CHAPTER X.

A BROKEN REED.

That morning's post brought with it a letter from Miss Gerace, which bore on the envelope these words:--

"IMMEDIATE DELIVERY IS REQUESTED."

"What on earth can be the matter with my aunt now?" thought Dolly as she opened it.

Next moment Lenore called out, "Mamma, mamma!" and Esther, happening to be bringing in the kettle at that instant, exclaimed, "Oh! ma'am, what has happened?"

But Dolly put them both aside, and sitting down all of a tremble, spread the letter on the table, for her hands were shaking so she could not hold it steady, and read to herself,

"Dreadful news has reached us to-night; a telegram to say _Mr. Werner is dead_. Leonora is like one distracted, and poor Mrs. Trebasson completely prostrated. Leonora left by the express, and I write to entreat you to go to her at once. We forgot to ask her Lord Darsham's present address. Get it and telegraph to him immediately. Mrs. Trebasson wishes me to go to London to see if I can be of any use, so I shall see you soon. Do not lose a moment in going to Leonora. "Yours, "A. G."

Dolly rose up like a person who had received some dreadful blow.

"Fetch me my hat and shawl, Esther," she said. "I must go to London by the next train."

"But you have not had any breakfast ma'am," expostulated the girl.

Mrs. Mortomley made no reply. She only walked through the open door and began pacing up and down the plot of grass.

Lenore ran after her crying, "My dear, dear mamma, what is the matter?" and Esther followed with "Oh! my dear mistress, speak to me."

"Mrs. Werner is in great trouble, and I must go to her. Do not ask me anything more," was the reply, and then Dolly leaned up against a great tree growing in the hedgerow, and shut her eyes, and felt as if the earth were going round and round. She understood, if no one else did,--she comprehended that of his own free will Henry Werner had gone on the longest and darkest journey the human mind can imagine--that his message to his wife would be given from one who sent it, knowing ere eight hours of the six months had elapsed he would have passed into eternity. This was why he had spoken so freely to her, and this was the reason he had extorted her forgiveness, and asked her to remember him in her prayers. Every other consideration in life was for the moment blotted out by the shadow of that man dead--dead by his own act--dead because the trouble was too great to be contended with, because the ruin was too utter to be endured.

Dolly went upstairs. She had paused by the way and swallowed some wine and water, to enable her tongue to perform its office.

"Archie," she said, as she nervously smoothed her husband's pillows, "I must go to London, and I want you to be quiet and satisfied while I am away. Leonora is in dreadful distress, and wants me. Mr. Werner is dangerously ill, not expected to recover, and she has great need of me. I do not like leaving you, dear, but--"

"Go at once," he interrupted. "Kiss me and go, dear. I shall do very well indeed. Poor Werner! It is a curious thing I was dreaming about him yesterday. I dreamt he was here, and--"

"I must go, love," she said, unable to bear the interview longer. "Good-bye."

And she was gone.

Now it so happened that Mrs. Mortomley chanced, without any reference to Mrs. Werner, to know Lord Darsham's then address, and consequently the moment she got into town she telegraphed this message to him.

"Leonora's husband has committed suicide. Pray come to her at once."

Mrs. Mortomley only sent this message because she considered that, by stating what she believed to be the literal truth, she would bring Leonora's cousin more rapidly to her assistance. In the then state of her nerves, sudden death by the Visitation of God seemed to her so slight a misfortune that she fancied pure death would appear a trifle to Lord Darsham.

That any one could ever really have supposed Mr. Werner died through illness or misadventure, never occurred to Dolly, who felt quite positive he had fully made up his mind to destroy himself when with her on the preceding day, and it was therefore with a frightful shock she learned upon arriving at her friend's house that every soul in it believed Mr. Werner, who was suffering from a severe attack of neuralgia, had died accidentally while inhaling chloroform to lull the pain.

"What a dreadful thing I have done!" she thought. "How shall I ever be able to make it right with Lord Darsham?"

And then Dolly went upstairs into that very room where Mr. and Mrs. Werner had held their colloquy about the Mortomleys, and found Mrs. Werner as nearly insane as a rational woman can ever be.

She was full of self-reproach, and Dolly thanked God for it. Knowing what she knew of the man's misery, it would have tried her almost beyond endurance to have listened to the faintest whisper of self-pity, but there was none.

