Chapter II: Prologue: Part II

As Dr. Netherbridge left Lady Cranstoun’s apartments, and proceeded down the broad oak staircase to the ground floor, he found a man servant waiting for him in the hall.

“Sir Philip has just arrived, sir, and wishes to see you before you go. Will you kindly come to the library?”

The little doctor followed the man, filled with considerable curiosity as to what manner of man could have inspired so strong a sensation of fear and dislike in the breast of his young wife. Lady Cranstoun’s father had spoken of the son-in-law who would not acknowledge his existence as the “gray wolf.” But then Gypsy Carewe was hardly an unprejudiced person, and Dr. Netherbridge, who always desired to preserve an impartial mind, reminded himself of the fact that a girl of Clare Cranstoun’s undisciplined, keenly emotional nature would necessarily be an extremely trying companion to a man as reserved and proud as Sir Philip was popularly supposed to be.

“Dr. Netherbridge, sir.”

The servant threw open the library door after a deferential tap on its panels, which was followed by a curt “Come in!” The young doctor found himself in a spacious apartment completely lined with oaken book-cases well filled with volumes. Before the fire, in the Englishman’s favorite attitude, his hands behind him, and his feet set rather wide apart on a lion-skin rug, stood a broad-shouldered and deep-chested man, rather below the medium height, with a square pale face, and black hair which, in spite of the fact that he was but eight-and-twenty, was already streaked with gray. In some indefinable way Sir Philip impressed all who saw him with the sense of power, of mental as well as physical force of very exceptional kind. In features he somewhat resembled the first Napoleon Bonaparte, but, if anything, his mouth was even more rigidly compressed and hard in outline than that of the great conqueror. He appeared to be a man of superb health and physique, notwithstanding his exceptional pallor, which contrasted strangely with the inky blackness of his eyebrows, and of the lashes which bordered his deep-set, glittering, steel-gray eyes. He gazed keenly at the doctor, and then with haughty condescension waved his long white hand toward a chair, which the latter did not take, but remained standing.

“You have seen Lady Cranstoun?” Sir Philip began abruptly, in a low-pitched but peculiarly grating voice.

“I have just left her.”

“What is your opinion?”

“She is extremely ill, but more so in mind than in body.”

Sir Philip smothered an exclamation of impatience.

“As I presume your business doesn’t extend to the mind, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me what is wrong with the body?”

“Certainly, Sir Philip. Lady Cranstoun is deliberately starving herself because she does not wish to live.”

Sir Philip’s black eyebrows bent heavily over his eyes, which gleamed with suppressed anger.

“Can’t she be made insensible by drugs, and food be administered to her then?” he asked, harshly.

“Scarcely. But she has promised me to take the medicine which I shall send her as soon as I get back; and there will be no possibility of her death from inanition while she takes that. She seems to me to have naturally a splendid constitution, and there is no doubt that if she can be persuaded to take nourishment, and to cease from worrying, her health will be all that can be desired.”

“You seem to have had exceptional success with your patient,” sneered Sir Philip, with a short and very unpleasant laugh. “Her other doctors couldn’t get a word out of her. Pray what method did you adopt to loosen her tongue?”

Ernest Netherbridge was a quiet tempered man, by no means easily roused to wrath. But there was something in the hard contempt of the Baronet’s manner which seemed to rouse all the latent aggressiveness of his nature. Looking Sir Philip full in the eyes, he answered his question steadily.

“I was extremely sorry for Lady Cranstoun, Sir Philip, and possibly I made up in sympathy for what I lacked in skill.”

A very slight flush passed over Sir Philip’s colorless face.

“I am extremely grateful for your most kind pity for my wife,” he said, with biting sarcasm. “In her name and my own I offer you my hearty thanks for your sympathy. May I ask how she has merited it?”

“Certainly. Lady Cranstoun is very young. I understood her to say she is still under twenty. She appears to be very dull and lonely, and a prey to great depression. Also, she had not, so she told me, been outside the house for two months. Hers is a temperament imperatively demanding fresh air, plenty of exercise and change of scene, and bright and sympathetic society. Had she more of these things, I think it unlikely that she would entertain the idea of suicide, and require such constant watching as she does now.”

