BOOK II
IN WHICH THE SECRET OF THE INHERITANCE TRANSMITTED TO GABRIEL CAREW IS REVEALED IN A SERIES OF LETTERS FROM ABRAHAM SANDIVAL, ESQ., ENGLAND, TO HIS FRIEND, MAXIMILIAN GALLENGA, ESQ., CONTRA COSTA CO., CALIFORNIA
I
My Dear Max, – For many months past you have complained that I have been extremely reticent upon domestic matters, and that I have said little or nothing concerning my son Reginald, who, since you quitted the centres of European civilisation to bury yourself in a sparsely populated Paradise, has grown from childhood to manhood. A ripe manhood, my dear Max, such as I, his father, approve of, and to the future development of which, now that a grave and strange crisis in his life has come to a happy ending, I look forward with loving interest. It is, I know, your affection for Reginald that causes you to be anxious for news of him. Well do I remember when you informed me of your fixed resolution to seek not only new scenes but new modes of life, how earnestly you strove to prevail upon me to allow him to accompany you.
"He is young and plastic," you said, "and I can train him to happiness. The fewer the wants, the more contented the lot of man."
You wished to educate Reginald according to the primitive views to which you had become so strongly wedded, and you did your best to convert me to them, saying, I remember, that I should doubtless suffer in parting with Reginald, but that it was a father's duty to make sacrifices for his children. You did not succeed. My belief was, and is, that man is born to progress, and that to go back into primitiveness, to commence again, as it were, the history of the world and mankind, as though we had been living in error through all the centuries, is a folly. I did not apply this criticism to you; I regarded your new departure not as a folly, but as a mistake. I doubt even now whether it has made you happier than you were, and I fancy I detect here and there in your letters a touch of sadness and regret-of which perhaps you are unconscious-that you should have cut yourself away from the busy life of multitudes of people. However, it is not my purpose now to enlarge upon this theme. The history I am about to relate is personal to myself and to Reginald, whose destiny it has been to come into close contact with a family, the head of which, Gabriel Carew, affords a psychological study as strange probably as was ever presented to the judgment of mankind.
There are various reasons for my undertaking a task which will occupy a great deal of time and entail considerable labour. The labour will be interesting to me, and its products no less interesting to you, who were always fond of the mystical. I have leisure to apply myself to it. Reginald is not at present with me; he has left me for a few weeks upon a mission of sunshine. This will sound enigmatical to you, but you must content yourself with the gradual and intelligible unfolding of the wonderful story I am about to narrate. Like a skilful narrator I shall not weaken the interest by giving information and presenting pictures to you in the wrong places. The history is one which it is my opinion should not be lost to the world; its phases are so remarkable that it will open up a field of inquiry which may not be without profitable results to those who study psychological mysteries. A few years hence I should not be able to recall events in their logical order; I therefore do so while I possess the power and while my memory is clear with respect to them.
You will soon discover that neither I nor Reginald is the principal character in this drama of life. That position is occupied by Mr. Gabriel Carew, the owner of an estate in the county of Kent, known as Rosemullion.
My labours will be thrown away unless you are prepared to read what I shall write with unquestioning faith. I shall set down nothing but the truth, and you must accept it without a thought of casting doubt upon it. That you will wonder and be amazed is certain; it would, indeed, be strange otherwise; for in all your varied experiences (you led a busy and eventful life before you left us) you met with none so singular and weird as the events which I am about to bring to your knowledge. You must accept also-as the best and most suitable form through which you will be made familiar not only with the personality of Gabriel Carew, but with the mysterious incidents of his life-the methods I shall adopt in the unfolding of my narrative. They are such as are frequently adopted with success by writers of fiction, and as my material is fact, I am justified in pressing it into my service. I am aware that objection may be taken to it on the ground that I shall be presenting you with conversations between persons of which I was not a witness, but I do not see in what other way I could offer you an intelligent and intelligible account of the circumstances of the story. All that I can therefore do is to promise that I will keep a strict curb upon my imagination and will not allow it to encroach upon the domains of truth. With this necessary prelude I devote myself to my task.
