Faithful Margaret: A Novel
up my mind."
The suitor tapped his heel with his cane and meditated. If his frowning
brow and furious eyes did not belie him, this response was an unexpected
one, and routed his previous plans.
"Have I checkmated you?" thought Margaret. "You dread the delay of four
weeks? Yes, you do, I see it in your wicked face, and I say to myself,
'Well done, Margaret!'"
"I have no motive beyond your own welfare," responded the lover, "when I
urge you to place the day of your answer a little nearer."
"Is that a threat? Shall I turn round and tell Mrs. Chetwode that
Colonel Brand has threatened me because I cannot promise to accept him
without deliberation?"
"You have misunderstood me, then I shall say to your housekeeper. I
shall explain that your weak health reminded me of the danger of
protracted anxiety, and that then I urged you, for your own welfare, to
place the day of your answer a little nearer."
There was a pause, and the two antagonists eyed each other firmly.
"In spite of the danger to my welfare," said Margaret, with unmistakable
emphasis, "I must insist on taking a month to consider your proposal. I
shall take as much care as possible of my health meanwhile, so that you
may have no reason to complain of my imprudence."
"You are determined, then?" said the colonel, rising, with cold fury in
his eyes. His repressive power was almost forsaking him, and it was with
difficulty that he preserved that decorous gentleness of manner which he
had donned with such care.
"Yes, I am determined."
There she stood, waiting with freezing smile for him to go. No gentleman
could decently stay another moment under such circumstances.
A sudden impulse, quick as thought, moved Margaret to accompany him to
the door; a certain expression on his face stirred up a Babel of
memories; it was gone, and they were gone, but she would sound the same
waters again.
"Keep the door shut, John, because of the draft," she said to the
servant, passing out under the stars with her adorer.
"I shall feel obliged if you only communicate with me through Mr.
Davenport," said she, touching the stone lintel with her hand, "until
the next four weeks elapse. I shall specially invite you to the castle
should I wish to see you at any time, and I expect you to obey the
call."
The colonel bowed silently.
A wild, wan moon came out through a riven cloud and shone on Castle
Brand. The man on the lowest step and the woman on the highest, gazed
fixedly into each other's faces; his, fierce, envious, and distrustful,
hers, watchful, cold, and unflinching.
Waiting breathlessly for that wave of memory to beat upon the sands
again, it came with the grouping of certain incidents, and with the
magic spell of association.
The time had come when the false seeming of this man should drop like a
garment. The time had come when a light from the past should break upon
Margaret with the suddenly shining moon. The time had come when their
souls were revealed to each other and doomed to recognition despite the
most perfect masking which rascality could assume to compass its end or
purity devise to hide from peril.
These two had stood thus before, the moon gleaming coldly on both--his
horse pawing in the shadow, a dying woman in the Brand state chamber.
Margaret turned suddenly on her heel and shut the door. She leaned
against the staircase pillars and clasped her hands under the eyes of
the astonished John.
"I know him now," she muttered; "he was here the night of Mrs. Brand's
death. His name was _Roland Mortlake_!"
CHAPTER XVI.
UNVAILING AN IMPOSTOR.
Margaret stole to her chamber and bolted the door, and leaned her dizzy
head upon her hand.
Gradually the first surprise of her mind gave way before a dreadful
despondency, and she revolved the revelation in ever increasing alarm.
"He is cleverer than I am," she assured herself, "and he will most
likely win the contest. He has come out of a past which I shall never be
able to trace to personate St. Udo Brand, and his resemblance is the
weakest instrument he uses. He has appeared like a horrible phantom in
St. Udo's guise, and he defies me to tear his mask from him. He is no
mere adventurer who has traded upon an accidental likeness to Colonel
Brand and stepped into his shoes upon the day of his death--he is a
deliberate scoundrel who probably was arranging his plot upon the night
on which he came from Regis with Captain Brand's letter. He has waited
for St. Udo's death to step into his place and enact his life from the
point where he laid it down on the battle-field. Has he anything to do
with the sudden end of that life? Has he murdered St. Udo Brand? Great
Heaven! am I to unvail an impostor and find an assassin in this man?"
She clenched her hands, and faithful memory brought back the vision of
the dying hero, upon his pulseless horse, and she heeded it now, though
she had sternly repressed all belief of it before.
"Is Mortlake the crawling demon who crouched over the brave colonel in
the dark and stabbed him? Have I met him first upon the steps of Castle
Brand--second in my vision of St. Udo's death, and last in my
treacherous lover of to-night? Oh, my heart! is St. Udo really dead
then, and by his hand! The grand lion-hearted king, by the hand of a
fawning slave?"
Wild with horror, she shuddered at the dark chasm she beheld yawning in
her way, but not for a moment did she shrink from the tortuous path
which led to that abyss--the path of inexorable pursuit which ended not
until the man was hunted down and unmasked.
She waited until she was calm, and then she wrote her letter to the two
executors, which was to expose the man who stood in St. Udo's position,
well knowing the dangers of the path she had chosen, and accepting her
chances without fear:
"CASTLE BRAND.
