Kitabı oku: «An Isle of Surrey: A Novel», sayfa 8

CHAPTER XIV.
THE FIRE AT RICHMOND

A more devoted husband was not in all Richmond than William Crawford. A more trusting and affectionate wife could not be found in all England than Ellen, his wife, whom in tones of great tenderness he always called Nellie. To her first husband, old Thomas Crawford, whom she had married in the zenith of her maiden beauty twenty-five years ago, when she was twenty-two, she had ever been Ellen. Her name in his mouth had always seemed cold and stately; at home she had always been Nellie. But the dignity of marriage, and of marriage with a man forty years older than herself, had elevated her into Mrs. Crawford among outsiders and Ellen among her own relatives and in her own house.

Her husband, father and mother, and only brother had been dead some time before her present husband came to live next door to her at Singleton Terrace, Richmond. She was a confirmed invalid, and had been unable to move about freely for four years. She had always been the gentlest of the good, and rested quite resigned to her fate. She never repined, never grumbled, never murmured. Except while in the throes of pain, her face wore a placid look, which changed into a smile when any one spoke to her or came near her.

Her doctors had told her all along that her case was not beyond hope. They spoke of it generally as loss of nerve-power. In hundreds of such affections there had been complete cures, and in thousands partial and important improvements. They traced her condition to a carriage accident, in which the horses ran away, and she had been heavily thrown, shortly after her marriage. The injury then received lay dormant until developed by the sudden and horrible death of her husband.

He was past eighty at the time, but hale and hearty. He ate a good breakfast on the day of his death, and had gone out to look at some new machinery a friend of his had got in a sawmill.

An hour after leaving his own door he was carried back over the threshold, a palpitating, bleeding mass, torn and ground and mangled out of all human shape. His coat had caught in the machinery, and he had been drawn in among the ruthless wheels and killed. His wife happened to be looking out of the dining-room window as the bearers came along the road and up the front garden. Owing to brutal thoughtlessness, no one had been sent on to break the awful news to her. She rushed into the hall as the four men bearing the stretcher entered.

They had placed a cloak over the body. She knew by the face being covered that all was over.

"Is he dead?" she shrieked, and raised the cloak before any one could stay her. She saw the mangled horror which an hour ago had been sound and hearty and-whole.

Without a sound she sank to the floor in a swoon. When she recovered consciousness she could not stand without aid. The strength of her lower limbs was gone. A double blow had fallen on that house, and although people expressed and felt sorrow for the old man, and horror at his sudden and terrible death, all the tears were for the lovely soft-mannered wife, who seemed to think less of herself than another woman of her own shadow.

After the awful death of her husband followed years of lonely widowhood, in which she was as helpless to get about as a little child Then came this suave and low-voiced man to lodge next door. He made no advances to her whatever. To do anything of the kind would have been revolting. It would have been plain to the most credulous that he sought her money, and not herself. He was not even a friend. He did not affect to be on terms of intimacy with her. He comported himself as an acquaintance who had great interest in her and sympathised much with her in the unhappy condition of her health.

Later occurred the fire and the rescue. The cause of the fire had never been ascertained. It arose in the kitchen under Mrs. Crawford's room, and in the back of the house. Because of her malady, the widow occupied a room on the first floor, the kitchen being a sunken story.

At that time Mrs. Crawford had a companion-a widow also-who usually slept in the same room with the invalid, but who on the night of the fire was absent from the house. The companion went for a day and a night every month to visit her brother at Rochester. All the other nights the lady companion had been away the cook passed in her mistress's room. But at this time a change of the two servants, cook and housemaid, had just taken place, and both being strangers, Mrs. Crawford decided to have neither in her room that night; she resolved to sleep alone. Mrs. Farraday on her way to the station had met the next-door lodger and told him these facts, expressing a sincere hope that Mrs. Crawford would pass a comfortable night, and adding that though the poor lady often found a great difficulty in going to sleep, once she went off she never woke till morning, and required no help in the night, but had some one in her room merely for companionship.

