St. Cuthbert's Tower by Florence Warden - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXVI.

NED MITCHELL, although he had let Meredith Brander off easily at the moment of the discovery of the body, had no intention of letting his sister’s murderer escape the just punishment of his crime. The discovery of the vicar’s ring inside the poor girl’s remains had not been altogether unexpected by Ned and by the doctor, whom he had taken into his confidence. He had had the wit to connect the vicar’s loss of his ring, which the girl must have stolen and secreted unnoticed by him in the course of their last fatal interview, with the strange threat Nellie Mitchell had uttered to Martha Lowndes. He had confided his suspicions to the doctor, who had thus been on the alert to prevent Meredith from touching the remains of the murdered girl before he himself had examined them.

After a few words of explanation to old Mr. Williams, and a little substantial advice to the two workmen who had dug out the skeleton, Ned marched off with Abel Squires in the direction of Rishton Vicarage. On the way they passed Vernon Brander, who wished to stop Ned. But the latter hurried on, and to all the entreaties he tried to utter, turned a deaf ear.

“If you’ve been fool enough to hold your tongue for ten years, and bear the blame of somebody else’s crime, that’s nothing to do with me. You may talk till you’re tired, but my sister’s murderer shall get what he deserves.”

And he walked on stubbornly with the tramp.

When they reached the Vicarage, and asked to see the vicar, they were shown into the drawing-room, and left waiting there for some minutes. When the door opened, it was Mrs. Brander, instead of her husband, who came in.

“What, has he run away already?” asked Ned, in a hard, jeering tone.

“No, my husband does not yet know you are here,” she answered, in a very sad voice. “I knew you would come, and so I told the servant to announce your arrival to me.”

“What’s the good of that?” asked Ned, roughly. “You’ve done no harm, and we’ve nothing to do with you, except that we’re going to set you free from a rascal.”

Abel Squires had withdrawn to the farthest window, and tried to hide himself behind the curtain. Rough fellow as he was, to hear a man speak in a bullying tone to that beautiful, dignified lady was too much for him.

Mrs. Brander had never in her life before looked so handsome as she looked now, standing erect before this coarse man, with a flush of deep humiliation in her cheeks, and passionate entreaty softening her proud eyes.

“But, my children, my poor children: they have done less harm in the world than your sister did, and if you hurt my husband you sacrifice them. Think of that. You have children of your own. You don’t dote on them passionately any more than I do on mine; therefore you can enter into my feelings. Is it fair, is it just, that they should suffer? I don’t appeal for myself, for you don’t like me. But just think of this: for ten years I have been a dutiful wife to this man, who was unfaithful to me even in my fresh youth, when I was beautiful, so they said, and loving, and devoted. Listen. I knew of the murder on the night he committed it; for he came straight back with stained hands, and a face I never shall forget. Do you not think that was something to forgive? But I did it, and I implore you to do it too. I am not asking you an impossible thing, for I have done it myself. And think under what circumstances!”

But Ned remained as hard as nails.

“I suppose—no offence to you, madam—your motives were not entirely unselfish; and even if they were, that’s no business of mine. If you chose to put up with him, that was your lookout. I came back here to punish my sister’s murderer, and I’m not going to be made a fool of by a woman when the game’s in my own hands.”

Ned spoke the more harshly, that he was really rather touched by her beauty and her high spirit. There was something in her frank, straightforward manner of pleading more to his taste than any amount of tearful, hysterical incoherence would have been. But Mrs. Brander had a most unexpected ally near at hand. Thumpety-thump came Abel Squires, with his wooden leg, out of his hiding place. He did not look at the lady, but going straight up to Ned, jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of where she was standing.

“Hold hard, Mester Mitchell,” said he, without moving a muscle of his dried-up face; “Ah didn’t bargain fur this when Ah coom here to-day. A woman’s a woman. An’ t’ woman ye’re so soft abaht’s dead, but t’ woman ye’re so hard on’s alive. Steady theer, Mester Mitchell, or Ah’ll hev to swear Ah killed t’ lass mysen.”

The poor woman broke down at these words from the rough tramp; she turned away abruptly to hide the tears which sprang to her eyes. Ned, who was hard, brusque, and determined, but not inhuman, moved uneasily about the room.

“Women have no business to interfere in these matters,” said he, angrily.

Mrs. Brander saw that there was hope. She moved nearer to him, clasping her hands, not in supplication, but because they would twitch and tremble, and so betray the anguish she was suffering. She tried to speak, but couldn’t. But with one piteous look out of her proud eyes, she turned away again.

