Rupert Godwin

A NEW WAY TO PAY OLD DEBTS.

Rupert Godwin went at once to the library, where Harley Westford was waiting for him.

“Come, my dear Captain,” he said, as he entered the spacious room, the walls of which were lined with books, whose costly and artistic bindings announced alike the wealth of a millionnaire and the perfect taste of an accomplished bibliopole,—“come, Captain, let us understand each other fully. You want this money to-night?”

“I do. My demand may perhaps be unreasonable, as this house is not your place of business, nor this an hour in which you are accustomed to transact business; but the peculiar circumstances of the case must plead my excuse. I tell you again, Mr. Godwin, to me this is a matter of life or death.”

“And if I refuse to give you the money to-night you will apply for it to-morrow, as soon as the bank opens?”

“Unquestionably.”

“And if then there was any delay in the production of your money, what would you do?”

“I would dog your footsteps day and night; I would haunt you like your own shadow; I would stand upon the steps of your banking-house in Lombard-street and proclaim you as a thief and a scoundrel, until that twenty thousand pounds was produced. My money!” cried the Captain in passionate accents; “it is not my money; it is my wife’s money, my children’s money; and you had better try to take my life than to rob me of that.”

“Come, come, my dear sir,” said the banker, with his blandest smile, “pray do not excite yourself. I was only putting a case. I daresay if I were a dishonest man you would be what is vulgarly called an ugly customer; but as I have no intention of withholding your money for an hour longer than is necessary, we need not discuss the matter with any violence. I told you just now that I was not in the habit of carrying twenty thousand pounds about me. Under ordinary circumstances, therefore, I should not be able to give you your money to-night. You say your vessel sails at daybreak to-morrow?”

“She does.”

“And you will be a loser if you cannot sail with her?”

“A very considerable loser.”

“Very well, then, Captain Westford,” answered the banker; “you have not behaved very generously to me. You have intruded yourself upon my domestic privacy, and have insulted me by most unjust suspicions. In spite of this, however, I am prepared to act generously towards you. As the circumstances of the case are exceptional, I will strain a point in your favour. It happens, strange to say, that I have in this house a sum of money amounting to more than the twenty thousand pounds which you lodged in my hands.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes. It is a strange coincidence, is it not?”

The banker laughed as he made this remark. Had Harley Westford been a suspicious man, skilled in reading the darker secrets of the human heart, something strained and unnatural in that laugh might have struck upon his ear, awakening a vague terror. But he suspected nothing. He was quite ready to believe that he had wronged Rupert Godwin by his impetuous demand for the return of his money.

“I happen to have an eccentric old lady amongst my customers, whose fortune of some seven-and-twenty thousand pounds was, until a few days since, lodged in the hands of different railway companies,” said the banker, in his most business-like tone. “But a week or so ago she wrote to me in a panic, caused by some silly report she had heard, desiring me to sell out of these companies, and to keep her money in my hands until she gave me further directions respecting the disposal of it. But the best part of the business is, that she begged me to keep the money at my country-house, for fear, as she said, of a robbery in Lombard-street. Did you ever hear of anything so absurd?”

Again Mr. Godwin laughed, the same forced unnatural laugh as before.

“However, Captain Westford,” he continued, “the old proverb very truly tells us, ‘It is an ill wind that blows nobody good.’ You shall profit by the old lady’s eccentricity. If you will come with me to the other side of my house, where I keep all valuables intrusted to me, I will give you Bank of England notes to the amount of twenty thousand pounds.”

“I thank you very much,” answered the Captain.

“No thanks, I am glad to do as much for the sake of——your wife.”

The banker made a long pause before uttering those two last words.

He opened an iron safe, artfully disguised by doors of carved oak, and took from it a heavy bunch of keys, all labelled with slips of parchment. These keys belonged to the northern wing of the Hall.

As the two men were about to leave the room, the door was opened, and a woman appeared upon the threshold.

Never had Harley Westford looked upon beauty more splendid than that which now greeted his sight.