All this Mrs. Farraday told the sympathetic next-door lodger, who joined with her in the expression of a hope-nay, a conviction-that the invalid would pass a peaceful and untroubled night.

The sympathetic lodger next door was not, of course, then called William Crawford. He took that name when some months later he married the widow. He was not known by the name of John Ainsworth either. For a very simple and sufficient reason he wished to forget John Ainsworth. Philip Ray had sworn never to forget John Ainsworth, and had, moreover, sworn to shoot John Ainsworth if ever they met.

John Ainsworth had as many names as a royal prince. He cared very little for names. He cared a great deal for pretty faces just for a while; or, rather, he cared for pretty faces always, but liked change. Better even than pretty faces, he cared for money. The older he grew the more enamoured he became of money. When a man of spirit cares greatly for pretty faces, and still more greatly for money, what matters how people may call him so long as he may gaze on beauty and rattle guineas in his pocket? One of the most useful qualities of a pretty face is that you can turn your back upon it when you are tired of it. One of the most delightful qualities of money is that you can, if you only know where to seek, always find men willing to gamble with you.

When John Ainsworth left Beechley suddenly and not alone three years ago he and the companions of his flight changed trains at Horsham. At the same time he altered his name. He became of his own free action, unchallenged by any one, Mr. George Hemphill. When he left the train and went on board the steamer for New York he described himself and his party as Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Plunkett and child. When he took steamer back to England he travelled alone as Mr. Walter Greystones.

Mrs. Crawford's sympathetic next-door lodger was known to her and to Richmond as Mr. William Goddard.

In Mrs. Crawford's house the only servants, the cook and housemaid, slept in a front top room.

At about four o'clock in the morning, after Mrs. Farraday's departure for Rochester, Mrs. Crawford was awakened by an awful sense of suffocation. The room was full of smoke. She could see this by the night light. She called out as loudly as she was able, but there were two doors, three floors, and three pair of stairs between her and the maids. She rang the little handbell placed at the side of her bed by Mrs. Farraday before setting out for the train. The voice was very thin and weak, and the bell no better than a toy. The voice could be heard no further off than the next room and hall. The sound of the bell might reach the kitchen and the drawing-room overhead, no farther.

The smoke in the room increased. It had a thick, oppressive, oily taste and smell, something like the smell of paraffin. Mrs. Crawford was not aware of any paraffin being in the house. She had a horror of paraffin, and none could be in the house with her approval.

She lay in her bed perfectly helpless. It was awful to lie here awaiting the approach of death, seeing the great clouds of smoke rise thicker and thicker every minute, and know that soon insensibility would fall upon her, and then death.

If she could but get to the window and fling herself out, she might be maimed for the remainder of her days, still she would be almost certain to escape with life. But she could not move from that bed to save her life. Her arms were as strong and capable as ever; but her lower limbs were as much beyond her control as the limbs of the dead.

She had often pictured to herself the horrors of being buried alive. She had often fancied to herself the soul-distracting awakening in the tomb, the confined space, the damp cerecloths, the cold planks, the stifling air, the maddening certainty that above were space and sunshine and warmth, the songs of birds and the voices of kindly people going blithely to and fro.

Her own situation was as bad, nay worse. In the tomb there would be no light to show the sombre robes of death gradually closing down upon her. There would be no danger of the fierce fiery agony of flame before all was over. There would be from the first no hope of deliverance.

Here she was helpless, and could see the smoke growing denser and denser every moment, the weight upon her chest increasing with every tumultuous inspiration. Around her head, across her brow, a band of burning hot metal seemed gradually tightening and bursting in upon her brain.

She could hear the sound of the flames flapping and beating in muffled distant riot below, and yet she could not move.

She had read once of a man buried up to the head in the sand of the seashore for scurvy, powerless to stir, and so left by his companions while they went away for an hour. Towards this miserable man presently glides a serpent out of some sedges above high-water mark. That situation had filled her mind with ineffable horror. Her case now was still more terrible, for there was no companion who might chance to return in time. Besides, until the last moment the man in the sand might hope the serpent would not strike, that the reptile was not hungry. Here the fire would strike infallibly; flames were always hungry, voracious, in satiable.

