"No," I replied unmoved. "I told your lordship that I had written a will at the late Lord Wetherby's dictation. I did not say-for how could I know? – that it was this one."
"Ah!" He hastily smoothed the sheets, and ran his eyes over their contents. When he reached the last page there was a dark scowl on his face, and he stood a while staring at the signatures; not now reading, I think, but collecting his thoughts. "You know the provisions of this?" he presently burst forth with violence, dashing the back of his hand against the paper. "I say, sir, you know the provisions of this?"
"I do not, my lord," I answered. Nor did I.
"The unjust provisions of this will," he repeated, passing over my negative as if it had not been uttered. "Fifty thousand pounds to a woman who had not a penny when she married his son! Aye, and the interest on another hundred thousand for her life! Why, it is a prodigious income, an abnormal income-for a woman! And out of whose pocket is it to come? Out of mine, every stiver of it! It is monstrous! I say it is! How am I to keep up the title on the income left to me, I should like to know?"
I marvelled. I remembered how rich he was. I could not refrain from suggesting that he had still remaining all the real property. "And," I added, "I understood, my lord, that the testator's personalty was sworn under four hundred thousand pounds."
"You talk nonsense!" he snarled. "Look at the legacies! Five thousand here, and a thousand there, and hundreds like berries on a bush! It is a fortune, a decent fortune, clean frittered away! A barren title is all that will be left to me!"
What was he going to do? His face was gloomy, his hands were twitching. "Who are the witnesses, my lord?" I asked in a low voice.
So low-for under certain conditions a tone conveys much, very much-that he shot a stealthy glance towards the door before he answered, "John Williams."
"Blind," I replied in the same low tone.
"William Williams."
"He is dead. He was Mr. Alfred's valet. I remember reading in the newspaper that he was with his master, and was killed by the Indians at the same time."
"True. I remember that that was the case," he answered huskily. "And the handwriting is Lord Wetherby's." I assented. Then for fully a minute we were silent, while he bent over the will, and I stood behind him looking down at him with thoughts in my mind which he could as little fathom as could the senseless wood upon which I leaned. Yet I too mistook him. I thought him, to be plain, a scoundrel; and-well, so he was-but a mean one. "What is to be done?" he muttered at length, speaking rather to himself than to me.
I answered softly, "I am a poor man, my lord," while inwardly I was quoting "quem Deus vult perdere."
My words startled him. He answered hurriedly, "Just so! just so! So shall I be when this cursed paper takes effect. A very poor man! A hundred and fifty thousand gone at a blow! But there, she shall have it! She shall have every penny of it; only," he concluded slowly, "I do not see what difference one more day will make."
I followed his downcast eyes, which moved from the will before him to the agreement for the lease of the house; and I did see what difference a day would make. I saw and understood and wondered. He had not the courage to suppress the will; but if he could gain a slight advantage by withholding it for a few hours, he had the mind to do that. Mrs. Wigram, a rich woman, would no longer let the house; she would be under no compulsion to do so; and my lord would lose a cheap residence as well as his hundred and fifty thousand pounds. To the latter loss he could resign himself with a sigh; but he could not bear to forego the petty gain for which he had schemed. "I think I understand, my lord," I replied.
"Of course," he resumed nervously, "you must be rewarded for making this discovery. I will see that it is so. You may depend upon me. I will mention the case to Mrs. Wigram, and-and, in fact, my friend, you may depend upon me.
"That will not do," I said firmly. "If that be all, I had better go to Mrs. Wigram at once, and claim my reward a day earlier."
He grew very red in the face at receiving this check. "You will not in that event get my good word," he said.
"Which has no weight with the lady," I answered politely but plainly.
"How dare you speak so to me?" his lordship cried. "You are an impertinent fellow! But there! How much do you want?"
"A hundred pounds."
"A hundred pounds for a mere day's delay, which will do no one any harm!"
"Except Mrs. Wigram," I retorted dryly. "Come, Lord Wetherby, this lease is worth a thousand a year to you. Mrs. Wigram, as you well know, will not voluntarily let the house to you. If you would have Wetherby House you must pay me. That is the long and the short of it."
"You are an impertinent fellow!" he repeated.
