Run to Earth - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (ebook reader .txt) 📗
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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“It may help me. I cannot venture to say more than that, my lady.”
“If there is even a chance, I must speak,” replied Honoria. “I will
tell you, then,” she said, throwing herself into a chair, and fixing
her grave, earnest eyes upon the face of her companion. “In order to
tell you what I know of Black Milsom, I must go back to the days of my
childhood. My first memories are bright ones; but they are so vague, so
shadowy, that it is with difficulty I can distinguish realities from
dreams; and yet I believe the things which I remember must have been
real. I have a faint recollection of a darkly beautiful face, that bent
over me as I lay in some bed or cradle, softer and more luxurious than
any bed I ever slept in for many years after that time. I remember a
soft, sweet voice, that sang me to sleep. I remember that in the place
I called home everything was beautiful.”
“And do you not even know where this home was?”
“I know nothing of its locality. I was too young to remember the names
of persons or places. But I have often fancied it was in Italy.”
“In Italy!”
“Yes; for the first home which I really remember was a fisherman’s hut,
in a little village within a few miles of Naples. I was the only child
in that miserable hovel—lonely, desolate, miserable, in the power of
two wretches, whose presence filled me with loathing.”
“And they were—?”
“An old woman, called Andrinetta—I know that, though I called her
‘nurse’ when she was with me in the beautiful home I so dimly
remember—and the man whom you have heard of under the name of Black
Milsom.”
“Is he an Italian?” asked Andrew, astonished.
“I don’t know,” replied Honoria. “In England he calls himself an
Englishman—in Italy he is supposed to be an Italian. What his real
calling was in those days I do not know; but I feel assured that it
must been dark and unlawful as all his actions have been since that
time. He pretended to get his living like the other fishermen in the
neighbourhood; but he was often idle for a week at a time, and still
more often, absent. I have seen him count over gold and jewels with old
Andrinetta on his return from some expedition. To me he was harsh and
cruel. I hated him, and he knew that I hated him. He ordered me to call
him father, and I was more than once savagely beaten by him because I
refused to do so. Under such treatment, in such a wretched home,
deprived of all natural companionship, I grew wild and strange. My will
was indomitable as the will of my tyrant; and on many occasions I
resisted him boldly. Sometimes I ran away, and wandered for days
together among the neighbouring hills and woods; but I returned always
sooner or later to my miserable shelter, for I knew not where else to
go. My lonely life had made me shrink from all human creatures, except
the two wretches with whom I lived; and when the few neighbours would
have shown me some kindness, I ran from them in wild, unreasoning
terror.”
“Strange!” muttered the police-officer.
“Yes; a strange history, is it not?” returned Lady Eversleigh. “And you
wonder, no doubt, to hear of such a childhood from the lips of Sir
Oswald Eversleigh’s widow. One day I heard a neighbour reproaching the
man with his cruel treatment of me. ‘It is bad enough to have stolen
the child,’ he said; ‘you shouldn’t beat her as well.’ From that hour I
knew that I was a stolen child. I told him as much one night, and the
next morning he took me to Naples, where, in the most obscure and yet
most crowded part of the city, I lived for some years. ‘Nobody will
trouble himself about you here, my young princess,’ my tyrant said to
me. ‘Children swarm by hundreds in all the alleys; you will only be one
more drop of water in the ocean.’”
There was a pause, during which Honoria sat in a meditative attitude,
with her eyes fixed upon vacancy. It seemed as if she was looking back
into the shadowy past.
“I cannot tell you how wretched my life was for some time. Andrinetta
had accompanied us to Naples; and soon I saw she was very ill, and she
had fits of violence that approached insanity. Within doors she was my
sole companion. The man only slept in the house, and at times was
absent for months. How he earned his livelihood I knew no more than I
had known in the little sea-side village. I now rarely saw jewels or
gold in his possession; but at night, after he had gone to his chamber,
I often heard the chink of golden coin through the thin partition which
divided my room from his. I think in these days I must have perished
body and soul if Providence had not sent me a friend in the person of a
good Catholic priest—a noble and saintly old man—who visited the
wretched dens of poverty and crime, and who discovered my desolate
state. I need not dwell on that man’s goodness to me; it is, doubtless,
remembered in heaven, whither he may have gone before this time. He
taught me, he comforted me, he rescued me from the abyss of
wretchedness into which I had fallen. I took care to conceal his visits
from my tyrant, for I knew how that wicked heart would revolt against
my redemption from ignorance and misery. When I was fifteen years of
age, Andrinetta died. One day, soon after her death—for me a most
sorrowful day—Tomaso (as they called him there) told me that he was
going to bring me to England, I came with him, and for two years I
remained his companion. I will not speak of that time. I have told you
now all that I can tell.”