“I am deeply obliged to you for your valuable advice as to how my wife should be treated. Perhaps it is a little outside your province as a general country practitioner; but I am none the less sensible of your generosity in conferring it upon me.”

“Sir Philip,” returned the little doctor, taking his hat from the table, “in your letter you requested me to speak the truth. Unfortunately for my success in my profession, I am unable to do otherwise, and I can only regret that it has been unpalatable to you. I wish you good evening.”

“Stop!” Sir Philip called out, imperiously, as Dr. Netherbridge reached the door. “You will please send Lady Cranstoun’s medicine, and call to see her to-morrow. I will send the carriage for you at noon. If she has taken the whim in her head to be cured by you, she must have her way. Oh, by the bye, I may mention to you what you have no doubt found out for yourself. Lady Cranstoun’s father, Mr. Carewe, of Yorkshire, died in a madhouse, and I have often reason to fear my wife has inherited a touch of the complaint. Her statements since her illness began are incoherent in the extreme, and totally unreliable. But you will, of course, make allowance for that. Good-evening.”

“Good-evening, Sir Philip.”

Dr. Netherbridge seemed to breathe more freely when he found himself outside the gray fortress-like walls of the Chase. No patient he had ever yet had could approach in interest that fragile creature with the deathly white face and great dark eyes, whose husband was her worst enemy, and whose servants were her spies.

“You will be my friend, will you not?”

The words and the pathetic look which accompanied them haunted the young man. Especially since he had seen her husband a deep pity for her had taken possession of his mind. In speaking of his wife, Sir Philip’s voice, naturally hard, grew harder still, and the cold gleam of his eyes appeared absolutely diabolical. The whole of the Cranstouns’ miserable married life seemed to be laid bare before the doctor as he made his way thoughtfully toward his bachelor home, borne along the dark roads in the comfortable carriage in which he had come. He pictured to himself the spoiled, impulsive girl, little more than a child, whose strange beauty and proud maidenliness had won Sir Philip Cranstoun’s short-lived but passionate love. Such a union could only end in one way between so ill-matched a pair, and the woman who, with kind and tender but firm treatment, might have proved herself a loving and devoted wife and mother, had been cowed, terrified, sneered at, and repressed, until she had become the miserable nerve-wracked creature whom he had just seen.

It was with some approach to excitement that the little doctor prepared to inquire of his housekeeper--a garrulous, gossiping, stout woman--concerning what had taken place before the Recorder that day. But the initiative was taken by Mrs. Brooks herself, who, as she laid his frugal supper on the table, plunged at once into the subject on her mind:

“Lor’, sir! to think of your going off in the Cranstoun carriage, like that! It’ll make some folks I know that live in a great house outside the town, with a brass plate, and a boy in buttons to carry round the medicine-bottles in a basket, fit to burst themselves of envy. When you’re rested, sir, I’m just longing to know all about the Chase. I’ve always heard tell it’s such a fine place, grand enough for a royal dook. But to think of poor Sir Philip having such things said to him in court to-day, and all along of an impudent poacher fellow, who, I dare say, fully deserves his five years and more if the truth be known.”

The doctor put down his knife and fork.

“What do you mean, Mrs. Brooks?” he asked. “Tell me just what happened.”

“Willingly, sir. If I might make so bold as to take a chair, being rather bad like, with rheumatism in the knees. It was this way, sir. My young sister-in-law, my brother William’s wife, you know, sir, she lives just across the way to the court-house, and William being in the force, she gets in to see the cases, and mostly drops in to tea with me afterward, to tell me about them; well, to-day she says there was a big, dark, young man, and well enough looking for his class of life, as was brought up on a charge of unlawfully wounding one of Sir Philip Cranstoun’s gamekeepers in a plantation near the Chase some few weeks ago. It appears it was about ten or a little before, and two of Sir Philip’s men, one of them with his arm all bandaged up, and a wound in his head, gave evidence as they were on the lookout for poachers, when they caught sight of this young man and another in a plantation near the Chase. Both were well-known poachers, and awful desperate men. The gamekeepers crept silently until they came upon them; but the poachers were very powerfully built and violent, and in the fight Sir Philip’s men were getting the worst of it, and the older ruffian had his knife out to murder the gamekeeper, as he knelt on his chest, pinning him to the ground, when Sir Philip himself, who was in the woods with his gun, hearing the scuffle, came up in the nick of time, and shot the poacher dead.”

