Chapter XIII: A Storm of Wind

The wind was rising. Coming in gusts from across the sea, it swept round the Dolphin Inn with a force that seemed to shake the old walls and stir the windowpanes--for the corner that made the site of the inn was always an exposed one. Madame Guise, undressing slowly by the expiring fire in her chamber, shivered as she listened to it.

The wind did not howl in this fashion around her own sheltered home in the sunny Dauphine. There was no grand sea there for it to whirl and play over, and come off with a shrieking moan. Not often there did they get cold weather like this; or white snow covering the plains; or ice in the water-jugs. And never yet before in her uneventful life, had it fallen to her lot to travel all across France from South to North with a little child to take care of, and then to encounter the many hours' passage in a stifling ship on a rough and raging sea: and after a night's rest in London to come off again in the cold English stage-coach for how many miles she hew not. All this might have served to take the colour from her face and to give the shiverings to her frame--for land travelling in those days was not the easy pastime it is made now.

But there was worse behind it. Not the cold, not the want of rest, was it that was so trying to her, but the frightful whispers of a supposed tragedy that had (so to say) greeted her arrival at the Dolphin. But a few hours yet within its walls, and she had been told that him of whom she had come in secret search, her husband, had disappeared out of life.

For this poor young lady, Charlotte Guise, was in truth the wife of Anthony Castlemaine. His wife if he were still living; his widow if he were dead. That he was dead, hearing all she had heard, no doubt could exist in her mind; no hope of the contrary, not the faintest shadow of it, could enter her heart. She had come all this long journey in search of her husband, fearing some vague treachery; she had arrived to find that treachery of the deepest dye had only too probably put him out of sight for ever.

When the father, Basil Castlemaine, was on his death-bed, she had heard the charge he gave to Anthony, to come over to England and put in the claim to his right inheritance; she had heard the warning of possible treachery that had accompanied it.

Basil died. And when Anthony, in obedience to his father's last injunctions, was making ready for the journey to England, his wife recalled the warning to him. He laughed at her. He answered jokingly saying that if he never returned to Gap, she might come off to see the reason, and whether he was still in the land of the living. Ah, how many a word spoken in jest would, if we might read the future, bear a solemn meaning! That was one.

Anthony Castlemaine departed on his mission to England, leaving his wife and little child in their home at Gap. The first letter Charlotte received from her husband told her of his arrival at Greylands, and that he had put up at the Dolphin Inn. It intimated that he might not find his course a very smooth one, and that his uncle James was in possession of Greylands' Rest. Some days further on she received a second letter from him; and following closely upon it, by the next post in fact, a third. Both these letters bore the same date. The first of them stated that he was not advancing at all; that all kinds of impediments were being placed in his way by his uncles; they appeared resolved to keep him out of the estate, refusing even to show him how it was left and it ended with an expressed conviction that his Uncle James was usurping it. The last letter told her that since posting the other letter earlier in the day, he had seen his Uncle James; that the interview, which had taken place in a meadow, was an unpleasant one, his uncle even having tried to strike him that he (Anthony) really did not know what to be at, but had resolved to try for one more conference with his uncle before proceeding to take legal measures, and that he should certainly write to her again in the course of a day or two to tell her whether matters progressed or whether they did not. In this last letter there ran a vein of sadness, very perceptible to the wife. She thought her husband must have been in very bad spirits when he wrote it: and she anxiously looked for the further news promised.

It never came. No subsequent letter ever reached her. After waiting some days, she wrote to her husband at the Dolphin Inn, but she got no answer. She wrote again, and with the like result. Then, feeling strangely uneasy, not knowing how to get tidings of him, or to whom to apply, she began to think that she would have to put in practice the suggestion he had but spoken in jest, and go over to England to look after him. A short period of vacillation--for it looked like a frightfully formidable step to the untravelled young lady--and she resolved upon it. Arranging the affairs of her petit menage, as she expressed it, she started off with her child; and in due time reached London. There she stayed one night, after sending off a note to Greylands, directed to her husband at the Dolphin Inn, to tell of her intended arrival on the following day; and in the morning she took her seat in the Stilborough coach. These three letters, the two from Gap and the one from London, were those that led to the dispute between Mr. and Mrs. Bent, which Ethel Reene had disturbed. The landlord had them safely locked up in his private archives.