“Well,” said Ned, in very ill-tempered tones, “we’re wasting our time here, Abel, and Mrs. Brander’s. So, please, madam, let us see your husband, and have done with him.”

But Mrs. Brander hastened to intercept him on his way to the door.

“You will not be too hard,” she pleaded, in a breaking voice. “You are not vindictive, I am sure.”

“I beg your pardon, madam, that’s just what I am,” snarled Ned. “And if I’m fool enough not to insist on the hanging he deserves, I’m not going to let him off scot free, I can tell you.”

“Of course not, of course not,” said she, in a tone of great relief. “He has done wrong—great wrong; and he must suffer for it—we must suffer for it. Only don’t expose him. Anything but that.”

“Yes, anything but what he deserves, of course. Let us pass, madam, please. He is in the library, I suppose?”

“I suppose so,” she faltered.

Ned turned round abruptly.

“You suppose so! Well, if he’s given us the slip, and left you to bear the brunt of it all, it’ll be the worse for him.”

Mrs. Brander drew herself up in the old, proud way, and spoke with her accustomed cold haughtiness in addressing a person she disliked.

“You need not be afraid, Mr. Mitchell. I can stand by a criminal husband: I would not by a cowardly one.”

“Do you call it courageous, then, to kill a woman, and let another man bear the blame for ten years?” asked Ned.

Mrs. Brander did not answer. She led the way across the hall to the study, and knocked.

“Come in,” called out the vicar, in his usual voice.

She opened the door, and signed to the two men to follow her in. Abel would have slunk away, but Ned Mitchell kept a tight hold on his arm. Both, however, kept in the background, near the door, while the lady went up to her husband, and laid her hand upon his shoulder. He leant back in his comfortable chair, pen still in hand. He had been busy writing, and the table was covered with large sheets of MS. He faced the two intruders with an air of mild annoyance, which would have made an onlooker think that he was the injured person. Ned, with astonishment, which he would not admit by word or look, examined the bland, fair face, with its healthy complexion, frank blue eyes, broad white forehead, and saw on it no trace of shame, guilt, or even of anxiety. It was his wife’s face which bore all these signs. As she stood, upright and daring, by her husband’s side, handsome, majestic, and brave, Ned Mitchell felt that to deal with Meredith as he deserved, while she remained there, was impossible. He half turned, as if anxious to put off the interview. The vicar changed his position, wheeling his chair round, so that he could face the two men.

“Well,” he said, “you wish to speak to me, do you not?”

His tone was mildly peremptory.

“Yes, we do. But what we have to say we wish to say to you alone.”

“Go, my dear,” said Meredith, turning kindly to his wife.

She hesitated, and he pushed her gently away from him. Then she stooped, kissed his forehead, and with an imploring, yet still dignified, look into Ned’s reluctant eyes as she passed him, she slowly left the room.

“Now,” said Mitchell, in a louder, more assured tone, as if much relieved, “we’ve got an account to settle with you.”

“Well, sit down, and let us have it out.”

Meredith was not in the least discomposed. He took up the pen he had been using, wiped it carefully, and then crossing his legs and clasping his hands over them, assumed the attitude in which he was accustomed to give private advice or consolation to members of his flock.

“I’m afraid we are interrupting you,” said Ned, ironically; so he prepared to sit down, which Abel shyly refused to do.

“Not at all. I was writing my sermon for next Sunday, but as I suppose it lies with you whether I shall be allowed to preach it, I can’t complain of your visit as an interruption.”

“You take this business pretty coolly,” said Ned, losing patience.

Meredith looked at him with a sudden flash of fire in his blue eyes, a spark of the same fierce spirit which he had revealed to Ned on the night when he conquered and controlled the bloodhounds at the cottage.

“Do you suppose that I have kept my head for ten years to lose it now?”

Ned was taken back. There was a pause before he said, in almost a respectful voice—

“You admit everything, then.”

“I admit everything you know, of course. This man here could prove whatever I might deny. Besides, everybody knows that ring is mine; I did not know until to-day how I lost it, as you may guess; else I should have been prepared with some story.”

Ned Mitchell, who had brought the ring with him and had just produced it, thinking to confound the vicar, slipped it back into his pocket with uncertain fingers.

“And you are prepared for the consequences?”

“As much prepared as a man ever is for a very unpleasant contingency.”

“Even if the contingency is—what the law prescribes for discovered murderers?”

“You mean hanging?”