Nothing save sorrow for the husband, taken so suddenly, for his children left orphaned, for the years during which she might have made him happier.

"I thought myself a good wife," she moaned, "but I was not a good wife. I helped him as I imagined, but, Dolly dear, an ounce of love is worth a pound of pride any day. He wanted, he must have wanted, something more when he returned to this great cold, handsome house than a woman to sit at the head of his dinner table. I have thought about it all at Dassell, Dolly darling. I made up my mind, God helping me, to be more a wife to him than I had ever been, and it is all too late--too late--too late."

"I am afraid he had a great deal on his mind," Dolly ventured.

"Yes, there can be no doubt about that. He was so fond of business, and thought so much of money, and--"

"We won't talk about it, dear, now," Mrs. Mortomley said softly.

"Have you--seen him?" Mrs. Werner asked, after a pause.

"No," Dolly answered. "I should like to do so, though, if I may."

"You have quite forgiven him?"

"I had done that, Lenny, thank God, before this."

Just a faint pressure of the trembling fingers, and Dolly rose to go downstairs.

"Williams, I want to see your master," she said, and Williams forthwith conducted her into the same room where Messrs. Forde and Kleinwort had sat on that night when they came to Mr. Werner's house in quest of Mortomley.

There in the same dress he wore when last she saw him alive, he lay stiff and dead.

"Why has not something been done with him?" Dolly asked shuddering. "Why do you let him lie there like that?"

"We must not move him until after the inquest," said the man.

Mrs. Mortomley crept upstairs again--in her folly what had she done?

But for her this inquest might have passed over quietly, and a verdict of killed by an accidental dose of chloroform returned.

The hours of that day lengthened themselves into years, and when at last Miss Gerace arrived, she found her niece looking the picture of death itself.

"My dear child, you must go home," she said, gazing in shocked amazement at Dolly's changed face and figure. "All this is too much for you."

But Dolly said, "No; if you love me, aunt, go to Wood Cottage and take care of Archie till I can leave Leonora. I must see the end of it. I will tell you why some day. I cannot leave now."

So Miss Gerace went to Wood Cottage, and wrapping her bonnet in a handkerchief laid it on the drawers in Lenore's room, and so solemnly set up her Lares and Penates in Dolly's house, and she broke the news of Mr. Werner's sudden death wisely and calmly to Mr. Mortomley, who turned his head from the light and lay very still and quiet, thinking mighty solemn thoughts for an hour afterwards.

"I think my poor Dolly ought not to stay there," he said at last. "She has had trouble enough of her own to bear lately."

"And I think your Dolly is at this moment just where God means her to be," answered Miss Gerace, a little gruffly, for she herself was uneasy about her niece's appearance, and in her heart considered Dolly stood in as much need of tender care as Mrs. Werner.

Just about the time when Miss Gerace was leaving, in order to make the, to her, unaccustomed journey to London, Mr. Forde sat alone in his office waiting impatiently for the appearance of Werner, or a note from him.

"You shall hear from me to-morrow before midday, without fail," Werner had promised on the previous forenoon, and whatever his faults he had never failed in a promise of this nature before.

"Ah! if that little wretch Kleinwort, who loved always to be talking evil about Werner, had only been like him, I need never have been reduced to the straits in which I find myself to-day," thought the unfortunate manager.

"Had any one planted an acre of reeds, Mr. Forde would have gone on transferring his simple faith from one to another till the last one broke." So Henry Werner declared; and no person understood so well as he that when his collapse ensued, the last poor reed on which the manager leaned would be broken to pieces.

That very morning when Mr. Forde waited for his constituents, as for some reason best known to himself he had latterly began to call the customers of the General Chemical Company, he had gone through one of those interviews with his directors, which, to quote his own phrase, "made him feel old," and he had pretty good grounds for believing that if Henry Werner, the last big card in his hand, failed to win him a trick he could not stay at St. Vedast Wharf.

In that case all must come out. The shareholders would begin to ask troublesome questions which the directors must answer; and he--well--he, with all his heart and soul wished when he put on his hat over Mortomley's affairs, he had kept it on and left St. Vedast Wharf for ever, shaking the dust off his shoes as he did so.

But now all he had to hope for was that Henry Werner would obey his commands, issued in no doubtful terms, and bring that which might satisfy his, Mr. Forde's, directors.

Werner had ordered him out of his office, indeed, words grew so high between them; but he had still said he should be heard of by midday, and now it was one o'clock and neither he nor any tidings had come.

