Delphi collected works o.., p.264
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 264
Nevertheless, she bade Douglas a hasty farewell, and telling the coachman to turn, drove home, all tremulous. When she reached the house she saw the other one — the man in the pea-jacket — obviously engaged in watching for her return. It was too, too horrible — too bad to believe; yet she could hardly doubt it any longer now. The men must have been set there on purpose to spy upon her.
She went up to her own room, unattended, and opened the door softly. There, Elizabeth Woodward was looking out of the window, with her eyes so intently fixed on that hateful man below that she never even heard her mistress enter. Linda walked on tip-toe across the floor, and stood just behind the girl, as she strained her sight to see the fellow disappear round the far corner. Elizabeth started, and gave a little scream. Her eyes were full of tears. Her face had a conscious look. Linda turned to her piteously.
‘My child, my child,’ she cried, ‘who are these men? Tell me — do tell me! You know them! You know them!’
Elizabeth sank down on a chair, buried her face in her hands, and began at once to cry bitterly.
‘I don’t know them,’ she answered through her sobs; ‘but I know who they are. I’ve seen them before. I can’t keep the truth from you any longer, dear Duchess. They’re private detectives.’
‘So I thought,’ Linda said slowly, with a new and creeping sense of personal degradation. ‘Oh, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, it’s very, very cruel of him!’
The girl rose, and flung her arms wildly round the Duchess’s neck.
‘Oh, you’re too, too good!’ she cried, in a passionate outburst of sobs. ‘You poor dear, you poor dear! What shall I ever do? You make me so ashamed of myself!’
Another hateful doubt rose up all unbidden in Linda’s breast. Suspicion makes one so suspicious in return. What could the girl mean? ‘Oh, Elizabeth,’ she exclaimed, clapping her hand to her forehead in her agony of suspense, ‘don’t tell me that! Don’t say you, too, are against me! Don’t say he put you here to spy upon me and keep watch over me!’
The girl started back in another sudden burst of fierce emotion. ‘Oh no; not that!’ she cried, trembling like an aspen leaf. ‘Never that, thank Heaven! Not treacherous, not treacherous! Dear Duchess, dear lady, don’t ever believe that about me. I’m bad enough already, I know — oh, so bad, so wicked! — but I wouldn’t do that; no, not for the universe. I wouldn’t hurt you or spy upon you, not if it was to save my life. Why, I love you, Duchess! Nobody ever spoke kindly to me or treated me yet as you’ve always treated me. I’ve got a good side to my nature still, bad as I am, thank God! and you’ve played upon that good side as nobody ever played upon it in my life till now. I wouldn’t do a thing to harm you, not for all the world. Oh, my lady, my lady, I love you, I love you!’ And, to Linda’s immense surprise, the poor sobbing creature flung herself wildly at her feet, and laid her head in her lap, laughing and crying long and violently.
Before Linda had time to think what this could all mean, however, a strange thrill ran visibly through her maid’s body. Her head fell sideways, and her face grew deadly white and bloodless. Linda touched her hands. They were cold as a stone. In a moment the truth dawned upon her: Elizabeth had fainted. She was desperately ill. This was no hysterical bout, no passing ailment. In an emergency Linda always did the right thing instinctively. She lifted her maid up in those strong, round arms of hers, laid her gently on the bed as one might lay a sick child, put a little eau-de-Cologne on her cheeks and forehead, fanned her with a Japanese fan, snatched at random from the mantelpiece, and rang the bell loudly for brandy and the doctor.
When the doctor came, he pronounced it at once far more than a mere fainting fit. The girl had gone on battling against disease too long. She was seriously, not to say dangerously, ill. In fact, if her grace wasn’t afraid to hear it, this was typhoid fever.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
MISS WOODWARD’S SECRET.
For three or four weeks Linda nursed her maid with unceasing care through that terrible attack as she would have nursed a sister. Night and day she watched tenderly by the girl’s bedside, gave her medicine and food, bathed her with her own hands, and soothed and petted her as one pets a frightened child, in her paroxysms of delirium.
