Chapter III: The Runaway (2)

The lady bent forward, and whispered something in the maid's ear.

“Madame desires to thank you sincerely,” said the maid. “She is much impressed by your consideration and kindness.”

“I will return in a couple of hours,” said I, with a most doctorial sententiousness, and in reality eagerly desiring to be alone, and in the privacy of my own room, before I should break out in those wild ecstasies which I felt were struggling within me for utterance.

I sat down to make a clean breast of it in these confessions, but I must ask my reader to let me pass over unrecorded the extravagances I gave way to when once more alone.

There are men--I am one of them--who require, constitutionally require, to be in love. That necessity which Don Quixote proclaimed to be a condition of knightly existence,--the devotion to a mistress,--is an essential to certain natures. This species of temperament pertained to me in my boyhood. It has followed me through life with many pains and suffering, but also with great compensations. I have ever been a poor man,--my friends can tell that I have not been a lucky one,--and yet to be rich and fortunate together, I would not resign that ecstasy, that sentiment of love, which, though its object may have changed, has still power to warm up the embers of my heart, and send through me a glow that revives the days of my hot youth and my high hopes.

I was now in love, and cared as little for Boards of Directors and resolutions passed in committee as for the ordinances of the Grand Lama. It might rain mandamuses and warrants, they had no power to trouble me. As I wended my way to No. 4 with my bowl of ice, I felt like a votary bearing his offering to the shrine of his patron saint. My gift might lie on the altar, but the incense of my devotion soared up to heaven.

I would gladly have visited her every hour, but she would only permit me to come twice a day. I was also timid, and when Virginie said my ten minutes was up I was dismissed. I tried to bribe Virginie, but the unworthy creature imagined, with the levity of her nation, I had designs on her own affections, and threatened to denounce me to her mistress,--a menace which cost me much mortification and more money.

I don't know that the cure made great progress,--perhaps I have learned since why this was so; at all events, I pursued my treatment with assiduity, and was rewarded with a few soft-voiced words, as thus: “How kind you are!” “What a gentle hand you have!” “How pleasant that ice is!” At length she was able to move about the room. I wished to offer my arm, but she declined. Virginie was strong enough to support her. How I detested that woman! But for her, how many more opportunities had I enjoyed of offering small services and attentions! Her very presence was a perpetual restraint. She never took her eyes off me while I was in the room with her mistress,--black-beady, inexpressive eyes for the most part, but with something devilish in their inscrutability that always frightened me. That she saw the passion that was consuming me, that she read me in my alternate paroxysm of delight or despair, was plain enough to me; but I could not make her my friend. She would take my presents freely, but always with the air of one whose silence was worth buying at any price, but whose co-operation or assistance no sum could compass. Her very mode of accepting my gifts had something that smote terror into me. She never thanked me, nor even affected gratitude. She would shake her head mournfully and gloomily, as though matters had come to a pretty pass between us, and as though some dreadful reckoning must one day be expected to account for all this corruption. “Ah, Monsieur Gosslett,” said she one day with a sigh, “what a precipice we are all standing beside! Have you thought of the ruin you are leading us to?” These were very strange words; and though I took my watch and chain from my pocket, and gave them to her in order to induce her to explain her meaning, she only burst into tears and rushed out of the room. Was I then the happiest of mortals or the most wretched? Such was the problem that drove sleep that long night from my eyelids, and found me still trying to solve it when the day broke.

Days would often pass now without Mrs. Dacre permitting me to visit her, and then Virginie significantly hinted that she was right in this,--that it was for my good as well as her own, and so on. I mourned over my banishment and bewailed it bitterly. “One would think, sir, you forget my mistress was married,” said Virginie to me one day; and I protest it was no more than the truth. I had completely, utterly forgotten it; and the stern fact thus abruptly announced almost felled me to the earth.

Mrs. Dacre had promised to take a drive with me as soon as she felt able to bear the motion of a carriage; but though I often recalled the pledge, she found excuses of one kind or other to defer performance, and as I now rarely saw her, she would write me a line, sometimes two lines, on a scrap of paper, which Virginie would lay open on my table and generally shake her head very meaningly as I read it.