Forewarned, forearmed, is an old saying. Anthony Castlemaine's wife had been warned, and she strove to be armed. She would not present herself openly and in her own name at Greylands. If the Castlemaine family were dealing hardly with her husband, it would be more prudent for her to go to work warily and appear there at first as a stranger. The worst she had feared was, that Mr. James Castlemaine might be holding her husband somewhere at bay; perhaps even had put him in a prison--she did not understand the English laws--and she must seek him out and release him. So she called herself Guise as soon as she landed in England. Her name had been Guise before her marriage, and she assumed it now. Not much of an assumption: in accordance with the French customs of her native place, she retained her maiden name as an affix to her husband's, and her cards were printed Madame Castlemaine-Guise. Had her assertion of the name wanted confirmation, there it was on the small trunk; which had GUISE studded on it in brass nails, for it had belonged to her father. Her intention had been to proceed to Stilborough, put up there, and come over to Greylands the following day. But when she found the coach passed through Greylands--which she had not known, and she first recognised the place by the sign of the famous dolphin, about which Anthony had written to her in his first letter--she resolved to alight there, the little girl's symptoms of feverish illness affording a pretext for it. And so, here she was, at the often-heard-of Dolphin Inn, inhabiting the very chamber that her ill-fated husband had occupied, and with the dread story she had listened to beating its terrors in her brain.

A gust of wind shook the white dimity curtain, drawn before the casement, and she turned to it with a shiver. What did this angry storm of wind mean? Why should it have arisen suddenly without apparent warning? Charlotte Guise was rather superstitious, and asked herself the question. When she got out of the coach at the inn door, the air and sea were calm. Could the angry disturbance have come to show her that the very elements were rising at the wrong dealt out to her husband? Some such an idea took hold of her.

"Every second minute I ask whether it can be true," she murmured in her native language; "or whether I have but dropped asleep in my own house, and am dreaming it all. It is not like reality. It is not like any story I ever heard before. Anthony comes over here, all those hundreds of weary miles, over that miserable sea, and finds himself amid his family; his family whom he had never seen. 'Greylands' Rest is mine, I think,' he says to them; 'will you give it to me?' And they deny that it is his. 'Then,' says he, 'what you say may be so; but you should just show me the deeds--the proofs that it is not mine.' And they decline to show them; and his uncle, James Castlemaine, at an interview in the field, seeks to strike him. Anthony comes home to the hotel here, and writes that last letter to me, and puts it in the post late at night. Then he and the landlord go walking out together in the moonlight, and by-and-by they see Mr. James Castlemaine go into a lonely place of cloisters called the Friar's Keep, and he, nay poor husband, runs in after him; and he never comes out of it again. The host, waiting for him outside, hears a shot and an awful cry, but he does not connect it with the cloisters; and so he promenades about till he's weary, thinking the uncle and nephew are talking together, and--and Anthony never at all comes out again! Yes, it is very plain: it is too plain to me: that shot took my dear husband's life. James Castlemaine, fearing he would make good his claim to the estate and turn him out of it, has murdered him."

The wind shrieked, as if it were singing a solemn requiem; the small panes of the casement seemed to crack, and the white curtain fluttered. Charlotte Guise hid her shrinking face for a moment, and then turned it on the shaking curtain, her white lips parting with some scarcely breathed words.

"If the spirits of the dead are permitted to hover in the air, as some people believe perhaps his spirit is here now, at this very window! Seeking to hold commune with mine; calling upon me to avenge him. Oh, Anthony, yes! I will never rest until I have found out the mystery of your fate. I will devote my days to doing it!"

