Kitabı oku: «Johnny Ludlow, Third Series», sayfa 18

One evening, Tod being out and Mrs. Todhetley in the nursery, I was alone with the Squire in the twilight. The great harvest moon was rising behind the trees; and the Squire, talking of some parish grievance that he had heard of from old Jones the constable, let it rise: while I was wishing he would call for lights that I might get on with “The Old English Baron,” which I was reading for about the seventeenth time.

“And you see, Johnny, if Jones had been firm, as I told him this afternoon, and taken the fellow up, instead of letting him slope off and be lost, the poachers– Who’s this coming in, lad?”

The Squire had caught sight of some one turning to the door from the covered path. I saw the fag-end of a petticoat.

“I think it must be Mrs. Scott, sir. The mother said she had promised to come over one of these first evenings.”

“Ay,” said the Squire. “Open the door for her, Johnny.”

I had the front-door open in a twinkling, and saw a lady with a travelling-cloak on her arm. But she bore no resemblance to Mrs. Scott.

“Is Mr. Todhetley at home?”

The soft voice gave me a thrill and a shock, though years had elapsed since I heard it. A confused doubt came rushing over me; a perplexing question well-nigh passed my lips: “Is it a living woman or a dead one?” For there, before me, stood Nash Caromel’s dead wife, Charlotte the First.

CHARLOTTE AND CHARLOTTE

I

People are apt to say, when telling of a surprise, that a feather would have knocked them down. I nearly fell without the feather and without the touch. To see a dead woman standing straight up before me, and to hear her say “How are you, and is the Squire at home?” might have upset the balance of a giant.

But I could not be mistaken. There, waiting at the front-door to come in, her face within an inch of mine, was Nash Caromel’s first wife, Charlotte Tinkle; who for some two years now had been looked upon as dead and buried over in California.

“Is Mr. Todhetley at home!” she repeated. “And can I see him?”

“Yes,” I answered, coming partially out of my bewilderment. “Do you mind staying here just a minute, while I tell him?”

For, to hand in a dead woman, might take him aback, as it had taken me. The pater stood bolt upright, waiting for Mrs. Scott (as he had supposed it to be) to enter.

“It is not Mrs. Scott,” I whispered, shutting the door and going close up to him. “It—it is some one else. I hardly like to tell you, sir; she may give you a fright.”

“Why, what does the lad mean?—what are you making a mystery of now, Johnny?” cried he, staring at me. “Give me a fright! I should like to see any woman give me that. Is it Mrs. Scott, or is it not?”

“It is some one we thought dead, sir.”

“Now, Johnny, don’t be a muff. Somebody you thought dead! What on earth’s come to you, lad? Speak out!”

“It is Nash Caromel’s first wife, sir: Charlotte Tinkle.”

The pater gazed at me as a man bereft of reason. I don’t believe he knew whether he stood on his head or his heels. “Charlotte Tinkle!” he exclaimed, backing against the curtain. “What, come to life, Johnny?”

“Yes, sir, and she wants to see you. Perhaps she has never been dead.”

“Bless my heart and mind! Bring her in.”

The first thing Charlotte the First did when she came in and the Squire clasped her by her two hands, was to burst into a fit of sobbing. Some wine stood on the sideboard; the Squire poured her out a glass, and she untied the strings of her bonnet as she sat down.

“If I might take it off for a minute?” she said. “I have had it on all the way from Liverpool.”

“Do so, my dear. Goodness me! I think I must be in a dream. And so you are not dead!”

“Yes, I knew it was what you must have all been thinking,” she answered, stifling her sobs. “Poor Nash!—what a dreadful thing it is! I cannot imagine how the misconception can have arisen.”

“What misconception?” asked the pater, whose wits, once gone a wool-gathering, rarely came back in a hurry.

“That I had died.”

“Why, that friend of yours with whom you were staying—Bunn—Munn—which was it, Johnny?—wrote to tell your husband so.”