"So you have said before, my lord."
I expected him to burst into a furious passion, but I suppose there was a something of power in my tone, beyond the mere defiance which the words expressed; for, instead of doing so, he eyed me with a thoughtful, malevolent gaze, and paused to consider. "You are at Poole and Duggan's," he said slowly. "How was it that they did not search this cupboard, with which you were acquainted?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "I have not been in the house since Lord Wetherby died," I said. "My employers did not consult me when the papers he left were examined."
"You are not a member of the firm?"
"No, I am not," I answered. I was thinking that, so far as I knew those respectable gentlemen, no one of them would have helped my lord in this for ten times a hundred pounds. My lord! Faugh!
He seemed satisfied, and taking out a note-case laid on the table a little pile of notes. "There is your money," he said, counting them over with reluctant fingers. "Be good enough to put the will and envelope back into the cupboard. Tomorrow you will oblige me by rediscovering it-you can manage that, no doubt-and giving information at once to Messrs. Duggan and Poole, or Mrs. Wigram, as you please. Now," he continued, when I had obeyed him, "will you be good enough to ask the servants to tell Mrs. Wigram that I am waiting?"
There was a slight noise behind us. "I am here," said some one. I am sure that we both jumped at the sound, for though I did not look that way, I knew that the voice was Mrs. Wigram's, and that she was in the room. "I have come to tell you, Lord Wetherby," she went on, "that I have an engagement from home at twelve. Do I understand, however, that you are ready? If so, I will call in Mrs. Williams."
"The papers are ready for signature," the peer answered, betraying some confusion, "and I am ready to sign. I shall be glad to have the matter settled as agreed." Then he turned to me, where I had fallen back, as seemed becoming, to the end of the room, and said, "Be good enough to ring the bell if Mrs. Wigram permit it."
As I moved to the fireplace to do so, I was conscious that the lady was regarding me with some faint surprise. But when I had regained my position and looked towards her, she was standing near the window gazing steadily out into the square, an expression of disdain rendered by face and figure. Shall I confess that it was a joy to me to see her fair head so high, and to read even in the outline of her girlish form a contempt which I, and I only, knew to be so justly based? For myself, I leant against the edge of the screen by the door, and perhaps my hundred pounds lay heavily on my heart. As for him, he fidgeted with his papers, although they were all in order, and was visibly impatient to get his bit of knavery accomplished. Oh! he was a worthy man! And Welshman!
"Perhaps," he presently suggested, for the sake of saying something, "while your servant is coming, you will read the agreement, Mrs. Wigram. It is very short, and, as you know, your solicitors have already seen it in the draft."
She bowed, and took the paper negligently. She read some way down the first sheet with a smile, half careless, half contemptuous. Then I saw her stop-she had turned her back to the window to obtain more light-and dwell on a particular sentence. I saw-God! I had forgotten the handwriting! – I saw her gray eyes grow large and fear leap into them as she grasped the paper with her other hand, and stepped nearer to the peer's side. "Who," she cried, "who wrote this? Tell me! Do you hear? Tell me quickly!"
He was nervous on his own account, wrapt in his own piece of scheming, and obtuse.
"I wrote it," he said, with maddening complacency. He put up his glasses and glanced at the top of the page she held out to him. "I wrote it myself, and I can assure you that it is quite right, and a faithful copy. You do not think-"
"Think! Think! no, no! This, I mean! Who wrote this?" she cried, awe in her face, and a suppliant tone, – strange as addressed to that man, – in her voice.
He was confounded by her vehemence, as well as hampered by his own evil conscience.
"The clerk, Mrs. Wigram, the clerk," he said petulantly, still in his fog of selfishness. "The clerk from Messrs. Duggan and Poole's."
"Where is he?" she cried out breathlessly. I think she did not believe him.
"Where is he?" he repeated in querulous surprise. "Why here, of course. Where should he be, madam? He will witness my signature."
Would he? Signatures! It was little of signatures I recked at that moment. I was praying to Heaven that my folly might be forgiven me, and that my lightly planned vengeance might not fall on my own head. "Joy does not kill," I was saying to myself, repeating it over and over again, and clinging to it desperately. "Joy does not kill!" But oh! was it true in the face of that white-lipped woman?