Dr. Netherbridge started from his chair.

“Dead, do you say?” he asked. “Be quite sure. Do you really mean that Sir Philip Cranstoun, with his own hand, shot one of the poachers dead?”

“With his own gun, sir, most certainly. The man’s been buried for weeks now. It all came out at the inquest, when Sir Philip and his gamekeeper attended to explain the accident. Didn’t you read of it in the papers?”

“No; or if I did, I did not attach much importance to it _then_. It is different now, and horrible, most horrible! What was the dead man’s name?”

“Hiram Carewe, sir, a man of forty-one, a gypsy fellow, against whom more than one could bear witness he was a confirmed poacher, as was his precious son, James Carewe, who is now starting his five years. But you never heard anything like the savage way in which he turned upon Sir Philip when he saw him in the witness-box. ‘You murdered my father,’ he shouted out. ‘You, Philip Cranstoun, liar, and coward! Your men are liars and perjurers, too. You know right well what father and I came to the Chase for, and that we never struck a blow but in self-defence. We hadn’t a weapon about us but our clasp-knives, and after you’d murdered my father you were three to one against me, and I had to fight for my life. You’re a perjurer and a villain, but I swear I’ll be even with you yet.’ He was hushed down, of course, and when the doctors had proved how bad the gamekeeper’s wounds were, he being dreadfully hacked about the neck and shoulders by James Carewe’s knife, the jury found him guilty of unlawfully wounding with intent to kill, and gave him five years, as served him right. But, lor’, sir, that wasn’t the end of it, for poor Sir Philip, who in his evidence said all he could to screen the man, I’m sure, as soon as he was leaving the building to get on his horse, as his groom was holding for him, up comes a ragged, wicked-looking, old gray-haired gypsy woman, all yellow and wrinkled, with a pair of eyes like burning coals, so William’s wife told me. ‘Where’s my son’s murderer?’ she yelled. ‘Where’s the man who’s killing my Hiram’s child?’ Up she come close to Sir Philip, before any one could stop her, and flings in his face a handful of mud she picked up in the roadway. Sir Philip he swears, and the witch she shrieks with laughter. Then suddenly she stops, lifts her finger, and rolls out the most awful curse a body ever heard. William’s wife said it made her cold to her bones to listen. The woman cursed his whole life and all that he did. He should lose wife and child, she said, his name should become a scoff and a byword throughout the land; he should be wretched at home and hated abroad; no one should ever love him again; and she would live, if it was for fifty years, to laugh at him, as he lay dying in a miserable hovel, deserted and alone.

“She took such a tone of command, and looked so terrible, that the people about seemed afraid to stop her; and even Sir Philip himself, as he stood wiping the mud from his face, seemed sort of dazed like for the minute. As soon as she’d finished, he was for calling for the police, but not as if he was in much of a hurry for them, and no one meddled with the old woman, who went off muttering and cursing. But there was a sharp stone in the mud she threw, and William’s wife saw the blood running down the side of Sir Philip’s face as he wiped it with his handkerchief. But, poor man! what a day for him, to be insulted like that, and out of court, all on account of a pack of filthy gypsies. And they do say, though, of course, I’m not so silly as to believe it, that those gypsies have the evil eye, and that it’s most awful unlucky to be cursed by one of them. William’s wife said she felt she’d rather have died at once than have such things said to her. The old woman’s eyes looked that dreadful that William’s wife was taken with hysterics as she was telling me about the affair. Lor’, sir, I do hope nothing dreadful will happen in consequence.”

