“How do you know I am alone?” I asked.
“Because,” said Charley, “I have been watching the London boat out, and I saw Captain Fennel and your sister go by it. Major and Mrs. Smith were with me. It is a lovely night.”
“Wait a moment,” I said, as Charley was about to depart when I had accepted the invitation. “Do you know whether an Englishman named Dangerfield is living here?”
“Don’t think there is; I have not met with him,” said Charley. “Why, Miss Preen?”
“Oh, only that I was asked to-day whether I knew any one of that name,” I returned carelessly. “Good-night, Mr. Charles. Thank you for coming.”
They have invited me, finding I was left alone, and I think it very kind of them. But the Smiths are both kind-hearted people.
September 23rd.—Half-past nine o’clock, p.m. Have just returned from Drecques by the last train after spending a pleasant day. Quiet, of course, for there is not much to do at Drecques except stroll over the ruins of the old castle, or saunter about the quaint little ancient town, and go into the grand old church. It was so fine and warm that we had dinner on the grass, the people at the cottage bringing our plates and knives and forks. Later in the day we took tea indoors. In the afternoon, when all the rest were scattered about and the major sat smoking his cigar on the bench under the trees, I sat down by him to tell him what happened yesterday, and I begged him to give me his opinion. It was no betrayal of confidence, for Major Smith is better acquainted with the shady side of the Fennels than I am.
“I heard there was an English lawyer staying at the Hôtel des Princes, and that he had come here from Douai,” observed the major. “His name’s Lockett. It must have been he who spoke to you on the pier.”
“Yes, of course. Do you know, major, whether any one has stayed at Sainteville passing as Mr. Dangerfield?”
“I don’t think so,” replied the major. “Unless he has kept himself remarkably quiet.”
“Could it apply to Captain Fennel?”
“I never knew that he had gone under an assumed name. The accusation is one more likely to apply to his brother than to himself. James Fennel is unscrupulous, very incautious: notwithstanding that, I like him better than I like the other. There’s something about Edwin Fennel that repels you; at least, it does me; but one can hardly help liking James, mauvais sujet though he is,” added the speaker, pausing to flirt off the ashes of his cigar.
“The doubt pointing to Edwin Fennel in the affair is his suddenly decamping,” continued Major Smith. “It was quite impromptu, you say, Miss Preen?”
“Quite so. I feel sure he had no thought of going away in the morning; and he did not receive any letter from England later, which was the excuse he gave Nancy for departing. Rely upon it that what he heard about the Mr. Dangerfield on the pier drove him away.”
“Well, that looks suspicious, you see.”
“Oh yes, I do see it,” I answered, unable to conceal the pain I felt. “It was a bitter calamity, Major Smith, when Nancy married him.”
“I’ll make a few cautious inquiries in the town, and try to find out if there’s anything against him in secret, or if any man named Dangerfield has been in the place and got into a mess. But, indeed, I don’t altogether see that it could apply to him,” concluded the major after a pause. “One can’t well go under two names in the same town; and every one knows him as Edwin Fennel.—Here they are, some of them, coming back!” And when the wanderers were close up, they found Major Smith arguing with me about the architecture of the castle.
Ten o’clock. Time for bed. I am in no haste to go, for I don’t sleep as well as I used to.
A thought has lately sometimes crossed me that this miserable trouble worries me more than it ought to do. “Accept it as your cross, and yield to it, Lavinia,” says Mary Carimon to me. But I cannot yield to it; that is, I cannot in the least diminish the anxiety which always clings to me, or forget the distress and dread that lie upon me like a shadow. I know that my life has been on the whole an easy life—that during all the years I spent at Selby Court I never had any trouble; I know that crosses do come to us all, earlier or later, and that I ought not to be surprised that “no new thing has happened to me,” the world being full of such experiences. I suppose it is because I have been so exempt from care, that I feel this the more.
Half-past ten! just half-an-hour writing these last few lines and thinking! Time I put up. I wonder when I shall hear from Nancy?
VI
A curious phase, taken in conjunction with what was to follow, now occurred in the history. Miss Preen began to experience a nervous dread at going into the Petite Maison Rouge at night.
She could go into the house ten times a-day when it was empty; she could stay in the house alone in the evening after Flore took her departure; she could be its only inmate all night long; and never at these times have the slightest sense of fear. But if she went out to spend the evening, she felt an unaccountable dread, amounting to horror, at entering it when she arrived home.