"Here!" She did not say more, but gazing at me with great dazed eyes, she raised her hand, and beckoned to me. And I had no choice but to obey-to go nearer to her, out into the light.
"Mrs. Wigram," I said hoarsely, my voice sounding to me only as a whisper, "I have news of your late-of your husband. It is good news."
"Good news?" Did she faintly echo my words? or, as her face from which all color had passed peered into mine, and searched it in infinite hope and infinite fear, did our two minds speak without need of physical lips? "Good news?"
"Yes," I whispered, "he is alive. The Indians did not-"
"Alfred!" Her cry rang through the room, and with it I caught her in my arms as she fell. Beard and long hair, and scar and sunburn, and strange dress-these which had deceived others-were no disguise to her-my wife. I bore her gently to the couch, and hung over her in a new paroxysm of fear. "A doctor! Quick! A doctor!" I cried to Mrs. Williams, who was already kneeling beside her. "Do not tell me," I added piteously, "that I have killed her."
"No! no! no!" the good woman answered, the tears running down her face. "Joy does not kill!"
An hour later this fear had been lifted from me, and I was walking up and down the library alone with my thankfulness; glad to be alone, yet more glad, more thankful still, when John came in with a beaming face. "You have come to tell me-" I cried eagerly, pleased that the tidings had come by his lips-"to go to her? That she will see me?"
"Her ladyship is sitting up," he replied.
"And Lord Wetherby?" I asked, pausing at the door to put the question. "He left the house at once?"
"Yes, my lord, Mr. Wigram has been gone some time."
Along the Garonne
We ascend the valley of the Garonne on our way to Pau, which we intended to use as a base of operations against the Pyrenees. Our route, as originally mapped out, lay by sea to Bordeaux, which is three days from Liverpool; and thence by rail to our destination, a journey merely of hours. But at the last moment we determined to postpone our stay at Pau, and instead to wander along the banks of the Garonne for a time, familiarizing ourselves with the ways of the country. Then, when we had rubbed off our insular corners against the Great French Politeness, and perfected our grasp of the language in talk with the Agenois villagers, we proposed to drop gently into Pau, armed at all points, and scarcely distinguishable from Frenchmen.
So we planned: and so it came about that we were free to enjoy ourselves and look about us critically, as the smoky little tender bore us up the wide channel of the Gironde from Pauillac, where our ship bound for South America had contemptuously dropped us, to Bordeaux itself. A little below the city, the Gironde, which is really the estuary of the Garonne and Dordogne, shrinks to the Garonne pure and simple, but under either name it seems equally a waste of turbid clay-laden waters. On our left hand a bright sun-the month was November-shone warmly on a line of low hills, formed of reddish earth, and broken by great marl quarries. Woods climbed about these, and here and there a village or a little town nestled under them. On our right the bank lay low, and was fringed with willows, the country behind it being flattish, planted as it seemed to us with dead thorn-bushes, and dotted sparely with modern castellated houses. Nevertheless it was towards this modest, almost dreary landscape that we gazed; it was of it we all spoke, and to it referred, as we named names famous as Austerlitz or Waterloo, names familiar in our mouths-and our butlers'-as household words. For are not more people versed in claret than in history? And this commonplace landscape, this western bank of the Gironde, a mere peninsula lying between the river and the low Atlantic coast, is called Medoc, and embraces all the best known Bordeaux vineyards in the world. It seems as if a single parish-say St. George's, Hanover Square, for that is a big one-might hold them all. There, see, is Château Lafitte. The vineyards of St. Estéphe and St. Julien we have just passed. Léoville and Latour are not far off. And now we are passing the Château of Margaux itself, and gaining experience, are beginning to learn that all those little thorn-bushes stuck about the fallows, as though to protect the ground-game from poachers' nets, are vines-vines of the premier crû! The vintage is over. The grapes, black, sour things, about the size of currants, have all been picked. Where we had looked to see the endless interlacings of greenery, and swelling clusters dropping fatness on a carpet of turf, we find only reddish fallows, and rows of dead gooseberry bushes.
