A Dark Night's Work (10 page)

"I received your letter yesterday, Mr. Livingstone. I was anxious to see
you to-day, in order that I might prevent you from speaking to my father.
I do not say anything of the kind of affection you can feel for me—me,
whom you have only seen once. All I shall say is, that the sooner we
both forget what I must call folly, the better."

She took the airs of a woman considerably older and more experienced than
himself. He thought her haughty; she was only miserable.

"You are mistaken," said he, more quietly and with more dignity than was
likely from his previous conduct. "I will not allow you to characterise
as folly what might be presumptuous on my part—I had no business to
express myself so soon—but which in its foundation was true and sincere.
That I can answer for most solemnly. It is possible, though it may not
be a usual thing, for a man to feel so strongly attracted by the charms
and qualities of a woman, even at first sight, as to feel sure that she,
and she alone, can make his happiness. My folly consisted—there you are
right—in even dreaming that you could return my feelings in the
slightest degree, when you had only seen me once: and I am most truly
ashamed of myself. I cannot tell you how sorry I am, when I see how you
have compelled yourself to come and speak to me when you are so ill."

She staggered into a chair, for with all her wish for his speedy
dismissal, she was obliged to be seated. His hand was upon the bell.

"No, don't!" she said. "Wait a minute."

His eyes, bent upon her with a look of deep anxiety, touched her at that
moment, and she was on the point of shedding tears; but she checked
herself, and rose again.

"I will go," said he. "It is the kindest thing I can do. Only, may I
write? May I venture to write and urge what I have to say more
coherently?"

"No!" said she. "Don't write. I have given you my answer. We are
nothing, and can be nothing to each other. I am engaged to be married. I
should not have told you if you had not been so kind. Thank you. But go
now."

The poor young man's face fell, and he became almost as white as she was
for the instant. After a moment's reflection, he took her hand in his,
and said:

"May God bless you, and him too, whoever he be! But if you want a
friend, I may be that friend, may I not? and try to prove that my words
of regard were true, in a better and higher sense than I used them at
first." And kissing her passive hand, he was gone and she was left
sitting alone.

But solitude was not what she could bear. She went quickly upstairs, and
took a strong dose of sal-volatile, even while she heard Miss Monro
calling to her.

"My dear, who was that gentleman that has been closeted with you in the
drawing-room all this time?"

And then, without listening to Ellinor's reply, she went on:

"Mrs. Jackson has been here" (it was at Mrs. Jackson's house that Mr.
Dunster lodged), "wanting to know if we could tell her where Mr. Dunster
was, for he never came home last night at all. And you were in the
drawing-room with—who did you say he was?—that Mr. Livingstone, who
might have come at a better time to bid good-bye; and he had never dined
here, had he? so I don't see any reason he had to come calling, and P. P.
C.-ing, and your papa
not
up. So I said to Mrs. Jackson, 'I'll send
and ask Mr. Wilkins, if you like, but I don't see any use in it, for I
can tell you just as well as anybody, that Mr. Dunster is not in this
house, wherever he may be.' Yet nothing would satisfy her but that some
one must go and waken up your papa, and ask if he could tell where Mr.
Dunster was."

"And did papa?" inquired Ellinor, her dry throat huskily forming the
inquiry that seemed to be expected from her.

"No! to be sure not. How should Mr. Wilkins know? As I said to Mrs.
Jackson, 'Mr. Wilkins is not likely to know where Mr. Dunster spends his
time when he is not in the office, for they do not move in the same rank
of life, my good woman; and Mrs. Jackson apologised, but said that
yesterday they had both been dining at Mr. Hodgson's together, she
believed; and somehow she had got it into her head that Mr. Dunster might
have missed his way in coming along Moor Lane, and might have slipped
into the canal; so she just thought she would step up and ask Mr. Wilkins
if they had left Mr. Hodgson's together, or if your papa had driven home.
I asked her why she had not told me all these particulars before, for I
could have asked your papa myself all about when he last saw Mr. Dunster;
and I went up to ask him a second time, but he did not like it at all,
for he was busy dressing, and I had to shout my questions through the
door, and he could not always hear me at first."