The oppression grew more suffocating. She was lying on her back, and she felt as though an intolerable mass of lead were crushing in her chest. The band across her forehead tightened, and she could not persuade herself that the bone of her skull had not been driven in upon her beating brain. Her hands seemed as though they were swollen to ten times their size. She could no longer move her arms with ease.

At length she felt as if the inexorable hand of death had seized her throat and was squeezing and closing up her windpipe.

She kept her eyes fixed on the light. This was the only thing that told of life. She could see nothing else.

It was not a light now, but a blue blur upon the darkness. It faded to a patch of faintly luminous smoke. She closed her eyes for a moment to clear her sight. The motion of the lids pained her exquisitely, and made the redhot band across her beating forehead burn more fiercely, more crushingly than ever into her brain.

With a groan she opened her eyes.

All was dark! The light had gone out, extinguished by the smoke.

She knew that where lights went out life soon followed This light had illumined dimly the way to the tomb. This bed was her grave.

She summoned all her courage, and drew a long breath. She summoned all her strength, and uttered one cry:

"Help!"

There was a loud crash, a sound of breaking glass, a rush of fresh cool air. She fainted.

When she recovered consciousness she was out of the burning house, in her own garden, and standing by her was William Goddard, who had rescued her from the burning house.

That was the beginning of close acquaintance between the man and the widow. She regarded him as one who had delivered her from death, and all Richmond and all the world who read an account of the fire looked upon him in the same way. There was no doubt in the mind of any one that had not this William Goddard crept along the ledge running round both houses and taken the helpless woman out of the burning house that night, she would never have seen the dawn of another day.

Before the fire had time to spread beyond the kitchen and Mrs. Crawford's room, help had arrived, and the maids were roused and taken to a place of safety.

When Mrs. Farraday came back she received nearly as great a shock as if she too had been in that threatened room the night before. She loved the gentle, kindly Mrs. Crawford as she loved no other living woman. Her first impulse was to fall on her knees and give thanks that her life had been spared. She kissed and embraced the invalid, and vowed that not to see all the relatives in the world would she ever leave her dear friend alone again.

"Every one is too good to me," said Mrs. Crawford, kissing the other woman, with tears in her eyes; "and, for all we know to the contrary, the terror of last night may have been designed by Heaven for my good only."

"Your good only! How could such an awful fright and such awful suffering have been only for your good? You are not one who needs to be made pious by terror. You are a saint!"

"Hush! Do not say such a foolish thing, Mrs. Farraday. I am nothing of the kind. I am only weak clay. But I was not speaking of spiritual benefits, but of bodily."

"Bodily benefits! Why, I wonder you did not die. If I had gone through what you suffered last night I do believe I should lose the use of my reason."

"And, owing to the fright I got last night, I have recovered the use of my limbs. Look!"

And she rose and walked across the room.

"Merciful Heavens!" cried the other. "This is indeed a miracle!"

The house in which the fire had occurred was Mrs. Crawford's own property, so she did not leave it, but had the requisite repairs done while continuing to occupy it. The widow now no longer required a room on the first floor. She was able to go up and down stairs. She could not walk so fast or so far as before the day her husband was carried in dead, but for all the purposes of her household she was as efficient as ever. The very fact that she was obliged to walk more slowly than other women added a new gentleness, a new charm to her graciousness. Her gratitude for deliverance from the fire and the thraldom of her wearying disease added a fresh softness to her smile and manner. It seemed as though youth had been restored to her. The whole world was beautiful to her, because it had been given back to her after she had made up her mind she should see it no more. All the people she met were her friends; for had not one of them snatched her from death, and restored her to the holy brotherhood of mankind?