Not that Elizabeth Woodward herself permitted it. Time after time, looking up pale and tearful from her feverish pillow, she besought her mistress with earnest entreaty to leave her. She wasn’t worthy of being so much cared for, she cried; if only the Duchess knew all — and there she always broke off short, with a stifled sigh and a look of profound meaning. Whatever it might be, Linda was certain the girl had something on her mind; but the very crisis of a dangerous fever was not, she wisely concluded, the best moment in the world to investigate its nature.
While her maid was ill, too, Linda went out but very little. The servants, to be sure, in their self-despising way, were scandalized that her grace should shut herself up for whole days at a time just to nurse a young woman of their own class through a severe illness — a paid girl from the hospital would have done it quite as well — but Linda didn’t much mind their righteous indignation. To dowagers who called and expressed their disapproval of such levelling ways, she said quite frankly she was engaged in looking after her maid, to whom she had taken a great personal fancy; and she added that, not having herself been born a Duchess, she considered Elizabeth Woodward quite as human as anybody else in the whole circle of her acquaintance. The girl interested her, and she liked to take care of her. She had a professional nurse in from an institute as well, of course, to lighten the heavy night duty; but she herself tended the patient in person for the greater part of the day, and took turns, as well, in sitting up now and again with her when the fever was at its highest.
Among those who called once or twice during Bertie’s absence, to Linda’s great discomfiture, for more reasons than one, was Basil Maclaine. That eager young man couldn’t resist the chance of thus making the most of his acquaintance with a Duchess. His attentions put Linda in a most awkward predicament. On the one hand she could no longer conceal from herself the humiliating fact that she was being closely watched by her husband’s orders, and by two trained detectives; nor could she pretend to doubt, after what Douglas Harrison had told her, that Basil Maclaine himself was almost certainly the object of the Duke’s insane jealousy. On the other hand, her own self-respect made it absolutely impossible for her to hint to Basil, however indirectly, that he should discontinue his visits. She owed it to herself, she felt, under these painful circumstances, to behave to him exactly as she would behave to any other casual acquaintance, neither making much nor little of him, but receiving him when he came as she received all other incidental callers. Yet she knew all the time that each such visit was, no doubt, being carefully recorded in writing against her, and that Bertie, on his return from Norway, would probably put the very worst possible interpretation upon them.
It’s a terrible thing to be innocent, and yet to know yourself suspected. Nobody in such a case can ever act quite naturally. The very sense of innocence, coupled with the knowledge of the suspicions against one, gives rise to an awkward self-consciousness which looks like guilt in the eyes of others. Even the servants noticed that her grace was perturbed whenever Mr. Maclaine called; and, putting her obvious uneasiness side by side with the Duke’s last words on quitting the house, they made such mischief out of the coincidence as only upper class servants, with time hanging heavily on their hands in the servants’ hall, ever know how to make for innocent people.
Elizabeth Woodward’s illness was long and severe. At one time it seemed as if she would never get better. During those doubtful days, while she hovered between life and death, so the butler reported, a well-dressed man, giving the name of Jones, had called frequently at the door to inquire after Miss Woodward’s condition. He was a very respectable man, the butler said emphatically — in fact, quite the gentleman — and he seemed to take on a good deal about Miss Woodward’s illness, and, being so thin, might never get over it; which last remark, though grammatically referable to the very respectable man, was rightly interpreted by Linda as intended on the butler’s part for an expression of sympathy and respect towards the amiable patient. But when Linda told the sick girl of Mr. Jones’s polite inquiries, Elizabeth only buried her face in her hands deeper than ever in her remorse, and cried out energetically that as long as she lived she didn’t ever want to see anything more of that dreadful creature.
It was evident, then, that, whatever the mystery might be about Elizabeth Woodward, Mr. Jones must in some way be very closely connected with it. Linda, looking at the poor girl’s refined and lady-like face, drew at once her own natural conclusion. There are so many such tragedies in the world around us, and the unknown Mr. Jones, she thought to herself with a sigh, only differed from the heroes (or villains) of most of them in this, that at least he had the grace to come and inquire after the health of his victim.
And that, Linda supposed, was the simple meaning of Elizabeth Woodward’s many broken remarks about her own supposed unutterable wickedness. Such wickedness as hers Linda could easily forgive. The Duchess was not one of those good women who make of their own virtue a pedestal of self-righteousness from which to look down with scorn and contempt upon the slips of all their less fortunate sisters.