“But the murder of Valentine Jernam!” exclaimed Andrew. “Suspicion
pointed to this man; and you—you know something of that?”
“I will not speak of that now,” replied Honoria. “I have said enough.
The day may come when I may speak more freely; but it has not yet
arrived. Trust me that I will not impede the course of justice where
this man is concerned. And now tell me, does my revelation afford one
ray of light which may help to dispel the darkness that surrounds my
Gertrude’s fate?”
“No, I cannot say it does. I cannot find out anything to indicate that
she has been taken far away. I am sure she is in England, and that one
of Milsom’s pals, a man named Wayman—”
Lady Eversleigh started, and exclaimed, “I know him! I know him! Go on!
go on!”
Larkspur directed a glance of keen and eager curiosity towards Lady
Eversleigh. “You know Wayman?” he said.
“Well, well,” she repeated. “I know him to be an unscrupulous ruffian.
If he knows where my child is, he will sell the secret for money, and
we will give him money—any sum; do you think I shall count the cost of
her safety?”
“No, no,” said Andrew Larkspur, “but you must not get so excited; keep
quiet—tell me all you know of Wayman, and then we shall see our way.”
At this point of the conversation Jane Payland knocked at the door of
her mistress’s sitting-room, and the interview between Honoria and the
police-officer was interrupted.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
“O, ABOVE MEASURE FALSE!”
Victor Carrington was very well content with the state of affairs at
Hilton House in all but one respect. The fulfilment of his purpose was
not approaching with sufficient rapidity. The rich marriage which he
had talked about for Reginald was a pure figment; the virtuous
ironmonger, with the richly dowered daughter, existed only in his
prolific brain—the need of money was growing pressing. He had done
much, but there was still much to do, and he must make haste to do it.
He had also been mistaken on one point of much importance to his
success; he had not calculated on the strength of Douglas Dale’s
constitution. Each day that he dined with Paulina—and the days on
which he did not were exceedingly few—Dale drank a small quantity of
cura�oa, into which Carrington had poured poison of a slow but sure
nature. As the small carafon in which the liquor was placed upon the
table was emptied, the poisoner never found any difficulty in gaining
access to the fresh supply.
The antique liquor-chest, with its fittings of Venetian glass was
always kept on the side-board in the dining-room, and was never locked.
Paulina had a habit of losing anything that came into her hands, and
the key of the liquor-chest had long been missing.
But the time was passing, and the poison was not telling, as far as he,
the poisoner, could judge from appearances, on Douglas Dale. He never
complained of illness, and beyond a slight lassitude, he did not seem
to have anything the matter with him. This would not do. It behoved
Carrington to expedite matters. His project was to accomplish the death
of Douglas Dale by poison, throwing the burthen of suspicion—should
suspicion arise—upon Paulina. To advance this purpose, he had
industriously circulated reports of the most injurious character
respecting her; so that Douglas Dale, if he had not been blinded and
engrossed by his love, must have seen that he was regarded by the men
whom he was in the habit of meeting even more coldly and curiously than
when he had first boldly announced his engagement to Madame Durski. He
made it known that Douglas Dale had made a will, by which the whole of
his disposable property was bequeathed to Paulina, and circulated a
rumour that the Austrian widow was utterly averse to the intended
marriage, in feeling, and was only contracting it from interested
motives.
“If Dale was only out of the way, and his heir had come into the money,
she would rather have Reginald,” was a spiteful saying current among
those who knew the lady and her suitor, and which had its unsuspected
origin with Carrington. Supposing Dale to come to his death by poison,
and that fact to be ascertained, who would be suspected but the woman
who had everything to gain by his death, whose acknowledged lover was
his next heir, and who succeeded by his will to all the property which
did not go immediately into the possession of that acknowledged lover?
The plan was admirably laid, and there was no apparent hitch in it, and
it only remained now for Carrington to accelerate his proceedings. He
still maintained reserve with Reginald Eversleigh, who would go to his
house, and lounge purposelessly about, sullen and gloomy, but afraid to
question the master-mind which had so completely subjugated his weak
and craven nature.
The engagement between Paulina and Douglas had lasted nearly two
months, when a cloud overshadowed the horizon which had seemed so
bright.
Madame Durski became somewhat alarmed by a change in her lover’s
appearance, which struck her suddenly on one of his visits to the
villa. For some weeks past she had seen him only by lamplight—that
light which gives a delusive brightness to the countenance.
To-day she saw him with the cold northern sunlight shining full upon
his face; and for the first time she perceived that he had altered much
of late.
“Douglas,” she said, earnestly, “how ill you are looking!”
“Indeed!”
“Yes; I see it to-day for the first time, and I
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