Wyllard's Weird (Mystery Classics Series). Mary Elizabeth BraddonЧитать онлайн книгу.
she should be interested in his motherless children, pleased to confide his plans and his thoughts to her. Time had sobered his enthusiasm about all things, and had softened all bitter memories. He took life now as a gentle legato movement. He had lived and suffered, and done his duty, and that which was left to him was rest. He sat down among his fields and his vineyards to take his ease just a little earlier than other men, that was all. A great sorrow suffered in the morning of life ages a man by at least a decade.
“Why are you waiting outside the station-house?” he asked; “have you had an alarm of burglars at Penmorval?”
“It is something much worse than that,” answered Mrs. Wyllard gravely; and then Bothwell related the catastrophe on the railway.
Julian Wyllard came back to the carriage just as the story was finished.
“This will be a job for you, Heathcote,” he said.
“A very sad one. The story has a brutal sound to me, remembering past stories of the same kind,” answered Heathcote. “It shall not be my fault if the ruffian escapes.”
“You think there is a ruffian, then? You don’t take it for a case of suicide?”
“Decidedly not,” replied the other promptly. “Why should a girl choose such a death as that?”
“Why should a girl throw herself off the Monument?” asked Wyllard. “Yet we know girls had a rage for doing that, fifty years ago. However, you will have a good opportunity for the display of your legal acumen in a really mysterious case. I did all I could in my small way to put the officials on the alert along the line; and if any scoundrel had a hand in that poor child’s death, I don’t believe he will get off easily. Where are you riding?”
“Only for an evening stroll over the downs.”
“You had better come home and have supper with us. It will be too late to call it dinner.”
“You are very good, but I dined at seven. Besides, I shall have to arrange about this inquest for tomorrow. I’ll talk to Morris, and then ride on to the Vital Spark, and settle matters with the people there.”
The Vital Spark was the small roadside inn where the dead girl was lying. The Penmorval barouche drove off, while Edward Heathcote stopped to talk to Morris, the Inspector. The jury would have to get notice early next morning. The inquest was to be held at five in the afternoon. This would give time for the tradesmen to get away from their shops. The chief business of the day in Bodmin town would be over.
“It will give time for any one in this neighbourhood, who knows anything about the girl, to come forward,” added Mr. Heathcote. “If she was going to a situation in this part of the world, as Mr. Wyllard suggests, some one must know all about her.”
“What a man he is, Mr. Heathcote!” said the Inspector admiringly. “Such clearness, such decision; always to the point.”
“Yes, he is a very superior man,” answered Heathcote heartily.
He had schooled himself long ago to generous thoughts about his rival. It pleased him to know that Dora had been lucky in her choice, that she had not taken a scorpion into her bosom when she preferred another man to himself. He had wondered sometimes—in a mere idle wonder, when he saw her in her beautiful home at Penmorval—whether it would have been possible for him to make her life happier than Julian Wyllard had made it; whether in his uttermost adoration he could ever have been a better husband to her than Julian Wyllard had been. He had looked searchingly for any flaw in the perfection of that union, and he had perceived none. He was generous-minded enough to be glad that it was so.
The carriage drove slowly up a long hill, and across a wide expanse of heathy ground, before it entered the gate of Penmorval, which was two miles from the town. It was a beautiful old place, standing on high ground, yet so richly wooded as to be shut in from the outer world. Only the Cornish giants, Roughtor and Brown Willie, showed their dark crests above the broad belt of timber which surrounded the good old Tudor mansion. A double avenue of elms and yews led to the old stone porch. The long stone façade facing northward looked out upon a level lawn divided from the park by a haw haw. The southern front was curtained with roses and myrtle, and looked upon one of the loveliest gardens in Cornwall—a garden which had been the pride and delight of many generations—a garden for which the wives and dowagers of three centuries of Cornish squires had laboured and thought. Nowhere could be found more glorious roses, or such a treasury of out-of-the-way flowers, from the finest to the simplest that grows. Nowhere did April sunlight shine upon such tulips and hyacinths, nowhere did June crown herself with fairer lilies, or autumn flaunt in greater splendour of dahlias, hollyhocks, and chrysanthemums. The soil teemed with flowers. There was no room left for a weed.
For a childless wife like Dora Wyllard a garden such as this is a kind of spurious family. She has her hopes, her fears, her raptures and anxieties about her roses and chrysanthemums, just as mothers have about their girls and boys. She counts the blossoms on a particular Gloire de Dijon. She remembers the cruel winter when that superb John Hopper succumbed to the frost. She has her nostrums and remedies for green-fly, as mothers have for measles. That glorious old garden helped to fill the cup of Mrs. Wyllard’s happiness, for it gave her inexhaustible employment. Having such a garden she could never say, with the languid yawn of the idle and the prosperous, “What can I do with myself today?” But Dora was not dependent on her garden for occupation. Exacting as the roses and lilies were, manifold as were the cares of the hothouses and ferneries and wildernesses, Mrs. Wyllard’s husband was more exacting still. When Julian was at home she could give but little time to her garden. He could hardly bear his wife to be out of his sight for half an hour. She had to be interested in all his schemes, all his letters, even to the driest business details. She rode and drove with him, and, as he had no taste for field sports, neither his guns nor his hunters took him away from her. He was a studious man, a man of artistic temperament, a lover of curious books and fine bindings, a lover of pictures and statues, and porcelain and enamels—a worshipper of the beautiful in every form. His tastes were such as a woman could easily and naturally share with him. This made their union all the more complete. Other wives wondered at beholding such domestic sympathy. There were some whose husbands could not sit by the domestic hearth ten minutes without dismal yawnings, men who depended upon newspapers for all their delight, men whose minds were always in the stable. Julian Wyllard was an ideal husband, who never yawned in a tête-à-tête with his wife, who shared every joy and every thought with the woman of his choice.
To-night, when they two sat down to the half-past, nine o’clock meal, with Bothwell, who was not much worse than a Newfoundland dog, for their sole companion, the wife’s first question showed her familiarity with the business that had taken her husband to London.
“Well, Julian, did you get the Raffaelle?” she asked.
“No, dear. The picture went for just three times the value I had put upon it.”
“And you did not care to give such a price?”
“Well, no. There are limits, even for a monomaniac like me. I had allowed myself a margin. I was prepared to give a hundred or two over the thousand which I had put down as the price of the picture; but when it went up to fifteen hundred I retired from the contest, and it was finally knocked down to Lamb, the dealer, for two thousand guineas. A single figure—a half-length figure of Christ bearing the cross, against a background of vivid blue sky. But such divinity in the countenance, such pathetic eyes! I saw women turn away with tears after they had looked at that picture.”
“You ought to have bought it,” said Dora, who knew that her husband had a great deal more money than he could spend, and who thought that he had a right to indulge his own caprices.
“My dearest, as I said before, there are limits,” he answered, smiling at her enthusiasm.
“Then you had your journey, and I had to endure the loss of your society for three dreary days, all for nothing?” said Dora.
“Not quite for nothing. There was the pleasure of seeing a very fine collection of pictures, and some magnificent Limoges enamels. I succeeded in buying