As my wife's father, you know, you are pretty sure to escape. Whatever my inclination might be, my regard for her would make me indulgent to you. You'll find candour avail you best in this case, depend upon it. Your daughter has inherited a fortune, and you want to put your hand upon it altogether. It would be wiser to moderate your desires, and be content with a fair share of the inheritance. Your daughter is not the woman to treat you ungenerously, nor am I the man to create any hindrance to her generosity."

"I can make no bargain with you, sir," replied Mr. Nowell, with the same cool audacity of manner that had distinguished him throughout the interview; "nor am I prepared to admit your claim to the position you assume. But if my daughter is your wife, she left you of her own free will, under no coercion of mine; and she must return to you in the same manner, or you must put the machinery of the law in force to compel her. And that, I flatter myself, in a free country like America, will be rather a difficult business."

It was hard for John Saltram to hear any man talk like this, and not be able to knock him down. But in his present condition Marian's husband could not have grappled a child, and he knew it.

"You are an outrageous scoundrel!" he said between his set teeth, tortured by that most ardent desire to dash his clenched fist into Mr. Nowell's handsome dissolute-looking face. "You are a most consummate villain, and you know it!"

"Hard words mean so little," returned Mr. Nowell coolly, "and go for so little. That kind of language before witnesses would be actionable; but, upon my word, it would be mere child's play on my part to notice it, especially to a man in your condition. You'd better claim your wife from the captain, and see what he will say to you. I have told him that there's some semi-lunatic on board, who pretends to be Mrs. Holbrook's husband; so he'll be quite prepared to hear your statement."

John Saltram left the saloon in silence. It was worse than useless talking to this man, who presumed upon his helpless state, and openly defied him. His next effort must be to see Marian.

This he found impossible, for the time being at any rate. The state-room number 7 was an apartment a little bigger than a rabbit-hutch, opening out of a larger cabin, and in that cabin there reposed a ponderous matron who had suffered from sea-sickness throughout the voyage, and who could in no wise permit a masculine intruder to invade the scene of her retirement.

The idea of any blockade of Marian's door was therefore futile. He must needs wait as patiently as he might, till she appeared of her own free will. He could not have to wait very long; something less than a day and a night, the steward had told him, would bring them to the end of the voyage.

Mr. Saltram went on deck, still assisted by the friendly steward, and seated himself in a sheltered corner of the vessel, hoping that the sea-breeze might bring him back some remnant of his lost strength. The ship's surgeon had advised him to get a little fresh air as soon as he felt himself able to bear it; so he sat in his obscure nook, very helpless and very feeble, meditating upon what he should do when the final moment came and he had to claim his wife.

He had no idea of making his wrongs known to the captain, unless as a last desperate resource. He could not bring himself to make Marian the subject of a vulgar squabble. No, it was to herself alone he would appeal; it was in the natural instinct of her own heart that he would trust.

Very long and weary seemed the remaining hours of that joyless voyage. Mr. Saltram was fain to go back to his cabin after an hour on deck, there to lie and await the morrow. He had need to husband his strength for the coming encounter. The steward told him in the evening that Mrs. Holbrook had not dined in the saloon that day, as usual. She had kept her cabin closely, and complained of illness.

The morning dawned at last, after what had seemed an endless night to John Saltram, lying awake in his narrow berth—a bleak blusterous morning, with the cold gray light staring in at the port-hole, like an unfriendly face. There was no promise in such a daybreak; it was only light, and nothing more.

Mr. Saltram, having duly deliberated the matter during the long hours of that weary night, had decided that his wisest course was to lie perdu until the last moment, the very moment of landing, and then to come boldly forward and make his claim. It was useless to waste his strength in any futile endeavour to baffle so hardy a scoundrel as Percival Nowell. At the last, when Marian was leaving the ship, it would be time for him to assert his right as her husband, and to defy the wretch who had beguiled her away from him.

Having once arrived at this decision, he was able to await the issue of events with some degree of tranquility. He had no doubt, even now, of his wife's affection for him, no fear as to the ultimate triumph of her love over all the lies and artifices of that scheming scoundrel, her father.

It was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon when the steward came to tell him that they were on the point of arriving at their destination. The wharf where they were to land was within sight. The man had promised to give him due warning of this event, and John Saltram had therefore contrived to keep himself quiet amidst all the feverish impatience and confusion of mind prevailing, amongst the other passengers. He was rewarded for his prudence; for when he rose to go on deck, he found himself stronger than he had felt yet. He went up the companion-ladder, took his place close to the spot at which the passengers must all leave the vessel, and waited.

New York was very near. The day had been cold and showery, but the sun was shining now, and the whole scene looked bright and gay. Every one seemed in high spirits, as if the new world they were about to touch contained for them a certainty of Elysium. It was such a delicious relief to arrive at the great lively Yankee city, after the tedium of a ten-day's voyage, pleasant and easy as the transit had been.

John Saltram looked eagerly among the faces of the crowd, but neither Percival Nowell nor his daughter were to be seen amongst them. Presently the vessel touched the wharf, and the travellers began to move towards the gangway. He watched them, one by one, breathlessly. At the very last, Mr. Nowell stepped quickly forward, with a veiled figure on his arm.

She was closely veiled, her face quite hidden by thick black lace, and she was clinging with something of a frightened air to her companion's arm.

John Saltram sprang up from his post of observation, and confronted the two before they could leave the vessel.

"Marian," he said, in slow decided tone, "let go that man's arm. You will leave this vessel with me, and with no one else."

"Stand out of the way, fellow," cried Percival Nowell; "my daughter can have nothing to say to you."

"Marian, for God's sake, obey me! There is the vilest treachery in this man's conduct. Let go his arm. My love, my darling, come with me!"

There was a passionate appeal in his tone, but it produced no answer.

"Marian!" he cried, still interposing himself between these two and the passage to the landing wharf. "Marian, I will have some answer!"

"You have had your answer, sir," said Percival Nowell, trying to push him aside. "This lady does not know you. Do you want to make a scene, and render yourself ridiculous to every one here? There are plenty of lunatic asylums in New York that will accommodate you, if you are determined to make yourself eligible for them."

"Marian!" repeated John Saltram, without vouchsafing the faintest notice of this speech. "Marian, speak to me!"

And then, as there came no answer from that shrinking clinging figure, with a sudden spring forward, that brought him quite close to her, John Saltram tore the veil away from the hidden face.

"This must be some impostor," he said; "this is not my wife."

He was right. The creature clinging to Percival Nowell's arm was a pretty woman enough, with rather red hair, and a common face. She was about Marian's height; and that was the only likeness between them.

The spectators of this brief fracas crowded round the actors in it, seeing nothing but the insult offered to a lady, and highly indignant with John Saltram; and amidst their murmurs Percival Nowell pushed his way to the shore, with the woman still clinging to his arm.



CHAPTER XLII.

THE PLEASURES OF WYNCOMB.

That shrill anguish-stricken cry which Ellen Whitelaw had heard on the night of the stranger's visit to Wyncomb Farm haunted her afterwards with a wearisome persistence. She could not forget that wild unearthly sound; she could not help continually trying to find some solution for the mystery, until her brain was tired with the perpetual effort.

Ponder upon this matter as she might, she could find no reasonable explanation of the enigma; and in spite of her common sense—a quality of which she possessed a very fair share—she was fain to believe at last that this grim bare-looking old house was haunted, and that the agonised shriek she and Mrs. Tadman had heard that night was only the ghostly sound of some cry wrung from a bleeding heart in days gone by, the echo of an anguish that had been in the far past.

She even went so far as to ask her husband one day if he had ever heard that the house was haunted, and whether there was any record of crime or wrong that had been done in it in the past. Mr. Whitelaw seemed scarcely to relish the question; but after one of his meditative pauses laughed his wife's inquiry to scorn, and told her that there were no ghosts at Wyncomb except the ghosts of dead rats that had ravaged the granaries—and certainly they seemed to rise from their graves in spite of poison and traps, cats and ferrets—and that, as to anything that had been done in the house in days gone by, he had never heard tell that his ancestors had ever done anything but eat and drink and sleep, and save money from year's end to year's end; and a hard time they'd had of it to pay their way and put something by, in the face of all the difficulties that surround the path of a farmer.

If Ellen Whitelaw's life had been as the lives of happier women, full of small daily cares and all-engrossing domestic interests, the memory of that unearthly scream would no doubt have faded out of her mind ere long, instead of remaining, as it did, a source of constant perplexity to her. But there was no interest, no single charm in her life. There was nothing in the world left for her to care for. The fertile flats around Wyncomb Farmhouse bounded her universe. Day by day she rose to perform the same monotonous duties, sustained by no lofty aim, cheered by neither friendship nor affection; for she could not teach herself to feel anything warmer than toleration for her daily companion, Mrs. Tadman—only working laboriously because existence was more endurable to her when she was busy than when she was idle. It was scarcely strange, then, that she brooded upon the memory of that night when the nameless stranger had come to Wyncomb, and that she tried to put the fact of his coming and that other incident of the cry together, and to make something out of the two events by that means; but put them together as she might, she was no nearer any solution of the mystery. That her husband and the stranger could have failed to hear that piercing shriek seemed almost impossible: yet both had denied hearing it. The story of the stranger having knocked his shin and cried out on doing so, appeared like a feeble attempt to account for that wild cry. Vain and hopeless were all her endeavours to arrive at any reasonable explanation, and her attempts to get anything like an opinion out of Mrs. Tadman were utterly useless. Mr. Whitelaw's cousin was still inclined to take a gloomy view of the stranger's visit, in spite of her kinsman's assurance that the transaction between himself and the unknown was a profitable one. Horse-racing—if not parting with a farm—Mrs. Tadman opined was at the bottom of the business; and when did horse-racing ever fail to lead to ruin sooner or later? It was only a question of time. Ellen sighed, remembering how her father had squandered his employer's money on the race-course, and how, for that folly of his, she had been doomed to become Stephen Whitelaw's wife. But there did not seem to her to be anything of the horsey element in her husband's composition. He was never away from home, except to attend to his business at market; and she had never seen him spelling over the sporting-papers, as her father had been wont to do, night after night, with a perplexed brow and an anxious face, making calculations upon the margin of the print every now and then with a stump of lead pencil, and chewing the end of it meditatively in the intervals of his lection.

