Guy Deverell II

GUY DEVERELL • II

“It is not a party – we should be only three,” said Sir Jekyl, in an eager whisper.

“All the more inviting,” continued Varbarriere, smiling. “But I suddenly recollected that I shall have rather a busy hour or two – three or four letters to write. My people of business in France never give me a moment; they won’t pay my rent or cork a bottle, my faith! without a letter.”

“Well, I’m sorry you can’t; but you must make it up to me, and see, you must take two or three of these to your dressingroom,” and he presented his case to M. Varbarriere.

“Ha! you are very good; but, no; I like to connect them with your room, they must not grow too common, they shall remain a treat. No, no, I won’t; ha, ha, ha! Thank you very much,” and he waved them off, laughing and shaking his head.

Somehow he could not brook accepting this trifling present. To be sure, here he was a guest at free quarters, but at this he stuck; he drew back and waved away the cigar-case. It was not logical, but he could not help it.

When Pelter and Sir Jekyl sat in the Baronet’s chamber, under their canopy of tobacco-smoke over their last cigar,

“See, Pelter,” said Sir Jekyl, “it won’t do to seem anxious; the fact is I’m not anxious; I believe he has a lot of money to leave that young fellow. Suppose they marry; the Deverells are a capital old family, don’t you see, and it will make up everything, and stop people talking about – about old nonsense. I’ll settle all, and I don’t care a curse, and I’ll not be very long in the way. I can’t keep always young, I’m past fifty.”

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“Judging by his manner, you know, I should say any proposition you may have to make he’d be happy to listen to,” said Mr. Pelter.

“You’re sleepy, Pelter.”

“Well, a little bit,” said the attorney, blinking, yawning, and grinning all together.

“And, egad, I think you want to be shaved,” said Sir Jekyl, who did not stand on ceremony with his attorney.

“Should not wonder,” said Mr. Pelter, feeling his chin over sleepily with his finger and thumb. “My shave was at half-past four, and what is it now? – half-past eleven, egad! I thought it was later. Good-night, Sir Jekyl – those are cigars, magnificent, by Jove! – and about that Strangways’ business, I would not be in too great a hurry, do you see? I would not open anything, till I saw whether they were going to move, or whether there was anything in it. I would not put it in his head, d’ye see, hey?” and from habit Pelter winked.

And with that salutation, harmless as the kiss apostolic, Mr. Pelter, aided by a few directions from Sir Jekyl, toddled away to his bedchamber yawning, and the Baronet, after his wont, locked himself into his room in very tolerable spirits.

There was a sofa in Varbarriere’s dressing-room, on which by this time, in a great shawl dressing-gown, supine lay our friend; like the painted stone monument of the Chief Justice of Chester in Wardlock church, you could see on the wall sharply defined in shadow the solemn outline of his paunch. He was thinking – not as we endeavour to trace thought in narrative, like a speech, but crossing zigzag from point to point, and back and forward. A man requires an audience, and pen and paper,

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CHAPTER XX

M. VARBARRIERE DECIDES

Varbarriere sat up on the side of his sofa.

“Who brought that woman, Gwynn, here? What do they want of her?” It was only the formula by which interrogatively to express the suspicion that pointed at Sir Jekyl and his attorney. “Soft words for me while tampering with my witnesses, then laugh at me. Why did not I ask Lady Alice whether she really wrote for her?”

Thus were his thoughts various as the ingredients of that soup called harlequin, which figures at low French taverns, in which are floating bits of chicken, cheese, potato, fish, sausage, and so forth – the flavour of the soup itself is consistent, nevertheless. The tone of Varbarriere’s ruminations, on the whole, was decided. He wished to avert the exposure which his interference alone had invited.

He looked at his watch – he had still a little more than half an hour for remedial thought and action – and now, what is to be done to prevent ce vieux singe blancfrom walking into the green chamber, and keeping watch and ward at his wife’s bedside until that spectre shall emerge through the wall, whom with a curse and a stab he was to lay?

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Well, what precise measures were to be taken? First he must knock up Sir Jekyl in his room, and tell him positively that General Lennox was to be at Marlowe by one o’clock, having heard stories in town, for the purpose of surprising and punishing the guilty. Sir Jekyl would be sharp enough to warn Lady Jane; or should he suggest that it would be right to let her know, in order to prevent her from being alarmed at the temper and melodramatics of her husband, and to secure that coolness and preparation which were necessary? It required some delicacy and tact, but he was not afraid. Next, he must meet General Lennox, and tell him in substance that he had begun to hope that he had been himself practised upon. Yes, that would do – and he might be as dark as he pleased on the subject of his information.

Varbarriere lighted his bed-room candle, intending to march forthwith to Sir Jekyl’s remote chamber.

Great events, as we all know, turn sometimes upon small pivots. Before he set out, he stood for a moment with his candle in one hand, and in his reverie he thrust the other into the pocket of his voluminous black trowsers, and there it encountered, unexpectedly, the letter he had that evening picked up on the floor of the gallery. It had quite dropped out of his mind. Monsieur Varbarriere was a Jupiter Scapin. He had not the smallest scruple about reading it, and afterwards throwing it into the fire, though it contained other men’s secrets, and was another man’s property.

