Chapter XVIII: ‘a Dark Tale Darkly Finished.’

Sibyl is free once more. She has been in durance scarcely a fortnight, yet it is a new thing for her to come out into the light of day, and feel that she is at liberty to go where she pleases. It is a wondrous and a strange relief to know that the awful suspicion which has been hanging over her, separating her from all the rest of the world, is removed. But her first anxiety is to escape from Redcastle. The place has become hateful to her. She knows that the eyes of those who once flattered and courted her have been turned upon her in cold unpitying curiosity, that of all her summer friends not one has remained true to her in the hour of adversity, and she is eager to get beyond ken of those cold hard faces, beyond the sound of those false voices, which have spoken her fairly in the day of prosperity, and kept silence when she had need of comfort.

‘I have no one but you, Alex,’ she says humbly; ‘no one but you and dear old uncle Robert. I wonder that you are both so good to me.’

She goes straight from the court to Dr. Faunthorpe’s house, and is curiously gentle and affectionate in her demeanour to her uncle and the two girls. Marion plunges into vehement hysterics at sight of her elder sister, and on recovering from that attack embraces Sibyl warmly, and is more demonstrative of sisterly affection than she has been for a long time. She is far more kindly disposed towards Sibyl, penniless, and the mark of the world’s scorn, than she ever felt towards the supposed heiress to Stephen Trenchard’s wealth. As for Jenny, she goes fairly mad, hugs her sister to desperation, is very proud of her own performance in the witness box, and finally rushes out to the kitchen to ask Hester to make hot cakes for tea. No one who has not eaten Yorkshire cakes, and seen them made and baked in a Yorkshire kitchen, by a brisk and energetic Yorkshire housewife, can have a just idea of the celerity with which this operation can be performed.

But on this particular evening Sibyl is far too languid to be tempted into injuring her digestion by the consumption of hot buttered cakes. She sits in a corner of the old parlour sofa and takes her cup of tea in pensive silence, and the anxious little doctor sees that the events of the last few months have had a destroying influence upon his favourite niece’s health and beauty. He creeps close beside her and feels her pulse. It is quick and irregular.

‘You want rest, my love,’ he says, ‘you must stay with us for a few weeks in your old room, and let me doctor you, and Hester nurse you, till you get strong again.’

‘I like my old room, uncle Robert, and I love to be with you, but I hate Redcastle. I should never get well here. Let me go with my husband to his new home, if he will have me.’

She looks pleadingly at Alexis, and sees that she has been forgiven.

‘My home is yours, Sibyl, and I will take you there as soon as you are free to go. But I think you had better accept your uncle’s hospitality for a little while, as your evidence will be required for Mr. Pilgrim’s trial.’

‘What?’ asks Sibyl, ‘is it not all over?’

‘No, my love, the trial has to come yet, and the witnesses examined by the coroner and magistrate will have to repeat their evidence.’

‘How dreadful!’ sighs Sibyl.

‘It is an ordeal to be gone through, my love, but when that is over we shall be free to go to Cheswold Grange, and all our troubles will be over, I hope. And before the summer is ended your uncle and your sisters must come and pay us a visit in Hampshire.’

‘That will be delightful!’ cries Jenny, rapturously; ‘Have you a nice garden?’

‘A glorious old garden, Jenny, with about a mile of wall fruit. Such plums and peaches!’

‘A nursery for English cholera,’ says the doctor.

‘And there’s a pony, Jane,--you’d like that, I think,’ observes Alexis.

‘Shouldn’t I just!’

‘But before you come to Cheswold Grange I should like you to cure yourself of one bad habit, Jane. I won’t mention it before company, but if you recall to your mind a certain interview between a gentleman and a young lady I dare say you will understand what I mean.’

Jenny blushes vehemently, remembering that little romance about Mrs. Yokohama Gray.