Although Mrs. Whitelaw did not, like Mrs. Tadman, associate the idea of the stranger's visit with any apprehension of her husband's impending ruin, she could not deny that some kind of change had arisen in him since that event. He had always drunk a good deal, in his slow quiet manner, which impressed people unacquainted with his habits with a notion of his sobriety, even when he was steadily emptying the bottle before him; but he drank more now, and sat longer over his drink, and there was an aspect of trouble and uneasiness about him at times which fairly puzzled his wife. Of course the most natural solution for all this was the one offered by the dismally prophetic Tadman. Stephen Whitelaw had been speculating or gambling, and his affairs were in disorder. He was not a man to be affected by anything but the most sordid considerations, one would suppose. Say that he had lost money, and there you had a key to the whole.

He got into a habit of sitting up at night, after the rest of the household had gone to bed. He had done this more or less from the time of his marriage; and Mrs. Tadman had told Ellen that the habit was one which had arisen within the last few months.

"He would always see to the fastenings of the house with his own eyes," Mrs. Tadman said; "but up to last autumn he used to go upstairs with me and the servants. It's a new thing for him to sit up drinking his glass of grog in the parlour by himself."

The new habit seemed to grow upon Mr. Whitelaw more rapidly after that visit of the stranger's. He took to sitting up till midnight—an awful hour in a farm-house; and Ellen generally found the spirit-bottle empty in the morning. Night after night, he went to bed soddened with drink. Once, when his kinswoman made some feeble remonstrance with him about this change in his habits, he told her savagely to hold her tongue—he could afford to drink as much as he pleased—he wasn't likely to come upon her to pay for what he took. As for his wife, she unhappily cared nothing what he did. He could not become more obnoxious to her than he had been from the first hour of her acquaintance with him, let him do what he would.

Little by little, finding no other explanation possible, Mrs. Whitelaw grew to believe quite firmly in the supernatural nature of that unforgotten cry. She remembered the unexplainable footstep which she had heard in the padlocked room in the early dusk of that new-year's-day, when Mrs. Tadman and she explored the old house; and she associated these two sounds in her mind as of a like ghostly character. From this time forward she shrank with a nervous terror from that darksome passage leading to the padlocked door at the end of the house. She had never any occasion to go in this direction. The rooms in this wing were low, dark, and small, and had been unused for years. It was scarcely any wonder if rats had congregated behind the worm-eaten wainscot, to scare nervous listeners with their weird scratchings and scramblings. But no one could convince Ellen Whitelaw that the sounds she had heard on new-year's-day were produced by anything so earthly as a rat. With that willingness to believe in a romantic impossibility, rather than in a commonplace improbability so natural to the human mind, she was more ready to conceive the existence of a ghost than that her own sense of hearing might have been less powerful than her fancy. About the footsteps she was quite as positive as she was about the scream; and in the last instance she had the evidence of Mrs. Tadman's senses to support her.

She was surprised to find one day, when the household drudge, Martha Holden, had been cleaning the passage and rooms in that deserted wing—a task very seldom performed—that the girl had the same aversion to that part of the house which she felt herself, but of which she had never spoken in the presence of the servants.

"If it wasn't for Mrs. Tadman driving and worrying after me all the time I'm at work, I don't think I could stay there, mum," Martha told her mistress. "It isn't often I like to be fidgetted and followed; but anything's better than being alone in that unked place."

"It's rather dark and dreary, certainly, Martha," Ellen answered with an admirable assumption of indifference; "but, as we haven't any of us got to live there, that doesn't much matter."

"It isn't that, mum. I wouldn't mind the darkness and the dreariness—and I'm sure such a place for spiders I never did see in my life; there was one as I took down with my broom to-day, and scrunched, as big as a small crab—but it's worse than, that: the place is haunted."

"Who told you that?"

"Sarah Batts."

"Sarah Batts! Why, how should she know anything about it? She hasn't been here so long as you; and she came straight from the workhouse."

"I think master must have told her, mum."

"Your master would never have said anything so foolish. I know that he doesn't believe in ghosts; and he keeps all his garden-seeds in the locked room at the end of the passage; so he must go there sometimes himself."

"O yes, mum; I know that master goes there. I've seen him go that way at night with a candle."

"Well, you silly girl, he wouldn't use the room if he thought it was haunted, would he? There are plenty more empty rooms in the house."

"I don't know about that, I'm sure, mum; but anyhow I know Sarah Batts told me that passage was haunted. 'Don't you never go there, Martha,' she says, 'unless you want to have your blood froze. I've heard things there that have froze mine.' And I never should go, mum, if it wasn't for moth—Mrs. Tadman's worrying and driving, about the place being cleaned once in a way. And Sarah Batts is right, mum, however she may have got to know it; for I have heard things."

"What things?"

"Moaning and groaning like, as if it was some one in pain; but all very low; and I never could make out where it came from. But as to the place being haunted, I've no more doubt about it than about my catechism."

"But, Martha, you ought to know it's very silly and wicked to believe in such things," Ellen Whitelaw said, feeling it her duty to lecture the girl a little, and yet half inclined to believe her. "The moanings and groanings, as you call them, were only sounds made by the wind, I daresay."

"O dear no, mum," Martha answered, shaking her head in a decided manner; "the wind never made such noises as I heard. But I don't want to make you nervous, mum; only I'd sooner lose a month's wages than stay for an hour alone in the west wing."

It was strange, certainly; a matter of no importance, perhaps, this idle belief of a servant's, these sounds which harmed no one; and yet all these circumstances worried and perplexed Ellen Whitelaw. Having so little else to think of, she brooded upon them incessantly, and was gradually getting into a low nervous way. If she complained, which she did very rarely, there was no one to sympathise with her. Mrs. Tadman had so many ailments of her own, such complicated maladies, such deeply-rooted disorders, that she could be scarcely expected to give much attention to the trivial sufferings of another person.

"Ah, my dear," she would exclaim with a groan, if Ellen ventured to complain of a racking headache, "when you've lived as long as I have, and gone through what I've gone through, and have got such a liver as I've got, you'll know what bad health means. But at your age, and with your constitution, it's nothing more than fancy."

And then Mrs. Tadman would branch off into a graphic description of her own maladies, to which Ellen was fain to listen patiently, wondering vaguely as she listened whether the lapse of years would render her as wearisome a person as Mrs. Tadman.

She had no sympathy from anyone. Her father came to Wyncomb Farm once a week or so, and sat drinking and smoking with Mr. Whitelaw; but Ellen never saw him alone. He seemed carefully to avoid the chance of being alone with her, guiltily conscious of his part in the contriving of her marriage, and fearing to hear some complaint about her lot. He pretended to take it for granted that her fate was entirely happy, congratulated her frequently upon her prosperity, and reminded her continually that it was a fine thing to be the sole mistress of the house she lived in, instead of a mere servant—as he himself was, and as she had been at the Grange—labouring for the profit of other people.

Up to this time Mr. Carley had had some reason to be disappointed with the result of his daughter's marriage, so far as his own prosperity was affected thereby. Not a sixpence beyond that one advance of the two hundred pounds had the bailiff been able to extort from his son-in-law. It was the price that Mr. Whitelaw had paid for his wife, and he meant to pay no more. He told William Carley as much one day when the question of money matters was pushed rather too far—told him in the plainest language.

This was hard; but that two hundred pounds had saved the bailiff from imminent destruction. He was obliged to be satisfied with this advantage, and to bide his time.

"I'll have it out of the mean hound sooner or later," he muttered to himself as he walked homewards, after a social evening with the master of Wyncomb.

One evening Mr. Carley brought his daughter a letter. It was from Gilbert Fenton, who was quite unaware of Ellen's marriage, and had written to her at the Grange. This letter afforded her the only pleasure she had known since fate had united her to Stephen Whitelaw. It told her that Marian Holbrook was living, and in all probability safe—though by no means in good hands. She had sailed for America with her father; but her husband was in hot pursuit of her, and her husband was faithful.

"I have schooled myself to forgive him," Gilbert went on to say, "for I know that he loves her—and that must needs condone my wrongs. I look forward anxiously to their return from America, and hope for a happy reunion amongst us all—when your warm friendship shall not be forgotten. I am waiting impatiently for news from New York, and will write to you again directly I hear anything definite. We have suffered the torments of suspense for a long weary time, but I trust and believe that the sky is clearing."

This was not much, but it was more than enough to relieve Ellen Carley's mind of a heavy load. Her dear young lady, as she called Marian, was not dead—not lying at the bottom of that cruel river, at which Ellen had often looked with a shuddering horror, of late, thinking of what might be. She was safe, and would no doubt be happy. This was something. Amid the wreck of her own fortunes, Ellen Whitelaw was unselfish enough to rejoice in this.