Mrs. Nash Caromel, sitting there in the twilight, her brown hair as smooth as ever and her eyes as meek, looked at the Squire in surprise.

“Oh no, that could not have been; Mr. Munn would not be likely to write anything of the sort. Impossible.”

“But, my dear lady, I read the letter. Your husband brought it to me as soon as it reached him. You remained at San Francisco, very ill after Nash’s departure, and you got no better, and died at last of low fever.”

She shook her head. “I was very poorly indeed when Nash left, but I grew better shortly. I had no low fever, and I certainly did not die.”

“Then why did Munn write it?”

“He did not write it. He could not have written it. I am quite certain of that. He and his wife are my very good and dear friends, and most estimable people.”

“The letter certainly came to your husband,” persisted the Squire. “I read it with my own eyes. It was dated San Francisco, and signed Francis Munn.”

“Then it was a forgery. But why any one should have written it, or troubled themselves about me and my husband at all, I cannot imagine.”

“And then, Nash—Nash– Good gracious, what a complication!” cried the Squire, breaking off what he meant to say, as the thought of Charlotte Nave crossed his mind.

“I know,” she quietly put in: “Nash has married again.”

It was a complication, and no mistake, all things considered. The Squire rubbed up his hair and deliberated, and then bethought himself that it might be as well to keep the servants out of the room. So I went to tell old Thomas that the master was particularly engaged with a friend, and no one was to come in unless rung for. Then I ran upstairs to whisper the news to the mother—and it pretty nearly sent her into a fit of hysterics.

Charlotte Caromel was entering on her history to the Squire when I got back. “Yes,” she said, “I and my husband went to California, having found little luck in America. Nash made one or two ventures there also, but nothing seemed to succeed; not as well even as it did in America, and he resolved to go back there, and try at something or other again. He sailed for New York, leaving me in San Francisco with Francis Munn and his wife; for I had been ill, and was not strong enough for the tedious voyage. The Munns kept a dry-goods store at San Francisco, and–”

“A dry-goods store!” interrupted the Squire.

“Yes. You cannot afford to be fastidious over there; and to be in trade is looked upon as an honour, rather than the contrary. Francis Munn was the youngest son of a country gentleman in England; he went to California to make his fortune at anything that might turn up; and it ended in his marrying and keeping a store. They made plenty of money, and were very kind to me and Nash. Well, Nash started for New York, leaving me with them, and he wrote to me soon after his arrival there. Things were looking gloomy in the States, he said, and he felt inclined to take a run over to England, and ask his brother Miles to help him with some money. I wrote back a letter in duplicate, addressing one to the agents’ in New York, the other to Caromel’s Farm—not knowing, you perceive, in which place he might be. No answer reached me—but people think little of the safety of letters out there, so many seem to miscarry. We fancied Nash might be coming back to San Francisco and did not trouble himself to write: like me, he is not much of a scribe. But the months went on, and he did not come; he neither came nor wrote.”

“What did you think hindered him?”

“We did not know what to think—except, as I say, that the letters had miscarried. One day Mr. Munn brought in a file of English newspapers for me and his wife to read: and in one of them I saw an announcement that puzzled me greatly—the marriage of one Nash Caromel, of Caromel’s Farm, to Charlotte Nave. Just at first it startled me; I own that; but I felt so sure it could not be my Nash, my husband, that I remained only puzzled to know what Nash Caromel it could be.”

“There is only one Nash Caromel,” growled the Squire, half inclined to tell her she was a simpleton—taking things in this equable way.

“I only knew of him; but I thought he must have some relative, a cousin perhaps, of the same name, of whom I had not heard. However,” continued Charlotte, “I wrote then to Caromel’s Farm, telling Nash what we had read, and asking him what it meant, and where he was. But that letter shared the fate of the former one, and obtained no reply. In the course of time we saw another announcement—The wife of Nash Caromel of a son. Still I did not believe it could be my Nash, but I could see that Mr. Munn did believe it was. At least he thought there was something strange about it all, especially our not hearing from Nash: and at length I determined to come home and see about it.”

