Mildred Arkell. Vol. 2 (of 3)

CHAPTER XI.

THE LAST OF ROBERT CARR

By a bright fire in her handsome and most comfortable drawing-room, in her widow's cap—assumed, now that all hope had died out—sat Mrs. Dundyke. The October wind was whistling without, the October rain was falling on the window panes; and there was a look of anxiety on her otherwise calm face, still so fair and attractive, as she listened to the storm. The summer and autumn, up to the close of September, had been remarkably warm and fine; but when October came in, it brought bad weather with it.

A gust and a patter, worse than any that had gone before, aroused Mrs. Dundyke from her seat. She laid her work—a woollen comforter, that she was knitting—on the small and beautiful table at her side, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and walked to the window.

"I wonder whether he is out in it?" she said, as she watched the trees bending in the storm. "This anxiety is killing him. The very work is killing him. Abroad in all weathers; out of one damp church into another; getting heated with his weak state and the ardour of the pursuit, and then becoming chilled in some sudden storm such as this! He may find the record, perhaps, but he will never live to reap the benefit."

Need you be told that Mrs. Dundyke's soliloquy applied to Robert Carr? He was staying with her. When he went back to London from Westerbury, and sought Mrs. Dundyke, to deliver certain messages of the kindest nature sent by him from Mr. Arkell and Travice, she had insisted upon his making her house his home while he remained in London to pursue his search.

And he did so; and began his toilsome search of the London church marriage registers. What a wearying task it was, let those testify who may have been obliged to enter upon such. By dint of a great deal of trouble, and of correspondence with Mr. Fauntleroy, and recalled recollections from middle-aged people in Westerbury, who had been young men once and friends of the elder Robert Carr, he, the present Robert Carr, succeeded in ascertaining the place where his father and mother had sojourned that fortnight in London. It was in one of the quiet streets of the Strand, in the parish of St. Clement Danes. But when St. Clement Danes' register was examined, no entry of any such marriage could be found there; and for the first time since the blow fell, Robert Carr felt his heart sink with a vague fear that he dared not dwell upon.

It had seemed to him so easy! He had felt as sure a trust in his mother's marriage as he felt in Heaven. It was only to find out where they had stayed that fortnight in London, and search the parish church register; for there, and only there, Robert Carr argued, the marriage had taken place. But there, it was now evident, that it had not taken place, and he was all at sea.

He began with the other churches; he knew not what else to do. In Holland they could not have been married, from the want of legal papers, and other matters, necessary to foreigners united abroad. He searched the churches nearest to St. Clement Danes first, and then went on to others, and others, and others. He would go up after breakfast from his kind friend, who was nursing him like a mother, and begin his daily task; out of one church into another, as she had phrased it, in all weathers—rain, hail, storm—and go back at night again utterly wearied out.

Mrs. Dundyke stood at the window watching the rain. She fancied it was beginning to grow dusk; but it was not time just yet, and the afternoon was a dark one. He would not be home yet awhile, she was thinking. He stopped in those cold churches as long as there was a ray of light to see by. Mrs. Dundyke was turning from the window, when she saw an omnibus stop, and Robert Carr get out of it. He seemed worse than usual; weaker in strength, more tottering in frame; and as he looked up at her with a faint, sad smile, a conviction came over her that she should not be able to save the life of this poor young man; that all her care, all her comforts, all her ample income would not benefit him. And how very ample her income would for the future be, she had not known until that day. She was a rich lady for this world; she might ride in her carriage, if she chose, and be grand for all time.

"Oh! Robert!" she exclaimed, meeting him on the stairs—and she had taken to call him by the familiar name, as she might a son—"I fear you have got very wet! I am so glad you came home early!"

He walked unsteadily to the easy chair by the fire, and sunk in it. Mrs. Dundyke, with him daily, saw not the change that every hour was surely making in him; but she did notice how wan and ill he looked this evening.

"Have you not been well to-day, Robert?"