Her husband asked to see Mr. Fenton's letter, which he spelt over with his usual deliberate air, and which seemed to interest him more than Ellen would have supposed likely—knowing as she did how deeply he had resented Marian's encouragement of Frank Randall's courtship.

"So she's gone to America with her father, has she?" he said, when he had perused the document twice. "I shouldn't have thought anybody could have persuaded her to leave that precious husband of hers. And she's gone off to America, and he after her! That's rather a queer start, ain't it, Nell?" Mrs. Whitelaw did not care to discuss the business with her husband. There was something in his tone, a kind of veiled malice, which made her angry.

"I don't suppose you care whether she's alive or dead," she said impatiently; "so you needn't trouble yourself to talk about her."

"Needn't I? O, she's too grand a person to be talked of by such as me, is she? Never mind, Nell; don't be cross. And when Mrs. Holbrook comes back to England, you shall go and see her."

"I will," answered Ellen; "if I have to walk to London to do it."

"O, but you sha'n't walk. You shall go by rail. I'll spare you the money for that, for once in a way, though I'm not over fond of wasting money."

Day by day Mr. Whitelaw's habits grew more secluded and morose. It is not to be supposed that he was troubled by those finer feelings which might have made the misery of a better man; but even in his dull nature there may have been some dim sense that his marriage was a failure and mistake; that in having his own way in this matter he had in nowise secured his own happiness. He could not complain of his wife's conduct in any one respect. She was obedient to his will in all things, providing for his comfort with scrupulous regularity, industrious, indefatigable even. As a housekeeper and partner of his fortunes, no man could have desired a better wife. Yet dimly, in that sluggish soul, there was the consciousness that he had married a woman who hated him, that he had bought her with a price; and, being a man prone to think the worst of his fellow-creatures, Mr. Whitelaw believed that, sooner or later, his wife meant to have her revenge upon him somehow. She was waiting for his death perhaps; calculating that, being so much her senior, and a hard-working man, he would die soon enough to leave her a young widow. And then, of course, she would marry Frank Randall; and all the money which he, Stephen, had amassed, by the sacrifice of every pleasure in life, would enrich that supercilious young coxcomb.

It was a hard thing to think of, and Stephen pondered upon the expediency of letting off Wyncomb Farm, and sinking all his savings in the purchase of an annuity. He could not bring himself to contemplate selling the house and lands that had belonged to his race for so many generations. He clung to the estate, not from any romantic reverence for the past, not from any sentimental associations connected with those who had gone before him, but from the mere force of habit, which rendered this grim ugly old house and these flat shelterless fields dearer to him than all the rest of the universe. He was a man to whom to part with anything was agony; and if he loved anything in the world, he loved Wyncomb. The possession of the place had given him importance for twenty years past. He could not fancy himself unconnected with Wyncomb. His labours had improved the estate too; and he could not endure to think how some lucky purchaser might profit by his prudence and sagacity. There had been some fine old oaks on the land when he inherited it, all mercilessly stubbed-up at the beginning of his reign; there had been tall straggling hedgerows, all of a tangle with blackberry bushes, ferns, and dog-roses, hazel and sloe trees, all done away with by his order. No, he could never bring himself to sell Wyncomb. Nor was the purchase of an annuity a transaction which he was inclined to accomplish. It was a pleasing notion certainly, that idea of concentrating all his hoarded money upon the remaining years of his life—retiring from the toils of agriculture, and giving himself up for the rest of his days to an existence of luxurious idleness. But, on the other hand, it would be a bitter thing to surrender his fondly-loved money for the poor return of an income, to deprive himself of all opportunity of speculating and increasing his store.

So the annuity scheme lay dormant in his brain, as it were, for the time being. It was something to have in reserve, and to carry out any day that his wife gave him fair cause to doubt her fidelity.

In the mean time he went on living his lonely sulky kind of life, drinking a great deal more than was good for him in his own churlish manner, and laughing to scorn any attempt at remonstrance from his wife or Mrs. Tadman. Some few times Ellen had endeavoured to awaken him to the evil consequences that must needs ensue from his intemperate habits, feeling that it would be a sin on her part to suffer him to go on without some effort to check him; but her gently-spoken warnings had been worse than useless.



CHAPTER XLIII.

MR. WHITELAW MAKES AN END OF THE MYSTERY.

Mrs. Whitelaw had been married about two months. It was bright May weather, bright but not yet warm; and whatever prettiness Wyncomb Farm was capable of assuming had been put on with the fresh spring green of the fields and the young leaves of the poplars. There were even a few hardy flowers in the vegetable-garden behind the house, humble perennials planted by dead and gone Whitelaws, which had bloomed year after year in spite of Stephen's utilitarian principles. It was a market-day, the household work was finished, and Ellen was sitting with Mrs. Tadman in the parlour, where those two spent so many weary hours of their lives, the tedium whereof was relieved only by woman's homely resource, needlework. Even if Mrs. Whitelaw had been fond of reading, and she only cared moderately for that form of occupation, she could hardly have found intellectual diversion of that kind at Wyncomb, where a family Bible, a few volumes of the Annual Register, which had belonged to some half-dozen different owners before they came from a stall in Malsham market to the house of Whitelaw, a grim-looking old quarto upon domestic medicine, and a cookery-book, formed the entire library. When the duties of the day were done, and the local weekly newspaper had been read—an intellectual refreshment which might be fairly exhausted in ten minutes—there remained nothing to beguile the hours but the perpetual stitch—stitch—stitch of an industriously-disposed sempstress; and the two women used to sit throughout the long afternoons with their work-baskets before them, talking a little now and then of the most commonplace matters, but for the greater part of their time silent. Sometimes, when the heavy burden of Mrs. Tadman's society, and the clicking of needles and snipping of scissors, grew almost unendurable, Ellen would run out of the house for a brief airing in the garden, and walk briskly to and fro along the narrow pathway between the potatoes and cabbages, thinking of her dismal life, and of the old days at the Grange when she had been full of gaiety and hope. There was not perhaps much outward difference in the two lives. In her father's house she had worked as hard as she worked now; but she had been free in those days, and the unknown future all before her, with its chances of happiness. Now, she felt like some captive who paces the narrow bounds of his prison-yard, without hope of release or respite, except in death.

This particular spring day had begun brightly, the morning had been sunny and even warm; but now, as the afternoon wore away, there were dark clouds, with a rising wind and a sharp gusty shower every now and then. Ellen took a solitary turn in the garden between the showers. It was market-day; Stephen Whitelaw was not expected home till tea-time, and the meal was to be eaten at a later hour than usual.

The rain increased as the time for the farmer's return drew nearer. He had gone out in the morning without his overcoat, Mrs. Tadman remembered, and was likely to get wet through on his way home, unless he should have borrowed some extra covering at Malsham. His temper, which of late had been generally at its worst, would hardly be improved by this annoyance.

There was a very substantial meal waiting for him: a ponderous joint of cold roast beef, a dish of ham and eggs preparing in the kitchen, with an agreeable frizzling sound, a pile of hot buttered cakes kept hot upon the oven top; but there was no fire in the parlour, and the room looked a little cheerless in spite of the well-spread table. They had discontinued fires for about a fortnight, at Mr. Whitelaw's command. He didn't want to be ruined by his coal-merchant's bill if it was a chilly spring, he told his household; and at his own bidding the fire-place had been polished and garnished for the summer. But this evening was colder than any evening lately, by reason of that blusterous rising wind, which blew the rain-drops against the window-panes with as sharp a rattle as if they had been hailstones; and Mr. Whitelaw coming in presently, disconsolate and dripping, was by no means inclined to abide by his own decision about the fires.

"Why the —— haven't you got a fire here?" he demanded savagely.

"It was your own wish, Stephen," answered Mrs. Tadman.

"My own fiddlesticks! Of course I didn't care to see my wood and coals burning to waste when the sun was shining enough to melt any one. But when a man comes home wet to the skin, he doesn't want to come into a room like an ice-house. Call the girl, and tell her to light a blazing fire while I go and change my clothes. Let her bring plenty of wood, and put a couple of logs on top of the coals. I'm frozen to the very bones driving home in the rain."

Mrs. Tadman gave a plaintive sigh as she departed to obey her kinsman.

"That's just like Stephen," she said; "if it was you or me that wanted a fire, we might die of cold before we got leave to light one; but he never grudges anything for his own comfort!"

Martha came and lighted a fire under Mrs. Tadman's direction. That lady was inclined to look somewhat uneasily upon the operation; for the grate had been used constantly throughout a long winter, and the chimney had not been swept since last spring, whereby Mrs. Tadman was conscious of a great accumulation of soot about the massive old brickwork and ponderous beams that spanned the wide chimney. She had sent for the Malsham sweep some weeks ago; but that necessary individual had not been able to come on the particular day she wished, and the matter had been since then neglected. She remembered this now with a guilty feeling, more especially as Stephen had demanded a blazing fire, with flaring pine-logs piled half-way up the chimney. He came back to the parlour presently, arrayed in an old suit of clothes which he kept for such occasions—an old green coat with basket buttons, and a pair of plaid trousers of an exploded shape and pattern—and looking more like a pinched and pallid scarecrow than a well-to-do farmer. Mrs. Tadman had only carried out his commands in a modified degree, and he immediately ordered the servant to put a couple of logs on the fire, and then drew the table close up to the hearth, and sat down to his tea with some appearance of satisfaction. He had had rather a good day at market, he condescended to tell his wife during the progress of the meal; prices were rising, his old hay was selling at a rate which promised well for the new crops, turnips were in brisk demand, mangold enquired for—altogether Mr. Whitelaw confessed himself very well satisfied with the aspect of affairs.