“You must have been a long time coming,” remarked the Squire. “The child is fifteen months old.”

“But you must remember that often we did not get news until six months after its date. And I chose a most unfortunate route—overland from California to New York.”

“What on earth– Why, people are sometimes a twelvemonth or so doing that!” cried the Squire. “There are rocky mountains to scale, as I’ve heard and read, and Red Indians to encounter, and all sorts of horrors. Those who undertake it travel in bands, do they not? and are called pilgrims, and some of them don’t get to the end of the journey alive.”

“True,” she sighed. “I would never have attempted it had I known what it would be: but I did so dread the sea. Several of us were laid up midway, and had to be left behind at a small settlement: one or two died. It was a long, long time, and only after surmounting great discomforts and difficulties, we reached New York.”

“Well?” said the Squire. It must be remembered that they were speaking of days now gone by, when the journey was just what she described it.

“I could hear nothing of my husband in New York,” she resumed, “except that Abraham Whitter believed him to be at home here. I took the steamer for Liverpool, landed at dawn this morning, and came on by rail. And I find it is my husband who is married. And what am I to do?”

She melted away into tears again. The Squire told her that she must present herself at the farm; she was its legal mistress, and Nash Caromel’s true wife. But she shook her head at this: she wouldn’t bring any such trouble upon Nash for the world, as to show him suddenly that she was living. What he had done he must have done unwittingly, she said, believing her to be dead, and he ought not to suffer for it more than could be helped. Which was a lenient way of reasoning that put the Squire’s temper up.

“He deserves no quarter, ma’am, and I will not give it him if you do. Within a week of the time he heard of your death he went and took that Charlotte Nave. Though I expect it was she who took him—brazen hussy! And I am glad you have come to put her out!”

But, nothing would induce Charlotte the First to assume this view, or to admit that blame could attach to Nash. Once he had lost her by death, he had a right to marry again, she contended. As to the haste—well, she had been dead (as he supposed) a great many months when he heard of it, and that should be considered. The Squire exploded, and walked about the room, and rubbed his hair the wrong way, and thought her no better than an imbecile.

Mrs. Todhetley came in, and there was a little scene. Charlotte declined our offer of a bed and refreshment, saying she would like to go to her mother’s for the night: she felt that she should be received gladly, though they had parted in anger and had held no communication with one another since.

Gladly? ay, joyfully. Little doubt of that. So the Squire put on his hat, and she her bonnet, and away they started, and I with them.

We took the lonely path across the fields: her appearance might have raised a stir in the highway. Charlotte was but little altered, and would have been recognized at once. And I have no space to tell of the scene at Mrs. Tinkle’s, which was as good as a play, or of the way they rushed into one another’s arms.

“Johnny, there’s something on my mind,” said the Squire in a low tone as we were going back towards home: and he was looking grave and silent as a judge. “Do you remember those two foreign letters we chanced to see of Nash Caromel’s, with the odd handwriting, all quavers and tails?”

“Yes, I do, sir. They were ship letters.”

“Well, lad, a very ugly suspicion has come into my head, and I can’t drive it away. I believe those two letters were from Charlotte—the two she speaks of—I believe the handwriting which puzzled me was hers. Now, if so, Nash went to the altar with that other Charlotte, knowing this one was alive: for the first letter came the day before the marriage.”

I did not answer. But I remembered what I had overheard Nave the lawyer say to Nash Caromel: “You must marry her: where there’s a will there’s a way”—or words to that effect. Had Nave concocted the letters which pretended to tell of Mrs. Nash Caromel’s death, and got them posted to Nash from New York?