A girl of some nineteen years of age, whose darkly-flashing eyes and Spanish style of beauty proclaimed her the daughter of Rupert Godwin, stood before him. But all that was stern and cold in the banker’s face was softened into beauty in that of his daughter.

The eyes were oriental in their dark lustre, and there was a dewy softness mingled even with the eager brightness of their gaze. A crimson glow relieved the pale olive of the clear skin; and half-parted lips, whose vermilion recalled the hue of the pomegranate, displayed two rows of small white teeth that glittered in the lamp-light.

The girl’s figure was tall and commanding, but she was graceful as an Andalusian countess.

Such was Julia Godwin, the only daughter of the banker and of the poor neglected lady who had been his wife.

“I have been looking for you everywhere, papa!” exclaimed Julia; “where have you been hiding yourself all the evening?”

The banker turned upon his daughter with a frown.

“Have I to tell you again, Julia, that this is a room which I devote to business, and that I will not be intruded upon here?” he exclaimed sternly. “This gentleman is with me on an affair of vital importance, and I must beg that you will retire to your own apartments, and leave us undisturbed.”

“O, very well, papa,” said Julia, pouting her rosy under-lip in evident vexation, and lingering on the threshold with the privileged pertinacity of a spoiled child; “but it is dreadfully weary work sitting alone a whole evening in this melancholy old house, where one expects to see a ghost walk out of the panelling at any moment after dark. Mrs. Melville has gone to town to dine with some old friends, and will not come back till to-morrow morning; so I am all alone. And I looked forward to such a pleasant evening with you. However, I’m going, papa; only I do think you’re very unkind, and I——”

The dark frown upon Mr. Godwin’s face silenced his daughter’s complaining voice, and she retired, murmuring to herself about her father’s unkindness.

Even the sternest men are liable to some weaknesses; and it must be confessed that Julia Godwin was a spoiled child, the favourite companion of a doting father.

Between Rupert Godwin and his son there was neither affection nor companionship. A strange and unnatural dislike divided the father and his only son; and it was in his daughter that the proud man had centred all his hopes.

“Come, Captain Westford,” said the banker, when Julia had vanished, “it is growing late. The last train from Hertford leaves at a little before midnight. Will you be able to walk as far as the station?”

“Three times that distance, if necessary,” answered the seaman heartily.

“Come, then.”

Rupert Godwin took the lamp in one hand and the bunch of keys in the other. He went into the hall, followed by Captain Westford.

“There will be no vehicle required for this gentleman,” the banker said, to a servant whom they met in the hall; “he will take a short cut across the park, and walk back to Hertford.”

Rupert Godwin led the way along corridors carpeted with velvet pile, and adorned with pictures and statues, and great china vases of exotic flowers, whose rich perfumes filled the air. All was luxury and elegance in this part of the house, and through the open doors Harley Westford caught glimpses of exquisitely-furnished apartments, in which the carved oaken wainscots and richly-adorned ceilings of the Elizabethan age contrasted with the most graceful achievements of modern upholstery.

But suddenly the scene changed. At the end of a long corridor the banker unlocked a ponderous oaken door, and led the way into a dark passage, where the atmosphere seemed thick with dust, and where there was a faint musty smell that seemed the very odour of decay.

They were now in the northern wing of Wilmingdon Hall, amongst those disused chambers to whose dull solitude it pleased the banker sometimes to betake himself.

Harley Westford looked round him with a shudder.

“We seamen are rather superstitious fellows,” he said; “the air of this place chills me to the bone, and I should expect to meet a ghost in these dark passages. The place feels like a grave.”

“Does it?” exclaimed the banker; “that’s strange!”

Again, if Harley Westford had been a suspicious man, he might have detected something sinister in the tone in which those words were spoken.

The banker unlocked a door leading into a small low-roofed chamber which bore the aspect of being sometimes occupied by a business man.

There were iron safes along one side of the room, and a desk and a couple of chairs stood in the centre of the bare oak floor. There was a long narrow window, guarded by iron bars and by heavy shutters on the outside. At one end of the room there was a door, also heavily barred with iron.