Ned Mitchell nodded, and the vicar paused.

“I won’t say that I am prepared for that; I can’t say that I ever contemplated such a possibility seriously. It would be a terrible precedent to hang a vicar. I should probably get off as of ‘unsound mind,’ and be confined ‘during her Majesty’s pleasure.’”

“And if they shouldn’t be so lenient?”

“Then I should go through with it as well as a man may.”

“And if I let you off the full penalty,” said Ned, wondering if it were possible to disturb this stolid serenity, “what would you feel towards me?”

“Nothing,” answered the vicar, promptly. “You would do it, not for my sake, but out of admiration for my wife, pity for my children, and because my arrest would involve my brother’s, as an accessory after the fact. He saw me immediately after the—the deed: the crime, in fact: and he concurred, if he did not assist, in the concealment of the body, as Abel here probably knows.”

“Ay,” said Abel Squires, who was standing, awkwardly, as near the door as possible. “Mester Vernon and me had walked nigh all t’ way from Sheffield together, and we heerd cries o’ ‘Murder!’ An’ Mester Vernon he left me, an’ he jumped o’er t’ wall into t’ churchyard, an’ when he coom back he looked skeered loike, and his reight hond wur stained red, as if he’d held another hond that wur redder still. An’ somehow Ah guessed whose hond it wur as he’d been holdin’.”

Abel, after delivering this speech in a mumbling, shamefaced manner, ended abruptly, and looked at the door, as if he felt that his unpleasant mission was over. The vicar listened with interest, and nodded assent to the latter portion of the tramp’s words. Ned Mitchell continued to gaze at Meredith like a bear baulked of his prey.

“I don’t believe you’ve even felt much remorse all these years,” he said, savagely.

The vicar faced him frankly.

“To tell the truth, I haven’t,” he said. “That’s not in my temperament. I suppose this sounds especially remarkable because I am a clergyman. But my profession was forced upon me; I had to put an unnatural curb upon myself, and succeeded in attaining a pitch of outward decorum such as none of my family had ever reached before. But the strain was too great, for I am not by temperament virtuous; none of my family are. Vernon has an accident, and not his nature, to thank for his superiority. That is all I have to say.”

The vicar leaned back in his chair, as if weary of the discussion.

“Then you don’t seem to have any conscience,” said Ned, regarding him in bewilderment.

“Not much, I suppose,” answered the vicar; “though indeed lately I have had troubled nights, and shown the family tendency towards somnambulism; so my wife tells me. And in rather an unfortunate way,” he added, with a half smile.

As the vicar finished speaking, Ned came forward with his ponderous tread, laid his hand heavily on the writing-table, and looked down at the clergyman’s bland face with the air of a strong man who has definitely made up his mind.

“Now then, parson, I’ll tell you what you’ll have to do. You take that pen that you’ve just been writing your precious sermons with, and you write a detailed confession of your intrigue with my sister, your visits to her at night, your correspondence with her, the way in which you murdered her, and the way in which you disposed of her body. Then sign your name and put the date in full, and me and Abel here will oblige you by putting our signatures as witnesses.”

“And if I do this, what follows?” asked the vicar, taking up the pen and examining the nib.

“Then you get my permission to leave this country for any other you choose with your wife and children. And as long as you keep away, this paper will never go out of my possession.”

“And if I don’t do this?”

“What’s the good of going into that?”

The eyes of the two men met, and they understood each other. Without wasting more words, Meredith turned to the table, invited Ned with a gesture to sit down, and proceeded to draw up the prescribed confession. This he did fully and frankly, adding at the end certain graceful expressions of contrition which Ned, reading the document over carefully, took for what they were worth. The main body of the composition satisfied him, however; and after appending his own signature to the confession as a witness, and insisting on Abel’s adding his, he sealed up the paper with great solemnity. Then, intimating to Meredith Brander that the sooner he carried out the remaining part of the compact and left the country, the better it would be for him, he left the room with the curtest of farewells, and hastened out of the house to avoid what he called “another scene with the woman.”

Once outside he looked back at the vicarage with great interest.

“If one had to be a rascal,” said he, with some irrepressible admiration, “that’s the sort of rascal one would choose to be.”

Then Abel Squires left him and hobbled off, and Ned was left to his pipe and his reflections, both which he chose to enjoy, not at his garden gate as usual, but at the bottom of the hill, outside Rishton Hall farmyard.

Before he had been there more than a few minutes, the event he was prepared for took place. Olivia Denison, pale, excited, tearful, yet radiant, came to the gate, looking out anxiously. Seeing Ned, she ran out to him with a cry.