And what more natural than that among all the brotherhood of mankind she should look with most favour and gratitude on the man who had risked his life for hers, and restored her again to intimacies with the sunshine and the birds and the flowers?

That surely was enough for one man to do for any mortal.

But this man had done more for her. He had performed a miracle, wrought a charm. Doctors might say it was the shock which had cured her. All she knew was that when she lay there in the throes of death she had been helpless, that she had been helpless for years; that he came and snatched her from the choking deadly vapour, and that when she awoke to consciousness she was healed.

She had no more thought of love or marriage then than she had of wearing the Queen of England's crown.

But William Goddard had thoughts of marriage, and although he fancied he managed very skilfully to hide his designs, they were plain enough to Mrs. Farraday long before he did more than offer what might pass for considerate courtesies to Mrs. Crawford.

It was not without pain that Mrs. Crawford found she had no longer any need of Mrs. Farraday. But the pain was more than compensated for by the invigorating knowledge that she who had been a helpless invalid was now able to look after her own house. It is doubtful if she would ever have been able to suggest the idea of her companion's leaving. But the other woman began by seeing that she was not wanted, and ended by feeling that she was in the way. Accordingly, she anticipated what she perceived to be inevitable, and dismissed herself. She was sincerely attached to the amiable woman with whom she had lived so long, and whom no one could know well without loving dearly. But she felt it would be an injustice for her to tarry longer; and besides, she had duties of her own to look after in Rochester, for her brother living there had just lost his wife, and had asked her to come to him and keep house for him and look after his little children.

"If ever you have any need of me, you know where to send; and although I suppose I must consider myself as belonging to my brother, I will come to you for all the time I can. I hope and trust and pray that your health may never make you want any one in the house such as I have been. Who knows but you may soon find a more suitable companion than I could ever make."

The other blushed like a girl, and said:

"You are very, very kind, and you must come to see me often. Rochester is not so far away."

"No, not so far. I will come, you may be sure."

They embraced and kissed and wept; and so these two good women parted with mutual love and respect.

By this time William Goddard's attentions had become unmistakable. Mrs. Crawford could not deny that something was going on between her and her hero, her rescuer, the quiet-mannered, low-voiced, kind-hearted man who lived next door.

Mrs. Crawford was as simple as a child. She had not married her first husband for love. She married him because he had asked her and had treated her with respectful admiration and with a kind of rough gallantry, and, above all, because her father had told her that if she did marry Thomas Crawford it would relieve him of dire distress and put him on the high road to fortune. But, alas! for him, although he was somewhat relieved by Crawford on his marriage with Ellen, he never touched fortune. There was nothing like buying the girl on Crawford's side or compulsion on the father's. The girl was heart-whole and fancy-free, and would have laid down her life for her father.

She had never, in the romantic sense of the phrase, loved her husband; but from the day she was married until he died he was the first of all men in her consideration and esteem. She did her duty by him to the utmost of her power without having any irksome feeling of duty. He was a good, kind, indulgent husband-a man who, although hard in business, was amiable and good-natured at home, and who had aroused her enthusiastic gratitude, not by what he gave her, but by the services he had willingly rendered her father.

We read little of such lives in books. No doubt the beauty and sacredness that inhabit them make writers loth to invade their holy peace.

CHAPTER XV.
HOW WILLIAM GODDARD CHANGED HIS NAME

This gentle woman, who had long since left youth behind her, was experiencing for the first time the influence of romantic love. She was in her forty-seventh year, a widow who had been a faithful and devoted wife, and yet her heart was the heart of a girl. The age of passion was passed. The fact that up to the time of her marriage she had had no sweetheart, had never once found her heart dwelling on any young man of her acquaintance, may prove that she was never capable of the passion of love. There was at present no passion in her soul. But the overpowering and self-annihilating sentiment of love filled her now, and for the first time in her life she felt that she lived.

With her, as in all true love worthy of the name, she wished to get nothing; the desire, the insatiable desire, to give was paramount, with no rival feeling near its throne. There was no coquetry of concealment in her words or manner. When this man asked her to be his wife she took him tenderly by the hand and placed before him all the reasons why she was not worthy of him.