"DEAR SIRS: This is the second appeal I make to you on behalf
of the true disposition of Mrs. Brand's property. If this
appeal is unheeded, I will take the case in my own hands, and
pursue it to the end, whatever that end may be; and if I die
before I succeed, God will hold you responsible for my death.
"The man who calls himself Colonel St. Udo Brand came here
to-night according to appointment, and took the first step
against me, and for the possession of Seven-Oak Waaste, by
proposing for my hand.
"Believing him to be an imposter, I declined giving him a
decided answer, and bade him wait for one month. In other words
(and he perfectly understood it), I demanded a month in which
to discover the proofs of his villany.
"He accepted my fiat, but with great reluctance because he felt
his position so unsafe, before my marriage or death, that he
feared thirty day's delay might ruin it.
"At the moment of our parting, a sudden rush of memory revealed
to me the true personality of the pseudo Colonel Brand.
"I beg of you to weigh this communication well, and not to put
it down as you have put down my convictions before.
"On the night of Madam Brand's death, you remember that Captain
Brand, in his fatal carelessness, came as far as Regis to see
his grandmother, and staid there, sending a note of excuse to
me by a messenger. This messenger gave his name as Roland
Mortlake, and stood waiting at the foot of the steps while I
read the note.
"Mark me here! This man was so like the Brand's, that Purcell,
the steward, advanced to meet him, saying:
"'Welcome to the castle, captain!'
"He explained that he was not the captain, but the captain's
messenger, and he stood by all the time I was communicating the
contents of the letter to Purcell. He was so close to us, that
he must have heard all that passed. Under this belief, I turned
suddenly to him and told him to go instantly for Captain Brand,
and to tell him that the will must be changed, or he would be
ruined.
"His crafty, eager look so arrested me, that I gazed fixedly in
his face for some minutes; and it seemed to me that I
discovered a crime-stained and guileful soul in his eyes for
they haunted me long afterward.
"And I distinctly remember the words of the man who had
accompanied him, as he rode away under the trees:
"'_Gardez-tu_, my friend! You English take great news sourly.
_Ma foi!_ you curse Mademoiselle Fortune herself when she
smiles upon you the blandest!'
"I heeded these words not all then. I recalled them one by one
to-night from the hidden chamber of memory, and I protest that
they hold their own significance in that daring plot.
"Do you read nothing in this reminiscence beyond a woman's idle
vagaries of fancy?
"Will you believe it--only, that when I swear that the man,
Roland Mortlake, who stood on the castle-steps with me that
night, and the man, St. Udo Brand, who stood with me on the
castle-steps to-night, are one?
"I call upon you, in the interests of justice, to find the
proofs of this infamous imposture.
"I appeal to you, that you may do your duty by the dead and
unveil a monster of crime. What has Mortlake done with St. Udo
Brand?
"Perhaps he has murdered him. Will you let a possible murderer
escape you because a woman points him out? How do we know that
the news of his being killed in battle was not true? And, being
true, how do we know that Mortlake's hand was not the hand that
destroyed the heir of Castle Brand?
"How do we know that this plot, if sifted well, would not
reveal in the suitor you sent me to-night a red-handed
assassin?
"Come to me in the morning and tell me what you are going to
do. If you are going to do nothing, then I will carry on the
contest alone, and trace the history of Roland Mortlake from
the bottom step of Castle Brand, where I saw him first, pace by
pace, to the foot of the gallows, where I shall see him last.
"Yours Respectfully,
"MARGARET WALSINGHAM.
"TO MESSRS DAVENPORT & GAY."
Late as it was she rang for the housekeeper, and gave orders that her
letter should be conveyed to the lawyer's house that night.
"Tell Symonds to give it to Mr. Davenport himself, and to trust it to no
one else," she said.
The housekeeper met the feverish flash of her young mistress' eyes, and
took the envelope from her hand with much uneasiness.
"My poor dear, you ar'nt strong enough for all this worrying and
wearing," she observed, sympathetically. "I wish for your sake, deary,
the colonel had lain quiet in his grave."
Margaret drew back with a sudden storm of grief, and shut the door, Mrs.
Chetwode went down stairs, sorrowfully vowing to herself that Miss
Margaret would pine to death before she wore the colonel's wedding-ring.
"He lies quiet enough in his shallow grave," moaned Margaret; "noble,
proud St. Udo! Oh my heart; why was I doomed to be the Marplot of his
life? He was so haughty in his abhorrence of low scheming--so constant
in his love--so tender with his dying Vermont boys--so heroic, and so
reckless of his own grand life that I love him. _I love him!_ And he is
dead!"
She wrung her hands and wept such tears as make the heart grow old, and
the life wane early; such tears as are only rendered by a nature
generous and effulgent in its love as tropical sunshine, whose revenge
is self-immolating as the suttee of the Hindoo's widow.
Toward ten o'clock the next morning the executors made their appearance
in a gig, and betook themselves to the library.
They found their troublesome ward already waiting them, with an