With the morning, the Squire was at Caromel’s Farm. The old-fashioned low house, the sun shining on its quaint windows, looked still and quiet as he walked up to the front-door across the grass-plat, in the middle of which grew a fine mulberry-tree. The news of Charlotte’s return, as he was soon to find, had travelled to it already; had spread to the village. For she had been recognized the night before on her arrival; and her boxes, left in charge of a porter, bore her full name, Mrs. Nash Caromel.

Nash stood in that little library of his in a state of agitation not to be described; he as good as confessed, when the Squire tackled him, that he had known his wife might have been alive, and that it was all Nave’s doings. At least he suspected that the letter, telling of her death, might be a forgery.

“Anyway, you had a letter from her the day before you married, so you must have known it by that,” cried the Squire; who had so much to do always with the Caromel family that he deemed it his duty to interfere. “What on earth could have possessed you?”

“I—was driven into a corner,” gasped Nash.

“I’d be driven into fifty corners before I’d marry two wives,” retorted the Squire. “And now, sir, what do you mean to do?”

“I can’t tell,” answered Nash.

“A pretty kettle of fish this is! What do you suppose your father would have said to it?”

“I’m sure I can’t tell,” repeated Nash helplessly, biting his lips to get some life into them.

“And what’s the matter with your hands that they are so hot and white?”

Nash glanced at his hands, and hid them away in his pockets. He looked like a man consumed by inward fever.

“I have not been over well for some time past,” said he.

“No wonder—with the consciousness of this discovery hanging over your head! It might have sent some men into their graves.”

Nash drummed upon the window pane. What in the world to do, what to say, evidently he knew not.

“You must put away this Jez—this lady,” went on the Squire. “It was she who bewitched you; ay, and set herself out to do it, as all the parish saw. Let her go back to her father: you might make some provision for her: and instal your wife here in her proper place. Poor thing! she is so meek and patient! She won’t hear a word said against you; thinks you are a saint. I think you a scoundrel, Nash: and I tell you so to your face.”

The door had slowly opened; somebody, who had been outside, listening, put in her head. A very pretty head, and that’s the truth, surmounting a fashionable morning costume of rose-coloured muslin, all flounces and furbelows. It was Charlotte the Second. The Squire had called her a brazen hussy behind her back; he had much ado this morning not to call her so to her face.

“What’s that I hear you saying to my husband, Mr. Todhetley—that he should discard me and admit that creature here! How dare you bring your pernicious counsels into this house?”

“Why, bless my heart, he is her husband, madam; he is not yours. You’d not stay here yourself, surely!”

“This is my home, and he is my husband, and my child is his heir; and that woman may go back over the seas whence she came. Is it not so, Nash? Tell him.”

She put her hand on Nash’s shoulder, and he tried to get out something or other in obedience to her. He was as much under her finger and thumb as Punch in the street is under the showman’s. The Squire went into a purple heat.

“You married him by craft, madam—as I believe from my very soul: you married him, knowing, you and your father also, that his wife was alive. He knew it, too. The motive must have been one of urgency, I should say, but I’ve nothing to do with that–”

“Nor with any other business of ours,” she answered with a brazen face.

“This business is mine, and all Church Dykely’s,” flashed the Squire. “It is public property. And now, I ask you both, what you mean to do in this dilemma you have brought upon yourselves? His wife is waiting to come in, and you cannot keep her out.”

“She shall never come in; I tell you that,” flashed Charlotte the Second. “She sent word to him that she was dead, and she must abide by it; from that time she was dead to him, dead for ever. Mr. Caromel married me equally in the eyes of the world: and here I shall stay with him, his true and lawful wife.”

The Squire rubbed his face; the torrent of words and the heat made it glisten.

“Stay here, would you, madam! What luck do you suppose would come of that?”

“Luck! I have quite as much luck as I require. Nash, why do you not request this—this gentleman to leave us?”

“Why, he dare not keep you here,” cried the Squire, passing over the last compliment. “He would be prosecuted for—you know what.”