But never mind, even though this be but the first of many disillusions, and though the "sunny south" become hourly a more humorous catchword. To-day the sun is warm, the breeze is soft, the custom-house officers are civil. We air-but with the caution due to convalescents, or those of tender years-our shaky, tottering French, and get English answers. So we stride across the broad quays of Bordeaux, our hearts before us, our luggage behind, and ourselves in the best of spirits and tempers.
Bordeaux, as we saw it, was a cheerful, busy city, full of wide streets and open spaces and handsome buildings; a bright clean, airy, city with little smoke, an immense water frontage, and one very fine bridge: a pleasant etherealized Liverpool, in fact. The white blouses and blue trousers of the workmen, the soldiers' uniforms, the bare heads of some women and the gay 'kerchiefs, worn chignon-wise, of others, gave picturesqueness to the crowds circling about the kiosques, and reminded us, from time to time, that we were in a southern city. Not unnecessarily; for the thermometer fell on the day after our arrival to fifty degrees; and rain fell too, and we were quick to discover the true cause of French vivacity. The French have no fires at home. Consequently, when it is cold-and it often is very cold, even as far South as Bordeaux-their only resource is to go out, and jump about in such faint sunshine as they can find, and so make believe to be warm. Every one in Bordeaux seemed to be doing this that day.
We saw a number of churches, but I have jumbled them together in my mind, and dare not distinguish between the beauties of St. Seurin and St. Croix, St. Michel or the Cathedral. Only I attended a service on Sunday morning, and, having heard that no Frenchmen now went to church, noted with interest that of a large congregation one in every four was a man. But then Bordeaux is perhaps the most orthodox city in France, and primitive ideas, good and bad, still prevail in this southwestern province, peopled by descendants of the Huguenots and Albigenses, by devout Basques and simple Navarrese. And two things also in Bordeaux I remember-the semi-circular remains of a Roman amphitheatre, which no one visiting Bordeaux should omit to see; and, secondly, a lofty, detached spire of singular lightness and grace. It is called the Peyberland, and was built by Pierre Berland, who must have been an English subject.
His name strikes the vein of thought which was uppermost in my mind at Bordeaux. I found it impossible to forget that it had been for three centuries a half English city, and the capital of a half English province, ruled by an English king; or that up the wide Gironde, between the marly banks, Edward the Black Prince must many a time have sailed in state. Sir John Chandos and Sir Walter Manny, and many another English worthy, knew these streets as well as they knew Eastcheap or Aldgate. John of Gaunt and Talbot of Shrewsbury dwelt here, as much at home and at their ease as in York or Leicester. It is impossible not to wonder at those old Englishmen; not to think of them with pride, as we remember how firmly, the roving blood of Dane and Norman young in their veins, they grasped this prize; how long they clung to it, how boldly they flaunted the French lilies in the eyes of France; how cheerfully they crowded year by year to cross the bay in open boats! And then what cosmopolitans they were, with their manors in Devon and Aquitane, their houses in London and Bordeaux; with perhaps a snug little box at Calais, and a farm or two in Maine. How trippingly French and Provençal, and the rougher English, passed over their tongues. They founded no empire-on the contrary they lost one. But they were the immediate ancestors of Elizabeth's sea-dogs, for all that. In holding Guienne through those three centuries their strength was wasted. When they lost it (1451), they turned upon one another, and the Wars of the Roses took up half a century. After that they needed half-a-century's holiday to recruit themselves; and then out flashed the Vikings' spirit again-this time to better purpose-and under Drake and Grenville and Hawkins, they, the men of Poitiers and Sluys, made the greater England.
Even in Bordeaux they have left some traces of their work. They built this cathedral which stands here, in the third city of France. Their leopards are not yet effaced from the walls of yonder castle. Their dogs-les dogues des Anglais, our waiter dubbed them, on seeing us fondle them-play about the streets, and sniff with a special friendliness at English calves. Indeed, I never saw such a place for bull-dogs-chiefly brindled ones-as Bordeaux. We drank a toast after dinner the evening before we left. It was, Les dogues des Anglais!