At last, after a long struggle, the patient began to mend. What made her convalescence slower and more difficult than usual, the doctor thought, was the severe mental trouble she seemed to be enduring. As far as Linda could judge, indeed, her maid was passing through a long-drawn agony of remorse and shame. More than once the poor girl started up in her bed and began to speak, as if she meant to unburden her heart of its load of grief in one wild outburst of spontaneous confession; and then her courage would break down again, and she shrank once more within herself, unconfessed, and sobbed herself faint with her suppressed emotion. Linda encouraged her, as much as she could, to lay bare her breast and tell all her secret, whatever it might be; but Elizabeth was too afraid or too profoundly ashamed of herself to venture on such an unburdening. Nothing her mistress could say would induce her to speak out the fulness of her heart. She lay on her bed and moaned, and deplored her own wickedness, for hours at a time, so that the doctor declared she would never get well till she had relieved her mind of the grievous load that was oppressing it.
In spite of the doctor, however, Elizabeth Woodward slowly mended. Day after day her strength returned, and she began to sit up, and to feel like herself again. At length, one morning as she lay on the couch, with the window open and the sunlight streaming in, Linda suggested gently that, as soon as she was able to move, they might run down together for a change of air to Hastings or Bournemouth.
The bare suggestion seemed to throw back the poor worn and wasted girl into a perfect paroxysm of delirious fever. ‘Oh no,’ she cried energetically, raising herself up on her elbows, ‘I could never do that, Duchess. I could never do that. I’ve been more than enough expense and anxiety already to you. I’m ashamed of how I’ve troubled you. I won’t go away. I’ll go back at once ... to my own people.’
‘To your own people!’ Linda echoed in mild surprise. ‘I didn’t know you had any! But why to your own people, dear? If you won’t let me send you to Bournemouth, why go away at all? Why not stop here where you are, and where we are all so anxious to nurse you well and make you happy?’
But the patient only shook her head very sadly, with intense determination, and repeated once more, in a dreamy tone:
‘I must go home at once ... to my own people.’
‘Where do your people live, then?’ Linda asked, with some curiosity. ‘In the country, I hope. Somewhere that you’d get nice pure fresh air and abundant sunshine.’
Elizabeth shook her head again sadly, and sighed.
‘Oh dear no!’ she answered with a very resigned air. ‘Here in London. Quite dark. Almost in the City.’
‘Then the change’ll do you no good, you know,’ Linda persisted warmly. ‘Much better go with me down to Bournemouth. All I want is to set you up afresh and see you well once more. A month at the seaside, Dr. Bellamy says, ‘ll do just wonders for you.’
‘Nothing’ll do wonders for me, except to lie quiet in the grave,’ the girl answered excitedly, with another of her passionate half-hysterical outbursts. ‘And, besides, they’ll want me back. I can’t stop much longer.’
‘And how long do you think you’ll be at home?’ Linda asked, gently soothing her hand. ‘Perhaps you are right, dear. Home nursing’s the very best nursing of all. Have you a mother alive? or a sister? I suppose you have. Well, but how is it, if they live in London, they’ve never called round — not once — to inquire about you?’
Elizabeth let her head fall back upon the pillow with a weary air, and clasped her forehead in her hands, like one distracted.
‘Oh no, dear Duchess!’ she cried, in an agony of shame. ‘Don’t talk like that! I’ve no mother — no sister. I’m alone in the world. All alone — all lonely. And when I leave this house once, I leave it, I hope to God, for good and always.’
She spoke with wild force, and her eyes looked ghastly.
‘Why, my child, what do you mean?’ Linda exclaimed, taken aback and chilled by such unexpected vehemence. It sounded so ungrateful. ‘After all our nursing and tending you’re not going to run away from me at once, the moment you’re well — and just as I’m beginning to like you and appreciate you.’
