Armadale (94 page)

‘The Blanchards were consulted, as a matter of form,' pursued Bash-wood the younger. ‘
They
had no objection to her shutting herself up in a convent, as you may well imagine. The pleasantest letter they ever had from her, I'll answer for it, was the letter in which she solemnly took leave of them in this world for ever. The people at the convent were as careful as usual not to commit themselves. Their rules wouldn't allow her to take the veil till she had tried the life for a year first, and then, if she had any doubt, for another year after that. She tried the life for the first year, accordingly – and doubted. She tried it for the second year – and was wise enough, by that time, to give it up without further hesitation. Her position was rather an awkward one when she found herself at liberty again. The sisters at the convent had lost their interest in her; the mistress at the school declined to take her back as teacher, on the ground that she was too nice-looking for the place; the priest considered her to be possessed by the devil. There was nothing for it but to write to the Blanchards again, and ask them to start her in life as a teacher of music on her own account. She wrote to her former mistress accordingly. Her former mistress had evidently doubted the genuineness of the girl's resolution to be a nun, and had seized the opportunity
offered by the farewell letter of three years since to cut off all further communication between her ex-waiting maid and herself. Miss Gwilt's letter was returned by the post-office. She caused inquiries to be made; and found that Mr Blanchard was dead, and that his daughter had left the great house for some place of retirement unknown. The next thing she did, upon this, was to write to the heir in possession of the estate. The letter was answered by his solicitors; who were instructed to put the law in force at the first attempt she made to extort money from any member of the family at Thorpe-Ambrose. The last chance was to get at the address of her mistress's place of retirement. The family bankers, to whom she wrote, wrote back to say that they were instructed not to give the lady's address to any one applying for it, without being previously empowered to do so by the lady herself. That last letter settled the question – Miss Gwilt could do nothing more. With money at her command, she might have gone to England, and made the Blanchards think twice before they carried things with too high a hand. Not having a halfpenny at command, she was helpless. Without money and without friends, you may wonder how she supported herself while the correspondence was going on. She supported herself by playing the pianoforte at a low concert-room in Brussels. The men laid siege to her, of course, in all directions – but they found her insensible as adamant. One of these rejected gentlemen was a Russian; and he was the means of making her acquainted with a countrywoman of his – whose name is unpronounceable by English lips. Let us give her her title, and call her the Baroness. The two women liked each other at their first introduction; and a new scene opened in Miss Gwilt's life. She became reader and companion to the Baroness. Everything was right, everything was smooth on the surface. Everything was rotten and everything was wrong, under it.'

‘In what way, Jemmy? Please to wait a little, and tell me in what way.'

‘In this way. The Baroness was fond of travelling, and she had a select set of friends about her, who were quite of her way of thinking. They went from one city on the Continent to another, and were such charming people that they picked up acquaintances everywhere. The acquaintances were invited to the Baroness's receptions – and card-tables were invariably a part of the Baroness's furniture. Do you see it now? or must I tell you, in the strictest confidence, that cards were not considered sinful on these festive occasions, and that the luck, at the end of the evening, turned out to be almost invariably on the side of the Baroness and her friends. Swindlers, all of them – and there isn't a
doubt on my mind, whatever there may be on yours, that Miss Gwilt's manners and appearance made her a valuable member of the society in the capacity of a decoy. Her own statement is, that she was innocent of all knowledge of what really went on; that she was quite ignorant of card-playing; that she hadn't such a thing as a respectable friend to turn to in the world; and that she honestly liked the Baroness, for the simple reason that the Baroness was a hearty good friend to her from first to last. Believe that or not, as you please. For five years she travelled about all over the Continent, with these card-sharpers in high life, and she might have been among them at this moment, for anything I know to the contrary, if the Baroness had not caught a Tartar at Naples, in the shape of a rich travelling Englishman, named Waldron. Aha! that name startles you, does it? You've read the Trial of the famous Mrs Waldron,
⁶
like the rest of the world? And you know who Miss Gwilt is now, without my telling you?'