As if to encourage the singular fancy, that the whispered story and the surroundings of the hour had called up in her over-strung nerves and brain, a gust wilder than any that had gone before swept past the house at the moment with a rushing moan. The casement shook; its fastenings seemed to strain: and the poor young lady, in some irrepressible freak of courage, born of desperation, drew aside the curtain and looked forth.

No, no; nothing was there but the wind. The white snow lay on the ground, and covered the cliff that skirted the beach on the right. The night was light, disclosing the foam of the waves as they rose and fell; clouds were sweeping madly across the face of the sky.

The little girl stirred in bed and threw out her arms. Her mother let fall the window curtain and softly approached her. The hot face wore its fever-crimson; the large brown eyes, so like her father's, opened the red lips parted with a cry.

"Maman! Marie soif; Marie veut boire."

"Oh, is she fatherless?" mentally cried the poor mother, as she took up the glass of tisane. "Oui, ma petite! ma chérie! Bois donc, Marie; bois!"

The child seized the glass with her hot and trembling little hands, and drank from it. She seemed very thirsty. Before her mother had replaced it within the fender and come back to her, her pretty face was on the pillow again, her eyes were closing.

Madame Guise--as we must continue to call her--went to bed: but not to sleep. The wind raged, the child by her side was restless, her own mind was in a chaos of horror and trouble. The words of the prophet Isaiah in Holy Writ might indeed have been applied to her: The whole head was sick and the whole heart faint.

Towards morning she dropped into a disturbed sleep, during which a dream visited her. And the dream was certainly a singular one. She thought she was alone in a strange, dark garden: gloomy trees clustered about her, ugly looking mountains rose above. She seemed to be searching for something; to be obliged to search, but she did not know for what; a great dread, or terror, lay upon her, and but for being impelled she would not have dared to put one foot before the other in the dark path. Suddenly, as she was pushing through the impeding trees, her husband stood before her. She put out her hand to greet him; but he did not respond to it, but remained where he had halted, a few paces off, gazing at her fixedly. It was not the husband who had parted from her in the sunny South; a happy man full of glad anticipations, with a bright fresh face and joyous words on his lips: but her husband with a sad, stern countenance, pale, cold, and still. Her heart seemed to sink within her, and before she could ask him what was amiss she saw that he was holding his waistcoat aside with his left hand, to display a shot in the region of the heart. A most dreadful sensation of terror, far more dreadful than any she could ever know in this life, seized upon her at the sight; she screamed aloud and awoke. Awoke with the drops of moisture on her face, and trembling in every limb.

Now, as will be clear to every practical mind, this dream, remarkable though it was, must have been only the result of her own imaginative thoughts, of the tale she had heard, of the fears and doubts she had been indulging before going to sleep. But she, poor distressed, lonely lady, looked upon it as a revelation. From that moment she never doubted that her husband had been shot as described; shot in the heart and killed: and that the hand that did it was Mr. Castlemaine's.

"I knew his spirit might be hovering about me," she murmured, trying to still her trembling, as she sat up in bed. "He has been permitted to appear to me to show me the truth--to enjoin on me the task of bringing the deed to light. By Heaven's help I will do it! I will never quit this spot, this Greylands, until I have accomplished it. Yes, Anthony!--can you hear me, my husband?--I vow to devote myself to the discovery; I will bring this dark wickedness into the broad glare of noonday. Country, kindred, home, friends!--I will forget them all, Anthony, in my search for you.

"Where have they hidden him?" she resumed after a little pause. "Had Mr. Castlemaine an accomplice?--or did he act alone. Oh, alone; of a certainty, alone," she continued, answering her own question. "He would not have dared it had others been present; and the landlord below says Mr. Castlemaine was by himself when he went into the cloisters. Did he fling him into the sea after he was dead?--or did he conceal him somewhere in that place--that Keep? Perhaps he buried him in it? if so, his body is lying in unconsecrated ground, and it will never rest.--Marie, then, my little one, what is it? Are you better this morning?"