Nothing could be more dreary than the aspect of this apartment, dimly illuminated by the lamp which Rupert Godwin placed upon the desk.

“It is in this room that I keep any objects of special value intrusted to me for any length of time,” he said, as Harley Westford’s eyes wandered slowly round the apartment. “Those safes contain money and securities. That door leads to a cellar in which I keep plate.”

He opened one of the safes and took out an iron box.

“This is Miss Wentworth’s fortune,” he said, “twenty thousand pounds of which I am about to deliver to you.”

He set the box upon the desk; and while the Captain was looking at it with an almost respectful gaze, as the casket which contained so much wealth, Rupert Godwin turned once more to the safe.

This time Harley Westford did not see the object which he took from that iron repository.

It was something that flashed with a blue glitter in the light of the lamp—something which the banker concealed in the sleeve of his coat as he turned towards the sailor.

“Come,” he said, with his most careless manner, “you must see my mysterious cellar before you leave this old haunted wing of the Hall. You are not afraid of the ghosts, I suppose, in my company?”

“Neither in yours nor alone,” answered Harley; “a sailor is never afraid. He may believe in the appearance of strange visitants upon this earth, but he does not fear them.”

The banker unlocked the iron-barred door, and pulled it open.

It revolved very slowly on its ponderous hinges, revealing a flight of steep steps that led downwards into impenetrable darkness.

“So that is where you keep your treasures!” cried the sailor; “a regular Aladdin’s cave!”

“Yes,” answered Rupert Godwin; “if you are an amateur of old silver, you would find plenty to interest you in that vault—candelabras that have lighted the banquets of the Tudors, tankards that Cromwell’s thick lips have touched, tea-pots and salvers made by Queen Anne’s favourite silversmith, the tarnished treasures of some of the best families in England. Take the lamp and look down.”

Harley took the lamp from the table, and approached the threshold of the door.

He stood for some few moments looking thoughtfully down into the gloomy vault below.

“A queer place!” he said; “darker than the hold of a slave-ship off the African coast.”

As he uttered the last few words, the arm of the banker was suddenly raised, and that mysterious something which flashed with a blue glitter in the lamp-light descended upon the sailor’s back.

Harley Westford uttered one groan, staggered forward, and fell headlong down the steep flight of steps leading to the cellar.

There was a crash of broken glass as the lamp fell from his hand; then a dull heavy thud, which was re-echoed with a hollow sound in the vault below—a sound that prolonged itself like the suppressed roar of distant thunder.

The banker thrust his hand into his breast, then pushed the heavy door upon its hinges, and turned the key in the lock.

“I do not think he will come to Lombard-street to demand his money, or stand upon the steps of my house to denounce me for a thief and a scoundrel,” muttered Rupert Godwin, as he dropped the bunch of keys into his coat-pocket.

Then he groped his way from the room, and crept cautiously along the narrow passage leading to the occupied portion of the house.

He had left the door of communication ajar, and he saw the light shining through the aperture.

He seemed to breathe more freely as he emerged into the carpeted corridor, and locked the door behind him.

As he was turning the key in the lock, Julia Godwin came out of one of the rooms near at hand.

“Where is your friend, papa?” she asked, with a look of surprise.

“He has gone back to London.”

“But how did he go? I saw you both go into the northern wing just now, and I have been sitting in my own room with the door open listening for your footsteps ever since. I am sure he has not passed along this passage.”

For a moment the banker was silent.

“How inquisitive you are, Julia!” he said at last. “I let that gentleman out of the side-door in the northern wing, as he wanted to get across the park by the shortest way.”

“Ah, to be sure. But what could take you into that horrible northern wing?”

“Business. I have important papers there. Go back to your room, Julia; I cannot stay to be questioned.”

The girl looked at her father with an expression of mingled wonder and anxiety.

“Papa!” she exclaimed, “you are as pale as death. I never saw you look like this before. And it is not like you to be so cross to me. I am sure that something has happened to vex you, something very serious.”

“I had rather unpleasant business with that man; but it is all over now, and he has gone. Let me pass, Julia; I have important letters to write before I go to bed.”