So all is forgiveness and peace in the shabby old house at the end of the town, and Alexis, touched to the heart by his wife’s contrition, and by those sad eyes of hers which have a weary look that tells of suffering borne and hidden, feels that his old love for her is not quite dead, and that after all, faulty though she has been, she is the woman he would choose to sit by his fireside in the old house at Cheswold.

Alexis returns to his hotel that evening, where there is much talk of Joel Pilgrim and his arrest. No one has any doubt of his guilt, and many go so far as to affirm that they have been convinced of it from the first, and have declared their convictions to their friends and acquaintance. These being called upon to bear witness to this fact answer meanly that they don’t exactly remember: that such opinions may have been expressed: but that they fail to recall them. In any case Joel is prejudged in Redcastle, and there is a wonderful reaction about Sibyl, who is exalted into a heroine and martyr, as if to have been wrongfully suspected was equivalent to having performed some great and noble action. Mrs. Stormont calls for the first time in her life at the shabby old house at the lower end of the town, and leaves quite a packet of cards for Dr. Faunthorpe and his nieces, and one of the Colonel’s cards for the special benefit of Mr. Secretan; for it has become known to Redcastle that Alexis has a pretty little estate in Hampshire and is by no means that fortuneless adventurer he was supposed to be on his first appearance upon the Redcastle stage.

Everybody is eager for the trial, and there is a great deal of speculation as to the exact date at which it will ‘come on,’ and who will be the Crown lawyer, and who will defend the accused. Before midnight there runs a rumour that Pilgrim has secured the famous Vallentyne for his defender, and there is an idea that he will get off.

‘A clever counsel could shake the butler’s evidence, make the jury disbelieve him altogether perhaps; and without his evidence how are they to bring the crime home to Pilgrim?’ ask the knowing ones.

Before noon next day it is known that Joel Pilgrim has accepted his earthly defeat, and has gone forth to meet the fiat of a more terrible Judge than that sage and learned lawyer who would have sat in judgment upon him at the forthcoming assizes. Early on the morning following his arrest he has found means to elude the vigilance of his warder, and has opened a vein with a small penknife, which he has contrived to keep hidden in the silken lining of his coat-sleeve. Lying quietly on his prison bed, the warder slumbering on a pallet by his side, he has given himself his death-wound, and let life ebb silently without a groan.

He has occupied the earlier part of the night in writing, and this is the result, which is speedily devoured by the ravening maws of a thousand different newspapers and given to the world. It figures on the hoardings before newsvenders’ shops in fat black capitals:--

‘Startling Revelation--The Redcastle Murder--Dying Confession of
Joel Pilgrim!’

‘If it is any satisfaction to the world at large, which never
gave me anything that I did not obtain by an appeal to its
self-interest, to know the history of a man whose hours are now
numbered, I give it in a few words.

‘I am the son of Stephen Trenchard, the only offspring of his
marriage with a Hindoo dancing girl, and that marriage about
as legal an union as a European of some social standing cares
to contract with a low caste Indian. My mother had, I believe,
little except her beauty to recommend her to an Englishman’s
notice; but she was inoffensive, and she died young,--two merits
which secured her husband’s respect.

‘My father never acknowledged this marriage, or me as his son.
But he took me into his office at an early age, and finding
that I was tolerably shrewd, and of his own way of thinking in
commercial matters, had me well educated between the age of
eighteen and twenty-four, and at twenty-five took me for his
partner.

‘The fortunes of our house varied as years went on. We made
money very fast, but we had the misfortune sometimes to lose it
even faster. Our gains generally tempted us to make losses, and
each successful transaction brought an unlucky follower at its
heels. Thus if we made a hundred per cent. by indigo one year, we
perhaps lost a hundred and fifty per cent. by indigo the next,
being lured into some reckless speculation, time bargains, and
the rest of it. Our opium trade brought us most money, and we
trafficked in other goods which proved profitable merchandise,
but somewhat damaged the character of our house. In other words,
rather than let our vessels ground upon their beef-bones for
want of a remunerative cargo, we occasionally went in quietly
for the slave trade, supplied our Demerara friends with Coolies,
and shipped a good deal of live stock of this kind at different
ports. To put it briefly we were general dealers on a large scale.