It came on suddenly. One evening when Lavinia had been at Mrs. Hardy’s, Charley Palliser having run over to London, she returned home a little before ten o’clock. Opening the door with her latch-key, she was stepping into the passage when a sharp horror of entering it seized her. A dread, as it seemed to her, of going into the empty house, up the long, dark, narrow passage. It was the same sort of sensation that had struck her the first time she attempted to enter it under the escort of Monsieur Gustave Sauvage, and it came on now with as little reason as it had come on then. For Lavinia this night had not a thought in her mind of fear or loneliness, or anything else unpleasant. Mrs. Hardy had been relating a laughable adventure that Charley Palliser met with on board the boat when going over, the account of which he had written to her, and Lavinia was thinking brightly of it all the way home. She was smiling to herself as she unlatched the door and opened it. And then, without warning, arose the horrible fear.
How she conquered it sufficiently to enter the passage and reach the slab, where her candle and matches were always placed, she did not know. It had to be done, for Lavinia Preen could not remain in the dark yard all night, or patrol the streets; but her face had turned moist, and her hands trembled.
That was the beginning of it. Never since had she come home in the same way at night but the same terror assailed her; and I must beg the reader to understand that this is no invention. Devoid of reason and unaccountable though the terror was, Lavinia Preen experienced it.
She went out often—two or three times a-week, perhaps—either to dine or to spend the evening. Captain Fennel and Nancy were still away, and friends, remembering Miss Preen’s solitary position, invited her.
October had passed, November was passing, and as yet no news came to Lavinia of the return of the travellers. At first they did not write to her at all, leaving her to infer that as the boat reached London safely they had done the same. After the lapse of a fortnight she received a short letter from Nancy telling her really nothing, and not giving any address. The next letter came towards the end of November, and was as follows:
“My dear Lavinia,
“I have not written to you, for, truly, there is nothing to write about, and almost every day I expect Edwin to tell me we are going home. Will you kindly lend me a ten-pound note? Please send it in a letter. We are staying at Camberwell, and I enclose you the address in strict confidence. Do not repeat it to any one—not even to Mary Carimon. It is a relation of Edwin’s we are staying with, but he is not well off. I like his wife. Edwin desires his best regards.
“Your loving sister,“Nancy.”
Miss Preen did not send the ten-pound note. She wrote to tell Nancy that she could not do it, and was uncomfortably pressed for money herself in consequence of Nancy’s own action.
The five-pound note borrowed from Lavinia by Nancy on her departure had not been repaid; neither had Nancy’s share of the previous quarter’s money been remitted. On the usual day of payment at the end of September, Lavinia’s quarterly income came to her at Sainteville, as was customary; not Nancy’s. For Nancy there came neither money nor letter. The fact was, Nancy, escorted by her husband, had presented herself at Colonel Selby’s bank—he was junior partner and manager of a small private bank in the City—the day before the dividends were due, and personally claimed the quarterly payment, which was paid to her.
But now, the summary docking of just half their income was a matter of embarrassment to Miss Preen, as may readily be imagined. The house expenses had to go on, with only half the money to meet them. Lavinia had a little nest-egg of her own, it has been said before, saved in earlier years; and this she drew upon, and so kept debt down. But it was very inconvenient, as well as vexatious. Lavinia told the whole truth now to Mary Carimon and her husband, with Nancy’s recent application for a ten-pound note, and her refusal. Little Monsieur Carimon muttered a word between his closed lips which sounded like “Rat,” and was no doubt applied to Edwin Fennel.
Pretty close upon this, Lavinia received a blowing-up letter from Colonel Selby. Having known Lavinia when she was in pinafores, the colonel, a peppery man, considered he had a right to take her to task at will. He was brother to Paul Selby, of Selby Court, and heir presumptive to it. The colonel had a wife and children, and much ado at times to keep them, for his income was not large at present, and growing-up sons are expensive.