If Mrs. Dacre's notes were very brief, they were not less enigmatical,--she was the strangest writer that ever put pen to paper. Thus, to give an instance: the ice application she always referred to as “my coldness,” and she would say, “How long is your coldness to continue? have I not had enough of it yet? This coldness is becoming tiresome, and if it be continued, how am I to go out with you?” In another note, referring to our intended drive, she says, “If it is a question of running away, I must have a word to say first; for though I believe you have no fears on that score, I am not so courageous.” Virginie had been telling stories about my ponies; they were frisky, it is true, and it was thus her mistress alluded to them. Some disparagement of me as a whip provoked this remark from her: “As the time draws nearer, I ask myself, Shall I trust myself to your guidance? Who can say what may come of it?”

At last came this one line: “I have summoned up all my courage, and I will go with you this evening. Come up at eight, and I will be ready.” I ought to have mentioned before this that for nigh three weeks a vulgar-looking man, middle-aged and robust, had come to take the waters; and though he only spoke a few words of bad French, being English, had continued to put himself on terms of intimacy with all the subordinates of the household, and was constantly seen laughing with the boatmen and trying to converse with the gardeners.

Deechworth had conceived suspicion about him from the first; he connected him with the law proceedings that the company had instituted against me, and warned me to be cautious of the man. His opinion was that he belonged to the “Force.” “I know it, sir,” said he, “by his walk and his laugh.” The detectives, according to Deechworth, have a laugh quite peculiar to themselves; it never takes them off what they are saying or thinking about In fact, it is like the bassoon in a band; it serves just to mark the time while the air is being played by the other instruments.

“I don't like that Mr. Bracken, sir,” Deechworth would say; “he ain't here for no good, you'll see, sir;” and it is not improbable that I should have perfectly agreed with this opinion if I had ever troubled my head about him at all, but the fact was my mind was very differently occupied. All Scotland Yard and Sir Richard himself might have been domiciled at the establishment without their ever giving me a moment of uneasy reflection.

Whether Mrs. Dacre's scruples were those of prudery or cowardice, whether she dreaded me as a companion or feared me as a coachman, I cannot say; but she constantly put off our intended drive, and though occasionally the few words in which she made her apologies set my heart half wild with delight, simply because I pleased to read them in a sense of my own invention, yet I grew feverish and uneasy at these delays. At last there came the one line in pencil, “I have made up my mind I will go with you to-morrow evening.” It is in no extravagance or mock rapture I say it, but in plain homely truth, I would not have changed that scrap of paper for a check of ten thousand on Coutts.

It was my habit to lay all the little notes I received from her before me on my writing-table, and as I passed them under review, to weave out for myself a story of the progress of my love. The servants who waited on me, and who alone entered my study, were foreigners, and ignorant of English, so that I could permit myself this indulgence without fear. Now, on the afternoon on which I had received the latest of her despatches, I sauntered out into the wood to be alone with my own thoughts, unmolested and undisturbed. I wandered on for hours, too happy to count the time, and too deeply lost in my imaginings to remember anything but my own fancies. What was to come of this strange imbroglio in which I now stood; how was Fate about to deal with me? I had clearly arrived at a point where the roads led right and left Which was I to take, and which was the right one?