Dr. Netherbridge dismissed Mrs. Brooks presently, and going over to the Boar’s Head Hotel, where the latest local gossip was always to be heard, he found that his housekeeper’s account had been in no way exaggerated. James Carewe’s threats in court occupied a measure of public attention, but the gypsy woman’s curse was the cream of the news, and much solemn head-wagging took place over it. Not one person there, however, had the slightest suspicion of the relationship which existed between these poachers and gypsies and the lovely wife of Sir Philip Cranstoun, and Dr. Netherbridge returned to his home oppressed by the terrible responsibility which developed upon him of imparting the news of her father’s death and her brother’s imprisonment to Lady Cranstoun in her present critical state of health.

As to the chief actor in these scenes, Sir Philip Cranstoun, he was in his secret heart less unmoved by to-day’s events than he made himself appear. Old Mrs. Carewe’s curse lingered in his ears as he sat by his lonely dinner-table, trying vainly to dim his recollection of that unpleasant scene outside the court-house by deep draughts of rare old wine. But no amount of drinking had ever yet clouded his faculties, which to-night seemed abnormally on the alert.

His marriage had been a great, a terrible mistake, he told himself, as he sat in a deep, comfortable arm-chair before the great fire-place. Disdaining women of his own rank as silly, and those of a lower position in life as coarse and vulgar, nature had suddenly revenged herself upon him for his indifference to the other sex by inspiring in him a mad love for his sister’s beautiful gypsy _protégée_. In the height of this he had married her, and his passion had cooled almost as rapidly as it had grown hot. Instead of a docile and humble tool, he found a proud and self-willed girl, who seemed in no way impressed by his extraordinary condescension and kindness in making her Lady Cranstoun. Very speedily his love turned to a sombre dislike, and he set himself to work to crush all opposition out of her nature. On one point particularly he had insisted from the first. She must utterly and forever renounce her kindred, whose very existence he considered as an insult to him. His last remaining spark of affection for her was extinguished when he discovered that she had disobeyed his strenuous orders on this point, and had contrived to see and speak with her relatives. But his wish for an heir, and his fear lest the estates, which were strictly entailed, should pass to his brother, whom he heartily detested, forced him to tolerate his wife’s presence, and his anger, therefore, knew no bounds when, owing, as he believed to Clare’s indifference and neglect, his infant son’s life faded away. On that unlucky night when Hiram Carewe met his death, Sir Philip, who had been informed of the gypsies’ intention to visit his daughter, set his men on to seize the Carewes as poachers, and drive them out of the grounds. His men, over-zealous in executing their master’s orders, attacked the Carewes so savagely that, the wild gypsy blood of the latter being roused, one of the gamekeepers might well have paid for his obedience with his life but for Sir Philip’s shot. The Baronet had no intention of killing his wife’s father, although he was viciously glad of an opportunity to wound him. He hated Lady Cranstoun’s gypsy kindred most heartily, and wished them all out of the world; but it was a momentary matter of regret with him that his hand had fired the fatal shot which made Clare a orphan. After that point, affairs seemed taken out of his hands. The police interference, the inquest, and James Carewe’s trial, had all taken place without any impetus on his side; the one imperative necessity was that Lady Cranstoun should be, for some time at least, kept in ignorance of the fate of her father and brother.

Even as he thus reasoned, the door of the dining-room was suddenly opened, and Clare Cranstoun, corpse-like in her pallor, her long black hair dishevelled about her shoulders, and her eyes gleaming with what looked like madness, advanced toward him, ghost-like in her loose white dressing-gown, and he knew in an instant that she had learned the truth.

Sir Philip’s groom had, indeed, described to Margaret the scene outside the courthouse that afternoon, and the woman, totally ignorant of the interests at stake, had retailed the story to her mistress as she was brushing her hair for the night.

“My father! My brother!” Lady Cranstoun murmured, with parched lips, as she staggered forward into the room. “What have you done with them?”

Looking at her, he realized that it was impossible to deceive her longer. He pushed a chair toward her, but she impatiently declined it.

“I am sorry to say,” he answered then, in those hard, level tones of his, “that your father and your brother plotted with you to disobey my orders. It is you who are to blame for the consequences.”

“Where are they?” she cried, wildly.

“Your father was mistaken for a poacher, and was accidentally shot in a scuffle----”

“Murdered! Murdered by you!” she shrieked, wringing her hands as one distraught. “My father--my poor father!”