After tea he spent his evening luxuriantly, sitting close to the fire, with his slippered feet upon the fender, and drinking hot rum-and-water as a preventive of impending, or cure of incipient, cold. The rum-and-water being a novelty, something out of the usual order of his drink, appeared to have an enlivening effect upon him. He talked more than usual, and even proposed a game at cribbage with Mrs. Tadman; a condescension which moved that matron to tears, reminding her, she said, of old times, when they had been so comfortable together, before he had taken to spend his evenings at the Grange.

"Not that I mean any unkindness to you, Ellen," the doleful Tadman added apologetically, "for you've been a good friend to me, and if there's one merit I can lay claim to, it's a grateful heart; but of course, when a man marries, he never is the same to his relations as when he was single. It isn't in human nature that he should be."

Here Mrs. Tadman's amiable kinsman requested her to hold her jaw, and to bring the board if she was going to play, or to say as much if she wasn't. Urged by this gentle reminder, Mrs. Tadman immediately produced a somewhat dingy-looking pack of cards and a queer little old-fashioned cribbage-board.

The game lasted for about an hour or so, at the end of which time the farmer threw himself back in his chair with a yawn, and pronounced that he had had enough of it. The old eight-day clock in the lobby struck ten soon after this, and the two women rose to retire, leaving Stephen to his night's libations, and not sorry to escape out of the room, which he had converted into a kind of oven or Turkish bath by means of the roaring fire he had insisted upon keeping up all the evening. He was left, therefore, with his bottle of rum about half emptied, to finish his night's entertainment after his own fashion.

Mrs. Tadman ventured a mild warning about the fire when she wished him good night; but as she did not dare to hint that there had been any neglect in the chimney-sweeping, her counsel went for very little. Mr. Whitelaw threw on another pine-log directly the two women had left him, and addressed himself to the consumption of a fresh glass of rum-and-water.

"There's nothing like being on the safe side," he muttered to himself with an air of profound wisdom. "I don't want to be laid up with the rheumatics, if I can help it."

He finished the contents of his glass, and went softly out of the room, carrying a candle with him. He was absent about ten minutes, and then came back to resume his comfortable seat by the fire, and mixed himself another glass of grog with the air of a man who was likely to finish the bottle.

While he sat drinking in his slow sensual way, his young wife slept peacefully enough in one of the rooms above him. Early rising and industrious habits will bring sleep, even when the heart is hopeless and the mind is weary. Mrs. Whitelaw slept a tranquil dreamless sleep to-night, while Mrs. Tadman snored with a healthy regularity in a room on the opposite side of the passage.

There was a faint glimmer of dawn in the sky, a cold wet dawn, when Ellen was awakened suddenly by a sound that bewildered and alarmed her. It was almost like the report of a pistol, she thought, as she sprang out of bed, pale and trembling. It was not a pistol shot, however, only a handful of gravel thrown sharply against her window.

"Stephen," she cried, half awake and very much, frightened, "what was that?" But, to her surprise, she found that her husband was not in the room.

While she sat on the edge of her bed hurrying some of her clothes on, half mechanically, and wondering what that startling sound could have been, a sudden glow of red light shone in at her window, and at the same moment her senses, which had been only half awakened before, told her that there was an atmosphere of smoke in the room.

She rushed to the door, forgetting that to open it was perhaps to admit death, and flung it open. Yes, the passage was full of smoke, and there was a strange crackling sound below.

There could be little doubt as to what had happened—the house was on fire. She remembered how repeatedly Mrs. Tadman had declared that Stephen would inevitably set the place on fire some night or other, and how little weight she had attached to the dismal prophecy. But the matron's fears had not been groundless, it seemed. The threatened calamity had come.

"Stephen!" she cried, with all her might, and then flew to Mrs. Tadman's door and knocked violently. She waited for no answer, but rushed on to the room where the two women-servants slept together, and called to them loudly to get up for their lives, the house was on fire.

There were still the men in the story above to be awakened, and the smoke was every moment growing thicker. She mounted a few steps of the staircase, and called with all her strength. It was very near their time for stirring. They must hear her, surely. Suddenly she remembered an old disused alarm-bell which hung in the roof. She had seen the frayed rope belonging to it hanging in an angle of the passage. She flew to this, and pulled it vigorously till a shrill peal rang out above; and once having accomplished this, she went on, reckless of her own safety, thinking only how many there were to be saved in that house.

All this time there was no sign of her husband, and a dull horror came over her with the thought that he might be perishing miserably below. There could be no doubt that the fire came from downstairs. That crackling noise had increased, and every now and then there came a sound like the breaking of glass. The red glow shining in at the front windows grew deeper and brighter. The fire had begun in the parlour, of course, where they had left Stephen Whitelaw basking in the warmth of his resinous pine-logs.

Ellen was still ringing the bell, when she heard a man's footstep coming along the passage towards her. It was not her husband, but one of the farm-servants from the upper story, an honest broad-shouldered fellow, as strong as Hercules.

"Lord a mercy, mum, be that you?" he cried, as he recognised the white half-dressed figure clinging to the bell-rope "let me get 'ee out o' this; the old place'll burn like so much tinder;" and before she could object, he had taken her up in his arms as easily as if she had been a child, and was carrying her towards the principal staircase.

Here they were stopped. The flames and smoke were mounting from the lobby below; the man turned immediately, wasting no time by indecision, and ran to the stairs leading down to the kitchen. In this direction all was safe. There was smoke, but in a very modified degree.

"Robert," Ellen cried eagerly, when they had reached the kitchen, where all was quiet, "for God's sake, go and see what has become of your master. We left him drinking in the parlour last night. I've called to him again and again, but there's been no answer."

"Don't you take on, mum; master's all right, I daresay. Here be the gals and Mrs. Tadman coming downstairs; they'll take care o' you, while I go and look arter him. You've no call to be frightened. If the fire should come this way, you've only got to open yon door and get out into the yard. You're safe here."

The women were all huddled together in the kitchen by this time, half dressed, shivering, and frightened out of their wits. Ellen Whitelaw was the only one among them who displayed anything like calmness.

The men were all astir. One had run across the fields to Malsham to summon the fire-engine, another was gone to remove some animals stabled near the house.

The noise of burning wood was rapidly increasing, the smoke came creeping under the kitchen-door presently, and, five minutes after he had left them, the farm-servant came back to say that he could find no traces of his master. The parlor was in flames. If he had been surprised by the fire in his sleep, it must needs be all over with him. The man urged his mistress to get out of the house at once; the fire was gaining ground rapidly, and it was not likely that anything he or the other men could do would stop its progress.

The women left the kitchen immediately upon this warning, by a door leading into the yard. It was broad daylight by this time; a chilly sunless morning, and a high wind sweeping across the fields and fanning the flames, which now licked the front wall of Wyncomb Farmhouse. The total destruction of the place seemed inevitable, unless help from Malsham came very quickly. The farm servants were running to and fro with buckets of water from the yard, and flinging their contents in at the shattered windows of the front rooms; but this was a small means of checking the destruction. The house was old, built for the most part of wood, and there seemed little hope for it.

Ellen and the other women went round to the front of the house, and stood there, dismal figures in their scanty raiment, with woollen petticoats pinned across their shoulders, and disordered hair blown about their faces by the damp wind. They stood grouped together in utter helplessness, looking at the work of ruin with a half-stupid air; almost like the animals who had been hustled from one place of shelter to another, and were evidently lost in wonder as to the cause of their removal.

But presently, as the awful scene before them grew more familiar, the instincts of self-interest arose in each breast. Mrs. Tadman piteously bewailed the loss of her entire wardrobe, and some mysterious pocket-book which she described plaintively as her "little all." She dwelt dolefully upon the merits of each particular article, most especially upon a French-merino dress she had bought for Stephen's wedding, which would have lasted her a lifetime, and a Paisley shawl, the gift of her deceased husband, which had been in her possession twenty years, and had not so much as a thin place in it.

Nor was the disconsolate matron the only one who lamented her losses. Sarah Batts, with clasped hands and distracted aspect, wept for the destruction of her "box."

"There was money in it," she cried, "money! Oh, don't you think the men could get to my room and save it?"

"Money!" exclaimed Mrs. Tadman, sharply, aroused from the contemplation of her own woes by this avowal; "you must be cleverer than I took you for, Sarah Batts, to be able to save money, and yet be always bedizened with some new bit of finery, as you've been."

"It was give to me," Sarah answered indignantly, "by them as had a right to give it."

"For no good, I should think," replied Mrs. Tadman; "what should anybody give you money for?"

"Never you mind; it was mine. O dear, O dear! if one of the men would only get my box for me."

She ran to intercept one of the farm-labourers, armed with his bucket, and tried to bribe him by the promise of five shillings as a reward for the rescue of her treasures. But the man only threatened to heave the bucket of water at her if she got in his way; and Miss Batts was obliged to abandon this hope.

The fire made rapid progress meanwhile, unchecked by that ineffectual splashing of water. It had begun at the eastern end of the building, the end most remote from those disused rooms in the ivy-covered west wing; but the wind was blowing from the north-east, and the flames were spreading rapidly towards that western angle. There was little chance that any part of the house could be saved.

While Ellen Whitelaw was looking on at the work of ruin, with a sense of utter helplessness, hearing the selfish lamentations of Mrs. Tadman and Sarah Batts like voices in a dream, she was suddenly aroused from this state of torpor by a loud groan, which sounded from not very far off. It came from behind her, from the direction of the poplars. She flew to the spot, and on the ground beneath one of them she found a helpless figure lying prostrate, with an awful smoke-blackened face—a figure and face which for some moments she did not recognize as her husband's.

