CHAPTER XVI.

AN UNPLEASANT DISCOVERY.

The thought of this conversation with Mr. Sivewright followed Lucius all through the day’s work. He meditated upon it in the intervals of his toil, and that meditation only tended to confirm him in his opinion as to the lonely old man. Soured and embittered by his son’s ingratitude, Homer Sivewright had consoled himself by the indulgence of that passion which is of all passions the most absorbing—the greed of gain. As he beheld his profits accumulate he became more and more parsimonious; surrendered without regret the pleasures for which he had no taste; and having learned in his poverty to live a life of hardship and deprivation, was contented to do without luxuries and even comforts which had never become necessary to his existence. Thus the sole delight of his days had been the accumulation of money, and who could tell how far the usurer’s exorbitant profits had gone to swell the tradesman’s honest gains? The art collection might have been little more than a cover for the money-lender’s less reputable commerce.

Thus reasoned Lucius. He returned to Cedar House at about five in the afternoon, having dined hastily at a coffee-house in the Shadrack-road, in the midst of his day’s work.

He found the table in the spacious old parlour laid for tea, and drawn into one of the open windows. Lucille had contrived, even with her small means, to give a look of grace to the humble meal. There were a few freshly-cut flowers in a Venetian goblet, and some fruit in an old Derby dish; the brown loaf and butter and glass jar of marmalade had a fresher and daintier look than anything Mrs. Babb the charwoman ever set before her master. Lucius thought of the fair surroundings that wealth could buy for the girl he loved; thought how easy their lives would be if he were only rich enough to give her the home he dreamed of, if there were no question of waiting and patience. True that he might give her some kind of home—a home in the Shadrack district—at once, but was it such a shelter as he would care to offer to his fair young bride? Would it not be a dreary beginning of wedded life?

Yes, Mr. Sivewright’s hoarded wealth might give them much, but could he, Lucius, as an honest man, feel any satisfaction in the possession of a fortune gained in such crooked ways as the miser treads in his ruthless pursuit of gold? He tried to put all thought of that possible wealth out of his mind. That way lay temptation, perhaps dishonour; for in his mind it was impossible to disassociate the miser’s wealth from the means by which it had been amassed.

Lucille had the same pale troubled look which had alarmed him on the previous evening, but this he ascribed to a natural anxiety about her grandfather. He did his best to cheer her, as they drank tea together at the little table by the open window, ministered to by the devoted Wincher, whose bonnet hovered about them throughout the simple meal.

‘She’s fidgety about the old gentleman, poor child,’ said Mrs. Wincher. ‘I’m sure she’s been up and down that blessed old staircase twenty times to-day, that restless she couldn’t settle to nothink. And he is a bit cranky I’ll allow, not knowing his own mind about anythink, and grumbling about as beautiful a basin of broth as was ever sent up to a ninvalid. But sickness is sickness, as I tell our missy, and she mustn’t be surprised if sick folks is contrairy.’

When Mrs. Wincher had departed with the teatray, Lucius told Lucille of the search he had undertaken for Mr. Sivewright.

‘My grandfather told me about it,’ she said. ‘I am to show you the cabinet in the loft. He would have sent me up to fetch the papers alone, he said, only there is so much lumber crowded together that he doubted if I should be able to get at the cabinet. We had better go at once before the light begins to fade, for it is rather dark up there.’

‘I am ready, dear.’

Lucille produced a great bunch of rusty keys from the desk at which Mr. Sivewright had been wont to transact the mysterious business of his retirement, and they went up the old staircase side by side in the afternoon sunlight, which had not yet begun to wane. The wide corridor which led to the invalid’s room, with the doors of other rooms on either side of it, was familiar enough to Lucius; but he had never yet ascended above this story, and Lucille had told him that the upper floor was a barren desert—the undisputed territory of mice and spiders. She unlocked a door which opened on a narrow flight of stairs—the steep steps worn by the tread of departed generations, and of various levels. This staircase brought them to the topmost story, above which rose the loft they had to explore. The ceiling of the landing on this upper floor was low, blotched and swollen here and there with the rain of many a winter, the dilapidated roof being in some parts little better than a filter. There were curious old panelled doors on either side of this landing, which was lighted by one melancholy window, across whose narrow panes the spider had woven her cloudy tapestries.

