The Earl's promise

Before Miss Moffat had nearly reached Maryville, Susan met her.

“It went out of my head, Miss,” she began, “to tell you they had the fever at the farm. You have been there most like.”

“Yes; and seen the lad who appears to be dying.”

“What will we do now,” asked Susan in an access of despair, “the children have come home?”

“Well, what of that?”

“What of that!” repeated the woman, scornfully, “like as not you’ll have brought the fever home in your clothes with you.”

Grace stopped. It was a serious loss to her as a woman that she had never been with illness, and knew little or nothing about it, and now unwittingly she had run the risk of doing a very terrible wrong,—bringing infection into another person’s house, amongst another person’s children.

“Oh! I am so sorry,” she exclaimed, unheeding the contemptuous inflection of Susan’s voice; “what can we do; what ought I to do?”

“You had better take off your outside things, and give them to me to hang up in the air,” was the reply uttered in a mollified tone. “I will bring down your wrapper; and then if you throw your other clothes into water, maybe no harm will come of it. But don’t go talking to the mistress till you’ve changed.”

“I will not,” promised Miss Moffat, and she tried to keep her word, for when Mrs. Brady called to her querulously, Grace answered,—

“Wait for a few minutes, I will be with you directly.”

“I want you now.”

“I cannot come. I have been to the Castle Farm, and Reuben is ill with fever; and I must get rid of all possible chance of carrying infection before I see any one.”

“I do not care about infection,” answered Nettie.

“Well, if you do not I do,” retorted Grace, and she essayed to bolt her door; but as is not uncommon, even now in Ireland, all means of secure fastening were either broken or inoperative. “Dear Nettie,” she went on, “do not come near me; for the sake of the children, if not for your own, keep away.”

But Mrs. Brady resolutely had her will.

“Who did you see at the Castle Farm?” she asked.

“Mrs. Scott and Reuben. Nettie do be persuaded, and go away. If you or any of the children caught this fever, I should never forgive myself.”

“We will not catch fever any one of us,” answered Mrs. Brady. “I want to hear about the Scotts. What does Mrs. Scott say? You know what I mean.”

“About Amos?” Grace suggested; “what can she say. Do not let us talk of it, Nettie.”

“I must talk of it. Are you not going to see him, Grace?”

“Yes; but I did not intend to tell you.”

“Why not? I want you to go. I want to hear every word he speaks to you.”

“Nettie, you are ill,” said Miss Moffat, noticing the flush on her friend’s thin cheeks, the brightness of her eyes, and the parched dryness of her lips; “is there nothing you could fancy, dear; nothing I could get that might tempt you to eat?”

Mrs. Brady shook her head; then said with a faint smile,—

“I will try to eat something if you promise to tell me word for word all Amos says to you.”

“How can I do so, you being what you are?” Grace replied.

“I am the most miserable wretch on earth,” Nettie exclaimed. “My heart is breaking, Grace, and you will not do the simplest thing to try and ease it.”

“Nettie dear, how can you ask me?” pleaded Miss Moffat. “I do not love you less because I refuse to betray any confidence the unhappy man may put in me.”

“Do you think I want him hung?” inquired Nettie. “Do you think I should not be glad to hear he had got off safe? I tell you, if laying down my own life could procure his acquittal, I would cheerfully do it.”

“You certainly must be insane,” said Grace, with the quiet force of conviction; “however, to humour you I promise this, that I will repeat as much as I can of our conversation, although I should have thought this the very last subject on which you would have wished to hear me speak.”

“Should you?” exclaimed Nettie. “Well, that only shows how mistaken even clever people may be sometimes. Hush! Here comes that woman!” and Mrs. Brady slipped back into her own room, closing the door softly behind her.

Faithful to her promise Nettie did try to swallow something, but the attempt proved almost a total failure.

“It chokes me, dear,” she said almost humbly to her friend. “I wish—I wish I could have something to quiet me a little. Don’t you think,” she added wistfully, “that old Dr. Girvan, who has seen so many people in trouble, might think of something that would do me good?”

“He shall try,” answered Grace; and she sent a messenger for him.