II
Before, however, myself commencing the work there is something essential for you to do. Accompanying my own manuscript is a packet, carefully sealed and secured, on the outer sheet of which is written, "Not to be disturbed or opened until instructions to do so are given by Abraham Sandival to his friend Maximilian Gallenofa." The precaution is sufficient to whet any man's curiosity, but is not taken to that end. It is simply in pursuance of the plan I have designed, by which you will become possessed of all the details and particulars for the proper understanding of what I shall impart to you. The packet, my dear Max, is neither more nor less than a life record made by Gabriel Carew himself up to within a few months of his marriage, which took place twenty years ago in the village of Nerac. The lady Gabriel Carew married was the daughter of Doctor Louis, a gentleman of rare acquirements, and distinguished both for his learning and benevolence. There is no evidence in the record as to whether its recital was spread over a number of years, or was begun and finished within a few months; but that matters little. It bears the impress of absolute truth and candour, and apart from its startling revelations you will recognise in it a picturesqueness of description hardly to be expected from one who had not made a study of literature. Its perusal will perplexedly stir your mind, and in the feelings it will excite towards Gabriel Carew there will most likely be an element of pity, the reason for which you will find it difficult to explain. "Season your admiration for a while;" before I am at the end of my task the riddle will be solved.
As I pen these words I can realise your perplexity during your perusal of the record as to the manner in which my son Reginald came be associated with so strange a man as the writer. But this is a world of mystery, and we can never hope to find a key to its spiritual workings. With respect to this particular mystery nothing shall be hidden from you. You will learn how I came to be mixed up in it; you will learn how vitally interwoven it threatened to be in Reginald's life; you will learn how Gabriel Carew's manuscript fell into my hands; and the mystery of his life will be revealed to you.
Now, my dear Max, you can unfasten the packet, and read the record.
III
I assume that you are now familiar with the story of Gabriel Carew's life up to the point, or within a few months, of his marriage with Lauretta, and that you have formed some opinion of the different persons with whom he came in contact in Nerac. Outside Nerac there was only one person who can be said to have been interested in his fate; this was his mother's nurse, Mrs. Fortress, and you must be deeply impressed by the part she played in the youthful life of Gabriel Carew. Of her I shall have to speak in due course.
I transport you in fancy to Nerac, my dear Max, where I have been not very long ago, and where I conversed with old people who to this day remember Gabriel Carew and his sweet wife Lauretta, whom he brought with him to England some little time after their marriage. It is not likely that the incidents in connection with Gabriel Carew and his wife will be forgotten during this generation or the next in that loveliest of villages.
When you laid aside Carew's manuscript he had received the sanction of Lauretta's mother to his engagement with the sweet maid, and the good woman had given her children her blessing. Thereafter Gabriel Carew wrote: "These are my last written words in the record I have kept. From this day I commence a new life." He kept his word with respect to his resolve not to add another word to the record. He sealed it up and deposited it in his desk; and it is my belief that from that day he never read a line of its contents.
We are, then, my dear Max, in Nerac, you and I in spirit, in the holiday time of the open courtship of Gabriel Carew and Lauretta. Carew is occupying the house of which it was his intention to make Lauretta the mistress, and there are residing in it, besides the ordinary servants, Martin Hartog, the gardener, and his daughter, with whom, from Carew's record, Emilius was supposed to be carrying on an intrigue of a secret and discreditable nature. It is evident, from the manner in which Carew referred to it, that he considered it dishonourable. The name of this girl was Patricia.
There remain to be mentioned, as characters in the drama then being played, Doctor Louis, Eric, and Father Daniel.
The crimes of the two ruffians who had attempted to enter Doctor Louis's house remained for long fresh in the memories of the villagers. They were both dead, one murdered, the other executed for a deed of which only one person in Nerac had an uneasy sense of his innocence-Father Daniel. The good priest, having received from the unfortunate man a full account of his life from childhood, journeyed shortly afterwards to the village in which he had been born and was best known, for the purpose of making inquiries into its truth. He found it verified in every particular, and he learnt, moreover, that although the hunchback had been frequently in trouble, it was rather from sheer wretchedness and poverty than from any natural brutality of disposition that he had drifted into crime. It stood to his credit that Father Daniel could trace to him no acts of cruel violence; indeed, the priest succeeded in bringing to light two or three circumstances in the hunchback's career which spoke well for his humanity, one of them being that he was kind to his bedridden mother. Father Daniel returned to Nerac much shaken by the reflection that in this man's case justice had been in error. But if this were so, if the hunchback were innocent, upon whom to fix the guilt? A sadness weighed upon the good priest's heart as he went about his daily duties, and gazed upon his flock with an awful suspicion in his mind that there was a murderer among them, for whose crime an innocent man had been executed.