‘Are all those rooms empty?’ asked Lucius, looking at the numerous doors.

‘Yes,’ answered Lucille hurriedly. ‘My grandfather fancied the floors unsafe, and would put nothing into them. Besides, he had room enough down-stairs. The things he has stowed away in the roof are things upon which he sets no value—mere rubbish which almost any one else would have given away. Come, Lucius.’

There was a steep little staircase leading up to the loft, only one degree better than a ladder. This they mounted cautiously in semi-darkness, and then Lucius found himself in a vast substantially floored chamber, just high enough in the clear to admit of his standing upright, and amidst a forest of massive beams leaning this way and that, evidently the roof of a house built to defy the grim destroyer Time.

For some moments all was darkness; but while Lucius was striving to pierce the gloom, Lucille raised a sloping shutter in the centre of the roof, and let in a burst of western sunlight. Then he beheld the contents of the place—a chaos of ancient lumber, the wreck of time. It was like standing among the bruised and battered timbers of a sunken vessel at the bottom of the sea.

The objects around him were evidently the merest waste and refuse of a large and varied collection—broken armchairs, dilapidated buffets, old oak-carving in every stage of decay, odd remnants of mildewed and moth-eaten tapestry, fragments of shattered plaster casts; the head of a Diana, crescent crowned, lying amidst the tattered remains of a damask curtain; an armless Apollo, leaning lopsided and despondent of aspect against an odd leaf of a Japanese screen; old pictures whose subjects had long become inscrutable to the eye of man; stray cushions covered with faded embroidery, which had once issued bright and glowing from the fair hands that wrought it—on every side the relics of perished splendour, the very dust and sweepings of goodly dwellings that had long been empty. A melancholy picture, suggestive of man’s decay.

Lucille peered into the shadows which filled the angles of the loft, in quest of that oaken cabinet, of which she had but a faint remembrance.

‘It used to stand in the back-parlour in Bond-street when I was a child,’ she said. ‘Yes, I remember, a curious old thing, with the figures of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. There are little folding-doors that open the gates of Eden, with the angel and his flaming sword. There are carvings on each side; on one side the expulsion from Paradise, on the other the death of Abel. See, there it is, behind that pile of pictures.’

Lucius looked in the direction she indicated. In the extreme corner of the loft he saw a clumsy cabinet of the early Dutch school, much chipped and battered, with several old frameless canvases propped against it. He clambered over some of the more bulky objects which blockaded his way, cleared a path for Lucille, and after some minutes’ labour they both reached the corner where the cabinet stood.

The western light shone full upon this corner. The first task was to remove the pictures, which were thickly coated with dust, and by no means innocent of spiders. Lucille drew back with a shudder and a little girlish scream at the sight of a black and bloated specimen of that tribe.

Lucius put aside the pictures one by one. They were of the dingiest school of art, old shopkeepers doubtless, for which Mr. Sivewright had vainly striven to find a customer. Here and there an arm or a head was faintly visible beneath the universal brown of the varnish, but the rest was blank. It was, therefore, with considerable surprise that Lucius perceived beneath this worthless lumber a picture in a frame, and, by the appearance of the canvas, evidently modern. He turned it gently to the light, and saw—What? The face of the man he killed in the pine forest.

Happily for Lucius Davoren, he was kneeling on the ground, and with his back to Lucille, when he made this discovery. A cry of surprise, pleasure, terror, he knew not which, broke from her lips as he turned that portrait to the light; but from his there came no sound.

For the moment the blow stunned him; he knelt there looking at the too-well-remembered face—the face that had haunted him sleeping and waking—the face that he would have given years of his life utterly to forget.