"What did he say?"

"Oh! he had walked part of the way with Mr. Dunster, and then cut across
by the short path through the fields, as far as I could understand him
through the door. He seemed very much annoyed to hear that Mr. Dunster
had not been at home all night; but he said I was to tell Mrs. Jackson
that he would go to the office as soon as he had had his breakfast, which
he ordered to be sent up directly into his own room, and he had no doubt
it would all turn out right, but that she had better go home at once.
And, as I told her, she might find Mr. Dunster there by the time she got
there. There, there is your I papa going out! He has not lost any time
over his breakfast!"

Ellinor had taken up the
Hamley Examiner
, a daily paper, which lay on
the table, to hide her face in the first instance; but it served a second
purpose, as she glanced languidly over the columns of the advertisements.

"Oh! here are Colonel Macdonald's orchideous plants to be sold. All the
stock of hothouse and stove plants at Hartwell Priory. I must send James
over to Hartwell to attend the sale. It is to last for three days."

"But can he be spared for so long?"

"Oh, yes; he had better stay at the little inn there, to be on the spot.
Three days," and as she spoke, she ran out to the gardener, who was
sweeping up the newly-mown grass in the front of the house. She gave him
hasty and unlimited directions, only seeming intent—if any one had been
suspiciously watching her words and actions—to hurry him off to the
distant village, where the auction was to take place.

When he was once gone she breathed more freely. Now, no one but the
three cognisant of the terrible reason of the disturbance of the turf
under the trees in a certain spot in the belt round the flower-garden,
would be likely to go into the place. Miss Monro might wander round with
a book in her hand; but she never noticed anything, and was short-sighted
into the bargain. Three days of this moist, warm, growing weather, and
the green grass would spring, just as if life—was what it had been
twenty-four hours before.

When all this was done and said, it seemed as if Ellinor's strength and
spirit sank down at once. Her voice became feeble, her aspect wan; and
although she told Miss Monro that nothing was the matter, yet it was
impossible for any one who loved her not to perceive that she was far
from well. The kind governess placed her pupil on the sofa, covered her
feet up warmly, darkened the room, and then stole out on tiptoe, fancying
that Ellinor would sleep. Her eyes were, indeed, shut; but try as much
as she would to be quiet, she was up in less than five minutes after Miss
Monro had left the room, and walking up and down in all the restless
agony of body that arises from an overstrained mind. But soon Miss Monro
reappeared, bringing with her a dose of soothing medicine of her own
concocting, for she was great in domestic quackery. What the medicine
was Ellinor did not care to know; she drank it without any sign of her
usual merry resistance to physic of Miss Monro's ordering; and as the
latter took up a book, and showed a set purpose of remaining with her
patient, Ellinor was compelled to lie still, and presently fell asleep.

She awakened late in the afternoon with a start. Her father was standing
over her, listening to Miss Monro's account of her indisposition. She
only caught one glimpse of his strangely altered countenance, and hid her
head in the cushions—hid it from memory, not from him. For in an
instant she must have conjectured the interpretation he was likely to put
upon her shrinking action, and she had turned towards him, and had thrown
her arms round his neck, and was kissing his cold, passive face. Then
she fell back. But all this time their sad eyes never met—they dreaded
the look of recollection that must be in each other's gaze.

"There, my dear!" said Miss Monro. "Now you must lie still till I fetch
you a little broth. You are better now, are not you?"