Thus canvassing and discussing with myself, it was very late ere I got back to the castle; but I carried the key of a small portal gate that admitted me to my own quarters unobserved, and I could enter or pass out unnoticed. As I found myself in my study and lit my lamp, I turned to my writing-table. I started with amazement on discovering that the little notes and scraps of paper which bore Mrs. Dacre's writing had disappeared. These, and a small notebook, a sort of diary of my own, had been taken away; and that the act was not that of a common thief was clear, from the fact that a valuable silver inkstand and an onyx seal mounted in gold, and some other small objects of value lay about untouched. A cold sweat broke over me as I stood there overwhelmed and panic-stricken by this discovery. The terrors of a vague and undefined danger loom over a man with an intensity far greater than the fears of a known and palpable peril. I examined the fastenings of the door and the windows to see whether force had been used, but there was no sign of such. And as I had locked the door when leaving and found it locked on my return, how had this thief found entrance except by a key? I rung the bell; but the servants were all in bed, and it was long before any one replied to my summons. Of course, servant-like, they had seen nothing, heard nothing. I sent for Deechworth; he was asleep, and came unwillingly and angry at being routed out of bed. He, too, knew nothing. He questioned me closely as to whether I had seen the papers on my table before I left home for my walk, and half vexed me by the pertinacity of his examination, and, finally, by the way in which he depreciated the value of my loss, and congratulated me on the circumstance that nothing of real worth had been abstracted. This was too much for my patience, and I declared that I had rather the thief had left me without a coat or without a shilling than taken these precious scraps of paper. “Oh,” said he, with a sort of sneer, “I had not the slightest suspicion of the value you attached to them.” “Well, sir,” said I, losing all control over my passion, “now that you see it, now that you hear it, now that you know it, will you tell me at what price you will restore them to me?”

“You mean that it was I who took them?” said he, quietly, and without any show of warmth.

“I don't suppose you will deny it,” was my answer.

“That will do, Mr. Gosslett,” said he; “that's quite enough. I hope to be able to teach you that it's one thing to defy a board of directors, and it's another to defame a respectable man. I'll make you smart for this, sir;” and with these words he turned away and left the room.

I don't know when or how the servants retired,--whether I dismissed them, or whether they went of their own accord. I was like a madman. My temper, excited to the last limits of reason, impelled me to this or that act of insanity. At one moment I thought of hastening after Deechworth, and, with a revolver in my hand, compelling him to give up the stolen papers; and I shuddered as to what I should do if he refused. At another, I determined to follow him, and offer him everything I had in the world for them; for, all this time, I had worked myself up to the conviction that he, and he alone, was the thief. Oh, thought I, if I had but the aid of one of those clever fellows of the detective order, whose skill wants but the faintest clew to trace out these mysteries! and, suddenly, I bethought me of Mr. Bracken, whom Deechworth himself had pronounced to be “one of the Force.”

I rung my bell, and desired Mr. Bracken might be sent to me. The messenger was a long time absent, and came, at last, to say that Mr. Bracken had left the castle that evening, and taken all his luggage with him. The tidings struck me like a blow,--here, then, was the thief! And for what purpose could such a theft have been accomplished? “Tell Mr. Deechworth I want him,” cried I, being no less eager to make him my deepest apologies for my false accusation than to consult his strong common-sense in my difficulty.

The servant returned to say Mr. Deechworth had gone too. He had left the castle almost immediately after our stormy interview, and was already miles away on his road to the Rhine.

In my misery and desolation, in that abandonment to utter terror and confusion in which, with the drowning instinct, one snatches at straws, I sent to know if I could speak to Mrs. Dacre, or even her maid. How shall I describe my horror as I heard that they also were gone! They had left soon after Mr. Bracken; in fact, the post-horses that took them away had passed Mr. Bracken at the gate of the park.

I know no more how the rest of the night was passed by me, how the hours were spent till daybreak, than I could recount the incidents of delirium in fever. I must have had something like a paroxysm of insanity, for I appear to have rushed from room to room, calling for different people, and in tones of heart-rending entreaty begging that I might not be deserted. Towards morning I slept,--slept so soundly that the noises of the house did not disturb me. It was late in the afternoon when I awoke. The servant brought me my coffee and my letters; but I bade him leave me, and fell off to sleep again. In this way, and with only such sustenance as a cup of milk or coffee would afford, I passed fourteen days, my state resembling that of a man laboring under concussion of the brain; indeed, so closely did the symptoms resemble those of this affection, that the doctor carefully examined my head to see whether I had not incurred some actual injury. It was five weeks before I could leave my bed, and crawl down with difficulty to my study. The table was covered with the accumulated letters of thirty-odd posts, and I turned over the envelopes, most of which indicated communications from the company. There was also one in my uncle's hand. This I opened and read. It was in these words:--

“So, sir, not satisfied with a life of indolence and dependence, you have now added infamy to your worthlessness, and have not even spared the members of your own family the contagion of your vice. If you can give information as to the present abode of your wretched victim, do so, as the last amends in your power, and the last act of reparation, before you are consigned to that jail in which it is to be hoped you will end your days.”

