“Glad you did not meet him, sir—a row at any time brings one into mischief, but an interference with the course of law—don’t you see—a very serious affair, indeed!”
“Well, see—yes, I suppose so, and there was just another thing. Believing, as I do, that wretched person quite mad—don’t you see?—it would be very hard to let her—to let her half starve there where they’ve put her—don’t you think?—and I don’t care to go down to the place there, and all that; and if you’d just manage to let her have this—it’s all I can do just now—but—but its happening at my house—although I’m not a bit to blame, puts it on me in a way, and I think I can’t do less than this.”
He handed a banknote to the attorney, and was looking all the time on a brief that lay on the table.
Mr. Hincks, the respectable attorney, was a little shy, also, as he took it.
“I’m to say you sent it to—what’s her name, by the by?” he asked.
“Bertha Velderkaust, but you need not mention me—only say it was sent to her—that’s all. I’m so vexed, because as you may suppose, I had particular reasons for wishing to keep quiet, and I was staying there at the Grange, you know—Carwell—and thought I might keep quiet for a few weeks; and that wretched maniac comes down there while I was for a few days absent, and in one of her fits makes an attack on a member of my family; and so my little hiding-place is disclosed, for of course such a fracas will be heard of—it is awfully provoking—I’m rather puzzled to know where to go.”
Charles ceased, with a faint, dreary laugh, and the attorney looked at his banknote, which he held by the corners, as the mate, in Mudford’s fine story, might at the letter which Vanderdecken wished to send to his long-lost wife in Amsterdam.
It was not, however, clear to him that he had any very good excuse for refusing to do this trifling kindness for the brother of his quarrelsome and litigious client, Harry Fairfield, who, although he eschewed costs himself, laid them pretty heavily upon others, and was a valuable feeder for Mr. Hincks’ office.
This little commission, therefore, accepted, the attorney saw his visitor downstairs. He had already lighted a candle, and in its light he thought he never saw a man upon his legs look so ill as Charles, and the hand which he gave Mr. Hincks at the steps was dry and burning.
“It’s a long ride, sir, to Carwell,” the attorney hesitated.
“The horse has had some oats, thanks, down here,” and he nodded toward the Plume of Feathers at which he had put up his beast, “and I shan’t be long getting over the ground.”
And without turning about, or a look over his shoulder, he sauntered away, in the rising moonlight, toward the little inn.
XLIII
The Welcome
Charles rode his horse slowly homeward. The moon got up before he reached the wild expanse of Cressley Common, a wide sea of undulating heath, with here and there a grey stone peeping above its surface in the moonlight like a distant sail.
Charles was feverish—worn out in body and mind—literally. Some men more than others are framed to endure misery, and live on, and on, and on in despair. Is this melancholy strength better, or the weakness that faints under the first strain of the rack? Happy that at the longest it cannot be for very long—happy that “man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live,” seeing that he is “full of misery.”
Charles was conscious only of extreme fatigue; that for days he had eaten little and rested little, and that his short snatches of sleep, harassed by the repetition of his waking calculations and horrors, tired rather than refreshed him.
When fever is brewing, just as electric lights glimmer from the sullen mask of cloud on the eve of a storm, there come sometimes odd flickerings that seem to mock and warn.
Every overworked man, who has been overtaken by fever in the midst of his toil and complications, knows well the kind of tricks his brain has played him on the verge of that chaos.
Charles put his hand to his breast, and felt in his pocket for a letter, the appearance of which was sharp and clear on his retina as if he had seen it but a moment before.
“What have I done with it?” he asked himself—“the letter Hincks gave me?”
He searched his pockets for it, a letter of which this picture was so bright—purely imaginary! He was going to turn about and search the track he had traversed for it; but he bethought him, “To whom was the letter written?” No answer could he find. “To whom?” To no one—nothing—an imagination. Conscious on a sudden, he was scared.
“I want a good rest—I want some sleep—waking dreams. This is the way fellows go mad. What the devil can have put it into my head?”
Now rose before him the tall trees that gather as you approach the vale of Carwell, and soon the steep gables and chimneys of the Grange glimmered white among their boughs.
There in his mind, as unaccountably, was the fancy that he had met and spoken with his father, old Squire Harry, at the Catstone, as he crossed the moor.
“I’ll give his message—yes, I’ll give your message.”
And he thought what possessed him to come out without his hat, and he looked whiter than ever.
And then he thought, “What brought him there?”
And then, “What was
