A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day
“How will this end?” cried Lady Bassett, helplessly. “What shall I do?”
“You must go downstairs, and not come here for an hour at least, or
you'll spoil my work. Mr. Angelo is in the drawing-room.”
“I will go to him.”
Lady Bassett slipped out by the other door, and it was three hours,
instead of one, before she returned.
For the first time in her life she was afraid to face her husband.
CHAPTER XIX.
MEANTIME Mary Wells had a long conversation with her master; and after
that she retired into the adjoining room, and sat down to sew
baby-linen clandestinely.
After a considerable tune Lady Bassett came in, and, sinking into a
chair, covered her face with her hands. She had her bonnet on.
Mary Wells looked at her with black eyes that flashed triumph.
After so surveying her for some time she said: “I have been at him
again, and there's a change for the better already. He is not the same
man. You go and see else.”
Lady Bassett now obeyed her servant: she rose and crept like a culprit
into Sir Charles's room. She found him clean shaved, dressed to
perfection, and looking more cheerful than she had seen him for many a
long day. “Ah, Bella,” said he, “you have your bonnet on; let us have a
walk in the garden.”
Lady Bassett opened her eyes and consented eagerly, though she was very
tired.
They walked together; and Sir Charles, being a man that never broke his
word, put no direct question to Lady Bassett, but spoke cheerfully of
the future, and told her she was his hope and his all; she would baffle
his enemy, and cheer his desolate hearth.
She blushed, and looked confused and distressed; then he smiled, and
talked of indifferent matters, until a pain in his head stopped him;
then he became confused, and, putting his hand piteously to his head,
proposed to retire at once to his own room.
Lady Bassett brought him in, and he reposed in silence on the sofa.
The next day, and, indeed, many days afterward, presented similar
features.
Mary Wells talked to her master of the bright days to come, of the joy
that would fill the house if all went well, and of the defeat in store
for Richard Bassett. She spoke of this man with strange virulence; said
“she would think no more of sticking a knife into him than of eating
her dinner;” and in saying this she showed the white of her eye in a
manner truly savage and vindictive.
To hurt the same person is a surer bond than to love the same person;
and this sentiment of Mary Wells, coupled with her uniform kindness to
himself, gave her great influence with Sir Charles in his present
weakened condition. Moreover, the young woman had an oily, persuasive
tongue; and she who persuades us is stronger than he who convinces us.
Thus influenced, Sir Charles walked every day in the garden with his
wife, and forbore all direct allusion to her condition, though his
conversation was redolent of it.
He was still subject to sudden collapses of the intellect; but he
became conscious when they were coming on; and at the first warning he
would insist on burying himself in his room.
After some days he consented to take short drives with Lady Bassett in
the open carriage. This made her very joyful. Sir Charles refused to
enter a single house, so high was his pride and so great his terror
lest he should expose himself; but it was a great point gained that she
could take him about the county, and show him in the character of a
mere invalid.
Every thing now looked like a cure, slow, perhaps, but progressive; and
Lady Bassett had her joyful hours, yet not without a bitter alloy: her
divining mind asked itself what she should say and do when Sir Charles
should be quite recovered. This thought tormented her, and sometimes so
goaded her that she hated Mary Wells for her well-meant interference,
and, by a natural recoil from the familiarity circumstances had forced
on her, treated that young woman with great coldness and hauteur.
The artful girl met this with extreme meekness and servility; the only
reply she ever hazarded was an adroit one; she would take this
opportunity to say, “How much better master do get ever since I took in
hand to cure him!”
This oblique retort seldom failed. Lady Bassett would look at her
husband, and her face would clear; and she would generally end by
giving Mary a collar, or a scarf, or something.
Thus did circumstances enable the lower nature to play with the higher.
Lady Bassett's struggles were like those of a bird in a silken net;
they led to nothing. When it came to the point she could neither do nor
say any thing to retard his cure. Any day the Court of Chancery, set in
motion by Richard Bassett, might issue a commission _de lunatico,_ and,
if Sir Charles was not cured by that time, Richard Bassett would
virtually administer the estate--so Mr. Oldfield had told her--and
that, she felt sure, would drive Sir Charles mad for life.
So there was no help for it. She feared, she writhed, she hated
herself; but Sir Charles got better daily, and so she let herself drift
along.
Mary Wells made it fatally easy to her. She was the agent. Lady Bassett
was silent and passive.
After all she had a hope of extrication. Sir Charles once cured, she
would make him travel Europe with her. Money would relieve her of Mary
Wells, and distance cut all the other cords.
And, indeed, a time came when she looked back on her present situation
with wonder at the distress it had caused her. “I was in shallow water
then,” said she--“but now!”
CHAPTER XX.
SIR CHARLES observed that he was never trusted alone. He remarked this,
and inquired, with a peculiar eye, why that was.
Lady Bassett had the tact to put on an innocent look and smile, and
say: “That is true, dearest. I _have_ tied you to my apron-string
without mercy. But it serves you right for having fits and frightening
me. You get well, and my tyranny will cease at once.”
However, after this she often left him alone in the garden, to remove
from his mind the notion that he was under restraint from her.
Mr. Bassett observed this proceeding from his tower.
