Beggars on Horseback Part 6

"Oh, sir"--she began, "if only this shadow--if you would only let it lift--if you would only believe in me--in him!"

"Who knows," said the Squire benignly, "but that I may see cause to change my opinions. You will understand, my dear daughter, that a father is in so responsible a position, he must not accept an affair of the kind lightly, without due inquiry. Perhaps the fellow who sent me that report was prejudiced, who knows? I might, in justice, inquire further.

But you are not wearing your beads, my child."

"They--they have not all come yet," she faltered, "but I received some more yesterday."

"The roses on thy cheeks are the best adornment in a father's eye," said the Squire, "and now tell Lylie to bring me some broth with brandy in it, and bless thee, my child. And," he added to himself as she left the room, "I do not think I shall be taken with sickness again yet awhile."

Sophie's easily persuaded reason and her affectionate nature were swayed to grat.i.tude, and she reproached herself because something in her was repulsed by the old man's blandness. She ran downstairs and out into the yard singing under her breath, and saw the postboy coming up the drive. He had a packet for her which she took up to her room to open.

There were a dozen or so more of the polished pebbles, cut into beads, and a short note in which Crandon a.s.sured her of his undying affection, and ended by saying, "Do not spare the powder in order to keep the rust off the pebbles."

That afternoon Charles Le Petyt came over to Troon and walked with Sophie in the garden. He was full of joy to see the increased brightness of her look, and soon detected a softening in her tone when she spoke of her father--Crandon's name they avoided by silent consent.

"You may yet be happy with your father, Sophie," said Mr. Le Petyt with the hopefulness of the born idealist, and Sophie, confident in her supernatural knowledge, agreed.

"And I reproach myself that sometimes I have been wicked enough to wish I might never see him again," she said as they walked slowly towards the house door, past the open dairy windows, "and indeed, Charles, I think it must have been the Devil himself who sometimes suggested to me how much happier I should be if he were dead. I have seemed to hear a whisper: 'Who would not wish an old father dead for ten thousand pounds?'--because that meant freedom and--peace."

"My poor Sophie," replied Charles pressing her hand.

He stayed and took tea with her and the Squire, and the latter went to bed soon after he had left. The weather had turned rainy, autumn seemed invaded by a tang of winter that evening, and the Squire, who was subject to fits of s.h.i.+vering, had a huge fire lit, and demanded hot gruel of Lylie.

"There's no occasion for you to leave your ironing, Lylie," remarked Sophie when they were in the kitchen, and the woman acquiescing, Sophie went into the pantry. She was gone some time, and when she reappeared Lylie glanced up from the ironing of her turned satin slip. Sophie caught the glance, and fore-stalling a question, remarked carelessly:

"I have been stirring the gruel and eating some of the oatmeal out of it, for I've taken a great fancy to it. I believe I shall often eat from my father's gruel."

She stirred it round over the fire as she spoke.

"I'll take it overstairs," said Lylie, who viewed the friendlier relations between father and daughter with dislike. Sophie turned the gruel out into a basin and set the saucepan down on the hob.

"I will see to it," she retorted hurriedly, but Lylie seized the basin and bore it out of the kitchen.

Not a quarter of an hour later the Squire's screams echoed through the house. He was very sick, hiccuped like a person bitten by a mad dog, and cried out that he was burnt up with fire. Sophie, terrified, insisted on James riding at once to St. Annan's for the apothecary, and herself banished from the Squire's room by the commands he managed to articulate, she stayed against his door outside, every now and then pressing her fingers to her ears when a more awful sound than common came from within.

He was a trifle easier when the apothecary arrived and applied remedies, and Lylie took advantage of the lull to creep swiftly to the kitchen and pick up the saucepan Sophie had left on the hob. Hester, whom all the outcry had brought from her bed, watched her movements curiously.

Lylie lit two candles and bore the pan to the light.

"Come and look here, Hester," said Lylie slowly, feeling some of the sediment from the pan between her finger and thumb, as she spoke, "Did you ever see oatmeal so white?"

"Oatmeal!" said Hester, "why, 'tes as white as flour."

"'Tes more gritty'n flour. I see et all, Hester. Have 'ee never heard that poison's white and gritty? Measter's poisoned, and tes Miss that's done et."

A slight sound came from the kitchen door and both women looked round, but Sophie, whose foot had been on the threshold, had turned and fled upstairs to the door of her father's room again, where she flung herself on the floor and pressed her forehead against the wooden panel. In that long drawn moment of listening the truth had rushed in over her consciousness--and overwhelmed reason and self-control.