Bordeaux, being like London too high on the river to get the sea-breeze, has its Brighton at Arcachon. To reach the latter from the city, a railway passes some thirty miles westward across a tract of light, sandy soil, thinly clothed with woods. As you glide through these, now in sunshine, now in shade, you catch a glimpse here and there of clearings and wooden shanties, and groups of peasants leaning on axes. Then, scarcely descending, you find yourself on the seashore, with the Bay of Biscay before you. Nearer, a basin of deepest blue, almost cut off from the outer sea by a reef of the dunes, forms a glorified harbor. Along this basin runs a broad beach, backed by a row of magnificent hotels with spacious terraces; and behind these lie two or three streets of rather paltry shops and restaurants. Having seen all this-the plage, the hotels, the terraces, the streets-you fancy you have seen Arcachon, and are inclined to be disappointed. But this is not Arcachon proper, which lies at the back of all this, and at the back even of that fairy-like Casino that rises on the abrupt slope of the sand-dunes behind us, and seemed the rear of all things. For on the land-side of the Casino is a forest of pines and larches, wild, far stretching, and apparently illimitable: a forest that is perpetually running up one sand-hill and down another, as if it were trying to get a view of the sea, and were not easily satisfied. And amid the vivid greens and dull blues of the foliage, glitter here and there and everywhere the daintiest of Swiss chalets or Indian bungalows, bright boxes of wood and stucco, colored and painted, and fretted and carved so delicately that one would infer that rain never fell here; or else that these were not intended for out-of-door wear. Mere toys they seem, set in smooth lawns. Flowers glow about them, and the scent of the pines is everywhere, and everywhere are shady aisles of trees hung with white mosses, and leading into the gloom of the forest. Nature and luxury have come together here; the result is that soft, languid, southern beauty, Mademoiselle Arcachon-of the Théâtre des Folies Bordelaises. Yet is her constitution tolerably strong-thanks to the Atlantic breezes, though the sun was bright on the day we visited her, the wind was cold and the thermometer scarcely above forty degrees. This in early November.
The next evening saw us enter a very different place in a different way. For leaving Bordeaux we reached La Réole on foot and at dusk, welcomed only by the fantastic rays of a few swinging oil lamps. La Réole is the antipodes to Arcachon. It is a small, ancient town, which, small as it is, has a great place in Froissart and Davila, and still frowns bravely down upon the rich plain of the Garonne. It stands on a steep, cloven hill that rises sheer from the wide, yellow, rush-bordered river about forty miles above Bordeaux. On the crest above the Garonne stands a castle once English, and in size and position not unlike that at Chepstow. Beside it are a church, a modern château, and a place of modern houses. Upon the second crest, and in the cleft between the two, are huddled together the steep alleys and crazy tottering houses, all corners and gables, of the old town. A stream on which are several mills pours through the ravine, being overhung by tall, delapidated houses of three stories, with as many sets of wooden balconies and outside stairs. One might almost step across the water from one balcony to another, so much do the houses bulge. We took infinite delight in the old-world quaintness of this scene, in the air of decay that hung about all things, in the crumbling coats of arms, the wavy, tiled roofs, the sinking houses, the swinging lanterns; above all in the gray walls of the castle, brightened here and there by the pure discs of a rose bush, or the green of ivy.
Froissart has a very pretty story-and a strange story too-to tell of La Réole. He says that Sir Walter Manny being with the English besieging it, "was reminded of his father;" that he had heard in his infancy that he had been buried there, or in that neighborhood. (Is there not a pleasant smack about that "was reminded of," and that dubious "he had heard in his infancy"?) The elder Manny, the chronicler explains, had unluckily wounded to death in a tournament at Cambray a Gascon knight; and by way of penance had agreed to go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostella, at Santiago in Spain. On his return he passed near La Réole, and hearing that the brother of the King of France was besieging it, stayed to visit him; and going home one night from the royal hotel to his lodgings, was waylaid and murdered. The Gascon's kinsmen were strongly suspected of the foul deed; but they were powerful, "and none took the part of the Lord of Manny." So he was buried in a small chapel outside La Réole; and was almost forgotten when his son, being in the neighborhood, raked up the old story, and offered a reward of a hundred crowns to any one who could show him the grave. This an old man volunteered to do, and took Sir Walter to a tomb which was further identified by a Latin inscription. Thereupon, the son, as pious as brave-a subject of Queen Philippa of Hainault, I fear, and not a trueborn Englishman, though he died in London, was buried in the Charter House, and left his lands "on either side of the sea" to the Earl of Pembroke-had the remains conveyed to Valenciennes in Hainault, and buried there.