The child was awaking with a moan. She had been baptised and registered in her native place as Mary Ursula. Her grandfather, Basil, never called her anything else; her father would sometimes shorten it to "Marie Ursule:" but her mother, not so well accustomed to the English tongue as they were, generally used but the one name, Marie. She looked up and put out her little hands to her mother: her eyes were heavy, her cheeks flushed and feverish.

That the child was worse than she had been the previous night, there could be little question of, and Madame Guise felt some alarm. When breakfast was over--of which meal the child refused to partake, but still complained of thirst--she inquired whether there was a doctor in the place. She asked for him as she would have asked in her own land. Is there a medecin here? and Mrs. Bent interpreted it as medicine, comprehended that medicine was requested, and rejoiced accordingly. Mrs. Bent privately put down the non-improvement to the tisane. Had a good wholesome powder been administered over night, the child, she believed, would have been all right this morning.

The doctor, Mr. Parker, came in answer to the summons: a grey-haired, pleasant-speaking man. He had formerly been in large practice at Stilborough; but after a dangerous illness which attacked him there and lasted more than a year, he took the advice of his friends and retired from the fatigues of his profession. His means were sufficient to live without it. Removing to Greylands, for change of air, and for the benefit of the salt sea-breezes, he grew to like the quietude of the place, and determined to make it his home for good. Learning that a small, pretty villa was for sale, he purchased it. It lay back from the coach road beyond the Dolphin Inn, nearly opposite the avenue that led to Greylands' Rest. The house belonged to Mr. Blackett of the Grange--the Grange being the chief residence at a small hamlet about two miles off; and Mr. Castlemaine had always intended to purchase it should it be in the market, but Mr. Blackett had hitherto refused to sell. His deciding to do so at length was quite a sudden whim; Mr. Parker heard of it, and secured the little property--which was anything but agreeable at the time to the Master of Greylands.

There Mr. Parker had since resided, and had become strong and healthy again. He had so far resumed his calling as to attend when a doctor was wanted in Greylands, for there was none nearer than Stilborough. At first Mr. Parker took to respond for humanity's sake when appealed to, and he continued it from love of his profession. Not for one visit in ten did he get paid, nor did he want to: the fishermen were poor, and he was large-hearted.

After examining the little lady traveller, he pronounced her to be suffering from a slight attack of inflammation of the chest, induced, no doubt, by the cold to which she had been exposed when travelling. Madame Guise informed him that they had journeyed from Paris (it was no untruth, for they had passed through the French capital and stayed a night in it), and the weather had become very sharp as they neared the coast--which coast it had taken them two days and a night in the diligence to reach; and the sea voyage had been fearfully hard, and had tried the little one. Yes, yes, the doctor answered, the inclement cold had attacked the little J girl, and she must stay in bed and be taken care of. Madame Guise took occasion to observe that she had been going farther on, but, on perceiving her child's symptoms of illness, had halted at this small village, called Greylands, which looked open and healthy--but the wind had got up at night. Got up very much and very suddenly, assented the doctor, got up to a gale, and it was all the better for the little one that she had not gone on. He thought he might have to put a small blister on in the afternoon, but he should see. A blister?--what was that? returned madame, not familiar with the English word. Oh, she remembered, she added a moment after--a vésicatoire.

"Yes, yes, I see it all: Heaven is helping me," mentally spoke poor Charlotte Guise, as she took up her post by Marie after the doctor's departure, and revolved matters in her mind. "This illness has been sent on purpose: a token to me that I have done right to come to Greylands, and that I am to stay in it. And by the good help of Heaven I will stay, until I shall have tracked home the fate of my husband to Mr. Castlemaine."