This was a letter from Sir Jekyl Marlowe to Pelter and Crowe, and was in fact upon the special subject of Herbert Strangways. Unlucky subject! unlucky composition! Now there

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was, of course, here a great deal of that sort of communication which occurs between a clever attorney and his clever client, which is termed “privileged,” and is not always quite fit to see the light. Did ever beauty read letter of compliment and adoration with keener absorption?

Varbarriere’s face rather whitened as he read, and his fat sneer was not pleasant to see.

He got through it, and re-commenced. Sometimes he muttered and sometimes he thought; and the notes of this oration would have read nearly thus: –

“So the question is to be opened whether the anonymous payment – he lies, it was in my name! – through the bankers protects me technically from pursuit; and I’m to be ‘run by the old Hebrew pack from cover to cover,’ over the Continent – bravo! – till I vanish for seven years more.” Here Monsieur Varbarriere laughed in lurid contempt.

The letter went on in the same vein – contemptuous, cruel, he fancied. Everyone is cruel in self-defence; and in its allusions and spirit was something which bitterly recalled the sufferings which in younger and weaker days that same Baronet, pursuing the same policy, had inflicted upon him. Varbarriere remembered when he was driven to the most ignominious and risky shifts, to ridiculous disguises; he remembered his image in the cracked shaving-glass in the garret in his lair near Notre Dame – the red wig and moustache, and the goggles.

How easily an incautious poke will re-awake the dormant neuralgia of toothache; and tooth, cheek, ear, throat, brain, are all throbbing again in the re-induced anguish! With these sharp and vivid recollections of humiliation, fear, and suffer-

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ing, all stirred into activity by this unlucky letter, that savage and vindictive feeling which had for so long ruled the life of Herbert Strangways, and had sunk into an uneasy doze under the narcotic of this evening’s interview, rose up suddenly, wide awake and energetic.

He looked at his watch. The minute-hand showed him exactly how long he had been reading this confidence of client to attorney. “You will, will you?” murmured Varbarriere, with his jaw a little fiercely set, and a smile. “He will checkmate me, he thinks, in two or three moves. He does not see, clever fellow, that I will checkmate him in one!”

Now, this letter had preceded all that had occurred this evening to soften old animosities – though, strictly examined, that was not very much. It did not seem quite logical then, that it should work so sudden a revolution. I cannot, however, say positively; for in Varbarriere’s mind may have long lain a suspicion that Sir Jekyl was not now altogether what he used to be, that he did not quite know all he had inflicted, and that time had made him wiser, and therefore gentler of heart. If so, the letter had knocked down this hypothesis, and its phrases, one or two of them, were of that unlucky sort which not only recalled the thrill of many an old wound, but freshly galled that vanity which never leaves us, till ear and eye grow cold, and light and sound are shut out by the coffin-lid.

So Varbarriere, being quite disenchanted, wondered at his own illusions, and sighed bitterly when he thought what a fool he had been so near making of himself. And thinking of these things, he stared grimly on his watch, and by one of

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those movements that betray one’s abstraction, held it to his ear, as if he had fancied it might have gone down.

There it was, thundering on at a gallop. The tread of unseen fate approaching. Yes, it was time he should go. Jacques peeped in.

“You’ve done as I ordered?” “Yes Monsieur.”

“Here, lend me a hand with my cloak – very good. The servants, the butler, have they retired?”

“So I believe, Monsieur.”

“My hat – thanks. The lights all out on the stairs and lobbies?”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

“Go before – is that lighted?” “Yes, sir.”

This referred to one of those little black lanterns which belong to Spanish melodrama, with a semi-cylindrical horn and a black slide. We have most of us seen such, and handled if not possessed them.

“Leporello! hey, Jacques?” smiled Varbarriere sardonically, as he drew his short black cloak about him.

“Monsieur is always right,” acquiesced the man, who had never heard of Leporello before.

“Get on, then.”

And the valet before, the master following, treading cautiously, they reached the stair-head, where Varbarriere listened for a moment, then descended and listened again at the foot, and so through the hall into the long gallery, near the end of which is a room with a conservatory.

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This they entered. The useful Jacques had secured the key of the glass door into the conservatory, which also opened the outer one; and Varbarriere, directing him to wait there quietly till his return, stepped out into the open air and faint moonlight. A moment’s survey was enough to give him the lie of the ground, and recognising the file of tufted lime-trees, rising dark in the mist, he directed his steps thither, and speedily got upon the broad avenue, bordered with grass and guarded at either side by these rows of giant limes.

On reaching the carriage-way, standing upon a slight eminence, Varbarriere gazed down the misty slope toward the gate-house, and then toward Marlowe Manor, in search of a carriage or a human figure. Seeing none, he strolled onward toward the gate, and soon did see, airy and faint in the haze and distance, a vehicle approaching. It stopped some two hundred yards nearer the gate than he, a slight figure got out, and after a few words apparently, the driver turned about, and the slim, erect figure came gliding stiffly along in his direction. As he approached Varbarriere stood directly before him.

“Ha! here I am waiting, General,” said Varbarriere, advancing. “I – I suppose we had better get on at once to the house?”

General Lennox met him with a nod.

“Don’t care, sir. Whatever you think best,” answered the General, as sternly as if he were going into action.

“Thanks for your confidence, General. I think so;” and side by side they walked in silence for a while toward the house.

“Lady Alice Redcliffe here?” “Yes, sir.”

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