“Oh, Mr. Mitchell,” she said, almost in a whisper, “I must ask you to forgive me. I had such unjust thoughts of you. I thought, until the night before last, that you meant to ruin Vernon, in spite of your promise.”

“Um,” said Ned; “you hadn’t much faith in your lover, now, had you, to think him capable of——”

“Hush! never mind that. You see, I must have felt at the bottom of my heart that he was really good. For I loved him all the time just the same.”

“That doesn’t follow at all. Women always go by contraries. The more of a villain a man is, the more a woman likes him. Look at the vicar here, and the way his wife sticks to him. And look at me, as honest a fellow as ever lived, and what do you think my wife cares for me or my affections? Not a single straw, I tell you.”

“Well,” said Olivia, smiling, “considering the small amount of affection you seem to waste on her, I think it’s just as well for her happiness that she is not dying for love of you.”

“Ah, you’re full of these new fangled notions about the equality of the sexes. Now, I say, men and women are different. The man does all the hard work, and even if he goes a little bit off the straight sometimes, it’s no more than he has a right to, provided he fills the mouths at home. The woman has nothing to do but look after the home and children, and mend their clothes and her husband’s. And if she can’t find time besides to be devoted to her husband, and to think him the finest fellow on earth in return for what he does for her, why, she ain’t worth her salt; that’s all. Now that’s my marriage code, Miss Denison, though I can see by your face it isn’t yours.”

“I really haven’t considered the subject much,” replied Olivia, demurely, but with a bright blush.

“You might do worse, though, than consider it, now that things have shaped themselves a bit,” said Ned, in a dry tone. “Our dear friend the vicar here is going to leave this country, in consideration of a certain little matter being hushed up—”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” interrupted Olivia, with a deep-drawn breath of relief; “that is good of you, Mr. Mitchell. For it would have been—dreadful—dreadful!”

Ned was looking away over the cornfields, where his sharp eyes detected a figure he recognized, wandering about in an aimless manner.

“I think you’d better take a walk out into the meadows there,” he said, after a minute’s pause, turning again to the young lady, with a kindly look on his hard face. “It will do you good after all the excitement and botherment of this morning.”

Olivia blushed again.

“Thank you,” she said, with a proud turn of her head. “I don’t care to go out again this afternoon. The air is much too oppressive.”

“Oh, all right,” said Ned with a dry nod; “then I musn’t keep you out here talking in the ‘oppressive’ air, I suppose. Good-day, Miss Denison.”

“Good-bye,” she said, gently, holding out her hand, which he shook with a firm pressure.

Then he walked up the hill, talking to himself.

“These old-country lasses are fine creatures,” he meditated. “There’s Mrs. B., whom I didn’t care for, and Miss D. whom I did, and I’m blest if they haven’t both got too good a spirit to be married at all. Yet one wouldn’t care to see them old maids, either—nor yet men—nor yet angels. These high-spirited ladies, who can think and act for themselves, don’t seem to fit in somehow. One would feel they were kind of too good for one. Give me a nice, comfortable lass, whom you needn’t study any more than a potato. You know what to be at with one of them. By-the-bye, now I suppose I must take ship and see how my own potato is getting on.”

Nevertheless, from the top of the hill he looked down rather sentimentally in the direction of the old farm. As he did so, he caught sight of a girl’s tall figure in the meadows. He laughed maliciously.

“She’s gone to meet him. I thought she would. I’d have let off half a dozen scoundrels to give that lass her heart’s desire; that I would!”

And he watched her till a rising in the meadow ground, and a thick, flowering hedge, hid her from sight.

After a few minutes’ arguing with herself, Olivia, who guessed the reason of Ned Mitchell’s suggestion of a walk in the fields, decided that she ought without delay to let Vernon Brander know the result of the interview between his brother and the colonist. So she darted through the gate and across the road with the agility of a deer, in spite of the oppressive air. So excited was she, so full of joy at the turn affairs had taken, that she almost ran along the footpath, beside the sweet-scented hedges, with an occasional little leap or bound of most undignified happiness. Thus it happened that when she came unexpectedly face to face with Vernon Brander on rounding a thicket of bushes and small trees, she was springing into the air with her face radiant with delight, and a soft song—something about “birds” and “love”—upon her lips. Vernon, on his side, looked, if anything, even more haggard and woebegone than usual. Both stopped short, and Olivia, who had become on the instant very subdued, drew a deep breath of confusion.