"Not very. I have been spitting so much of that blood again. And I felt so weary too; so sick of it all."

"There's no success, then, again!"

"None. Altogether, I thought I'd leave it for the day, and come back and take a rest."

He sighed as he spoke, but the sigh broke off with a moaning sound. Mrs. Dundyke glanced at him. She had resumed her knitting—which was a chest protector for himself—until the wine that she had rung for should be brought.

"Robert, are you losing heart?"

"No, I can never lose that. There was a marriage, if we could only find out where. You would be as sure of it as I am, dear Mrs. Dundyke, had you known my mother."

Mrs. Dundyke made no rejoinder. For herself, she had never fully believed in the marriage at all, but she was not cruel enough to say so. She sat watching him over her knitting: now bending forward with his thin hands spread out to the warmth of the fire; now suddenly bringing his hands to his chest as he coughed, choked; now lying back in the chair, panting, his thin nostrils working, his breath coming in great gasps; and there came in that moment over Mrs. Dundyke as she looked, a conviction—she knew not whence or why—that a very, very short period would bring the end.

She felt her face grow moist with a cold moisture. How was it that she had been so blind to the obvious truth? She knitted two whole rows of knitting before she spoke, and then she told him, with a calm voice, that she should write for his wife.

"How kind you are!" he murmured. "I shall never repay you."

Mrs. Dundyke laughed cheerfully.

"I don't want repayment. There is nothing to repay."

"Nothing to repay! No kindly friendship, no trouble, no cost! I wonder how much I cost you in wine alone?"

"Robert," she said, in a low, earnest tone—though she wondered whether he might not be jesting—"do you know what they tell me my future income will be? Mr. Littelby was here to-day, giving me an account of things, for I put my poor husband's affairs into his hands on my return. It will not be much less than two thousand a year."

The amount of the sum quite startled him.

"Two thousand a year!"

"It will indeed, as they tell me. By the articles of partnership I am allowed a handsome income from the house in Fenchurch-street; but the chief of the money comes from speculations my husband has been engaged in for many years, in connexion with a firm on the Stock Exchange. Safe speculations, and profitable; not hazardous ones. This money is realized, and put out in the Funds, in what they call the Five-per-Cents.; and I shall have nearly two thousand a year. I had no idea of it; and the puzzle to me now is, how I shall spend it. Don't you think I require a few kind visitors to help me?"

Before he could answer, there came on a violent fit of coughing, worse than any she had yet seen, and quite a little stream of blood trickled from his mouth. It was nothing particularly new, but that night Mrs. Carr was written for in haste.

"Tell her to bring the desk with her," said Robert; and Mrs. Dundyke wrote down the words just as he spoke them.

But he rallied again, and in a day or two was actually out as before, prosecuting his search amidst those hopeless churches. He confided what he called a secret to Mrs. Dundyke—namely, that he had not confessed to his wife that any suspicion was cast upon his birth. The honest truth was, Robert Carr shrunk from it; for he knew it would so alarm and grieve her. She was well connected; had fallen in love with the young Cambridge student during a visit she was paying in England; and when the time came that marriage was spoken of, her friends raised some objection because Robert Carr's father was not of gentle blood, but was in business as a merchant. What she would say when she came to know that he was suspected of not being even that merchant's legitimate son, Robert scarcely cared to speculate.

She arrived in an afternoon at Mrs. Dundyke's, having come direct to London Bridge by the steamer from Rotterdam. Robert was out in London, as usual; but Mrs. Dundyke was not alone: Mildred Arkell was with her. Perhaps of all people, next to his wife, Mildred had been most shocked at the fate of Mr. Dundyke. This was the first time she had seen his widow, for she had been away in the country with Lady Dewsbury.

A young, pretty woman, looking little more than a girl, with violet-blue eyes, dark hair, and a flush upon her cheeks. Mrs. Dundyke marvelled at her youth—that she should be a wife since three years, and the mother of two children.