"You need not go for the broth, Miss Monro," said Mr. Wilkins, ringing
the bell. "Fletcher can surely bring it." He dreaded the being left
alone with his daughter—nor did she fear it less. She heard the strange
alteration in her father's voice, hard and hoarse, as if it was an effort
to speak. The physical signs of his suffering cut her to the heart; and
yet she wondered how it was that they could both be alive, or, if alive,
they were not rending their garments and crying aloud. Mr. Wilkins
seemed to have lost the power of careless action and speech, it is true.
He wished to leave the room now his anxiety about his daughter was
relieved, but hardly knew how to set about it. He was obliged to think
about the veriest trifle, in order that by an effort of reason he might
understand how he should have spoken or acted if he had been free from
blood-guiltiness. Ellinor understood all by intuition. But henceforward
the unspoken comprehension of each other's hidden motions made their
mutual presence a burdensome anxiety to each. Miss Monro was a relief;
they were glad of her as a third person, unconscious of the secret which
constrained them. This afternoon her unconsciousness gave present pain,
although on after reflection each found in her speeches a cause of
rejoicing.

"And Mr. Dunster, Mr. Wilkins, has he come home yet?"

A moment's pause, in which Mr. Wilkins pumped the words out of his husky
throat:

"I have not heard. I have been riding. I went on business to Mr.
Estcourt's. Perhaps you will be so kind as to send and inquire at Mrs.
Jackson's."

Ellinor sickened at the words. She had been all her life a truthful
plain-spoken girl. She held herself high above deceit. Yet, here came
the necessity for deceit—a snare spread around her. She had not
revolted so much from the deed which brought unpremeditated death, as she
did from these words of her father's. The night before, in her mad fever
of affright, she had fancied that to conceal the body was all that would
be required; she had not looked forward to the long, weary course of
small lies, to be done and said, involved in that one mistaken action.
Yet, while her father's words made her soul revolt, his appearance melted
her heart, as she caught it, half turned away from her, neither looking
straight at Miss Monro, nor at anything materially visible. His hollow
sunken eye seemed to Ellinor to have a vision of the dead man before it.
His cheek was livid and worn, and its healthy colouring gained by years
of hearty out-door exercise, was all gone into the wanness of age. His
hair, even to Ellinor, seemed greyer for the past night of wretchedness.
He stooped, and looked dreamily earthward, where formerly he had stood
erect. It needed all the pity called forth by such observation to quench
Ellinor's passionate contempt for the course on which she and her father
were embarked, when she heard him repeat his words to the servant who
came with her broth.

"Fletcher! go to Mrs. Jackson's and inquire if Mr. Dunster is come home
yet. I want to speak to him."

"To him!" lying dead where he had been laid; killed by the man who now
asked for his presence. Ellinor shut her eyes, and lay back in despair.
She wished she might die, and be out of this horrible tangle of events.

Two minutes after, she was conscious of her father and Miss Monro
stealing softly out of the room. They thought that she slept.

She sprang off the sofa and knelt down.

"Oh, God," she prayed, "Thou knowest! Help me! There is none other help
but Thee!"

I suppose she fainted. For, an hour or more afterwards Miss Monro,
coming in, found her lying insensible by the side of the sofa.

She was carried to bed. She was not delirious, she was only in a stupor,
which they feared might end in delirium. To obviate this, her father
sent far and wide for skilful physicians, who tended her, almost at the
rate of a guinea the minute.

People said how hard it was upon Mr. Wilkins, that scarcely had that
wretch Dunster gone off, with no one knows how much out of the trusts of
the firm, before his only child fell ill. And, to tell the truth, he
himself looked burnt and scared with affliction. He had a startled look,
they said, as if he never could tell, after such experience, from which
side the awful proofs of the uncertainty of earth would appear, the
terrible phantoms of unforeseen dread. Both rich and poor, town and
country, sympathised with him. The rich cared not to press their claims,
or their business, at such a time; and only wondered, in their
superficial talk after dinner, how such a good fellow as Wilkins could
ever have been deceived by a man like Dunster. Even Sir Frank Holster
and his lady forgot their old quarrel, and came to inquire after Ellinor,
and sent her hothouse fruit by the bushel.

Mr. Corbet behaved as an anxious lover should do. He wrote daily to Miss
Monro to beg for the most minute bulletins; he procured everything in
town that any doctor even fancied might be of service, he came down as
soon as there was the slightest hint of permission that Ellinor might see
him. He overpowered her with tender words and caresses, till at last she
shrank away from them, as from something too bewildering, and past all
right comprehension.