She was, she told him, older than he by many years. She was a widow. She had suffered long ill-health, was not now quite recovered, and had been cautioned by the doctors that her extraordinary respite from helplessness might be ended any moment. She could never hope to be an active woman again. She could not go about with him as his wife should. He was a young man. A man of five-and-thirty was young enough to marry a girl thirty years younger than she was. He had told her he had found a wonderful plant in South America, a plant which would yield a fibre of inestimable value, a fibre that one day might be expected to supersede cotton and wool. He had told her that as soon as he had secured his patent and got up a company he should be one of the richest men in England, in the world. Why should he, whose star was rising, link himself to her, whose star was sinking fast, who could not hope to live very long, and who must not expect that even the short span allowed to her would be unbroken by a return of infirmity and helplessness? If he wanted money to carry out his great scheme, if he wanted not to share the harvest of his discovery with strangers, she was not without means, and every penny she could command was most heartily and humbly at his service.

He listened to her without any show of impatience, without a single interruption. When she had done he went on as though she had said nothing.

"I have everything on earth I want but one, and that one is more important to my happiness than all the rest put together. I want you for my wife. Will you marry me, Nellie?"

She smiled, and gazed at him out of eyes that told him he was unspeakably dear to her. "If you will have me you may," she said, and smiled again. Her husband had never in all their joint lives called her anything but Ellen. It touched her tender and confiding heart to be, as it were, drawn by that dear and familiar form of her name into the heart and nature of this man.

"I must and will," he said, and kissed her.

"If you care for me," she said, taking one of his hands in both her own, "I am yours to take by reason of my love for you, and by reason of your having restored my life when I had given it up. When I gave it up it was no longer mine. It became yours when you gave it back to me. What is left of it is yours, and everything else I have. Even my very name must be yours if you claim me."

"I do claim you, and no power on earth shall take you from me."

"Or you from me?"

"Or me from you, I swear."

He kissed her again. That was the betrothal.

There was nothing violent in the scene. Except for the two kisses and the beautiful light in the eyes of the woman and the clasping hands, any one seeing it and hearing nothing would have had no reason to suspect that it was a love scene. He was calm, firm, persistent, grave. He did not smile once. He indulged in no heroics, no extravagances, no transports. She admired him all the more for this. Anything of the kind would have been out of place, shocking. She was no young girl, to be won by rhapsodies or carried away by transports. She knew that although her youth had left her all her good looks were not yet gone. But he never said a word about her beauty. He was too sensible, and too noble, and too chivalrous, she told herself, to think she, a woman of forty-seven and in weak health, could be pleased by flippant flattery.

They sat hand in hand for a while, she in a dream of contented happiness. To her this was not the aftermath of love gathered off an autumn land; it was the first growth, which had never come above the soil until now, because no sun had shone on the field before.

There came no let or hindrance in the course of William Goddard's wooing. He had only been a few months in Richmond, but during that time his conduct there had been above reproach. At first, it is true, he had not been a regular attendant at church on Sunday. He had gone now and then, but not every Sabbath. From the beginning of his love-making he never missed the forenoon, and often attended the evening, services. He kept much to himself, and made no friends. He was a strict teetotaler, and frequented no such profitless places as clubs or billiard-rooms. When people heard of the engagement between Mrs. Crawford and William Goddard they said she was a lucky woman, and that her second husband would be even better, if such a thing were possible, than her first. If there had been in the whole town a rumour to his disadvantage it would have swelled into a howl, for those who knew the gentle widow felt a personal interest in her, a love for her, as though she had been a mother or sister.

When Mrs. Farraday went finally to take the head of her brother's (Edward Chatterton's) house at Rochester she naturally told him all the news of Richmond, of the fire, the rescue, the love-making, the engagement or understanding between the widow and the heroic next-door lodger. She told him everything she knew, and minutely described the two people and the two houses.