“Dear Lavinia,
“What in the name of common sense could have induced you to imagine that I should pay the two quarterly incomes some weeks before they were due, and to send Ann and that man Fennel here with your orders that I should do so? Pretty ideas of trusteeship you must have! If you are over head and ears in debt, as they tell me, and for that reason wish to forestall the time for payment, I can’t help it. It is no reason with me. Your money will be forwarded to Sainteville, at the proper period, to yourself. Do not ask me again to pay it into Ann’s hands, and to accept her receipt for it. I can do nothing of the kind. Ann’s share will be sent at the same time. She tells me she is returning to you. She must give me her own receipt for it, and you must give me yours.
“Your affectionate kinsman,“William Selby.”
Just for a few minutes Lavinia Preen did not understand this letter. What could it mean? Why had Colonel Selby written it to her? Then the truth flashed into her mind.
Nancy (induced, of course, by Edwin Fennel) had gone with him to Colonel Selby, purporting to have been sent by Lavinia, to ask him to pay them the quarter’s money not due until the end of December, and not only Nancy’s share but Lavinia’s as well.
“Why, it would have been nothing short of swindling!” cried Lavinia, as she gazed in dismay at the colonel’s letter.
In the indignation of the moment, she took pen and ink and wrote an answer to William Selby. Partly enlightening him—not quite—but telling him that her money must never be paid to any one but herself, and that the present matter had better be hushed up for Ann’s sake, who was as a reed in the hands of the man she had married.
Colonel Selby exploded a little when he received this answer. Down he sat in his turn, and wrote a short, sharp note to Edwin Fennel, giving that estimable man a little of his mind, and warning him that he must not be surprised if the police were advised to look after him.
When Edward Fennel received this decisive note through an address he had given to Colonel Selby, but not the one at Camberwell, he called Miss Lavinia Preen all the laudatory names in the thieves’ dictionary.
And on the feast of St. Andrew, which as every one knows is the last day of November, the letters came to an end with the following one from Nancy:
“All being well, my dear Lavinia, we propose to return home by next Sunday’s boat, which ought to get in before three o’clock in the afternoon. On Wednesday, Edwin met Charley Palliser in the Strand, and had a chat with him, and heard all the Sainteville news; not that there seemed much to hear. Charley says he runs over to London pretty often now, his mother being ill. Of course you will not mind waiting dinner for us on Sunday.
“Ever your loving sister,“Ann.”
So at length they were coming! Either that threat of being looked after by the police had been too much for Captain Fennel, or the failure to obtain funds was cutting short his stay in London. Any way, they were coming. Lavinia laid the letter beside her breakfast-plate and fell into thought. She resolved to welcome them graciously, and to say nothing about bygones.
Flore was told the news, and warned that instead of dining at half-past one on the morrow, the usual Sunday hour, it would be delayed until three. Flore did not much like the prospect of her afternoon’s holiday being shortened, but there was no help for it. Lavinia provided a couple of ducks for dinner, going into the market after breakfast to buy them; the dish was an especial favourite of the captain’s. She invited Mary Carimon to partake of it, for Monsieur Carimon was going to spend Sunday at Lille with an old friend of his, who was now master of the college there.
On this evening, Saturday, Lavinia dined out herself. Some ladies named Bosanquet, three sisters, with whom she had become pretty intimate, called at the Petite Maison Rouge, and carried her off to their home in the Rue Lamartine, where they had lived for years. After a very pleasant evening with them, Lavinia left at ten o’clock.
And when she reached her own door, and was putting the latch-key into the lock, the old fear came over her. Dropping her hands, she stood there trembling. She looked round at the silent, deserted yard, she looked up at the high encircling walls; she glanced at the frosty sky and the bright stars; and she stood there shivering.
But she must go in. Throwing the door back with an effort of will, she turned sick and faint: to enter that dark, lonely, empty house seemed beyond her strength and courage. What could this strange feeling portend?—why should it thus attack her? It was just as if some fatality were in the house waiting to destroy her, and a subtle power would keep her from entering it.
Her heart beating wildly, her breath laboured, Lavinia went in; she shut the door behind her and sped up the passage. Feeling for the match-box on the slab, put ready to her hand, she struck a match and lighted the candle. At that moment, when turning round, she saw, or thought she saw, Captain Fennel. He was standing just within the front-door, which she had now come in at, staring at her with a fixed gaze, and with the most malignant expression on his usually impassive face. Lavinia’s terror partly gave place to astonishment. Was it he himself? How had he come in?