Sir Philip laid his hand on the bell-rope.

“For three years,” he said, coldly, “I have been trying to prove to you that it is worse than useless to try to disobey my orders. This unfortunate accident will, I hope, convince you of your folly. As to the other poaching gypsy, James Carewe, I did what I could to get him off, but he had savagely assaulted one of my keepers, and has got five years for it. In future you will know better than to attempt to hold any communication with your disreputable family.”

She stared at him with distended eyes.

“In future!” she repeated, in a low, altered voice. “What have you to do with my future?”

Her tone was so singular that he looked into her face for the first time during this interview, and read there a burning hate, stronger and deeper than ever he was capable of cherishing. Without a word she turned from him, and left the room as the servant entered it in response to his master’s ring.

That night, in a storm of wind and rain, an old woman and a lad of sixteen waited in the woods outside the Chase, with a horse stolen from Sir Philip’s stables, the bridle of which was held by Brian Carewe. And at one o’clock a figure, in the black cloak, bonnet, and long veil of a nurse, stole from the great oak doors, and over the slippery dead leaves that cumbered the steps, to join them. The old woman helped her on the horse and mounted it behind her, the lad held the bridle; and so by devious ways through the forest, known only to gypsies, Lady Cranstoun, of the Chase, left her husband’s home never to return.

Rather more than a month later, while still the hue and cry over Lady Cranstoun’s disappearance, as it was rumored during an attack of delirium and fever, rang through the countryside, Dr. Ernest Netherbridge, reading a medical work before his study fire at midnight, was disturbed by a late caller.

His housekeeper was in bed, and he himself opened the door upon a tall, handsome, black-browed lad, and a covered cart, drawn by a powerfully-built horse, with flanks steaming in the frosty air.

It was a case of life and death, the lad said, and the patient was his sister. Dr. Netherbridge was an absolutely unselfish man in following his profession, and slipping on his overcoat, he entered the cart, and was driven for over an hour and a half through the dark country roads until the driver, who had been monosyllabic or silent on the way, drew up near a thatched cottage a little back from the road.

“You’ll find my sister and her grandmother within. I’ll wait here to drive you home,” he said.

Dr. Netherbridge tapped at the cottage door, which was opened by an evil-looking old woman, with unkempt hair bound with a bright-colored kerchief. After hearing his name, she conducted him to the invalid’s room, where two women, apparently nurses, were busy, the one in trying to quiet a baby ten days old, the other bending over the still figure of its mother stretched upon the bed.

One glance at the waxen face, the blue-black hair, delicate features and great dark eyes told Dr. Netherbridge that this mysterious patient was none other than the missing Lady Cranstoun, and that the baby girl whose fretful cries filled the room was the child concerning whom the Baronet was so anxious.

The mother was intensely weak, hardly, indeed, alive at all. Dr. Netherbridge administered and prescribed what remedies he could. But before leaving he thought well to inform old Mrs. Carewe, the sick woman’s grandmother, that he had recognized the patient, and should at once communicate the fact to her husband.

“That is just why I sent for you,” said the old woman, while a smile of malevolent cunning lit up her face. “As soon as my Clare is dead, and she won’t live above a few hours now, doctor or no doctor, that child will be sent to her father, Sir Philip Cranstoun. Poor folks like us, with no men to work for us, can’t afford to bring up a Baronet’s daughter properly. And your word will be needed in proof of her identity.”

On the following day, when he called at the Chase with his statement, Dr. Netherbridge learned that a neighboring farmer had been commissioned to bring a basket to the house, within which reposed an infant eleven days old, upon whose gown was pinned a paper with the following words:

“This is Stella Cranstoun, daughter of Sir Philip Cranstoun and Clare his wife, formerly Clare Carewe. She was born on the twelfth of November. Her mother, Lady Cranstoun, died at four o’clock this morning.--Signed, Sarah Carewe; Mary Wrexham, nurse; Julia Tait, nurse;” and dated carefully.

Thus was Sir Philip freed from his matrimonial perplexities, and left with an altogether undesired infant daughter on his hands.