“Good-night then, papa,” said Julia, holding up her face to be kissed. But before the kiss could be given, she recoiled from her father, with a sudden movement, and a low cry of terror.

“See there!” she exclaimed, pointing to his breast.

“What is the matter, child?”

“Blood, papa! A spot of blood upon your shirt.”

The banker looked down, and saw a little splash of blood upon the spotless whiteness of his cambric shirt-front. “How silly you are, Julia!” he said. “My nose bled a little just now, as I was stooping over some papers. My brain is overloaded with blood, I think. There, there—good-night, child.”

He pressed his lips upon the girl’s uplifted brow. Those cold bloodless lips sent a chill through her veins.

“What is the matter with papa, to-night?” she thought, as she returned to her own apartment; “I’m afraid something must have gone wrong in the City.”

The banker walked slowly to the dining-room, where Harley Westford had first broken in upon his reverie.

The lamps were still burning on the long table of polished oak; the wines still glowed with ruby lustre in the diamond-cut decanters.

But the room was not empty. Seated by the table, with the Times newspaper in his hand, Rupert Godwin beheld Jacob Danielson, the man who of all others he would have least wished to encounter at that moment.

The banker had buttoned his coat across his breast after that meeting with his daughter, and the blood-stain was no longer visible. But he could not repress a sudden start at sight of his clerk.

“You here, Danielson!” he exclaimed; “I thought you were on your way to London.”

“No; I was too late for the train, and so walked back to ask a night’s hospitality. I might have gone by the midnight train, of course; but then, you see, my landlady is a very particular sort of person, and it wouldn’t do for me to go back to my lodgings in the dead of the night; so I venture to return here. I hope I shall not be considered an intruder.”

“O, not at all,” answered Rupert, dropping suddenly into an arm-chair. “Will you be good enough to touch the bell?”

“Certainly. You are looking very pale.”

“Yes, I was seized with a spasm of the heart just now. I am subject to that sort of thing,” replied the banker, coolly. Then he added to the servant who entered the room, “Bring me some brandy.”

The man brought a decanter of brandy. Rupert Godwin half filled a tumbler with the spirit, and drained it to the last drop.

“And so you lost the train, and walked over here?” he asked of Danielson, presently.

“Yes; I dismissed your man with the dog-cart before I discovered that the train had started, so I had no alternative but to walk back.”

“You must have walked uncommonly fast,” said the banker, thoughtfully.

“Yes, I’m rather a fast walker. But where’s our friend the Captain?”

“Gone, half an hour ago.”

“You contrived to pacify him, then?”

“O, yes. He agreed to let me have the use of his money till his return from China. I shall pay him rather a high rate of interest.”

“Ah, to be sure,” answered the clerk, rubbing his chin in that slow and meditative manner which was peculiar to him, and staring thoughtfully at his employer, who drank another half-tumbler of brandy. “And so the Captain walked to the railway station. You directed him to go by a cross cut through the park, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“By the grotto and fernery, eh?”

“Yes; I sent him that way,” answered the banker, rather abstractedly.

“Strange!” said the clerk. “I ought to have met him, for I came that way.”

“Very likely he took the wrong path; these sailors never are very good hands at steering their course on shore.”

“No; to be sure. And the careless fellow has left his coat behind him, I see,” said Danielson, pointing to Harley Westford’s light overcoat, which hung on the back of a distant chair.

“Very careless,” answered the banker. “And now, as I am rather tired, I will wish you good-night, Danielson. The servants will show you to your room. Try some of that cognac. It is quite a liqueur.”

“It ought to be rather mild,” answered the clerk; “for I never saw you take so much brandy as you’ve drunk within the last five minutes.”

Rupert Godwin left the dining-room, and went up the broad oak staircase to his own apartment—a lofty and spacious chamber, furnished with dark carved oak, relieved by hangings of green velvet.

Here the mask fell from the assassin’s face; here the guilty man dared to be himself.

He dropped heavily into a chair, and covering his face with his hands, groaned aloud.