She knew him at last, however, and knelt down beside him. He was groaning in an agonized manner, and had evidently been fearfully burnt before he made his escape.

"Stephen!" she cried. "O, thank God you are here! I thought you were shut up in that burning house. I called with all my might, and the men searched for you."

"It isn't much to be thankful for," gasped the farmer. "I don't suppose there's an hour's life in me; I'm scorched from head to foot, and one arm's helpless. I woke up all of a sudden, and found the room in a blaze. The flames had burst out of the great beam that goes across the chimney-piece. The place was all on fire, so that I couldn't reach the door anyhow; and before I could get out of the window, I was burnt like this. You'd have been burnt alive in your bed but for me. I threw up a handful of gravel at your window. It must have woke you, didn't it?"

"Yes, yes, that was the sound that woke me; it seemed like a pistol going off. You saved my life, Stephen. It was very good of you to remember me."

"Yes; there's men in my place who wouldn't have thought of anybody but themselves."

"Can I do anything to ease you, Stephen?" asked his wife.

She had seated herself on the grass beside him, and had taken his head on her lap, supporting him gently. She was shocked to see the change the fire had made in his face, which was all blistered and distorted.

"No, nothing; till they come to carry me away somewhere. I'm all one burning pain."

His eyes closed, and he seemed to sink into a kind of stupor. Ellen called to one of the men. They might carry him to some place of shelter surely, at once, where a doctor could be summoned, and something done for his relief. There was a humble practitioner resident at Crosber, that is to say, about two miles from Wyncomb. One of the farm-servants might take a horse and gallop across the fields to fetch this man.

Robert Dunn, the bailiff, heard her cries presently and came to her. He was very much shocked by his master's condition, and at once agreed to the necessity of summoning a surgeon. He proposed that they should carry Stephen Whitelaw to some stables, which lay at a safe distance from the burning house, and make up some kind of bed for him there. He ran back to dispatch one of the men to Crosber, and returned immediately with another to remove his master.

But when they tried to raise the injured man between them, he cried out to them to let him alone, they were murdering him. Let him lie where he was; he would not be moved. So he was allowed to lie there, with his head on his wife's lap, and his tortured body covered by a coat, which one of the men brought him. His eyes closed again, and for some time he lay without the slightest motion.

The fire was gaining ground every instant, and there was yet no sign of the engine from Malsham; but Ellen Whitelaw scarcely heeded the work of destruction. She was thinking only of the helpless stricken creature lying with his head upon her lap; thinking of him perhaps in this hour of his extremity with all the more compassion, because he had always been obnoxious to her. She prayed for the rapid arrival of the surgeon, who must surely be able to give some relief to her husband's sufferings, she thought. It seemed dreadful for him to be lying like this, with no attempt made to lessen his agony. After a long interval he lifted his scorched eyelids slowly, and looked at her with a strange dim gaze.

"The west wing," he muttered; "is that burnt?"

"No, Stephen, not yet; but there's little hope they'll save any part of the house."

"They must save that; the rest don't matter—I'm insured heavily; but they must save the west wing."

His wife concluded from this that he had kept some of his money in one of those western rooms. The seed-room perhaps, that mysterious padlocked chamber, where she had heard the footstep. And yet she had heard him say again and again that he never kept an unnecessary shilling in the house, and that every pound he had was out at interest. But such falsehoods and contradictions are common enough amongst men of miserly habits; and Stephen Whitelaw would hardly be so anxious about those western rooms unless something of value were hidden away there. He closed his eyes again, and lay groaning faintly for some time; then opened them suddenly with a frightened look and asked, in the same tone,

"The west wing—is the west wing afire yet?"

"The wind blows that way, Stephen, and the flames are spreading. I don't think they could save it—not if the engine was to come this minute."

"But I tell you they must!" cried Stephen Whitelaw. "If they don't, it'll be murder—cold-blooded murder. O, my God, I never thought there was much harm in the business—and it paid me well—but it's weighed me down like a load of lead, and made me drink more to drown thought. But if it should come to this—don't you understand? Don't sit staring at me like that. If the fire gets to the west wing, it will be murder. There's some one there—some one locked up—that won't be able to stir unless they get her out."

"Some one locked up in the west wing! Are you mad, Stephen?"

"It's the truth. I wouldn't do it again—no, not for twice the money. Let them get her out somehow. They can do it, if they look sharp."

That unforgotten footstep and equally unforgotten scream flashed into Mrs. Whitelaw's mind with these words of her husband's. Some one shut up there; yes, that was the solution of the mystery that had puzzled and tormented her so long. That cry of anguish was no supernatural echo of past suffering, but the despairing shriek of some victim of modern cruelty. A poor relation of Stephen's perhaps—a helpless, mindless creature, whose infirmities had been thus hidden from the world. Such things have been too cruelly common in our fair free country.

Ellen laid her husband's head gently down upon the grass and sprang to her feet.

"In which room?" she cried. But there was no answer. The man lay with closed eyes—dying perhaps—but she could do nothing for him till medical help came. The rescue of that unknown captive was a more urgent duty.

She was running towards the burning house, when she heard a horse galloping on the road leading from the gate. She stopped, hoping that this was the arrival of the doctor; but a familiar voice called to her, and in another minute her father had dismounted and was close at her side.

"Thank God you're safe, lass!" he exclaimed, with some warmer touch of paternal feeling than he was accustomed to exhibit. "Our men saw the fire when they were going to their work, and I came across directly. Where's Steph?"

"Under the trees yonder, very much hurt; I'm afraid fatally. But there's nothing we can do for him till the doctor comes. There's someone in still greater danger, father. For God's sake, help us to save her—some one shut up yonder, in a room at that end of the house."

"Some one shut up! One of the servants, do you mean?"

"No, no, no. Some one who has been kept shut up there—hidden—ever so long. Stephen told me just now. O, father, for pity's sake, try to save her!"

"Nonsense, lass. Your husband's brain must have been wandering. Who should be shut up there, and you live in the house and not know it? Why should Stephen hide any one in his house? What motive could he have for such a thing? It isn't possible."

"I tell you, father, it is true. There was no mistaking Stephen's words just now, and, besides that, I've heard noises that might have told me as much, only I thought the house was haunted. I tell you there is some one—some one who'll be burnt alive if we're not quick—and every moment's precious. Won't you try to save her?"

"Of course I will. Only I don't want to risk my life for a fancy. Is there a ladder anywhere?"

"Yes, yes. The men have ladders."

"And where's this room where you say the woman is shut up?"

"At that corner of the house," answered Ellen, pointing.

"There's a door at the end of the passage, but no window looking this way. There's only one, and that's over the wood-yard."

"Then it would be easiest to get in that way?"

"No, no, father. The wood's all piled up above the window. It would take such a time to move it."

"Never mind that. Anything's better than the risk of going into yonder house. Besides, the room's locked, you say. Have you got the key?"

"No; but I could get it from Stephen, I daresay."

"We won't wait for you to try. We'll begin at the wood-yard."

"Take Robert Dunn with you, father. He's a good brave fellow."

"Yes, I'll take Dunn."

The bailiff hurried away to the wood-yard, accompanied by Dunn and another man carrying a tall ladder. The farm-servants had ceased from their futile efforts at quenching the fire by this time. It was a labour too hopeless to continue. The flames had spread to the west wing. The ivy was already crackling, as the blaze crept over it. Happily that shut-up room was at the extreme end of the building, the point to which the flames must come last. And here, just at the moment when the work of devastation was almost accomplished, came the Malsham fire-engine rattling along gaily through the dewy morning, and the Malsham amateur fire-brigade, a very juvenile corps as yet, eager to cover itself with laurels, but more careful in the adjustment of its costume than was quite consistent with the desperate nature of its duty. Here came the brigade, in time to do something at any rate, and the engine soon began to play briskly upon the western wing.

Ellen Whitelaw was in the wood-yard, watching the work going on there with intense anxiety. The removal of the wood pile seemed a slow business, well as the three men performed their work, flinging down great crushing piles of wood one after another without a moment's pause. They were now joined by the Malsham fire-escape men, who had got wind of some one to be rescued from this part of the house, and were eager to exhibit the capabilities of a new fire-escape, started with much hubbub and glorification, after an awful fire had ravaged Malsham High-street, and half-a-dozen lives had been wasted because the old fire-escape was out of order and useless.

"We don't want the fire-escape," cried Mr. Carley as the tall machine was wheeled into the yard. "The room we want to get at isn't ten feet from the ground. You can give us a hand with this wood if you like. That's all we want."

The men clambered on to the wood-pile. It was getting visibly lower by this time, and the top of the window was to be seen. Ellen watched with breathless anxiety, forgetting that her husband might be dying under the poplars. He was not alone there; she had sent Mrs. Tadman to watch him.

Only a few minutes more and the window was cleared. A pale face could be dimly seen peering out through the dusty glass. William Carley tried to open the lattice, but it was secured tightly within. One of the firemen leapt forward upon his failure, and shattered every pane of glass and every inch of the leaden frame with a couple of blows from his axe, and then the bailiff clambered into the room.

He was hidden from those below about five minutes, and then emerged from the window, somehow or other, carrying a burden, and came struggling across the wood to the ladder by which he and the rest had mounted. The burden which he carried was a woman's figure, with the face hidden by his large woollen neckerchief. Ellen gave a cry of horror. The woman must surely be dead, or why should he have taken such pains to cover her face?

