Part 4 (1/2)
”It is not a question whether you love me or not, Davies. You acknowledge that you were the spy of Mr. Hubert and his brothers. And if you were not spying for their benefit, why were you watching me as I came up the glen the day I was taken ill? Why did you go to the sea-wall to see in case I had left anything behind; and why did you treasure this handkerchief as a proof that I had been there?”
Mrs. Davies hesitated; but only, I believe, because she found it difficult to make her situation clear.
”Lady Brandling must try and understand,” she answered. ”I was not spying for Mr. Hubert. I have not spied for Mr. Hubert for a long while. I kept the handkerchief to show Lady Brandling that I knew what had made her faint that day. Also to show her that others did not know.
Lady Brandling is safe. She must know that they do not yet know. If they know what Lady Brandling perhaps shall have seen, Lady Brandling and her husband are dead people, like the people in the s.h.i.+p; dead like Sir Thomas.”
Dead like Sir Thomas! I repeated to myself. But I still kept my eyes fixed on hers in the gla.s.s, where she stood behind me, brush in hand.
”Davies,” I said, ”you must explain if I am to understand. You tell me you love me now though you did not love me at first. You tell me you were placed to spy over me by Mr. Hubert, and you tell me that you were not spying for him when you went to see whether I had left anything on the sea-wall. You have been good and kind beyond words during my sickness, and I desire to believe in you. But I dare not. Why should I believe that you have really changed so completely? Why should I believe that you are with _me_, and against _them_?”
Mrs. Davies's face changed strangely. It seemed to me to express deep perplexity and almost agonised helplessness. She twisted her fingers and raised her shoulders. She was wrestling with my unbelief. Suddenly she leaned over the dressing table close to me.
”Listen,” she said. ”I have learned things since then. Hubert told me lies, but I learned. I am against _them_ because I know they tried to kill my son.”
A look of incredulity must have pa.s.sed over my face, for she added,
”Aye; they only tried to kill one of my sons, Hugh, who I thought had gone overboard, whom they thought they had drowned, but who has come and told me. But--” and she fixed her eyes on mine, ”they _did_ kill my other son; I know that now. My other son of the heart, not the belly.
And that son, my Lady, was your brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Brandling.”
And then Davies made a strange imperious gesture, and I must needs listen to her talk. I have since pieced it together out of her odd enigmatic sentences. My late brother-in-law, after years of pa.s.sive connivance in _their_ doings, which paid for his debaucheries in foreign lands, became restive, or was suspected by his uncles, and condemned by them to death as a danger to their evil a.s.sociation. Sir Thomas was decoyed home, and, according to their habit in case of mutiny, taken out, a prisoner, to the deepest part of the channel, and drowned. The report was spread that he had been killed in a drunken brawl at Bristol, a show of legal proceedings was inst.i.tuted by his uncle in that city (naturally to no effect, there being no murderer there to discover), and a corpse brought back by them for solemn burial at St. Salvat's. But instead of being interred in the family vault, the body of the false Sir Thomas was destroyed by the burning of the Chapel during his wake. The suspicions of Mrs. Davies appeared to have been awakened by this fact, and by the additional one that she was not allowed to see the corpse of her beloved foster-son. Her own son Hugh, Sir Thomas's foster brother, disappeared about this time; and Hubert appears to have made the distracted mother believe that her own boy was the murderer of Sir Thomas, and had met with death at his hands; the whole unlikely story being further garnished for the poor credulous woman with a doubt that the murder of her foster-son had been, in some manner, the result of a conspiracy to bring about the succession of my husband. All this she seems to have believed at the time of our coming, and for this reason to have lent herself most willingly to spy upon my husband and me, in hopes of getting the proofs of his guilt. But her suspicions gradually changed, and her whole att.i.tude in the matter was utterly reversed when, a few days before the wreck of the great Indiaman and my adventure on the sea-wall, her son, whom she believed dead, had stolen back in disguise and told her of an expedition in which the uncles had carried a man to the high seas, gagged and bound, and drowned him: a man who was not one of their crew and whose stature and the colour of whose hair answered to those of the nominal master of St. Salvat's. Her son, in an altercation over some booty, had let out his suspicion to my uncles, and had escaped death only by timely flight masked under accidental drowning from a fis.h.i.+ng boat. Since this revelation Davies's devotion to the dead Sir Thomas had transferred itself to Eustace and me, and her one thought had become revenge against the men who had killed her darling.