Turning to take the candle from the slab in her bewilderment, when she looked again he was gone. What had become of him? Lavinia called to him by name, but he did not answer. She took the candle into the salon, though feeling sure he could not have come up the passage; but he was not there. Had he slipped out again? Had she left the door open when thinking she closed it, and had he followed her in, and was now gone again? Lavinia carried her lighted candle to the door, and found it was fastened. She had not left it open.
Then, as she undressed in her room, trying all the while to solve the problem, an idea crept into her mind that the appearance might have been supernatural. Yet—supernatural visitants of the living do not appear to us, but of the dead. Was Edwin Fennel dead?
So disturbed was the brain of Lavinia Preen that she could not get to sleep; but tossed and turned about the bed almost until daybreak. At six o’clock she fell into an uneasy slumber, and into a most distressing dream.
It was a confused dream; nothing in it was clear. All she knew when she awoke, was that she had appeared to be in a state of inexplicable terror, of most intense apprehension throughout it, arising from some evil threatened her by Captain Fennel.
VII
It was a fine, frosty day, and the first of December. The sun shone on the fair streets of Sainteville and on the small congregation turning out of the English Protestant Church after morning service.
Lavinia Preen went straight home. There she found that Madame Carimon, who was to spend the rest of the day with her—monsieur having gone to Lille—had not yet arrived, though the French Church Evangélique was always over before the English. After glancing at Flore in the kitchen, busy over the fine ducks, Lavinia set off for the Rue Pomme Cuite.
She met Mary Carimon turning out of it. “Let us go and sit under the wall in the sun,” said Mary. “It is too early yet for the boat.”
This was a high wall belonging to the strong north gates of the town, near Madame Carimon’s. The sun shone full upon the benches beneath it, which it sheltered from the bleak winds; in front was a patch of green grass, on which the children ran about amidst the straight poplar trees. It was very pleasant sitting there, even on this December day—bright and cheerful; the wall behind them was quite warm, the sunshine rested upon all.
Sitting there, Lavinia Preen told Madame Carimon of the curious dread of entering her house at night, which had pursued her for the past two months that she had been alone in it, and which she had never spoken of to any one before. She went on to speak of the belief that she had seen Captain Fennel the previous night in the passage, and of the dream which had visited her when at length she fell asleep.
Madame Carimon turned her kindly, sensible face and her quiet, dark, surprised eyes upon Lavinia. “I cannot understand you,” she said.
“You mean, I suppose, that you cannot understand the facts, Mary. Neither can I. Why this fear of going into the house should lie upon me is most strange. I never was nervous before.”
“I don’t know that that is so very strange,” dissented Mary Carimon, after a pause. “It must seem lonely to let one’s self into a dark, empty house in the middle of the night; and your house is in what may be called an isolated situation; I should not much like it myself. That’s nothing. What I cannot understand, Lavinia, is the fancy that you saw Captain Fennel.”
“He appeared to be standing there, and was quite visible to me. The expression on his face, which seemed to be looking straight into mine, was most malicious. I never saw such an expression upon it in reality.”
Mary Carimon laughed a little, saying she had never been troubled with nervous fears herself; she was too practical for anything of the sort.
“And I have been practical hitherto,” returned Lavinia. “When the first surprise of seeing him there, or fancying I saw him there, was over, I began to think, Mary, that he might be dead; that it was his apparition which had stood there looking at me.”
Mary Carimon shook her head. “Had anything of that sort happened, Nancy would have telegraphed to you. Rely upon it, Lavinia, it was pure fancy. You have been disagreeably exercised in mind lately, you know, about that man; hearing he was coming home, your brain was somewhat thrown off its balance.”
“It may be so. The dream followed on it; and I did not like the dream.”
“We all have bad dreams now and then. You say you do not remember much of this one.”
“I think I did not know much of it when dreaming it,” quaintly spoke Lavinia. “I was in a sea of trouble, throughout which I seemed to be striving to escape some evil menaced me by Captain Fennel, and could not do so. Whichever way I turned, there he was at a distance, scowling at me with a threatening, evil countenance. Mary,” she added in impassioned tones, “I am sure some ill awaits me from that man.”
“I am sure, were I you, I would put these foolish notions from me,” calmly spoke Madame Carimon. “If Nancy set up a vocation for seeing ghosts and dreaming dreams, one would not so much wonder at it. You have always been reasonable, Lavinia; be so now.”