One day Mr. Angelo called, and Lady Bassett left Sir Charles in the
garden, to go and speak to him.
She had not been gone many minutes when a boy ran to Sir Charles, and
said, “Oh, sir, please come to the gate; the lady has had a fall, and
hurt herself.”
Sir Charles, much alarmed, followed the boy, who took him to a side
gate opening on the high-road. Sir Charles rushed through this, and was
passing between two stout fellows that stood one on each side the gate,
when they seized him, and lifted him in a moment into a close carriage
that was waiting on the spot. He struggled, and cried loudly for
assistance; but they bundled him in and sprang in after him; a third
man closed the door, and got up by the side of the coachman. He drove
off, avoiding the village, soon got upon a broad road, and bowled along
at a great rate, the carriage being light, and drawn by two powerful
horses.
So cleverly and rapidly was it done that, but for a woman's quick ear,
the deed might not have been discovered for hours; but Mary Wells heard
the cry for help through an open window, recognized Sir Charles's
voice, and ran screaming downstairs to Lady Bassett: she ran wildly
out, with Mr. Angelo, to look for Sir Charles. He was nowhere to be
found. Then she ordered every horse in the stables to be saddled; and
she ran with Mary to the place where the cry had been heard.
For some time no intelligence whatever could be gleaned; but at last an
old man was found who said he had heard somebody cry out, and soon
after that a carriage had come tearing by him, and gone round the
corner: but this direction was of little value, on account of the many
roads, any one of which it might have taken.
However, it left no doubt that Sir Charles had been taken away from the
place by force.
Terror-stricken, and pale as death, Lady Bassett never lost her head
for a moment. Indeed, she showed unexpected fire; she sent off coachman
and grooms to scour the country and rouse the gentry to help her; she
gave them money, and told them not to come back till they had found Sir
Charles.
Mr. Angelo said, eagerly, “I'll go to the nearest magistrate, and we
will arrest Richard Bassett on suspicion.”
“God bless you, dear friend!” sobbed Lady Bassett. “Oh, yes, it is his
doing--murderer!”
Off went Mr. Angelo on his errand.
He was hardly gone when a man was seen running and shouting across the
fields. Lady Bassett went to meet him, surrounded by her humble
sympathizers. It was young Drake: he came up panting, with a
double-barreled gun in his hand (for he was allowed to shoot rabbits on
his own little farm), and stammered out, “Oh, my lady--Sir
Charles--they have carried him off against his will!”
“Who? Where? Did you see him?”
“Ay, and heerd him and all. I was ferreting rabbits by the side of the
turnpike-road yonder, and a carriage came tearing along, and Sir
Charles put out his head and cried to me,' Drake, they are kidnapping
me. Shoot!' But they pulled him back out of sight.”
“Oh, my poor husband! And did you let them? Oh!”
“Couldn't catch 'em, my lady: so I did as I was bid; got to my gun as
quick as ever I could, and gave the coachman both barrels hot.”
“What, kill him?”
“Lord, no; 'twas sixty yards off; but made him holler and squeak a good
un. Put thirty or forty shots into his back, I know.”
“Give me your hand, Mr. Drake. I'll never forget that shot.” Then she
began to cry.
“Doant ye, my lady, doant ye,” said the honest fellow, and was within
an ace of blubbering for sympathy. “We ain't a lot o' babies, to see
our squire kidnaped. If you would lend Abel Moss there and me a couple
o' nags, we'll catch them yet, my lady.”
“That we will,” cried Abel. “You take me where you fired that shot, and
we'll follow the fresh wheel-tracks. They can't beat us while they keep
to a road.”
The two men were soon mounted, and in pursuit, amid the cheers of the
now excited villagers. But still the perpetrators of the outrage had
more than an hour's start; and an hour was twelve miles.
And now Lady Bassett, who had borne up so bravely, was seized with a
deadly faintness, and supported into the house.
All this spread like wild-fire, and roused the villagers, and they must
have a hand in it. Parson had said Mr. Bassett was to blame; and that
passed from one to another, and so fermented that, in the evening, a
crowd collected round Highmore House and demanded Mr. Bassett.
The servants were alarmed, and said he was not at home.
Then the men demanded boisterously what he had done with Sir Charles,
and threatened to break the windows unless they were told; and, as
nobody in the house could tell them, the women egged on the men, and
they did break the windows; but they no sooner saw their own work than
they were a little alarmed at it, and retired, talking very loud to
support their waning courage and check their rising remorse at their
deed.
They left a house full of holes and screams, and poor little Mrs.
Bassett half dead with fright.
As for Lady Bassett, she spent a horrible night of terror, suspense,
and agony. She could not lie down, nor even sit still; she walked
incessantly, wringing her hands, and groaning for news.
Mary Wells did all she could to comfort her; but it was a situation
beyond the power of words to alleviate.
Her intolerable suspense lasted till four o'clock in the morning; and
then, in the still night, horses' feet came clattering up to the door.
Lady Bassett went into the hall. It was dimly lighted by a single lamp.
The great door was opened, and in clattered Moss and Drake, splashed
and weary and downcast.
“Well?” cried Lady Bassett, clasping her hands.