He paused, and looked at his father in sudden perplexity. Far from being overwhelmed by the discovery which had just burst on him, Mr Bashwood, after the first natural movement of surprise, faced his son with a self-possession which was nothing short of extraordinary under the circumstances. There was a new brightness in his eyes, and a new colour in his face. If it had been possible to conceive such a thing of a man in his position, he seemed to be absolutely encouraged instead of depressed by what he had just heard. ‘Go on, Jemmy,' he said, quietly; ‘I am one of the few people who didn't read the Trial – I only heard of it.'

Still wondering inwardly, Bashwood the younger recovered himself, and went on.

‘You always were, and you always will be, behind the age,' he said. ‘When we come to the Trial, I can tell you as much about it as you need know. In the meantime, we must go back to the Baroness and Mr Waldron. For a certain number of nights the Englishman let the card-sharpers have it all their own way – in other words, he paid for the privilege of making himself agreeable to Miss Gwilt. When he thought he had produced the necessary impression on her, he exposed the whole confederacy without mercy. The police interfered; the Baroness found herself in prison; and Miss Gwilt was put between the two alternatives of accepting Mr Waldron's protection, or being thrown on the world again. She was amazingly virtuous, or amazingly clever, which you please. To Mr Waldron's astonishment, she told him that she could face the prospect of being thrown on the world; and that he must address her honourably or leave her for ever. The end of it was what the end
always is, where the man is infatuated and the woman is determined. To the disgust of his family and friends, Mr Waldron made a virtue of necessity, and married her.'

‘How old was he?' asked Bashwood the elder eagerly.

Bashwood the younger burst out laughing. ‘He was about old enough, daddy, to be your son, and rich enough to have burst that precious pocket-book of yours with thousand-pound notes! Don't hang your head. It wasn't a happy marriage, though he
was
so young and so rich. They lived abroad, and got on well enough at first. He made a new will, of course, as soon as he was married, and provided handsomely for his wife, under the tender pressure of the honeymoon. But women wear out, like other things, with time; and one fine morning Mr Waldron woke up with a doubt in his mind whether he had not acted like a fool. He was an ill-tempered man; he was discontented with himself; and of course he made his wife feel it. Having begun by quarrelling with her, he got on to suspecting her, and became savagely jealous of every male creature who entered the house. They had no incumbrances in the shape of children, and they moved from one place to another, just as his jealousy inclined him, till they moved back to England at last, after having been married close on four years. He had a lonely old house of his own among the Yorkshire moors, and there he shut his wife and himself up from every living creature, except his servants and his dogs. Only one result could come, of course, of treating a high-spirited young woman in that way. It may be fate, or it may be chance – but, whenever a woman is desperate, there is sure to be a man handy to take advantage of it. The man in this case was rather a ‘dark horse', as they say on the turf. He was a certain Captain Manuel, a native of Cuba, and (according to his own account) an ex-officer in the Spanish navy. He had met Mr Waldron's beautiful wife on the journey back to England; had contrived to speak to her in spite of her husband's jealousy; and had followed her to her place of imprisonment in Mr Waldron's house on the moors. The captain is described as a clever, determined fellow – of the daring piratical sort – with the dash of mystery about him that women like—'

‘She's not the same as other women!' interposed Mr Bashwood, suddenly interrupting his son. ‘Did she—?' His voice failed him, and he stopped without bringing the question to an end.

‘Did she like the captain?' suggested Bashwood the younger with another laugh. ‘According to her own account of it, she adored him. At the same time her conduct (as represented by herself) was perfectly innocent. Considering how carefully her husband watched her, the
statement (incredible as it appears) is probably true. For six weeks or so, they confined themselves to corresponding privately; the Cuban captain (who spoke and wrote English perfectly,) having contrived to make a go-between of one of the female servants in the Yorkshire house. How it might have ended we needn't trouble ourselves to inquire – Mr Waldron himself brought matters to a crisis. Whether he got wind of the clandestine correspondence or not, doesn't appear. But this is certain, that he came home from a ride one day, in a fiercer temper than usual – that his wife showed him a sample of that high spirit of hers which he had never yet been able to break – and that it ended in his striking her across the face with his riding-whip. Ungentlemanly conduct, I am afraid we must admit; but to all outward appearance, the riding-whip produced the most astonishing results. From that moment, the lady submitted as she had never submitted before. For a fortnight afterwards, he did what he liked; and she never thwarted him – he said what he liked; and she never uttered a word of protest. Some men might have suspected this sudden reformation of hiding something dangerous under the surface. Whether Mr Waldron looked at it in that light, I can't tell you. All that is known is, that before the mark of the whip was off his wife's face, he fell ill, and that in two days afterwards, he was a dead man. What do you say to that?'