Davies told me all this, as I said, in short, enigmatic sentences; and I scarcely know whether her tale seemed to me more inevitably true or more utterly false in its hideous complication of unlikely horrors. When she had done:
”Davies,” I ask her solemnly, ”you have been a spy, you have, by your saying, been the accomplice of the most horrid criminals that ever disgraced the world. Why should I believe one word of what you tell me?”
Davies hesitated as before, then looked me full in the face ”If Lady Brandling cannot believe what it is needful that she should believe, let her ask her husband whether I am telling her a lie. Lady Brandling's husband knows, and he is afraid of telling _her_ because he is afraid of them.” Davies had been kneeling by the dressing-table, as if to make herself heard to me without speaking above a whisper.
I mustered all my courage, for these last words touched me closer, filled me with a far more real and nearer horror than all her hideous tales.
”Davies,” I said, ”kindly finish brus.h.i.+ng my hair. When it is brushed I can do it up myself; and you may go and wash that handkerchief.”
The old woman rose from her knees without a word, and finished brus.h.i.+ng my hair very carefully. Then she handed me the hairpins and combs ceremoniously. As she did so she murmured beneath her breath:
”Lady Brandling is a courageous lady. I love Lady Brandling for her courage.” She curtsied and withdrew. When the door was well closed on her I felt I could bear the strain no more; I leaned my head on the dressing table and burst into a flood of silent tears.
At that moment Eustace came in. ”Good G.o.d!” he said, ”what is the matter?” taking my hand and trying to raise me up.
But I hid my face. ”Oh, Eustace,” I answered, ”when I think of our child!”
But what I was saying, G.o.d help me, was not true.
_October_ 1, 1773.
What frightful suspicions are these which I have allowed to creep insidiously into my mind! Did he or did he not know? Does he know yet?
Every time we meet I feel my eyes seeking his face, scanning his features, and furtively trying to read their meaning, alas! alas! as if he were a stranger. And I spend my days piecing together bits of the past, and every day they make a different and more perplexing pattern. I remember his change of manner on receiving the news of his brother's death, and the gloom which hung over him during our journey and after our arrival here. I thought then that it was the unexpected return to the scenes of his unhappy childhood; and that his constraint and silence with me were due to his difficulty in dealing with the shocking state of things he found awaiting him. It seemed natural enough that Eustace, a thinker, a dreamer even, should feel hara.s.sed at his inability to clean out this den of iniquity. But why have remained here? Good G.o.d, is my husband a mere pensioner of all this hideousness, as his wretched brother seems to have been? And even for that miserable debauched creature the day came when he turned against his masters, and faced death, perhaps like a gentleman. Death.... How unjust I am grown to Eustace! I ought to try and put myself in his place, and see things as he would see them, not with the horrified eyes of a stranger. Like me, he may have believed at first that St. Salvat's was merely a nest of smugglers.... Or he may have had only vague fears of worse, haunting him like bad dreams of his childhood....
Besides, this frightful trade in drowned men and their goods has, from what Davies tells me, been for centuries the chief employment of this dreadful coast. Whole villages, and several of the first families of the country, practised it turn about with smuggling. Davies was ready with a string of names, she expressed no special horror and her conscience perhaps represents that of these people; an unlawful trade, but not without its side of peril, commending it to barbarous minds like highway robbery or the exploits of buccaneers, whom popular ballads treat as heroes.