“It was horrible,” he muttered, “very horrible; and yet they say revenge is sweet. Years ago I hungered for vengeance as some famished animal may hunger for his prey. And now it is mine. I am avenged, Clara Ponsonby. You will never look upon my rival again.”

The banker plunged his hand into his waistcoat, and drew from thence a long Spanish dagger of bright blue steel.

From the point half-way towards the hilt, the blade was stained with blood.

“His blood!” muttered Rupert Godwin; “the blood of the man I have hated for twenty years, and only met for the first time to-day! The ways of destiny are strange.”

The banker rose from his chair, and went to an old-fashioned ebony cabinet, in a secret drawer of which he placed the dagger.

“No living creature but myself knows the secret of that spring,” he said to himself. “They must be clever who find the weapon that killed Harley Westford.”

Then after a pause, he murmured:

“The weapon that killed him! Can I be certain that he is dead?”

And again, after a pause, he muttered:

“Bah! How should he survive to-night’s work? The stroke of the dagger was sure enough; and then the fall down the steep flight of steps. Can there be any doubt of his death? And again, if he survived the dagger-stroke and the fall, he must perish from loss of blood, cold, or even famine.”

There was something demoniac in the face of Rupert Godwin as he contemplated this horrible alternative.

“And the twenty thousand pounds are mine!” he exclaimed triumphantly, after a long pause: “mine—for ever; to deal with as I please. That sum may help me to sustain the shattered credit of my house. Fresh speculations may float me back to fortune. I may surmount all my difficulties, as I have surmounted the difficulty of to-night. What is it, after all?—this crime, which is so hideous to contemplate, so awful to remember? One bold, sudden stroke, and the thing is done. This man’s life comes to an end, as it might have come to an end a few days hence in some squall at sea. What is the world the worse for his loss, or how am I the worse for what I have done?”

This was the argument which this man held with himself in that first pause after the commission of the dread act which must separate him for evermore in thought and feeling from men with clean hands and sinless hearts.

He was not sorry for what he had done. He was disturbed by no feeling of compassion or regret for his victim. But he felt that he had done a deed the weight and influence of which upon his future existence he had yet to discover.

It seemed to him as if some physical transformation had been worked upon him since the doing of that awful deed. He no longer breathed, or moved, or spoke, with a sense of ease and freedom. His respiration was troubled, his limbs seemed to have lost their elasticity; when he spoke, his voice sounded strange to him.

“It is a kind of nightmare,” he said to himself, “and will pass away as quickly as it came. I have lived in lands where men hold each other’s lives very lightly. Am I the man to play the coward because this insolent sailor’s days have been cut shorter by so many months or years? Why did he come here to brave and defy me in my own house? He did not know what a desperate man he came to defy. He did not know what good cause I had to hate him.”

Excited by such thoughts as these, the banker paced up and down his spacious room, with his arms folded, and his head bent upon his breast.

Suddenly he stopped, and a look of terror passed across his face.

“The receipt!” he exclaimed. “Powers of hell! the receipt for the twenty thousand pounds! What if that should have fallen into other hands?”

Then, after a pause, he muttered:

“No, it is scarcely possible. The man would have kept it in his own possession. It is buried in the dark vault where he lies, never to rise again upon this earth.”

But in the next moment the banker remembered the coat which Harley Westford had left in the dining-room.

“If by any chance the receipt should be in one of the pockets of that coat!” he thought, as he stood motionless in the centre of the room. After a moment’s hesitation, he snatched a candle from the dressing-table, left his room, and went down to the hall below.

He went into the dining-room. There all was deserted. The lamps were out; Jacob Danielson was gone; but the Captain’s coat still hung on the chair where he had left it.

Rupert Godwin ransacked the pockets; but there was no shred of paper to be found in any one of them.

“What if Danielson should have examined them before me, and should have secured the receipt!” exclaimed the banker. “That would indeed be destruction. But no; surely, careless as these seafaring men may be, Harley Westford would never have carried the only document representing his fortune in the pocket of a loose overcoat.”