It was the same face; on that point there could be no shadow of doubt. The same face in the pride of youth, the bloom and freshness of early manhood. The same keen eyes; the same hooked nose, with its suggestion of affinity to the hawk and vulture tribe; the unmistakable form of the low brow, with its strongly marked perceptives and deficiency in the organs of thought; the black hair, growing downward in a little peak; the somewhat angular brows.

‘My father’s portrait,’ said Lucille, recovering quickly from that shock of surprise. ‘To think that my grandfather should have thrust it out of sight, here amongst all this worthless rubbish. How bitterly he must have hated his only son!’

_‘Your father!’_ cried Lucius, letting the picture drop from his nerveless hands, and turning to Lucille with a face white as the plaster head of Diana. ‘Do you mean to tell me that man was your father?’

‘My dear father,’ the girl answered sadly; ‘my father, whom I shall love to the end of my life, whom I love all the better for his misfortunes, whom I pity with all my heart for the ill fate that changed his father’s natural affection into a most unnatural hate.’

She took up the portrait, and carried it to a clearer spot, where she laid it gently down upon an old curtain.

‘I will find a better place for it by and by,’ she said. ‘It was too cruel of my grandfather to send it up here. And I have so often begged him to show me a picture of my father.’

‘I wonder you can remember his face after so long an interval,’ said Lucius, who had in some measure regained his self-possession, though his brain seemed still full of strange confused thoughts, amidst which the one horrible fact stood forth with hideous distinctness.

The man he had slain yonder was the father of the woman he loved. True that the act had been a sacrifice, and not a murder; the execution of ready-handed justice upon a criminal, and not an act of personal revenge. But would Lucille ever believe that? She who, in spite of all her grandfather’s dark hints and bitter speeches, still clung with a fond belief to the father she had loved. She must never know that fatal deed in the western wilderness; never learn what a wretch man becomes when necessity degrades him to the level of the very beasts against which he fights the desperate fight for life. Take from man civilisation and Christianity, and who shall say how far he is superior, either in the capacity to suffer or in kindliness of nature, to the tiger he hunts in the Indian jungle, or the wolf he shoots in the Canadian backwoods? And this was the man whose fate, until last night, he had stood pledged to discover; the man whose lost footsteps he was to have tracked through the wilderness of life. Little need of inquiry. This man’s troubled history had been brought to an abrupt ending, and by the seeker’s rash hand.

‘Come,’ said Lucille anxiously; ‘we must find those papers for my grandfather. He will not rest unless he has them this evening.’

Lucius began his task without another word; he could not trust himself to speak yet awhile. He unfastened the clumsy folding-doors of the cabinet, with a hand that trembled a little in spite of his effort to be calm, and opened the drawers one after another. They came out easily enough, and rattled loosely in their frames, so shrunken was the wood. Outer drawers and inner drawers, and papers in almost all of them—some were mere scrappy memoranda, scrawled on half sheets or quarter sheets of letter paper; other documents were in sealed envelopes; others were little packets of letters, two or three together, tied with faded red tape. Lucius examined all the drawers and minute cupboards, designed, one would suppose, with a special view to the accumulation of rubbish; emptied them of their contents, tied the papers all together in his handkerchief, and gave them into the custody of Lucille. The light had faded a little by the time this was done, and the corners of the loft were wrapped in deepening shadow—a gruesome ghostly place to be left alone in by this half-light. Lucille looked round her with a shudder as she turned to leave it.

They were on the perilous staircase—Lucius in front, Lucille behind him, half supported by his uplifted arm, both obliged to stoop to avoid knocking their heads against the low sloping ceiling—when Lucius saw and heard something sufficiently startling.

In the half dusk of the landing below them, he saw the door of one of those empty rooms which Lucille had declared to be locked opened—ever so little way—and then closed again quickly but softly, as if shut by a careful hand. He distinctly saw the opening of the door; he distinctly heard the noise of the lock.

