A general air of gaudiness prevailed. There was plenty of gilding and bright colour in the furniture, but nowhere the touch of daintiness and order that proclaims the gentlewoman’s sitting-room.
Side by side with the gaudiness and untidiness, there lingered pathetic traces of the sad episode that was ending poor Marie’s career. A heavy cloak flung over the back of a chair, with its lining burned away, proclaimed the last service it had rendered to its owner. A pair of tiny, silver trimmed slippers, scorched and blackened, lay beside it on the floor. A portrait of Marie Schira, that of a beaming, brilliant brunette, smiled down from an opposite wall on these tokens of the last tragedy in which she had played her part; and on a table immediately beneath this portrait the light of the one candle found out the diamonds in a massive gold bracelet, which lay side by side with a broken fan and a withered bouquet of carnations.
A step on the outside landing made Clive turn his head towards the door, which he had left slightly ajar. Presently a man’s head, with a hat on, looked in, and as hurriedly withdrew. Clive had a good memory for faces, and, slight as was the glimpse he had of this one, it recalled that of one of the two men who had passed him on the previous day in the Rue Vervien, and whose remark respecting Captain Culvers he had overheard.
The fact struck him as strange. He might have doubted the evidence of his eyesight, if it had not, a moment after, been corroborated by a voice in the adjoining room, whose tones he at once identified with those of the man who had animadverted upon Captain Culvers’s liking for the “two B’s.”
“Who is that man in there?” were the words that Clive heard in French, that had an unmistakeable English flavour to it. “Has Mattie sent for him or what does he want?”
The woman’s reply did not reach Clive’s ear.
Then the opening and shutting of a door, and the sound of heavy footsteps descending the stairs, told him that the man had departed.
Half an hour, marked by the jarringly merry chimes of a showy ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, slowly told itself out, and then there came the sound of other and lighter footsteps on the outer landing, followed once more by the opening and shutting of the door of the adjoining room.
“Mary, my poor child!” were the words that reached Clive now; “let me raise your pillows. It is I—your own Mattie back again.”
It was said in English, and in sweet, low tones, that might have been a lady’s.
Three minutes after, the door that divided the salon from the bedroom was softly opened, and Clive, looking up, saw standing, framed as it were in the doorway, the figure of a woman in a straight black gown, and with a black poke-bonnet on her head. Beneath the bonnet showed the sweet, careworn face of which he had caught a glimpse at the door of the hotel.
The woman closed the door behind her, and advanced into the dim room.
“Are you Lord Culvers, sir?” she asked. “It is very good of you to come. I suppose you saw my message on the writing-table? I did not like to disturb the gentleman asleep in the easy-chair, so I ventured to make use of the pen and ink I saw there.”
Clive explained that he was not Lord Culvers, but one of his most intimate friends, and that any story Marie Schira or her friends might have to tell, they might rely upon it would be faithfully and literally transmitted by him to Lord Culvers.
The woman kept her eyes fixed on him as he spoke.
“I fear it is too late, sir,” she said, sadly. “Since I went out this afternoon a sad change has set in, and I fear my poor sister will carry her story into the grave with her. Something has been preying on her mind for days past—something in connection with the name of Culvers, which has been very often on her lips in her delirium. I would have gone to you sooner if it had been possible.”
“But have you no idea what has been preying on her mind?” asked Clive, eagerly. “Can you conjecture nothing, absolutely nothing, as to the story she wished to tell Lord Culvers?”
“I will tell you all I know, sir, with pleasure,” she answered. “But it is very little. Till I was fetched from my work in London the other day I had not seen Mary for years. I had prayed night and day that the lost sheep might be brought back to the Fold; but—”
“Can you tell me who the man was who came in and went out about half an hour ago?” interrupted Clive, eager to snatch at any and every scattered thread that presented itself, in hopes that thus he might unravel something of the mystery which seemed to deepen at every turn.
“My brother John, sir, I suppose,” she answered. “There are three of us—Mary, John, and Martha—that’s me. Holy names these, sir; but, alas they have been but unworthily borne.”
It was between pious ejaculations so charged with deep feeling, that on her lips they became a prayer, that Clive gathered fragments of the family history of the bearers of these “holy names” that enabled him to understand something of the condition of things he was now called upon to face.
John had begun life as a stable help, from that he had risen to be a head groom. After that his career had become dubious. He had fallen into bad company, taken to gambling and betting, and for years his family had seen nothing of him.
Mary, a beautiful but frivolous girl, had run away from home, when little more than a child, to join a company of strolling