‘That’s just it,’ the girl cried, clinging hard to her mistress’s hand, and growing hotter and more excited in her talk each moment. ‘That’s just where it is, don’t you see. If you hadn’t been so kind to me, so good, so sweet; if you hadn’t used me as if I were made of flesh and blood like yourself; if you hadn’t treated me a great deal more like your sister than your maid; if you hadn’t sat up with me, and nursed me, and watched over me, and prayed for me, why, I’d have stopped on, of course, in this place, like all the rest of them, and let things come to their natural end, as usual. But you’ve been so good to me, so good to me — oh, you dear kind thing! — you’ve just made me hate myself. If they kill me for it, I must go; I can’t stop here any longer. They shall do their own dirty work themselves in future. No matter what comes of it, I shall go my own way: I shall leave this house the very first minute I’m well enough to stir out of my own bedroom.’
Linda shook her head helplessly.
‘I don’t understand you one bit,’ she cried, much bewildered, and confident the girl must be wandering in her mind from the fever. ‘You mustn’t talk any more now, my child — you’re far too weak. I can see you’re going off into pure nonsense.’
‘No, I’m not,’ the maid answered fervently, seizing her mistress by the neck, and drawing her down to her face to kiss her lips passionately. ‘I know what I’m saying, and you’ll know by-and-by. You’ll know and you’ll forgive me. You mustn’t mind about a month’s notice, or anything else like that. We can’t wait for that. I’m not fit to be here, and the moment I’m well enough to move I’ll leave you — I’ll leave you! But oh! Duchess, if ever I loved anybody in my life, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!’ And she clung to her neck as if she would grow there.
Linda smoothed her hair with her hand, and tried to compose her gently. She was almost sure now this was the merest after-effect of fever and delirium.
That evening, about eight o’clock, the butler reported to her grace, Mr. Jones called again, and asked anxiously after Woodward. He begged the butler to tell the young woman he had made kind inquiries. The butler did so, and Woodward received the message, as he afterwards remarked, ‘just a little bit flustered like.’ Mr. Jones was a very respectable-looking man indeed, the butler repeated — tall, thin, and gentlemanly. He had a slight mark on his right cheek, as if he’d been wounded or cut with something sharp; but otherwise, the butler observed once more, he was quite the gentleman.
Half an hour later, when Linda went up to see her maid after her sleep, she found, to her great surprise, the room was empty.
That was all. Nothing was gone from it, not even Elizabeth Woodward’s box; but her clothes had disappeared, and she herself with them. A sprawling pencilled note, in a shaky but very lady-like hand, was fastened on the pincushion:
‘Dear Duchess, — Good-bye. You have behaved like an angel to me. I could never stop another day in your house to wrong you further. You have made me feel as I never felt in my life before. Forgive me, forgive me!
‘Yours gratefully,
‘Elizabeth.’
The only explanation Linda could possibly make to herself of this strange mystery was that, in spite of her disclaimer, the delicate maid had been put there, like the detectives, by Bertie, to spy upon her.
CHAPTER XXXV.
THE DUKE DELIBERATES.
There’s nothing like solitude for a man with a wrong to brood over. In the society of his fellows the edge of his indignation may get worn and blunted by much rubbing against other ideas; but leave him alone in the wilderness, with his own thoughts, and he will feed his resentment undisturbed till it usurps, like some monstrous fungoid growth, the whole vacant field of his emotional nature. The Montgomeries had all something of the insane temperament in them; and the insane temperament, above all others, delights in such opportunities for nursing unrestrained its grief or its anger. It dotes on self-concentration. So six weeks in Norway, among the fiords and fells, gave the last of the house ample scope for the education of his jealousy.
The Duke had nothing to do, indeed, but to fish and to think about Linda. Fly-fishing allows a man plenty of time to think; and the Duke thought mostly (between casts) of that woman whom he had taken from her natural sphere in a Bloomsbury lodging-house to share the burden of an honour unto which she was not born, and for which, as his jaundiced eyes now told him, she was never fitted. He forgot, of course, when he talked to himself internally of the Bloomsbury lodging-house, that, as a matter of fact, he had taken his wife from the most brilliant and tasteful of New York salons, infinitely better decorated than the gloomy old halls of Powysland House, or Llanfyllin Castle, and that her money had enabled him, temporarily, to retrieve a position which before he married her had become all but hopeless. We do forget these unpleasant little distinctions when once we allow an overpowering passion to gain full mastery over us; and the Duke had quite enough of the insane temperament innate in his blood to be wholly swayed just then by that one hereditary passion of jealousy.