Mr. Forde felt he could not endure being treated in this way any longer, so he walked across to Mr. Werner's office, where he asked young Carless, once in Mortomley's Thames Street Warehouse, if his master was in.

"He has not come yet," was the answer; and had Mr. Forde been looking at the clerks' faces instead of thinking of Mr. Werner's shortcomings, he would have noticed an expression on them which might well have puzzled his comprehension.

"I will wait for him," and Mr. Forde made a step towards the inner office as if intending to take up a position there.

"Better sit down here," said one of the senior clerks, offering him a chair; "the inner office is locked."

"Locked! who locked it?" asked Mr. Forde angrily.

"Mr. Werner, when he left yesterday," was the reply.

Ten minutes passed, quarter of an hour struck, then the manager said,

"It does not seem of much use my waiting here. Tell Mr. Werner to come round to me the instant he arrives--the instant, remember. What are you looking at each other for in that manner?" he continued, shouting at them passionately. "Do you mean to do what I tell you or not?"

All the clerks but one drew back a little abashed; they had silently countenanced the perpetration of a grim practical joke, which, while the clock went on ticking, seemed to grow flat and stale and unprofitable to each of them save Carless.

He it was who now answered.

"Perhaps you are not aware that our governor is dead."

"You had better take care, sir," said Mr. Forde. "I do not know whether Mr. Werner has granted you a licence for impertinence, but if he has--by--he shall rue it and you too."

"It is true though," interposed a man sitting in a dark part of the office, who had not hitherto spoken, but remained, his head supported by his hands, reading 'The Times.'

"What is true," demanded the manager.

"That Mr. Werner is dead. I had occasion to go to his house this morning and found that he died last night."

"It is a lie; it is a ---- put off. He is gone like that villain Kleinwort; but he need not think to escape me. I will find him if he is above ground!"

"You won't have far to go then," was the reply. "He is lying stiff and safe enough in his own study."

"And he is gone to a land with which we have no extradition treaty," observed Carless, as Mr. Forde banged the door behind him.

"Hold your tongue, do," entreated the 'Times'' student, who, having been in a fashion confidential clerk to Mr. Werner, had some comprehension how the matter stood. "Our governor has been badgered into his grave, and I only hope they will call me on the inquest that I may be able to state my belief."

"And he was not half a bad sort, the governor," said Carless, shutting up the day-book.

"I say let's all go to the funeral," suggested a third; and so these young men wrote their employer's epitaph.

Meantime Mr. Forde was proceeding westward as fast as the legs of a swift horse could take him. To describe what he felt would be as impossible as to detail the contents and occupants of each vehicle the hansom passed--the hopes and fears--the miseries and joys hidden behind the walls of the countless houses, which lay to left and right of his route.

He believed; he did not believe. He dreaded; no it was all a sham. Now in imagination he started himself with the detectives in pursuit, again with dry parched lips he was answering the questions of his directors.

If he had realized the fact, he suffered in the course of that rapid drive enough misery to have driven many a man insane. Misery of his own causing if you will, but misery all the harder to endure on that account.

Happily for himself, however, Mr. Forde was a person who did not realize. He was a man who before he had grasped the worst decided there must be some means of escape from it, and accordingly, the first words he uttered to Williams were--

"Now, then, what's all this?"

"Have not you heard, sir," answered that well-trained functionary, startled for once out of his propriety of demeanour by Mr. Forde's tremendous knock, by Mr. Forde's loud utterance, "my master died last night!"

"Died! Nonsense; went away you mean."

"Passed away, sir, if you prefer that expression," acquiesced the man. "He had been out all day, and when he returned in the evening he said it was of no use serving dinner, for he was suffering such agonies from neuralgia that he could not eat anything. He had called at the doctor's on his way, but he was not at home.

"He asked me to bring him a cup of strong coffee, which I did.

"About eight o'clock I went in to the study to light the gas, and when I opened the door there was a strong smell of some apothecary's stuff," (here the man became visibly affected), "and something in that and the way my master was lying on the sofa attracted my attention. I spoke to him, but he did not answer me. I lifted his arm which was hanging over on the carpet, but it fell again when I let it go.

"Then I ran out of the house for a doctor. I had seen a doctor's carriage standing at the next door. He came in and looked at him. I asked what could be done, and he said 'Nothing, the poor gentleman is dead.'"