“Let him be prosecuted! Let the wicked woman do her worst. Let her bring an action, and we’ll defend it. I have more right to him than she has. Mr. Caromel, do you wish to keep up this interview until night?”

“Perhaps you had better go now, Squire,” put in the man pleadingly. “I—I will consult Nave, and see what’s to be done. She may like to go back to California, to the Munns; the climate suited her: and—and an income might be arranged.”

This put the finishing stroke to the Squire’s temper. He flung out of the room with a few unorthodox words, and came home in a tantrum.

We had had times of commotion at Church Dykely before, but this affair capped all. The one Mrs. Nash Caromel waiting to go into her house, and the other Mrs. Nash Caromel refusing to go out of it to make room for her. The Squire was right when saying it was public property: the public made it theirs. Tongues pitched into Nash Caromel in the fields and in the road: but some few of us pitied him, thinking what on earth we could do ourselves in a like position. While old Jones the constable stalked briskly about, expecting to get a warrant for taking up the master of Caromel’s Farm.

But the great drawback to instituting legal proceedings lay with Mrs. Nash Caromel the First. She declined to prosecute. Her husband might refuse to receive her; might hold himself aloof from her; might keep his second wife by his side; but she would never hurt a hair of his head. Heaven might bring things round in its own good time, she said; meanwhile she would submit—and bear.

And she held to this, driving indignant men distracted. They argued, they persuaded, they remonstrated; it was said that one or two strong-minded ones swore. All the same. She stayed on at her mother’s, and would neither injure her husband herself, nor let her family injure him. Henry Tinkle, her brother, chanced to be from home (as he was when she had run away to be married), or he might have acted in spite of her. And, when this state of things had continued for two or three weeks, the world began to call it a “crying scandal.” As to Nash Caromel, he did not show his face abroad.

“Not a day longer shall the fellow retain my money,” said the pater, speaking of the twelve hundred pounds he had lent to Nash: and in fact the term it had been lent for was already up. But it is easier to make such a threat than to enforce it; and it is not everybody who can extract twelve hundred pounds at will from uncertain coffers. Any way the Squire found he could not. He wrote to Nash, demanding its return; and he wrote to Nave.

Nash did not answer him at all. Nave’s clerk sent a semi-insolent letter, saying Mr. Caromel should be communicated with when occasion offered. The Squire wrote in a rage to his lawyer at Worcester, bidding him enforce the repayment.

“You two lads can take the letter to the post,” said he.

But we had not got many yards from home when we heard the Squire coming after us. We all walked into Church Dykely together; and close to the post-office, which was at Dame Chad’s shop, we met Duffham. Of course the Squire, who could not keep anything in had he been bribed to do it, told Duffham what steps he was about to take.

“Going to enforce payment,” nodded Duffham. “The man deserves no quarter. But he is ill.”

“Serve him right. What’s the matter with him?”

“Nervous fever. Has fretted or frightened himself into it. Report says that he is very ill indeed.”

“Don’t you attend him?”

“Not I. I did not please madam at the time the boy was born—would not give in to some of her whims and fancies. They have called in that new doctor who has settled in the next parish, young Bluck.”

“Why, he is no better than an apothecary’s boy, that young Bluck! Caromel can’t be very ill, if they have him.”

“So ill, that, as I have just heard, he is in great danger—likely to die,” replied Duffham, tapping his cane against the ledge of Dame Chad’s window. “Bluck’s young, but he is clever.”

“Bless my heart! Likely to die! What, Nash Caromel! Here, you lads, if that’s it, I won’t annoy him just now about the money, so don’t post the letter.”

“It is posted,” said Tod. “I have just put it in.”

“Go in and explain to Dame Chad, and get it out again. Or, stay; the letter can go, and I’ll write and say it’s not to be acted on until he is well again. Nervous fever! I’m afraid his conscience has been pricking him.”

“I hope it has,” said Duffham.