Her brother seemed interested. He was a florid, well conditioned, good-humoured, shrewd man of fifty, not averse from gossip in the evening when he sat in front of his own fire, with his legs stretched out before him, smoking his pipe.

"What is known of this man? You say he has been only a few months in Richmond?"

"That is all. I believe he has spent most of his life in South America. For a while he was in a gold mine, and he was for a while a farmer, I think."

"And what brought him back to England? South America is a fine place-that is, parts of it-if you are any good and have an opening. What did he come back to England for? Has he made his fortune?"

"I don't think he has made his fortune. He is not an old man, not even middle-aged. He is almost young-not more than thirty-five or so."

"Then why did he come back, and what is he losing months of his time in England for-at his time of life, too, when he ought to be working his hardest?"

"I don't know exactly. I think he has found some plant in the llanos out of which he can make cloth, and has come over about starting a company and taking out a patent. He says the plant is more valuable than flax or wool or cotton."

"Or all together?"

"Yes, I think he said that, but I am not sure. I haven't a good memory for this sort of thing."

"Kitty?"

"Well?"

"I have a fixed idea that every man who wants to take out a patent and start a company, and is months about the job, is either a born idiot or a consummate rogue. I have a very poor opinion of this Mr. Crawford Number Two."

"Good gracious, John! aren't you very hard on a man you never saw?"

He nodded his head gravely at the fire, but took no other notice of her question. He puffed at his pipe a minute in silence, blowing the smoke straight out in front of him, as if in pursuit of some design. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth with one hand, waved away the banks of smoke lying before him with the other, and turning round to her, said:

"And, Kitty, I should not be at all surprised to find that he set fire to the house and then rescued the fool of a woman for reasons best known to himself."

Mrs. Farraday started to her feet aghast.

"Do you know, John, that you are saying the most awful things a man could say? You horrify me!"

"I mean," he went on, looking once more lazily into the fire, "that I think he set fire to the house and rescued the woman in order that he might have a claim upon her, and that he doesn't care a – for her, and that all he wants, or ever thought of, is her money."

"John, you do not know the man, and it is shameful of you to say such things, and you could be put in prison for saying them; and then to think of your calling the dearest creature alive 'that fool of a woman,' is worse than any libel you could speak of think of!"

The tears were in Mrs. Farraday's eyes, and she could hardly command her voice.

"Think over the matter. He knows this fool of a woman is a helpless invalid. He knows from you that you are coming here. He learns from you that there are two strange servants who sleep in the top of the house; and on the very night you are away, and the first night for years this elderly woman is sleeping alone, the house next door to which he lives takes fire; the kitchen over which she sleeps takes fire, and there is a great smell of paraffin oil in the place, although no one knew of any being in the house. And lo and behold you! when the woman is just dead, he comes, bursts in her window, and rescues her, and makes love to this well-off invalid woman-he who has come back to England at the age of thirty-five, without a fortune, and with a cock-and-bull story about a patent and a fibre."

"Good-night. I will listen to no more such awful talk."

"Good-night, Kitty; yet, take my word for it, he set fire to that house."

But then, as Mrs. Farraday had remarked, her brother did not know the man; nor, moreover, did he live at Richmond.

No one suggested that there was any reason for delaying the marriage between Goddard and the widow. He had not yet secured his patent, and therefore could not start his company. Now and then he had to go up to London for a day or two to see the artificers who were carrying out his designs for the machines to be employed in converting his plant into cloth. When he returned to Singleton Terrace after these brief absences, he made up for lost time by increased tenderness and devotion.

He never came back empty-handed, and he never brought any splendid present; always a book, or a bouquet, or a basket of fruit-nothing more. He had bought her a ring, of course; but even that was inexpensive and simple-three small diamonds in a plain gold band.

"I shall be poor, Nellie, until I am rich; and I shall not be rich in money until my patent and my company are all right."

"But when you get your patent and your company, you will not want to go away again to America?" she asked anxiously. "I do not think I could face so long a voyage."