And so the story ends. But is it not a quaint and pretty story, and does it not smack of the times when the knight errant was one day tourneying at Cambray, and the next kneeling at Santiago, and on the third was waylaid at La Réole? And does it not plaintively suggest how, after long days of waiting, the news, still dim and uncertain, came through to the quiet castle in Hainault, news so dim, so uncertain, that the good son, when chance brought him to the scene of his father's death, could but faintly remember that it had happened there or thereabouts?
We seemed to be for a few days in a world of dying things. If La Réole was old and decadent, and showed few signs of former strength, the next place to which we came was still farther gone in decay. Port St. Marie is a straggling town lying low in a bend of the river. Most of its houses-they are large, with heavy doorways-are built in frameworks of wood after the style of our black and white houses, and have the spaces between the beams filled with bricks; long, thin bricks of close texture and the old Roman shape, set sometimes on end, sometimes lengthwise, more often aslant; any way so that they may fill the interstices. A large number of these houses are of three stories; and each upper story projecting two or three feet beyond the one below it, the buildings seem really nodding to their fall. Many were empty, with unglazed windows, and flapping shutters, and sinking corners; and yet the stout timbers, seasoned perhaps when Simon de Montfort was governor of Guienne and had his court in Bordeaux, held together, and bound up the crumbling clay. Above one door ran the legend "Le Couronné dut devoir," a sufficiently chivalrous motto. Above others were battered stone shields. On all was the stamp of assured ruin. Neglect and poverty were written large everywhere. Time had touched the place with no caressing hand, such as
Makes old bareness picturesque,
And tufts with grass a feudal tower,
but with mean and sordid fingers; and the result was pitifully dreary. It made our hearts ache. The very people we saw in the streets looked pallid and hopeless, like people going down the hill. Such a town, so desolate, so moribund, does not exist, thank heaven, in our more populous England. Yet in our way we enjoyed it. We gloated with something of the zest of ghouls over its decay, until having cloyed our souls with sadness, we got hurriedly away into the sunshine and the fields, where the patient, fawn-colored oxen were dragging the plough, and the countryman stood leaning on his goad to see us pass between the rows of poplars. No doubt he thought us mad to be toiling out of St. Marie with our faces set countrywards, when no great distance off lay the railway, which would take us in a few hours to Bordeaux, to the delights of café and boulevard. "Oh! but they are droll, these English!"
Any one leaving St. Marie must remark a singular, conical hill which rises abruptly from the plain before him. It is topped by a wooden steeple, while the dark outlines of walls and towers form a crown about its summit, and a row of cypresses rising solemnly above the lower buildings impart something of mystery to the place. It seemed to me like nothing so much as Mont St. Michel. In vain we ransacked our guide books. We could find no word of this fortress town which looked down on road and river; only in our map we discovered that its name was Clermont Dessus. Nothing daunted, however, we discovered a field path, and, climbing the hill, passed through a ruined gateway into the silence of the place. On three sides the walls were yet fairly perfect, and within them stood some fifty houses, many in ruins, more empty, a few inhabited. The floor of one was on a level with the roof of another, and the only means of access was by steep, tortuous alleys. The church had been partially restored, but was old and still bore marks of violent usage. The graveyard on a terrace displayed twenty-four cypresses, and an ancient stone cross. Above all this rose the ruins of a castle, smaller than that at La Réole and with traces of more recent occupation. Woodwork and iron still remained adhering to the walls. What, we wondered, had been its history. A few women and children were the only human creatures it held, and we could gather nothing from them save that it belonged, or had belonged, to the "Seigneur." For our climb, however, we felt amply rewarded by the view over the valley of the Garonne, and so ran quickly down the hill and stepped out stubbornly for Agen, which we reached after twice losing our way through a too ardent desire to cling to a pleasant green path by the river.