He brought his burden down the ladder very carefully, and gave the lifeless figure into Ellen's arms.

"Help me to carry her away yonder, while Robert gets the cart ready," he said to his daughter; "she's fainted." And then he added in a whisper, "For God's sake, don't let any one see her face! it's Mrs. Holbrook."



CHAPTER XLIV.

AFTER THE FIRE.

Yes, it was Marian. She whom Gilbert Fenton had sought so long and patiently, with doubt and anguish in his heart; she whose double John Saltram had followed across the Atlantic, had been within easy reach of them all the time, hidden away in that dreary old farm-house, the innocent victim of Percival Nowell's treachery, and Stephen Whitelaw's greed of gain. The whole story was told by-and-by, when the master of Wyncomb Farm lay dying.

William Carley and his daughter took her to the Grange as soon as the farmer's spring cart was ready to convey her thither. It was all done very quickly, and none of the farm-servants saw her face. Even if they had done so, it is more than doubtful that they would have recognised her, so pale a shadow of her former self had she become during that long dreary imprisonment; the face wan and wasted, with a strange sharpened look about the features which was like the aspect of death; all the brightness and colour vanished out of the soft brown hair; an ashen pallor upon her beauty, that made her seem like a creature risen from the grave.

They lifted her into the cart, still insensible, and seated her there, wrapped in an old horse-cloth, with her head resting on Mrs. Whitelaw's shoulder; and so they drove slowly away. It was only when they had gone some little distance from the farm, that the fresh morning air revived her, and she opened her eyes and looked about her, wildly at first, and with a faint shuddering sigh.

Then, after a few moments, full consciousness came back to her, and a sudden cry of rapture broke from the pale lips. "O God!" she exclaimed, "am I set free?"

"Yes, dear Mrs. Holbrook, you are free, never again to go back to that cruel place. O, to think that you should be used so, and I so near!"

Marian lifted her head from Ellen's shoulder, and recognised her with a second cry of delight.

"Ellen, is it you? Then I am safe; I must be safe with you."

"Safe! yes, dear. I would die sooner than any harm should come to you again. Who could have brought this cruelty about? who could have shut you up in that room?"

"My father," Marian answered with a shudder. "He wanted my money, I suppose; and instead of killing me, he shut me up in that place."

She said no more just then, being too weak to say much; and Ellen, who was employed in soothing and comforting her, did not want her to talk. It was afterwards, when she had been established in her old rooms at the Grange, and had taken a little breakfast, that she told Ellen something more about her captivity.

"O, Ellen, if I were to tell you what I have suffered! But no, there are no words can tell that. It's not that they ill-used me. The girl who waited on me brought me good food, and even tried to make me comfortable in her rough way; but to sit there day after day, Ellen, alone, with only a dim light from the top of the window above the wood-stack; to sit there wondering about my husband, whether he was searching for me still, and would ever find me, or whether, as was more likely, he had given me up for dead. Think of me, Ellen, if you can, sitting there for weeks and months in my despair, trying to reckon the days sometimes by the aid of some old newspaper which the girl brought me now and then, at other times losing count of them altogether."

"Dear Mrs. Holbrook, I can't understand it even yet. Tell me how it all came about—how they ever lured you into that place."

"It was easy enough, Ellen; I wasn't conscious when they took me there. The story is very short. You remember that day when you left the Grange, how happy I was, looking forward to my husband's return, and thinking of the good news I had to tell him. We were to be rich, and our lives free and peaceful henceforward; and I had seen him suffer so much for the want of money. It was the morning after you left when the post brought me a letter from my father—a letter with the Malsham post-mark. I had seen him in town, as you know, and was scarcely surprised that he should write to me. But I was surprised to find him so near me, and the contents of the letter were very perplexing. My father entreated me to meet him on the river-side pathway, between Malsham station and this house. He had been informed of my habits, he said, and that I was accustomed to walk there. That was curious, when, so far as I knew, he had sever been near this place; but I hardly thought about the strangeness of it then. He begged me so earnestly to see him; it was a matter of life or death, he said. What could I do, Nelly? He was my father, and I felt that I owed him some duty. I could not refuse to see him; and if he had some personal objection to coming here, it seemed a small thing for me to take the trouble to go and meet him. I could but hear what he had to say."

"I wish to heaven I had been here!" exclaimed Ellen; "you shouldn't have gone alone, if I had known anything about it."

"I think, if you had been here, I should have told you about the letter, for it puzzled me a good deal, and I knew how well I could trust you. But you were away; and my father's request was so urgent—the hour was named—I could do nothing but accede to it. So I went, leaving no message for you or for my husband, feeling so sure of my return within an hour or two."

"And you found your father waiting for you?"

"Yes, on the river-bank, within a short distance of Mr. Whitelaw's house. He began by congratulating me on the change in my prospects,—I was a rich woman, he said. And then he went on to vilify my husband in such hateful words, Ellen; telling me that I had married a notorious scoundrel and profligate, and that he could produce ample evidence of what he affirmed; and all this with a pretended pity for my weakness and ignorance of the world. I laughed his shameful slanders to scorn, and told him that I knew my husband too thoroughly to be alarmed even for a moment by such groundless charges. He still affected to compassionate me as the weakest and most credulous of women, and then came to a proposal which he said he had travelled to Hampshire on purpose to make to me. It was, that I should leave my husband, and place myself under his protection; that I should go to America with him when he returned there, and so preserve my fortune from the clutches of a villain. 'My fortune?' I said; 'yes, I see that it is that alone you are thinking of. How can you suppose me so blind as not to understand that? You had better be candid with me, and say frankly what you want. I have no doubt my husband will allow me to make any reasonable sacrifice in your favour.'"

"What did he say to that?"

"He laughed bitterly at my offer. 'Your husband!' he said 'I am not likely to see the colour of my father's money, if you are to be governed by him.' 'You do him a great wrong,' I answered. 'I am sure that he will act generously, and I shall be governed by him.'"

"He was very angry, I suppose?"

"No doubt of it; but for some time he contrived to suppress all appearance of anger, and urged me to believe his statements about my husband, and to accept his offer of a home and protection with him. I cannot tell you how plausible his words were—what an appearance of affection and interest in my welfare he put on. Then, finding me firm, he changed his tone, and there were hidden threats mixed with his entreaties. It would be a bad thing for me if I refused to go with him, he said; I would have cause to repent my folly for the rest of my life. He said a great deal, using every argument it is possible to imagine; and there was always the same threatening under-tone. He could not move me in the least, as you may fancy, Nell. I told him that nothing upon earth would induce me to leave my husband, or to think ill of him. And in this manner we walked up and down for nearly two hours, till I began to feel very tired and faint. My father saw this, and when we came within sight of Wyncomb Farmhouse, proposed that I should go in and rest, and take a glass of milk or some kind of refreshment. I was surprised at this proposal, and asked him if he knew the people of the house. He said yes, he knew something of Mr. Whitelaw; he had met him the night before in the coffee-room of the inn at Malsham."

"Then your father had slept at Malsham the night before?"

"Evidently. His letter to me had been posted at Malsham, you know. I asked him how long he had been in this part of the country, and he rather evaded the question. Not long, he said; and he had come down here only to see me. At first I refused to go into Mr. Whitelaw's house, being only anxious to get home as quickly as possible. But my father seemed offended by this. I wanted to get rid of him, he said, although this was likely to be our last interview—the very last time in his life that he would ever see me, perhaps. I could not surely grudge him half an hour more of my company. I could scarcely go on refusing after this; and I really felt so tired and faint, that I doubted my capability of walking back to this house without resting. So I said yes, and we went into Wyncomb Farmhouse. The door was opened by a girl when my father knocked. There was no one at home, she told him; but we were quite welcome to sit down in the parlour, and she would bring me a glass of fresh milk and a slice of bread-and-butter.

"The house had a strange empty look, I thought. There was none of the life or bustle one expects to see at a farm; all was silent as the grave. The gloom and quietness of the place chilled me somehow. There was a fire burning in the parlour, and my father made me sit down very close to it, and I think the heat increased that faintness which I had felt when I came into the house.

"Again and again he urged his first demand, seeming as if he would wear down all opposition by persistence. I was quite firm; but the effect of all this argument was very wearisome, and I began to feel really ill.

"I think I must have been on the point of fainting, when the door was opened suddenly, and Mr. Whitelaw came in. In the next moment, while the room was spinning round before my eyes, and that dreadful giddiness that comes before a dead faint was growing worse, my father snatched me up in his arms, and threw a handkerchief over my face. I had just sense enough to know that there was chloroform upon it, and that was all. When I opened my eyes again, I was lying on a narrow bed, in a dimly-lighted room, with a small fire burning in a rusty grate in one corner, and some tea-things, with a plate of cold meat, on a table near it. There was a scrap of paper on this table, with a few lines scrawled upon it in pencil, in my father's hand: 'You have had your choice, either to share a prosperous life with me, or to be shut up like a mad woman. You had better make yourself as comfortable as you can, since you have no hope of escape till it suits my purpose to have you set free. Good care will be taken of you. You must have been a fool to suppose that I would submit to the injustice of J.N.'s will.'

"For a long time I sat like some stupid bewildered creature, going over these words again and again, as if I had no power to understand them. It was very long before I could believe that my father meant to shut me up in that room for an indefinite time—for the rest of my life, perhaps. But, little by little, I came to believe this, and to feel nothing but a blank despair. O, Nelly, I dare not dwell upon that time! I suffered too much. God has been very merciful to me in sparing me my mind; for there were times when I believe I was quite mad. I could pray sometimes, but not always. I have spent whole days in prayer, almost as if I fancied that I could weary out my God with supplications."