Miss Preen took out her watch and looked at it. “We may as well be walking towards the port, Mary,” she remarked. “It is past two. The boat ought to be in sight.”
Not only in sight was the steamer, but rapidly nearing the port. She had made a calm and quick passage. When at length she was in and about to swing round, and the two ladies were looking down at it, with a small crowd of other assembled spectators, the first passengers they saw on board were Nancy and Captain Fennel, who began to wave their hands in greeting and to nod their heads.
“Any way, Lavinia, it could not have been his ghost last night,” whispered Mary Carimon.
Far from presenting an evil countenance to Lavinia, as the days passed on, Captain Fennel appeared to wish to please her, and was all suavity. So at present nothing disturbed the peace of the Petite Maison Rouge.
“What people were they that you stayed with in London, Nancy?” Lavinia inquired of her sister on the first favourable opportunity.
Nancy glanced round the salon before answering, as if to make sure they were alone; but Captain Fennel had gone out for a stroll.
“We were at James Fennel’s, Lavinia.”
“What—the brother’s! And has he a wife?”
“Yes; a wife, but no children. Mrs. James Fennel has money of her own, which she receives weekly.”
“Receives weekly!” echoed Lavinia.
“She owns some little houses which are let out in weekly tenements; an agent collects the rents, and brings her the money every Tuesday morning. She dresses in the shabbiest things sometimes, and does her own housework, and altogether is not what I should call quite a lady, but she is very good-hearted. She did her best to make us comfortable, and never grumbled at our staying so long. I expect Edwin paid her something. James only came home by fits and starts. I think he was in some embarrassment—debt, you know. He used to dash into the house like a whirlwind when he did come, and steal out of it when he left, peering about on all sides.”
“Have they a nice house?” asked Lavinia.
“Oh, good gracious, no! It’s not a house at all, only small lodgings. And Mrs. James changed them twice over whilst we were there. When we first went they were at a place called Ball’s Pond.”
“Why did you remain all that time?”
Mrs. Edwin Fennel shook her head helplessly; she could not answer the question. “I should have liked to come back before,” she said; “it was very wearisome, knowing nobody and having nothing to do. Did you find it dull here, Lavinia, all by yourself?”
“‘Dull’ is not the right word for it,” answered Lavinia, catching her breath with a sigh. “I felt more lonely, Ann, than I shall ever care to feel again. Especially when I had to come home at night from some soirée, or from spending the evening quietly with Mary Carimon or any other friend.” And she went on to tell of the feeling of terror which had so tried her.
“I never heard of such a thing!” exclaimed Ann. “How silly you must be, Lavinia! What could there have been in the house to frighten you?”
“I don’t know; I wish I did know,” sighed Lavinia, just as she had said more than once before.
Nancy, who was attired in a bright ruby cashmere robe, with a gold chain and locket, some blue ribbons adorning her light ringlets, for she had made a point of dressing more youthfully than ever since her marriage, leaned back in her chair, as she sat staring at her sister and thinking.
“Lavinia,” she said huskily, “you remember the feeling you had the day we were about to look at the house with Mary Carimon, and which you thought was through the darkness of the passage striking you unpleasantly? Well, my opinion is that it must have given you a scare.”
“Why, of course it did.”
“Ah, but I mean a scare which lasts,” said Ann; “one of those scares which affect the mind and take very long to get rid of. You recollect poor Mrs. Hunt, at Buttermead? She was frightened at a violent thunderstorm, though she never had been before; and for years afterwards, whenever it thundered, she became so alarmingly ill and agitated that Mr. Featherston had to be run for. He called it a scare. I think the fear you felt that past day must have left that sort of scare upon you. How else can you account for what you tell me?”
Truth to say, the same idea had more than once struck Lavinia. She knew how devoid of reason some of these “scares” are, and yet how terribly they disturb the mind on which they fasten.
“But I had quite forgotten that fear, Ann,” she urged in reply. “We had lived in the house eighteen months when you went away, and I had never recalled it.”
“All the same, I think you received the scare; it had only lain dormant,” persisted Ann.
“Well, well; you are back again now, and it is over,” said Lavinia. “Let us forget it. Do not speak of it again at all to any one, Nancy love.”