‘Lucille,’ he said, in an eager whisper, ‘you are wrong. There is some one in that room—the door exactly facing these stairs. Look.’

He pointed, and her eyes followed the direction of his finger. For a few moments she stood speechless, looking at the door with a scared face, and leaning upon him more heavily than before.

‘Nonsense, Lucius! you are dreaming. There can be no one there; the rooms are empty; the doors are all locked.’

‘I am quite certain, dearest,’ he answered, still in a whisper, and with his eyes fixed upon the door that had opened, or seemed to open. ‘Don’t be alarmed; it may be nothing wrong. It is only old Wincher prowling about this floor, I daresay, just as he prowls about the down-stair rooms. I’ll soon settle the question.’

‘I tell you, Lucius, the doors are all locked,’ cried Lucille, in a tone far louder than her wonted accents—a voice of anger or of alarm.

Lucius tried the door with a strong and resolute hand—shook it till it rattled in its time-worn frame. It was locked certainly, but locked on the inside. The keyhole was darkened by the key.

‘It is locked on the inside, Lucille,’ he said; ‘there is some one in the room.’

‘Impossible! Who should be there? No one ever comes up to this floor. There is nothing here to tempt a thief, even if thieves ever troubled this house. I keep the keys of all these rooms. Pray come down-stairs, Lucius. My grandfather will be impatient about those papers.’

‘How can that door be locked on the inside if you have the key of it?’

‘I have not the key of that particular door. There is a door of communication between that room and the next, and I keep one locked on the inside. It saves trouble.’

‘Let me see the two rooms; let me satisfy myself that all is right,’ he said, stretching out his hand for the keys.

‘I will not encourage any such folly,’ answered Lucille, moving quickly towards the staircase leading to the lower story. ‘Pray bring those papers, Lucius. I could not have imagined you were so weak-minded.’

‘Do you call it weak-minded to trust my own senses? And I have a special reason for being anxious upon this point.’

She was on her way down-stairs by this time. Lucius lingered to listen at the door, but no sound came from the room within. He tried all the doors one after another: they were all locked. He knelt down to look through the keyholes. Two of the rooms were darkened by closed shutters, only faint gleams of light filtering through the narrow spaces between them. One was lighter, and in this he saw an old bedstead and some pieces of dilapidated furniture. It looked a room which might have been used at some time for a servant’s bedroom.

After all, that opening and shutting of the door had been, perhaps, a delusion of his overwrought mind. Only a few minutes before there had been a noise like the spinning of a hundred Manchester cotton-looms in his brain. The horror and anguish of that hideous discovery in the loft still possessed him as he descended those stairs: what more likely than that, in such a moment, his bewildered senses should cheat him?

And could he doubt Lucille’s positive assurance as to the condition of those rooms? Could he doubt her whose truth was the sheet-anchor of his life? Or could he mistrust her judgment whose calm good sense was one of the finest qualities of her character?

Had it not been for Homer Sivewright’s strange story of noises heard in the dead of the night, he could have dismissed the subject far more easily. As it was he lingered for some time; listening for the faintest sound that might reach his ear, and hearing nothing but the scamper of a mouse within the wainscot, the fall of a dead fly from a spider’s web.

He found Lucille waiting for him in the corridor below, very pale, and with an anxious look, which she tried to disguise by a faint smile.

‘Well,’ she asked, ‘you have kept me waiting long enough. Are you satisfied now?’

‘Not quite. I should very much like to have the keys of yonder rooms. Such a house as this is the very place to harbour a scoundrel.’

The girl shuddered, and drew back from him with a look of absolute terror.

‘Don’t be frightened, Lucille. I daresay there is no one there; a strange cat, perhaps, at most; yet cats don’t open and shut locked doors. There may be no one; only in such a house as this, so poorly occupied by two helpless women and two feeble old men, one cannot be too careful. Some notion of your grandfather’s wealth may have arisen in the neighbourhood. His secluded eccentric life might suggest the idea that he is a miser, and that there is hoarded money in this house. I want to be assured that all is secure, Lucille; that no evil-intentioned wretch has crept under this roof. Give me your keys and let me search those rooms. It will only be the work of a few minutes.’