"Where is he?" asked Mr. Forde, who had listened impatiently to this statement.

"In the study, sir."

Mr. Forde crossed the hall and turned the handle of the door, but the door was locked.

"Have you the key?" he asked. "Yes, sir," answered Williams, fumbling in his pocket nervously--the fact being that, notwithstanding his large experience of the world and knowledge of society, he had never before come in contact with any one who did not consider it necessary at all events, to assume a certain sympathy with misfortune, and it is no exaggeration to say Mr. Forde's utter callousness frightened the man.

He had never previously seen a human being whose intense thought for self swallowed up every thought for other people; to whom the death or ruin of any number of his fellow-creatures was simply a bagatelle when compared with any misfortune which could touch himself.

"If you cannot unlock the door, let me do it," remarked Mr. Forde, taking the key out of Williams' fingers, and shooting back the bolt with a quick sharp click; with a steady determined step he crossed the room.

"Raise that blind," he said.

Williams hesitated, but then obeyed, and at the same moment Mr. Forde drew aside, with no faltering or gentle touch, the handkerchief which covered the dead man's face.

There he lay, as he had died. There was no sneer curling the lip now, no scowl disfiguring the forehead. There was no expression of despair, no look of anguish. Death was fast smoothing the hard lines out of that dark face; and as Mr. Forde realized all this--realized there was no deception about the matter--that no insult could reach his sense, no dread affect him more, he could have cursed the man who long and long before had told him if ever misfortune came upon him he should know how to meet it. This was how he had met it; this was what he had in his mind then. Mr. Forde understood perfectly that when once he found the battle going against him, when once he found the tide setting too strongly for him to resist its flow, he had always meant to end the difficulty thus.

"Yes, he is dead sure enough," commented Mr. Forde at length. "He has taken precious good care to leave other people in the lurch as any one who ever knew Henry Werner might safely have sworn he would do."

"I do not quite understand, sir," said the butler deprecatingly.

"Oh! you don't, my friend. Well, perhaps not; perhaps you think your master really had neuralgia, and really took that stuff to cure it."

"Certainly, sir."

"Oh! you do, do you? Well, then, I can tell you, the coward took it because he was afraid to meet his creditors, because he was afraid to meet me, because he knew he was a beggar, and that if he did not do something of this sort, his fine feathers would be stripped off, and he and his turned out into the world without a shilling, as better people have been before now.

"I must see his wife before I leave," he added abruptly.

"See Mrs. Werner, sir? Impossible."

"Impossible! Why is it impossible? Who is she that she should not be seen; who is she that she should not hear what I have to say? She has had all the smooth, she must now take her share of the rough."

"My mistress, sir, is very ill," remarked Williams, who really was in a state of mind baffling description.

He believed Mr. Forde was mad, but he could not determine how to get him out of the house.

"Ill," repeated Mr. Forde; "and so am I very ill, yet I have to be about. I shall have to face my directors to-morrow over that villain's affairs. Sick or well I shall have to be in the City. Don't talk to me about illness. I must and I will see Mrs. Werner, and you may go and tell her so."

"If you will please to walk into the dining-room, sir, I will deliver your message," said the butler. He really was afraid of leaving Mr. Forde alone with the corpse, uncertain whether, in default of the living man, he might not wreak his vengeance on the dead, and it was with a gasp of relief he saw Mr. Forde out of the study, and locked the door behind him.

"Ask Mrs. Mortomley to speak to me for a minute," he whispered to Mrs. Werner's maid, and when Dolly came to him on the landing, he told her all Mr. Forde had said.

Dolly listened to the end, then she answered,

"Tell Mr. Forde from me, that if he waits in this house for ever, he shall never speak to Mrs. Werner, but that if he has any communication to make, Lord Darsham will see him this evening at eight o'clock."

Downstairs went Williams with this message, which Dolly, leaning over the banisters, heard him deliver in less curt language.

"I know nothing of Lord Darsham," answered Mr. Forde, walking up and down the hall. "I have had no transactions with him, but I have with that fellow," an intimation indicating Werner lying dead in the study. "He has robbed us, and ruined me, and by--I will see his wife."

"Williams," rang out Dolly's voice at this juncture, clear and shrill, and yet with an undertone of intensified passion in it, "if that person insists on remaining in a house where there is so much misery, send for a policeman. I will take the responsibility."