"And Stephen; did you see him?"

"Yes, now and then—once in several days, in a week perhaps. He used to come, like the master of a madhouse visiting his patients, to see that I was comfortable, he said. At first I used to appeal to him to set me free—kneeling at his feet, promising any sacrifice of my fortune for him or for my father, if they would release me. But it was no use. He was as hard as a rock; and at last I felt that it was useless, and used to see him come and go with hopeless apathy. No, Ellen, there are no words can describe what I suffered. I appealed to the girl who waited on me daily, but who came only once a-day, and always after dark. I might as well have appealed to the four walls of my room; the girl was utterly stolid. She brought me everything I was likely to want from day to day, and gave me ample means of replenishing my fire, and told me that I ought to make myself comfortable. I had a much better life than any one in the workhouse, she said; and I must be very wicked if I complained. I believe she really thought I was a harmless madwoman, and that her master had a right to shut me up in that room. One night, after I had been there for a time that seemed like eternity, my father came——"

"What!" cried Ellen Whitelaw, "the stranger! I understand. That man was your father; he came to see you that night; and as he was leaving you, you gave that dreadful shriek we heard downstairs. O, if I had known the truth—if I had only known!"

"You heard me, Ellen? You were there?" Marian exclaimed, surprised. She was, as yet, entirely ignorant of Ellen's marriage, and had been too much bewildered by the suddenness of her escape to wonder how the bailiff's daughter had happened to be so near at hand in that hour of deadly peril.

"Yes, yes, dear Mrs. Holbrook; I was there, and I did not help you. But never mind that now; tell me the rest of your story; tell me how your father acted that night."

"He was with me alone for about ten minutes; he came to give me a last chance, he said. If I liked to leave my husband for ever, and go to America with him, I might do so; but before he let me out of that place, he must have my solemn oath that I would make no attempt to see my husband; that I would never again communicate with any one I had known up to that time; that I would begin a new life, with him, my father, for my sole protector. I had had some experience of the result of opposing him, he said, and he now expected to find me reasonable.

"You can imagine my answer, Ellen. I would do anything, sacrifice anything, except my fidelity to my husband. Heaven knows I would have given twenty years of my life to escape from that dismal place, with the mere chance of being able to get back to my husband; but I would not take a false oath; I could not perjure myself, as that man would have made me perjure myself, in order to win my release. I knelt at his feet and clung about him, beseeching him with all the power I had to set me free; but he was harder than iron. Just at the end, when he had the door open, and was leaving me, telling me that I had lost my last chance, and would never see him again, I clung about him with one wild desperate cry. He flung me back into the room violently, and shut the door in my face. I fancied afterwards that that cry must have been heard, and that, if there had been any creature in the house inclined to help me, there would have come an end to my sufferings. But the time passed, and there was no change; only the long dreary days, the wretched sleepless nights."

This was all. There were details of her sufferings which Marian told her faithful friend by-and-by, when her mind was calmer, and they had leisure for tranquil talk; but the story was all told; and Marian lay down to rest in the familiar room, unspeakably grateful to God for her rescue, and only eager that her husband should be informed of her safety. She had not yet been told that he had crossed the Atlantic in search of her, deluded by a false scent. Ellen feared to tell her this at first; and she had taken it for granted that John Saltram was still in London. It was easy to defer any explanation just yet, on account of Marian's weakness. The exertion of telling the brief story of her sufferings had left her prostrate; and she was fain to obey her friendly nurse.

"We will talk about everything, and arrange everything, by-and-by, dear Mrs. Holbrook," Ellen said resolutely; "but for the present you must rest, and you must take everything that I bring you, and be very good."

And with that she kissed and left her, to perform another and less agreeable duty—the duty of attendance by her husband's sick-bed.



CHAPTER XLV.

MR. WHITELAW MAKES HIS WILL.

They had carried Stephen Whitelaw to the Grange; and he lay a helpless creature, beyond hope of recovery, in one of the roomy old-fashioned bed-chambers.

The humble Crosber surgeon had done his best, and had done it skilfully, being a man of large experience amongst a lowly class of sufferers; and to the aid of the Crosber surgeon had come a more prosperous practitioner from Malsham, who had driven over in his own phaeton; but between them both they could make nothing of Stephen Whitelaw. His race was run. He had been severely burnt; and if his actual injuries were not enough to kill him, there was little chance that he could survive the shock which his system had received. He might linger a little; might hold out longer than they expected; but his life was a question of hours.

The doomed man had seemed from the first to have a conviction of the truth, and appeared in no manner surprised when, in answer to his questions, the Malsham doctor admitted that his case was fatal, and suggested that, if he had anything to do in the adjustment of his affairs, he could scarcely do it too soon. At this Mr. Whitelaw groaned aloud. If he could in any manner have adjusted his affairs so as to take his money with him, the suggestion might have seemed sensible enough; but, that being impracticable, it was the merest futility. He had never made a will; it cost him too much anguish to give away his money even on paper. And now it was virtually necessary that he should do so, or else, perhaps, his wealth would, by some occult process, be seized upon by the crown—a power which he had been accustomed to regard in the abstract with an antagonistic feeling, as being the root of queen's taxes. To leave all to his wife, with some slight pension to Mrs. Tadman, seemed the most obvious course. He had married for love, and the wife of his choice had been very dutiful and submissive. What more could he have demanded from her? and why should he grudge her the inheritance of his wealth? Well, he would not have grudged it to her, perhaps, since some one must have it, if it had not been for that aggravating conviction that she would marry again, and that the man she preferred to him would riot in the possession of his hardly-earned riches. She would marry Frank Randall; and between them they would mismanage, and ultimately ruin, the farm. He remembered the cost of the manure he had put upon his fields that year, and regretted that useless outlay. It was a hard thing to have enriched his land only that others might profit by the produce.

"And if I've laid down a yard of drain-pipes since last year, I've laid down a dozen mile. There's not a bit of swampy ground or a patch of sour grass on the farm," he thought bitterly.

He lay for some hours deliberating as to what he should do. Death was near, but not so very close to him just yet. He had time to think. No, come what might, he would not leave the bulk of his property to fall into the keeping of Frank Randall.

He remembered that there were charitable institutions, to which a man, not wishing to enrich an ungrateful race, might bequeath his money, and obtain some credit for himself thereby, which no man could expect from his own relations. There was an infirmary at Malsham, rather a juvenile institution as yet, in aid whereof Mr. Whitelaw had often been plagued for subscriptions, reluctantly doling out half-a-guinea now and then, more often refusing to contribute anything. He had never thought of this place in his life before; but the image of it came into his mind now, as he had seen it on market-days for the last four years—a bran new red-brick building in Malsham High-street. He thought how his name would look, cut in large letters on a stone tablet on the face of that edifice. It would be something to get for his money; a very poor and paltry something, compared with the delight of possession, but just a little better than nothing.

He lay for some time pondering upon this, with that image of the stone tablet before his eyes, setting forth that the new wing of this institution had been erected at the desire of the late Stephen Whitelaw, Esq., of Wyncomb Farm, who had bequeathed a sum of money to the infirmary for that purpose, whereby two new wards had, in memory of that respected benefactor, been entitled the Whitelaw wards—or something to the like effect. He composed a great many versions of the inscription as he lay there, tolerably easy as to his bodily feelings, and chiefly anxious concerning the disposal of the money; but, being unaccustomed to the task of composition, he found it more difficult than he could have supposed to set forth his own glory in a concise form of words. But the tablet would be there, of course, the very centre and keystone of the building, as it were; indeed, Mr. Whitelaw resolved to make his bequest contingent upon the fulfilment of this desire. Later in the evening he told William Carley that he had made up his mind about his will, and would be glad to see Mr. Pivott, of Malsham, rival solicitor to Mr. Randall, of the same town, as soon as that gentleman could be summoned to his bedside.

The bailiff seemed surprised at this request.

"Why, surely, Steph, you can't want a lawyer mixed up in the business!" he said. "Those sort of chaps only live by making work for one another. You know how to make your will well enough, old fellow, without any attorney's aforesaids and hereinafters. Half a sheet of paper and a couple of sentences would do it, I should think; the fewer words the better."

"I'd rather have Pivott, and do it in a regular manner," Mr. Whitelaw answered quietly. "I remember, in a forgery case that was in the papers the other day, how the judge said of the deceased testator, that, being a lawyer, he was too wise to make his own will. Yes, I'd rather see Pivott, if you'll send for him, Carley. It's always best to be on the safe side. I don't want my money wasted in a chancery suit when I'm lying in my grave."

William Carley tried to argue the matter with his son-in-law; but the attempt was quite useless. Mr. Whitelaw had always been the most obstinate of men—and lying on his bed, maimed and helpless, was no more to be moved from his resolve than if he had been a Roman gladiator who had just trained himself for an encounter with lions. So the bailiff was compelled to obey him, unwillingly enough, and dispatched one of the men to Malsham in quest of Mr. Pivott the attorney.

The practitioner came to the Grange as fast as his horse could carry him. Every one in Malsham knew by this time that Stephen Whitelaw was a doomed man; and Mr. Pivott felt that this was a matter of life and death. He was an eminently respectable man, plump and dapper, with a rosy smooth-shaven face, and an air of honesty that made the law seem quite a pleasant thing. He was speedily seated by Mr. Whitelaw's bed, with a pair of candles and writing materials upon a little table before him, ready to obey his client's behests, and with the self-possessed aspect of a man to whom a last will and testament involving the disposal of a million or so would have been only an every-day piece of practice.