‘I say he deserved it!' answered Mr Bashwood, striking his hand excitedly on the table, as his son paused, and looked at him.

‘The doctor who attended the dying man was not of your way of thinking,' remarked Bashwood the younger, drily. ‘He called in two other medical men, and they all three refused to certify the death. The usual legal investigation followed. The evidence of the doctors and the evidence of the servants pointed irresistibly in one and the same direction; and Mrs Waldron was committed for trial, on the charge of murdering her husband by poison. A solicitor in first-rate criminal practice was sent for from London, to get up the prisoner's defence – and these “Instructions” took their form and shape accordingly. What's the matter? What do you want now?'

Suddenly rising from his chair, Mr Bashwood stretched across the table, and tried to take the papers from his son. ‘I want to look at them,' he burst out eagerly. ‘I want to see what they say about the captain from Cuba. He was at the bottom of it, Jemmy – I'll swear he was at the bottom of it!'

‘Nobody doubted that, who was in the secret of the case at the time,' rejoined his son. ‘But nobody could prove it. Sit down again, dad, and compose yourself. There's nothing here about Captain Manuel but the
lawyer's private suspicions of him, for the counsel to act on or not, at the counsel's discretion. From first to last, she persisted in screening the captain. At the outset of the business, she volunteered two statements to the lawyer – both of which he suspected to be false. In the first place, she declared that she was innocent of the crime. He wasn't surprised, of course, so far; his clients were, as a general rule, in the habit of deceiving him in that way. In the second place, while admitting her private correspondence with the Cuban captain, she declared that the letters on both sides related solely to a proposed elopement, to which her husband's barbarous treatment had induced her to consent. The lawyer naturally asked to see the letters. “He has burnt all my letters, and I have burnt all his,' was the only answer he got. It was quite possible that Captain Manuel might have burnt
her
letters, when he heard there was a coroner's inquest in the house. But it was in her solicitor's experience (as it is in my experience too) that when a woman is fond of a man, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, risk or no risk, she keeps his letters. Having his suspicions roused in this way, the lawyer privately made some inquiries about the foreign captain – and found that he was as short of money as a foreign captain could be. At the same time, he put some questions to his client about her expectations from her deceased husband. She answered, in high indignation, that a will had been found among her husband's papers, privately executed only a few days before his death, and leaving her no more, out of all his immense fortune, than five thousand pounds. “Was there an older will, then,” says the lawyer, “which the new will revoked?” Yes, there was; a will that he had given into her own possession; a will made when they were first married. “Leaving his widow well provided for?” Leaving her just ten times as much as the second will left her. “Had she ever mentioned that first will, now revoked, to Captain Manuel?” She saw the trap set for her – and said, “No, never!” without an instant's hesitation. That reply confirmed the lawyer's suspicions. He tried to frighten her by declaring that her life might pay the forfeit of her deceiving him in this matter. With the usual obstinacy of women, she remained just as immovable as ever. The captain, on his side, behaved in the most exemplary manner. He confessed to planning the elopement; he declared that he had burnt all the lady's letters as they reached him, out of regard for her reputation; he remained in the neighbourhood; and he volunteered to attend before the magistrates. Nothing was discovered that could legally connect him with the crime – or that could put him into court on the day of the Trial, in any other capacity than the capacity of a witness. I don't believe myself that there's any moral
doubt (as they call it) that Manuel knew of the will which left her mistress of fifty thousand pounds; and that he was ready and willing, in virtue of that circumstance, to marry her on Mr Waldron's death. If anybody tempted her to effect her own release from her husband by making herself a widow, the captain must have been the man. And unless she contrived, guarded and watched as she was, to get the poison for herself, the poison must have come to her in one of the captain's letters.'