And forthwith Dolly retreated to Mrs. Werner's dressing-room, and bolted the doors of that and her friend's apartment.

She had once been brave, but the days and the weeks and the months had been draining her courage. Physically, she felt she was not strong enough to encounter one of the people who had compassed her husband's ruin; and though she would have fought for Leonora till she died, still her woman's nature warned her to shun a fight if possible.

"You will go now please, sir," urged poor Williams, "and come back and see his lordship to-night."

Whereupon Mr. Forde anathematized his lordship, and asked,

"How does that woman, that wife of Mortomley's, come here?"

"She was sent for, sir; my mistress has been quieter since her arrival. They are old friends."

"Humph," ejaculated Mr. Forde; "then any fool can tell where Henry Werner's money went." And he permitted himself to be edged out to the door-step by Williams, who took an early opportunity of saying he was wanted and of shutting the door hastily on that unwelcome visitor.

All that afternoon Williams surveyed callers doubtfully from a side window before opening the door. Had Mr. Forde again appeared, he would have put up the chain, and parleyed with him like a beleaguered city to the opposing force.

About six o'clock Lord Darsham came rattling up in a hansom. He had telegraphed back a reply to Dolly, and followed that reply as fast as an express train could bring him.

She ran downstairs, thankful for his arrival, and after years, long, long years, the Vicar of Dassell's little girl and Charley Trebasson, Leonora's first lover, met again.

"I should have known you anywhere," he said, after the first words of greeting and exclamations of pity and horror were uttered.

"Am I so little changed?" she asked, with a forced smile.

"Ah! you are so much changed," he answered; "you look so many years too old, you look so much too thin. What is the matter with you Mrs. Mortomley? I cannot bear to--"

"Never mind me," she said almost brusquely; "Your business now is with Leonora; I ought not to have sent you that telegram, you must forget it."

"Is Mr. Werner not dead then?" he asked.

"Dead! yes, indeed he is poor fellow!" she answered; "but I acted on a fancy when I telegraphed that he committed suicide. He took chloroform to relieve the pain of neuralgia, and the chloroform killed him."

Mrs. Werner's cousin looked Mrs. Mortomley steadily in the face while she uttered this sentence, then, when she paused and hesitated, he said,

"You had better be perfectly frank with me. I remember, if you do not, how when you were a child, it was of no use your trying to tell a fib because your eyes betrayed you, and I must say to you now, as I often said to you then, speak the truth, for with that tell-tale face no one will believe you when you try to invent a likely falsehood."

"To be perfectly straightforward then," answered Dolly; "when I sent that telegram to you I believed Mr. Werner had destroyed himself; when I arrived here, I found every one believed his death was due entirely to accident."

"And may I inquire why you believed he had committed suicide?"

"No," she replied; "that is my secret, and for very special reasons I want to have nothing to do with the matter--special reasons," she repeated; "not selfish, pray understand. I did not think of the inquest; I did not think of anything except that, on Leonora's account, you ought to be here, when I wrote that telegram, and--"

"I know what you mean," he interrupted; seeing the subject affected her deeply, and he took a turn up and down the room before he spoke again.

"What could have induced him to kill himself?" he said, at length stopping abruptly in his walk.

"A Mr. Forde, who has been here to-day, demanding to see Leonora, and who is coming this evening to see you, told Williams he was afraid to meet his creditors. Williams, who has never seen the slightest evidence of shortness of money about this house, inclines to the opinion that Mr. Forde is mad, and I have done my best to confirm that opinion, but Mr. Forde I believe to be right; I am afraid you will find he destroyed himself, because he was a ruined man."

There was silence for a minute, broken only by the sound of Dolly's suppressed sobs.

"Poor fellow," said Lord Darsham; "he must have suffered horribly before it came to this."

"Only those who have gone through such an ordeal can imagine what he must have endured," she answered simply; "depend upon it his heart was broken days before he died."

"I never liked Werner," commented her auditor. "I always thought him a self-contained money-worshiping snob, and I never believed, spite of the purple and fine linen, that Leonora was happy in her marriage, but I am sorry for him now. A man who commits suicide must have an enormous capacity for misery, and a man who has an enormous capacity for misery must have had an enormous capacity for something better, had any opportunity for developing it occurred."

"You will forget my telegram," she entreated.

"I shall say nothing about it, which will amount to much the same thing," he answered.