Gabriel Carew was happy. The gloom of his early life, which threatened to cast dark shadows over all his days, seemed banished for ever. He was liked and respected in the village in which he had found his happiness; his charities caused men and women to hold him in something like affectionate regard; he was Father Daniel's friend, and no case of suffering or poverty was mentioned to him which he was not ready to relieve; in Doctor Louis's home he held an honoured place; and he was loved by a good and pure woman, who had consented to link her fate with his. Surely in this prospect there was nothing that could be productive of aught but good.
The sweetness and harmony of the time, however, were soon to be disturbed. After a few weeks of happiness, Gabriel Carew began to be troubled. In his heart he had no love for the twin brothers, Eric and Emilius; he believed them to be light-minded and unscrupulous, nay, more, he believed them to be treacherous in their dealings with both men and women. These evil qualities, he had decided with himself, they had inherited from their father, Silvain, whose conduct towards his unhappy brother Kristel had excited Gabriel Carew's strong abhorrence. As is shown in the comments he makes in his record, all his sympathy was with Kristel, and he had contracted a passionate antipathy against Silvain, whom he believed to be guilty of the blackest treachery in his dealings with Avicia. This antipathy he now transferred to Silvain's sons, Eric and Emilius, and they needed to be angels, not men, to overcome it.
Not that they tried to win Carew's good opinion. Although his feelings for them were not openly expressed, they made themselves felt in the consciousness of these twin brothers, who instinctively recognised that Gabriel Carew was their enemy. Therefore they held off from him, and repaid him quietly in kind. But this was a matter solely and entirely between themselves and known only to themselves. The three men knew what deep pain and grief it would cause not only Doctor Louis and his wife, but the gentle Lauretta, to learn that they were in enmity with each other, and one and all were animated by the same desire to keep this antagonism from the knowledge of the family. This was, indeed, a tacit understanding between them, and it was so thoroughly carried out that no member of Doctor Louis's family suspected it; and neither was it suspected in the village. To all outward appearance Gabriel Carew and Eric and Emilius were friends.
It was not the brothers but Carew who, in the first instance, was to blame. He was the originator and the creator of the trouble, for it is scarcely to be doubted that had he held out the hand of a frank friendship to them, they would have accepted it, even though their acceptance needed some sacrifice on their parts. The reason for this qualification will be apparent to you later on in the story, and you will then also understand why I do not reveal certain circumstances respecting the affection of Eric and Emilius for Martin Hartog's daughter, Patricia, and for the female members of the family of Doctor Louis. It would be anticipating events. I am relating the story in the order in which it progressed, and, so far as my knowledge of it goes, according to the sequence of time.
Certainly the dominant cause of Gabriel Carew's hatred for the brothers sprang from his jealousy of them with respect to Lauretta. They and she had been friends from childhood, and they were regarded by Doctor Louis and his wife as members of their family. This in itself was sufficient to inflame so exacting a lover as Carew. He interpreted every innocent little familiarity to their disadvantage, and magnified trifles inordinately. They saw his sufferings and were, perhaps, somewhat scornful of them. He had already shown them how deep was his hatred of them, and they not unnaturally resented it. After all, he was a stranger in Nerac, a come-by-chance visitor, who had usurped the place which might have been occupied by one of them had the winds been fair. Instead of being overbearing and arrogant he should have been gracious and conciliating. It was undoubtedly his duty to be courteous and mannerly from the first day of their acquaintance; instead of which he had, before he saw them, contracted a dislike for them which he had allowed to swell to monstrous and unjustifiable proportions.
Gabriel Carew, however, justified himself to himself, and it may be at once conceded that he had grounds for his feelings which were to him-and would likely have been to some other men-sufficient. These may now be set forth.
When a lover's suspicious and jealous nature is aroused it does not from that moment sleep. There is no rest, no repose for it. If it require opportunities for confirmation or for the infliction of self-suffering, it is never difficult to find them. Imagination steps in and supplies the place of fact. Every hour is a torture; every innocent look and smile is brooded over in secret. A most prolific, unreasonable, and cruel breeder of shadows is jealousy, and the evil of it is that it breeds in secret.
Gabriel Carew set himself to watch, and from the keen observance of a nature so thorough and intense as his nothing could escape. He was an unseen witness of other interviews between Patricia Hartog and Emilius; and not only of interviews between her and Emilius but between her and Eric. He formed his conclusions. The brothers were playing false to each other, and the girl was playing false with both. This was of little account; he had no more than a passing interest in Patricia, and although at one time he had some kind of intention of informing Martin Hartog of these secret interviews, and placing the father on his guard-for the gardener seemed to be quite unaware that an intrigue was going on-he relinquished the intention, saying that it was no affair of his. But it confirmed the impressions he had formed of the character of Eric and Emilius, and it strengthened him in his determination to allow no intercourse between them and the woman he loved.