William Carley had shown himself very civil and obliging in providing for the lawyer's comfort, and having done so, now took up his stand by the fire-place, evidently intending to remain as a spectator of the business. But an uneasy glance which the patient cast from time to time in the direction of his father-in-law convinced Mr. Pivott that he wanted that gentleman to be got rid of before business began.

"I think, Mr. Carley, it would be as well for our poor friend and I to be alone," he said in his most courteous accents.

"Fiddlesticks!" exclaimed the bailiff contemptuously. "It isn't likely that Stephen can have any secrets from his wife's father. I'm in nobody's way, I'm sure, and I'm not going to put my spoke in the wheel, let him leave his money how he may."

"Very likely not, my dear sir. Indeed, I am sure you would respect our poor friend's wishes, even if they were to take a form unpleasing to yourself, which is far from likely. But still it may be as well for Mr. Whitelaw and myself to be alone. In cases of this kind the patient is apt to be nervous, and the business is done more expeditiously if there is no third party present. So, my dear Mr. Carley, if you have no objection——"

"Steph," said the bailiff abruptly, "do you want me out of the room? Say the word, if you do."

The patient writhed, hesitated, and then replied with some confusion,—

"If it's all the same to you, William Carley, I think I'd sooner be alone with Mr. Pivott."

And here the polite attorney, having opened the door with his own hands, bowed the bailiff out; and, to his extreme mortification, William Carley found himself on the outside of his son-in-law's room, before he had time to make any farther remonstrance.

He went downstairs, and paced the wainscoted parlour in a very savage frame of mind.

"There's some kind of devil's work hatching up there," he muttered to himself. "Why should he want me out of the room? He wouldn't, if he was going to leave all his money to Ellen, as he ought to leave it. Who else is there to get it? Not that old mother Tadman, surely. She's an artful old harridan; and if my girl had not been a fool, she'd have got rid of her out of hand when she married. Sure to goodness she can never stand between Stephen and his wife. And who else is there? No one that I know of; no one. Stephen wouldn't have kept any secret all these years from the folks he's lived amongst. It isn't likely. He must leave it all to his wife, except a hundred or so, perhaps, to mother Tadman; and it was nothing but his natural closeness that made him want me out of the way."

And at this stage of his reflections, Mr. Carley opened a cupboard near the fire-place and brought therefrom a case-bottle, from the contents of which he found farther solace. It was about half-an-hour after this that he was summoned by a call from the lawyer, who was standing on the broad landing-place at the top of the stairs with a candle in his hand, when the bailiff emerged from the parlour.

"If you'll step up here, and bring one of your men with you, I shall be obliged, Mr. Carley," the attorney said, looking over the banisters; "I want you to witness your son-in-law's will." Mr. Carley's spirits rose a little at this. He was not much versed in the ways of lawyers, and had a notion that Mr. Pivott would read the will to him, perhaps, before he signed it. It flashed upon him presently that a legatee could not benefit by a will which he had witnessed. It was obvious, therefore, that Stephen did not mean him to have anything. Well, he had scarcely expected anything. If his daughter inherited all, it would be pretty much the same thing; she would act generously of course.

He went into the kitchen, where the head man, who had been retained on the premises to act as special messenger in this time of need, was sitting in the chimney-corner smoking a comfortable pipe after his walk to and from Malsham.

"You're wanted upstairs a minute, Joe," he said; and the two went clumping up the wide old oaken staircase.

The witnessing of the will was a very brief business. Mr. Pivott did not offer to throw any light upon its contents, nor was the bailiff, sharpsighted as he might be, able to seize upon so much as one paragraph or line of the document during the process of attaching his signature thereto.

When the ceremony was concluded, Stephen Whitelaw sank back upon his pillow with an air of satisfaction.

"I don't think I could have done any better," he murmured.

"It's a hard thing for a man of my age to leave everything behind him; but I don't see that I could have done better."

"You have done that, my dear sir, which might afford comfort to any death-bed," said the lawyer solemnly.

He folded the will, and put it into his pocket.

"Our friend desires me to take charge of this document," he said to William Carley. "You will have no reason to complain, on your daughter's account, when you become familiar with its contents. She has been fairly treated—I may say very fairly treated."

The bailiff did not much relish the tone of this assurance. Fair treatment might mean very little.

"I hope she has been well treated," he answered in a surly manner. "She's been a good wife to Stephen Whitelaw, and would continue so to be if he was to live twenty years longer. When a pretty young woman marries a man twice her age, she's a right to expect handsome treatment, Mr. Pivott. It can't be too handsome for justice, in my opinion."

The solicitor gave a little gentle sigh.

"As an interested party, Mr. Carley," he said, "your opinion is not as valuable as it might be under other circumstances. However, I don't think your daughter will complain, and I am sure the world will applaud what our poor friend has done—of his own accord, mind, Mr. Carley, wholly and solely of his own spontaneous desire. It is a thing that I should only have been too proud to suggest; but the responsibility of such a suggestion is one which I could never have taken upon myself. It would have been out of my province, indeed. You will be kind enough to remember this by-and-by, my dear sir."

The bailiff was puzzled, and showed Mr. Pivott to the door with a moody countenance.

"I thought there was some devil's work," he muttered to himself, as he watched the lawyer mount his stiff brown cob and ride away into the night; "but what does it all mean? and what has Stephen Whitelaw done with his money? We shall know that pretty soon, anyhow. He can't last long."



CHAPTER XLVI.

ELLEN REGAINS HER LIBERTY.

Stephen Whitelaw lingered for two days and two nights, and at the expiration of that time departed this life, making a very decent end of it, and troubled by no thought that his existence had been an unworthy one.

Before he died, he told his wife something of how he had been tempted into the doing of that foul deed whereof Marian Saltram had been the victim. Those two were alone together the day before he died, when Stephen, of his own free will, made the following statement:——

"It was Mrs. Holbrook's father, you see," he said, in a plausible tone, "that put it to me, how he might want his daughter taken care of for a time—it might be a short time, or it might be rather a longish time, according to how circumstances should work out. We'd met once before at the King's Arms at Malsham, where Mr. Nowell was staying, and where I went in of an evening, once in a way, after market; and he'd made pretty free with me, and asked me a good many questions about myself, and told me a good bit about himself, in a friendly way. He told me how his daughter had gone against him, and was likely to go against him, and how some property that ought in common justice to have been left to him, had been left to her. He was going to give her a fair chance, he said, if she liked to leave her husband, who was a scheming scoundrel, and obey him. She might have a happy home with him, if she was reasonable. If not, he should use his authority as a father.

"He came to see me at Wyncomb next day—dropped in unawares like, when mother Tadman was out of the way—not that I had asked him, you see. He seemed to be quite taken with the place, and made me show him all over the house; and then he took a glass of something, and sat and talked a bit, and went away, without having said a word about his daughter. But before he went he made me promise that I'd go and see him at the King's Arms that night.

"Well, you see, Nell, as he seemed to have taken a fancy to me, as you may say, and had told me he could put me up to making more of my money, and had altogether been uncommonly pleasant, I didn't care to say no, and I went. I was rather taken aback at the King's Arms when they showed me to a private room, because I'd met Mr. Nowell before in the Commercial; however, there he was, sitting in front of a blazing fire, and with a couple of decanters of wine upon the table.

"He was very civil, couldn't have been more friendly, and we talked and talked; he was always harping on his daughter; till at last he came out with what he wanted. Would I give her house-room for a bit, just to keep her out of the way of her husband and such-like designing people, supposing she should turn obstinate and refuse to go abroad with him? 'You've a rare old roomy place,' he said. 'I saw some rooms upstairs at the end of a long passage which don't seem to have been used for years. You might keep my lady in one of those; and that fine husband of hers would be as puzzled where to find her as if she was in the centre of Africa. It would be a very easy thing to do,' he said; 'and it would be only friendly in you to do it.'"

"O, Stephen!" cried his wife reproachfully, "how could you ever consent to such a wicked thing?"

"I don't know about the wickedness of it," Mr. Whitelaw responded, with rather a sullen air; "a daughter is bound to obey her father, isn't she? and if she don't, I should think he had the power to do what he liked with her. That's how I should look at it, if I was a father. It's all very well to talk, you see, Nell, but you don't know the arguments such a man as that can bring to bear. I didn't want to do it; I was against it from the first. It was a dangerous business, and might bring me into trouble. But that man bore down upon me to that extent that he made me promise anything; and when I went home that night, it was with the understanding that I was to fit up a room—there was a double door to be put up to shut out sound, and a deal more—ready for Mrs. Holbrook, in case her father wanted to get her out of the way for a bit."

"He promised to pay you, of course?" Ellen said, not quite able to conceal the contempt and aversion which this confession of her husband's inspired.

"Well, yes, a man doesn't put himself in jeopardy like that for nothing. He was to give me a certain sum of money down the first night that Mrs. Holbrook slept in my house; and another sum of money before he went to America, and an annual sum for continuing to take care of her, if he wanted to keep her quiet permanently, as he might. Altogether it would be a very profitable business, he told me, and I ought to consider myself uncommonly lucky to get such a chance. As to the kindness or unkindness of the matter, it was better than shutting her up in a lunatic asylum, he said; and he might have to do that, if I refused to take her. She was very weak in her head, he said, and the doctors would throw no difficulty in his way, if he wanted to put her into a madhouse."