‘Forgive me for refusing you anything, Lucius,’ she said; ‘but my grandfather told me never to part with those keys to any one. You know his curious fancies. I promised to obey him, and cannot break my promise.’

‘Not even for me?’

‘Not even for you. Especially as there is not the slightest cause for this fancy of yours. That staircase door is kept always locked, the keys locked up in my grandfather’s desk. It is impossible that any living creature could go up to that attic-floor without my knowledge. Nor is it possible for any one to get into the lower part of the house unseen by me or by the Winchers.’

‘I don’t know about that. It would be easy enough for any one to get from the wharf to the garden. There are half-a-dozen doors at the back of the house, and more than a dozen places in the stables and outhouses where a man might lie hidden, so as to slip into the house at any convenient moment.’

‘You forget how carefully Mrs. Wincher turns all the keys, and draws all the bolts at sunset. Pray be reasonable, Lucius, and dismiss this absurd fancy from your mind. And instead of standing here with that solemn face, arguing about impossibilities, come to my grandfather’s room with those papers.’

Never had she spoken more lightly. Yet a minute ago her cheek had been blanched, her eye dilated by terror. Lucius gave a little sigh of resignation and followed her along the corridor. After all it was a very foolish thing that he had been doing; raising fears, perhaps groundless, in the breast of this lonely girl. Her grandfather had studiously refrained from any mention of his suspicions lest he should alarm Lucille. Yet he, the lover, had been so reckless as to suggest terrors which might give a new pain to her solitary life.

Mr. Sivewright received the bundle of papers with evident satisfaction, and turned them over with hands that trembled in their eagerness.

‘Documents of no moment,’ he said; ‘a few old records of my business life, put away in that disused piece of lumber up-stairs, and half forgotten. But when, at the gates of the tomb, a man reviews his past life, it is a satisfaction to be able to try back by means of such poor memorials as these. They serve to kindle the lamp of memory. He sees his own words, his own thoughts written years ago, and they seem to him like the thoughts and words of the dead.’

He thrust the papers into a desk which was drawn close to his bedside.

‘You have been better to-day, I hope?’ said Lucius, when Lucille had left the room in quest of the old man’s evening meal.

‘No; not so well. I don’t like your new medicine.’

‘My new medicine is the medicine you have been taking for the last five weeks—a mild tonic, as I told you. But you are tired of it, perhaps. I’ll change it for something else.’

‘Do. I don’t like its effect upon me.’

And then he went on to state symptoms which seemed to indicate increasing weakness, nausea, lassitude, and that unreasonable depression of mind which was worse than any physical ailment.

‘It seems like a forecast of death,’ he said despondently.

Lucius was puzzled. For some time past there had been a marked improvement, but this change boded no good. The thread of life had been worn thin; any violent shock might snap it. But Lucius had believed that in supreme rest and tranquillity lay the means of recovery. He could not vanquish organic disease; but he might fortify even a worn-out constitution, and make the sands of life drop somewhat slower through the glass.

To the patient he made light of these symptoms, urged upon Mr. Sivewright the necessity of taking things quietly, and above all of not allowing himself to be worried by any groundless apprehensions.

‘If you have a notion that there is anything going wrong in this house, let me sleep here for a few nights,’ said Lucius. ‘There are empty rooms enough to provide lodgings for a small regiment. Let me take up my quarters in one of them—the room next this one, for instance. I am a light sleeper; and if there should be foul play of any kind, my ear would be quick to discover the intruder.’

‘No,’ said the old man. ‘It is kind of you to propose such a thing, but there’s no necessity. It was a nervous fancy of mine, I daresay; the effect of physical weakness. Say no more about it.’