"I wrote to you to be sure to bring the children," said Mrs. Dundyke.

"I know: it was very kind. But I thought, as Robert was ill, they might disturb him with their noise. They are but babies; and I left them behind."

Mrs. Dundyke was considering how she could best impart the news of the suspected birth to this poor, unconscious young lady. "If you could give her a hint of it yourself, should she arrive during my absence!" Robert Carr had said to Mrs. Dundyke that very morning, with the hectic deepening on his hollow cheeks. And Mrs. Dundyke began her task.

And a sad shock it proved to be. Mrs. Carr, accustomed to the legal formalities that attend a marriage in the country of her birth, and without which formalities the ceremony cannot be performed, could not for some time be led to understand how, if there was a marriage, it could have been kept a secret. There were many points difficult to make her, a foreigner, understand; but when she had mastered them, she grew strangely interested in the recital of the past, and Mildred Arkell, as a resident in Westerbury at the time, was called upon to repeat every little detail connected with the departure of her husband's father and mother from their native place. In listening, Mrs. Carr's cheek grew hectic as her husband's.

But she had her secret also, which she had been keeping from her husband. She told it now to Mrs. Dundyke. Something was wrong with affairs at Rotterdam. The surviving partners of the house, three covetous old Dutchmen, disputed their late partner's right (or rather that of his children) to draw out certain monies from the house; at the death of Robert Carr it lapsed to the house, they said. This was the account Mrs. Carr gave, but it was not a very clear one, neither did she seem to understand the case. The Carrs had in the house other money, about which there was no dispute, but even this the firm refused to pay out until the other matter was settled. The effect was, that the Carrs had no money to go on with; and there would probably be litigation.

"I did not tell Robert, because I was in hopes it would be comfortably decided without him," said Mrs. Carr. "By the way, you wrote me word that Robert said I was to bring over the desk. Which desk did he mean? his own or his father's?"

"I really don't know," replied Mrs. Dundyke; "he was very ill when he spoke, and I wrote the words down just as he spoke them."

"Well, I have brought both; I know he examined Mr. Carr's desk after his death, and he locked it up again, and has the key with him. His own desk also was at home; so, not knowing which was meant, I brought the two."

When Robert Carr came home that evening he looked awfully ill. The expression is not too strong a one; there was something in his attenuated face, its sunken eyes, its ghastly colour, and its working nostrils, that struck the beholder with awe. Mrs. Dundyke was alone in the dining parlour when he came in, and was shocked to see him. Whether it was the long day's work on his decreasing strength—for he had remained later than usual—she could not tell, but he had never looked so near death as this.

"Oh, Robert!" was her involuntary exclamation; "I had better go up and prepare your wife before she sees you."

He suffered her to put him in the great invalid chair she had surreptitiously had brought in a day or two before; he drank the restoring cordial she tendered him; he was passive in her hands as a child, in his great weakness. "I'm afraid I must have a week's rest," he said to her, as she busied herself taking off his gloves, and smoothing his poor damp hair. "My strength seems to be failing unaccountably; I don't know how I have got through the day."

"Oh yes, yes," she eagerly assented; "a little rest; that is what you want. You shall lie in bed all to-morrow."

"Has Emma brought the children?"

"No. They are quite well," she says; "I am going to send her down to you. And, Robert, she knows all, and says she'll help to search the registers herself."

Mrs. Dundyke spoke in a light-hearted tone, but before she went upstairs she sent an urgent message for the doctor.

And when the surgeon came, he said there was no further hope whatever, as, indeed, there had not been for some time now, and that a day or two would "decide."

Decide what? But that he did not say.

In one sense of the word, it may be said that death had come suddenly upon Robert Carr. Had he been less absorbed in that one point of worldly interest, he might have seen its approach more clearly. Not until the morning succeeding his wife's arrival, did he look it fully in the face; and then he found that it was upon the very threshold, was entering in at the opened door.