I read this till my head reeled. Who were the members of my family I had contaminated or corrupted? Who was my wretched victim? And why I was to die in prison I knew not. And the only conclusion I could draw from it all was that my uncle was hopelessly mad, and ought to be shut up.

A strange-looking, coarse-papered document, that till then had escaped my notice, now caught my eye. It was headed “Court of Probate and Divorce,” and set forth that on a certain day in term the case of “MacNamara _versus_ Mac-Namara, Gosslett, co-respondent,” would come on for trial; the action being to obtain a rule _nisi_ for divorce, with damages against the co-respondent.

A notice of service, duly signed by one of my own people, lay beside this; so that at last I got a faint glimmering of what my uncle meant, and clearly descried what was im plied by my “victim.”

I believe that most readers of the “Times” or the “Morning Post” could finish my story; they, at all events, might detail the catastrophe with more patience and temper than I could. The MacNamara divorce was a nine-days' scandal. And “if the baseness of the black-hearted iniquity of the degraded creature who crept into a family as a supplicant that he might pollute it with dishonor; who tracked his victim, as the Indian tracks his enemy, from lair to lair,--silent, stealthily, and with savage intensity,--never faltering from any momentary pang of conscience, nor hesitating in his vile purpose from any passing gleam of virtue,--if this wretch, stigmatized by nature with a rotten heart, and branded by a name that will sound appropriately in the annals of crime, for he is called Gosslett,”--if all this, and a great deal more in the same fashion, is not familiar to the reader, it is because he has not carefully studied the Demosthenic orations of the Court of Arches. In one word, I was supposed to have engaged the affections and seduced the heart of Mrs. MacNamara, who was a cousin of my own, and the daughter of the Rev. W. Dudgeon, in whose house I had been “brought up,” &c. I had withdrawn her from her husband, and taken her to live with me at Lahneck under the name of Dacre, where our course of life--openly, fearlessly infamous--was proved by a host of witnesses; in particular, by a certain Virginie, maid of the respondent, who deposed to having frequently found me at her feet, and who confessed to have received costly presents to seduce her into favoring the cause of the betrayer. Mr. Bracken, a retired detective, who produced what were called the love-letters, amused the jury considerably by his account of my mad freaks and love-sick performances. As for Mrs. MacNamara herself, she entered no appearance to the suit; and the decree _nisi_ was pronounced, with damages of five thousand pounds, against Paul Gosslett, who, the counsel declared, was in “a position to pay handsomely for his vices, and who had ample means to afford himself the luxury of adultery.” I was told that the mob were prepared to stone me if I had been seen; and that, such was the popular excitement about me, a strong police force was obliged to accompany a red-whiskered gentleman to his house because there was a general impression abroad that he was Gosslett.

Of course I need not say I never ventured back to England; and I indite this, my last confession, from a small village in Bohemia, where I live in board--partial board it is--with a very humble family, who, though not complimentary to me in many things, are profuse in the praises of my appetite.

I rarely see an English newspaper; but a Galignani fell in my way about a week ago, in which I read the marriage of Mrs. MacNamara with R. St. John, Esq., the then Secretary of Legation at Rio. This piece of news gave me much matter of reflection as to my unhappy victim, and has also enabled me to unseal my lips about the bridegroom, of whom I knew something once before.

The man who is always complaining is the terror of his friends; hence, if nothing but bad luck attend we, I shall trouble the world no more with my Confessions; if Fate, however, should be pleased to smile ever so faintly on me, you shall hear once more from poor Paul Gosslett.

THE END.

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