Lucius went home earlier than usual that evening, much to the amazement of Mrs. Wincher, who begged him to give them a ‘toon’ before departing. This request, however, was not supported by Lucille. She seemed anxious and restless, and Lucius blamed his own folly as the cause of her anxiety.

‘My dearest,’ he said tenderly, retaining the icy-cold hand which she gave him at parting, ‘I fear those foolish suspicions of mine about the rooms up-stairs have alarmed you. I was an idiot to suggest any such idea. But if you have the faintest apprehension of danger, let me stay here to-night and keep guard. I will stay in this room, and make my round of the house at intervals all through the night. Let me stay, Lucille. Who has so good a right to protect you?’

‘O no, no,’ she cried quickly, ‘on no account. There is not the slightest occasion for such a thing. Why should you suppose that I am frightened, Lucius?’

‘Your own manner makes me think so, darling. This poor little hand is unnaturally cold, and you have not been yourself all this evening.’

‘I am a little anxious about my grandfather.’

‘All the more reason that I should remain here to-night. I can stay in his room if you like, so as to be on the spot should he by any chance grow suddenly worse, though I have no fear of that.’

‘If you do not fear that, there is nothing to fear. As to your stopping here, that is out of the question. I know my grandfather wouldn’t like it.’

Lucius could hardly dispute this, as Mr. Sivewright had actually refused his offer to remain. There was nothing for him to do but to take a lingering farewell of his betrothed, and depart, sorely troubled in spirit.

He was not sorry when the old iron gate closed upon him. Never till to-night had he left the house that sheltered Lucille without a pang of regret, but to-night, after the discovery of the portrait in the loft, he felt in sore need of solitude. He wanted to look his situation straight in the face. This man—the man his hand had slain—was the father of his promised wife. The hand that he was to give to Lucille at the altar was red with her father’s blood. Most hideous thought, most bitter fatality which had brought that villain across his path out yonder in the trackless forest. Was this world so narrow that they two must needs meet—that no hand save his could be found to wreak God’s vengeance upon that relentless savage?

Her father! And in the veins of that gentle girl, who in her innocent youth had seemed to him fair and pure as the snowdrop unfolding its white bells from out a bed of newly-fallen snow, there ran the blood of that most consummate scoundrel! All his old theories of hereditary instincts were at fault here. From such a sire so sinless a child! The thought tortured him. Could he ever look at that sweet pensive face again without conjuring up the vision of that wild haggard visage he had seen in the red glare of the pine-logs, those hungry savage eyes, gleaming athwart elf-locks of shaggy hair, and trying to find a strange distorted likeness between the two faces?

And this horrible secret he must keep to his dying day. One hint, one whisper of the fatal truth, and he and Lucille would be sundered for ever. Did honour counsel him to confess that deed of his in the forest? Did honour oblige him to tell this girl that all her hopes of reunion with the father she had loved so dearly were vain; that his hand had made a sudden end of that guilty life, cut off the sinner in his prime, without pause for repentance, without time even to utter one wild appealing cry to his God? True that the man had declared himself an infidel, that he was steeped to the lips in brutish selfishness, grovelling, debased, hardened in sin. Who should dare say that repentance was impossible, even for a wretch so fallen? Far as the east is from the west are the ways of God from the ways of man, and in His infinite power there are infinite possibilities of mercy and forgiveness.

‘I was mad when I did that deed,’ thought Lucius; ‘mad as in the time that followed when I lay raging in a brain fever; yet, Heaven knows, I believed it was but stern justice. There was no tribunal yonder. We were alone in the wilderness with God, and I deemed I did but right when I made myself the instrument of His wrath. All that followed that awful moment is darkness. Schanck never spoke of that villain’s fate, nor did I. We instinctively avoided the hideous subject, and conspired to hide the secret from Geoffrey. Poor, good-natured old Schanck! I wonder whether he has found his way back from the Californian gold-fields. If I had leisure for such a pilgrimage, I’d go down to Battersea and inquire. I doubt if a rough life among gold-diggers would suit him long.’

Book the Second.