An additional torture was in store for him, and it fell upon him like a thunderbolt. One day he saw Emilius and Lauretta walking in the woods, talking earnestly and confidentially together. His blood boiled; his heart beat so violently that he could scarcely distinguish surrounding objects. So violent was his agitation that it was many minutes before he recovered himself, and then Lauretta and Emilius had passed out of sight. He went home in a wild fury of despair.
He had not been near enough to hear one word of the conversation, but their attitude was to him confirmation of his jealous suspicion that the young man was endeavouring to supplant him in Lauretta's affections. In the evening he saw Lauretta in her home, and she noticed a change in him.
"Are you ill, Gabriel?" she asked.
"No," he replied, "I am quite well. What should make me otherwise?"
The bitterness in his voice surprised her, and she insisted that he should seek repose. "To get me out of the way," he thought; and then, gazing into her solicitous and innocent eyes, he mutely reproached himself for doubting her. No, it was not she who was to blame; she was still his, she was still true to him; but how easy was it for a friend so close to her as Emilius to instil into her trustful heart evil reports against himself! "That is the first step," he thought. "What must follow is simple. These men, these villains, are capable of any treachery. Honour is a stranger to their scheming natures. How shall I act? To meet them openly, to accuse them openly, may be my ruin. They are too firmly fixed in the affections of Doctor Louis and his wife-they are too firmly fixed in the affections of even Lauretta herself-for me to hope to expose them upon evidence so slender. Not slender to me, but to them. These treacherous brothers are conspiring secretly against me. I will meet them with their own weapons. Secrecy for secrecy. I will wait and watch till I have the strongest proof against them, and then I will expose their true characters to Doctor Louis and Lauretta."
Having thus resolved, he was not the man to swerve from the plan he laid down. The nightly vigils he had kept in his young life served him now, and it seemed as if he could do without sleep. The stealthy meetings between Patricia and the brothers continued, and before long he saw Eric and Lauretta in the woods together. In his espionage he was always careful not to approach near enough to bring discovery upon himself.
In an indirect manner, as though it was a matter which he deemed of slight importance, he questioned Lauretta as to her walks in the woods with Eric and Emilius.
"Yes," she said artlessly, "we sometimes meet there."
"By accident?" asked Gabriel Carew.
"Not always by accident," replied Lauretta. "Remember, Gabriel, Eric and Emilius are as my brothers, and if they have a secret-" And then she blushed, grew confused, and paused.
These signs were poisoned food indeed to Carew, but he did not betray himself.
"Have they a secret?" he asked, with assumed carelessness.
"It was wrong of me to speak," said Lauretta, "after my promise to say nothing to a single soul in the village."
"And most especially," said Carew, hitting the mark, "to me."
She grew more confused. "Do not press me, Gabriel."
"Only," he continued, with slight persistence, "that it must be a heart secret."
She was silent, and he dropped the subject.
From the interchange of these few words he extracted the most exquisite torture. There was, then, between Lauretta and the brothers a secret of the heart, known only to themselves, to be revealed to none, and to him, Gabriel Carew, to whom the young girl was affianced, least of all. It must be well understood, in this explanation of what was occurring in the lives of these young people at that momentous period, that Gabriel Carew never once suspected that Lauretta was false to him. His great fear was that Eric and Emilius were working warily against him, and were cunningly fabricating some kind of evidence in his disfavour which would rob him of Lauretta's love. They were conspiring to this end, to the destruction of his happiness, and they were waiting for the hour to strike the fatal blow. Well, it was for him to strike first. His love for Lauretta was so all-absorbing that all other considerations-however serious the direct or indirect consequences of them-sank into utter insignificance by the side of it. He did not allow it to weigh against Lauretta that she appeared to be in collusion with Eric and Emilius, and to be favouring their schemes. Her nature was so guileless and unsuspecting that she could be easily led and deceived by friends in whom she placed a trust. It was this that strengthened Carew in his resolve not to rudely make the attempt to open her eyes to the perfidy of Eric and Emilius. She would have been incredulous, and the arguments he should use against his enemies might be turned against himself. Therefore he adhered to the line of action he had marked out. He waited, and watched, and suffered. Meanwhile, the day appointed for his union with Lauretta was approaching.