All the bustle, the anxiety as to temporal interests, the plans and provisions for the future for those to be left behind, ensued. Mrs. Dundyke hastily summoned a legal gentleman, Mr. Littelby. He was a solicitor of many years' standing, not in practice for himself, but conducting the business of an eminent legal firm. He was an old friend of the Dundykes, and Robert Carr had seen him several times; indeed his advice and assistance had been of much service in the search of the church registers. Mr. Littelby was about leaving his present situation, and was in negotiation with a firm in the country for another. Mrs. Dundyke sent up a hasty summons for him.

A handsome bedchamber, in which was every comfort, a bright fire in the hearth, a bed, on which lay a shadowy form, a pale shadowy face, a young weeping girl standing near, soon to be a widow, and you have almost the last scene in the short life of Robert Carr.

He was dying, poor fellow, with that secret, which he had no doubt shortened his life in endeavouring to trace, still unsolved; and he was dying with the conviction, that the proofs did exist somewhere, as fully upon him as it ever had been.

"Emma!"

She dried her eyes, and tried to hide that they had been wet, as she heard the call. The day was getting on.

"Is Littelby not come yet?"

"Yes, I think he is. Some one came a few minutes ago, and is downstairs with Mrs. Dundyke. I think I hear them coming up."

Mrs. Dundyke was coming into the room with a gentleman, a middle-aged man with a sharp nose and pleasant dark eyes. It was Mr. Littelby. They were left alone together—the lawyer and the dying man. But it was a very short and simple task, this will-making. Over almost as soon as begun.

"He asked me to tie you up with trustees, Emma," said the dying man; "but I have left all to you—children, and money, and all else. You will love them, won't you, when I am gone?"

"Oh, Robert, yes!" she said, with a burst of sorrow. "I wish I and they could go with you."

"And, Emma, mind that you prosecute this search. I have asked Littelby to help you, and he will. He says he expects to leave London at the end of the year, for he is in negotiation with another firm; but I dare say it will be found before then. Let that search be your first and greatest task."

She said it should be—she would have promised anything in that parting hour. She lay, with her pretty hair on the counterpane, and her wet eyes turned to him, devouring his last looks, listening to his last words. Almost literally the last in this world, for, before the close of the afternoon, Robert Carr fell into a lethargy, from which he did not awake alive.

And those two lone women were together in the house of the dead—widows indeed. The one deprived of her young husband almost on the threshold of life; the other bereft, she knew not how, of her many years' partner. Poor Mrs. Dundyke had hardly wanted more sorrow in her desolate home.

So far as ease in the future went, she was well off. The large income mentioned by her to Robert Carr would indeed be hers. It was chiefly the result of that first thousand pounds Mr. Dundyke had risked on the Stock Exchange. Fortune had favoured him in an unusual degree. You remember the nails in the horse-shoe, how they doubled and doubled: so it had seemed to be with the thousand pounds of Mr. Dundyke. But poor Mrs. Carr's future fortune was all uncertain. Whether she would have sufficient to keep her children in easy competency, or whether she would find herself, like so many more gentlewomen, obliged to do something for her bread in this world of changes, she did not know.

Even in this week that succeeded her husband's death, she was applied to for money, which she could not find. The application came from Mr. Fauntleroy. Lawyers have a peculiar facility for getting rid of money, as some of us have been obliged to know to our cost; and Mr. Fauntleroy had already disposed of the first fifty pounds advanced to him, and wanted more if he was to go on with the case.

Mrs. Carr had it not. Until affairs should be settled in Rotterdam, she had no such sum at her command. She could have procured it indeed from many friends, but she was sorely puzzled what to do for the best. On the one hand, there was the dying promise to her husband to pursue this cause; on the other, there was the extreme doubt whether there was any real cause to pursue. If there was no cause, why, then, how worse than foolish it would be to spend money over a chimera. Many and many were the anxious consultations she had with Mrs. Dundyke, even while her husband lay dead in the house.