‘The business had never been weaker than in that year when my
father suddenly took it into his head that it was time for him
to retire, and drew ten thousand pounds out of the house, some
thousands beyond our real capital. It left me with a crippled
business, and I felt that my father had done me a great wrong
by this selfish retirement. For the first year after his return
to England fortune favoured me, and the prospects of the house
brightened. I made one or two lucky hits and began to pluck up
spirit. But this state of things did not last long. I lost a
shipload of coolies under somewhat painful circumstances. The
ship and supposed cargo, not the coolies, were heavily insured.
The underwriters refused to pay, and there was some talk of
scuttling. This scandal, although strangled in the birth, did me
harm. A commercial man’s reputation is as delicate a blossom as
a hothouse flower, any chill wind nips it. When I found things
going to the bad in Calcutta, I came home, thinking that my
father might help me out of my difficulties, or at least enable
me to float my unwieldy ship a little while longer by the use of
a few of those thousands he had squeezed out of the business.
This he peremptorily refused, and had the injustice to accuse
me of bad trading. We had bitter words on the subject on many
occasions; and not content with refusing to help me, he urged me
to raise money to pay off the remaining ten thousand pounds due
to him by a deed of dissolution which he had made me sign before
he left Calcutta, he resigning his share of the business in
consideration of receiving twenty thousand pounds, ten thousand
at the time of the execution of the deed, ten thousand within
three years from that date.

‘The time had expired, and he urged me repeatedly to raise the
money. When he found that I had set my heart upon marrying his
niece--whom I naturally supposed to be a single woman, he made my
payment of this ten thousand pounds a condition of my marriage.
No money, no wife, he said--thus using my tenderest feelings as a
lever to wrench money out of me. I think this plan of proceeding
hardly comes under the head of fatherly affection.

‘Of the tragedy which terminated the story of my father’s
existence I have nothing to say. Time may perhaps make that
mystery clear. I shall not gratify idle curiosity by any
revelation, supposing it to be in my power to reveal anything
touching this question, which I leave as a subject for
speculation to that new school which devotes its labours to the
study of psychological mysteries.’

This is all--disappointing perhaps to the world in general, but giving Redcastle a new subject for conversation.

‘Imagine that horrid Indian being Mr. Trenchard’s son after all!’ exclaims Mrs. Stormont, when she and her dear Mrs. Groshen meet to discuss the latest scandal over their harlequin teacups. ‘I always thought there was a likeness.’

‘I can’t say that I saw any resemblance. Such a difference in complexion, you know. But what a horribly disreputable set these Trenchards seem to have been!’ says Mrs. Groshen, in a wholesale way, as if there had been a regiment of them.

‘Yes, selling slaves, and opium, and scuttling ships, and doing everything horrid.’

‘And to think that we should have asked them to dinner!’ cries the banker’s wife, remembering how often she has squandered her housekeeping money upon hothouse fruit and flowers to decorate the board at which Stephen Trenchard was to be the chief guest.

‘How lucky that dreadful Pilgrim never accepted our invitations!’ exclaims Mrs. Stormont. ‘I have no doubt he was afraid to show himself in society. He eats with chopsticks, I dare say.’

‘I rather think that chopsticks are Chinese, my dear,’ replies Mrs. Groshen, whose remembrance of the Child’s Guide to Useful Knowledge has not been weakened by the lapse of so many years as have gone by since her elder friend left a fashionable boarding school, carefully finished in all those elegant accomplishments which take six years to learn and can be comfortably forgotten in three.

Thus runs town talk in quiet Redcastle. There will be no trial, and among the general public interest in Stephen Trenchard’s murder languishes, and soon dies for want of nutriment.