“Mr. Brander,” she began, in a cool, almost cold, voice, “I—I—er, I have just met Ned Mitchell, and I think you ought to know what he says.”

“For Heaven’s sake, yes: tell me!”

“He is going to hush it all up, on condition that your brother leaves the country altogether.”

Vernon drew a deep breath of relief, and almost reeled against the fence which protected the thicket on one side.

“Thank God!” he whispered.

And he put one hand to his face as if to shut out the fearful picture his imagination and his fears had been conjuring up. Olivia waited impatiently as long as she could. At last when she could bear this neglect no longer, she said, rather tartly—

“Mrs. Brander will have to go too.”

“Of course, of course; she will go with her husband.”

Vernon was still in a dazed state, not yet understanding what a great change in his prospects of happiness the day’s events had made.

“I think it was very silly of you to keep silence all these years just to please her. It was she who made you, I suppose—came to you, and wheedled you. Men are so easily coaxed,” continued Olivia, disdainfully, with her head in the air.

She had never been curt and dictatorial, like this, with him before. Poor Vernon, quite unskilled in the wiles of her sex, was abashed and bewildered.

“Yes,” he admitted, humbly. “She came to me and begged me not to say anything if people suspected me. And, you see, I had been so fond of her, and she was in delicate health, and I had no wife or children to be hurt by what people might think of me. And so I promised.”

“And she made you promise not to marry, didn’t she?”

“Well, yes. Poor thing, she had to do the best she could for her husband and children; and, of course, she thought if I married, I should let out the secret to my wife, and my wife would insist on having things explained.”

“I should think so,” said Olivia.

“And now,” said Vernon, who was getting more and more downcast under the influence of this surprising change in her, “I’m too old and too sour to marry, and I think I shall go away with them, and have my little Kitty to console me.”

“Yes,” said Olivia, quietly, her voice losing suddenly all its buoyancy as well as all its momentary sharpness; “I think that will be a very good plan. You will let us know when you intend to start, won’t you, for my father and mother owe you an apology first? Now, I must be getting back. Good-evening.”

Dull Vernon began at last to have a glimmer of insight into the girl’s secret feelings. He shook hands with her, let her walk as far as the very end of the field, noticing with admiration which had suddenly, after the strain of the morning, again grown passionate, her springing walk and graceful, erect carriage. Then he ran after her on the wings of the wind, and placed himself, panting, with his back to the gate she was approaching.

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” he said, as he looked with sparkling eyes into her face. “But you seem to forget I’ve lent you thirty pounds. I shall want it back to pay my passage.”

Olivia caught her breath, and her face, which was wet with tears, grew happy again.

“I’d forgotten all about it,” said she, in a tremulous voice, half saucily, half demurely. “But anyhow, you can’t have it.”

“And why not, Miss Denison?” asked Vernon, coming a step nearer.

“Because I—I don’t want you to go away,” answered she.

And she fell into his arms without further invitation, and gave him a tender woman’s kiss, an earnest of the love and sympathy he had hungered for these ten years!

The true story of the murder at St. Cuthbert’s never became commonly known. At the inquest which was opened on the remains found in the crypt, nobody who had anything to tell told anything worth hearing. But, then, nobody was very anxious to discover the truth, for rumors too dreadful for investigation began to fly about; and nobody was astonished when, the health of his children requiring a change to a warmer climate, the Reverend Meredith Brander got, by the interest of his uncle, Lord Stannington, an appointment at Malta, for which place he started, with his wife and family, without delay.

The vacant living of Rishton was given by Lord Stannington to his other nephew, Vernon; and Olivia, though lamentably unlike the popular ideal of a clergyman’s wife, became as much idolized by the poor of the parish as her husband was already.

John Oldshaw got Rishton Hall Farm; for Mr. Denison’s friends persuaded him to give up farming while he had still something left to lose. But the farmer did not long survive his coveted happiness. Dying in a fit of apoplexy, he left his broad acres in the care of his son Mat, who, instead of setting up as a country gentleman, as his sisters declared he would do if he had any spirit, married little Lucy, made her a good husband, and remained for ever, in common with his wife, the idolatrous slave of her late mistress.

“Theer bean’t more’n one woman in t’ world,” he would say, “too good for Parson Brander. Boot theer be one, and thot’s his wife.”

But though “Parson Brander” himself agreed with this, he was mistaken; for, like every other good woman, she was the better, and the little world around her was the better, for the fact that she was the noble and true mate of a noble and true man.

THE END.