The door opened and the apothecary stumbled over her.

"Miss Bendigo--" he began in compa.s.sion, then some words to which the Squire had just given vent flashed back at him and he hesitated.

"Bring her in," ordered the patient hoa.r.s.ely.

Sophie scrambled to her feet and went towards the bed. She fell on her knees beside it.

"Oh, sir, forgive me, I didn't know, I didn't know," she babbled, "send me where you will, only forgive me and get well . . . I'll never see or hear from or write to him more, if you'll but forgive me, I shall be happy. Papa, papa!"

Over Sophie's head the Squire beckoned the apothecary into the room.

Then:

"I do forgive thee," he murmured, speaking with difficulty and veiling his eyes with his thin wrinkled lids, "but thou should'st have remembered I am your father. As for the villain Crandon, hadst thou loved me thou wouldst curse him and the ground he walks on."

"Oh, sir," said Sophie, to whom the words of pardon alone had penetrated, "your kindness strikes at my soul. Sir, on my knees I pray you will not curse me."

"_I_ curse thee!" gasped the Squire, forcing his distorted mouth into a semblance of the old bland smile, "no, child, I bless thee and hope G.o.d will bless thee, and I pray thou mayest live to repent and amend. . . .

Leave me, lest thou should'st say something to thy prejudice--"

apparently, thought the apothecary, who was himself trembling with horror, this martyred father had forgotten the presence of a listener.

"Go to the clergyman, Mr. Le Petyt, he will take care of thee. Alas, poor man, I am sorry for him. . . ."

"Papa, I am innocent, I swear to you I am. I never knew. I am innocent of this. . . ."

"I fear thou art not quite innocent and that there is some powder in such hands as will appear against thee. Harvey take away my poor misguided child."

Sophie stumbled blindly from the room and went upstairs. Mr. Harvey hesitated a moment, saw the patient almost comatose, and went down to the kitchen. There Lylie still pored over the saucepan, which she thrust out at him.

"See, Mr. Harvey," she demanded, "what's this stuff in wi' the gruel?

Can 'ee tell me that?"

Mr. Harvey examined the contents of the pan carefully, tried some on his finger, and shook his cautious head.

"I cannot be very positive," he replied at length, "but at least it can have no business in the gruel. Give me white paper and I will take some home and test it when it is dry."

Lylie helped him sc.r.a.pe the sediment into a sheet of paper, and he folded it up and pocketed it. He then gave instructions to the two women to heat more water for fomentations while he returned to the sick room.

Finding the Squire still comatose, he sat with his fingers on the intermittent pulse. Meanwhile Sophie, in whom fear, the most sickening of all emotions had awakened, crept downstairs, holding her breath past her father's room, down to the kitchen. Lylie happened to be in the scullery at the moment, Hester, still weak from morbid excitement as well as illness, was seated in a shadowy corner of the kitchen. Sophie crept in, looked fearfully round her, listened, and then began to stuff some papers into the grate. She thrust them into the heart of the flames and then breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Now I am more easy, thank G.o.d," she murmured, and slipped out of the kitchen as cautiously as she had come. Lylie, from behind the crack of the scullery door, went towards the grate, where she was joined by Hester. . . .

A little later all was noise again, the Squire had been seized with violent spasms, raving and hiccuping like a madman, unable to swallow as much as a sip of water. Towards the small hours he grew delirious, then sank gradually; with the dawn he died.

Sophie sat rigid in her room, paler than the paling day. She looked back over the past, recalling little speeches of Crandon's which, had she been less simple, less adoring, must have warned her of his plan. She saw the skill with which he had trapped her, she saw what he hoped to gain, she saw how he would lose nothing. It was she who had to pay. At the thought fear, natural, human fear, caught at her again and she sprang to her feet, a thing distraught. Escape--she must escape, get away from this dread that was closing in on her. She tied on cloak and hood and feverishly crammed all the money that for months she had been saving against her marriage into a little bag. On the stairs she ran into James Ruffiniac, and with her hands on his coat, pressing, begging, silent suppliants, she made him come into the dining-room.

"James," she said, "do you want to make your fortune? You do, do you not? If you will come with me, it is made."

"What do you want me to do?" asked James.

"Only to hire a postchaise to go to London, and I'll give you fifteen guineas now, and more when we come there. Only to do that. And in London you would make your fortune."

"Not on my life," he told her. "What you'm done you must see the end of.

'Tes your guilty soul makes you flee. I'll have to tell of this."

"I--I was merely jesting," faltered Sophie, "to see if you would.

James--" but he had swung on his heel and left her.