“When the old man arrived he shook his head, called Nettie ‘poor girl’; felt her pulse, said the shock had been too much for her; advised that she should leave Maryville as soon as possible; expressed his intention of sending her a soothing mixture, and went away believing he understood Mrs. Brady’s case.

“Ah!” said Nettie after he had gone, “if these doctors when they listen to our hearts’ throbbing could only tell what is really passing in them, how we should dread their coming!”

“Dear, do try to keep yourself quiet,” expostulated Grace, and Nettie obediently kept silence.

Another restless night, as Grace heard; so restless that Grace rose and taking the child Nettie had insisted on having to sleep with her away, put the little creature into her own bed, and kept watch by Mrs. Brady till the next morning.

“Grace,” said the widow turning her face towards her friend, and stroking the hand that held hers so tenderly, “you are too good to me by far; but some day I do not think you will be sorry to remember all you have done for me.”

“Darling, I am only too thankful to be able to do anything,” was the reply, and Grace pillowed the once beautiful face upon her arm; and whilst Nettie slept fitfully, looked at the lines trouble had graven on the forehead she could remember, as if it were only a day previously, white and smooth and unmarked by even a trace of care.

Without much trouble Amos Scott’s solicitor had been able to obtain permission for Miss Moffat to see her old friend. In Kilcurragh it was talked of as a nine days’ wonder that a young lady of fortune and position should so far demean herself as to pay a visit to a common murderer; for according to general procedure the public had already tried and condemned the suspected man.

If people were not very much concerned about Mr. Brady’s death, they were at least very greatly infuriated against Amos Scott.

“No man’s life,” they said, “would be safe if the farmer was allowed to get off,—if those who considered themselves injured were suffered to take the law into their own hands and revenge themselves as they pleased.” With much more to the same effect, which Miss Moffat did not hear, and which would not have greatly affected her had she heard.

Never before had Grace felt so much shocked at the change a short time is capable of effecting as when she beheld Amos Scott.

He was worn almost to skin and bone; and there was a sad, weary, despairing look in his face that might well touch the heart of a woman who had known him in his prime of health and hope and prosperity.

There was a gentleness in his manner she had never perceived before. It seemed almost as though he had already passed through the gates of death and dropped the rude garments that concealed his finer and higher nature at the portals.

“Miss Grace; Miss Grace, why did you ever come to a place like this,” were his first words. “If the master had been alive he would not have suffered it.”

“Very probably not,” she answered. “He would have come for me in that case; now I am alone, I have no one.”

“Why did you demean yourself for the likes of me?” he asked.

“I am not demeaning myself,” she replied, “and I came to see you because, guilty or innocent, I cannot forget the past.”

“I am not guilty, Miss Grace.”

“On your solemn word, Amos.”

“If I was standing before my Maker, face to face, as I believe I soon shall,” he said rising, and lifting his hand reverently above his head, “I am not guilty in deed of the black villain’s death. I do not go so far as to say,” he went on, dropping his hand and resuming his seat, like one too weak to remain long standing, “I never wished him dead. I have often; and even now I can hardly feel sorry that he has been struck down. I have been a murderer in my heart, Miss Grace; I don’t deny it. Many and many a night when I have been tramping home through the wet and the mud—empty of food and sick with sorrow,—I have thought if I could just hear he had taken the fever, or broken his neck, or been upset and drowned, I could have made myself content to leave the old place—and Ireland,—and go away to the country I said I never could thole to be banished to. But now,” he added after an expressive pause, “I shall never have the chance; I shall never go anywhere but from here to the Court, and from the Court back here; and from here to—”

He covered his face. A man may be brave enough, and yet weak as a child when he tries to speak of an ordeal such as this.

For a minute Grace did not speak; she could not for the tears she was trying to restrain. Then she said, “Amos!” and he lifted his head.

“Yes, Miss Grace.”

“Before God you are innocent?”

“I have said so once, Miss; there is no need in my saying so twice; for if you don’t believe me at my first telling, you won’t believe me at my second.”

“I beg your pardon,” she said gently, “I did believe you the first time. I ought not to have tried to make assurance doubly sure. More than that, before I ever came here I felt you were innocent, and if it is possible for me to save you, I will do it.”

“Miss Grace,” he answered, “you mean kindly, but you may be doing me a deadly hurt. I have been facing certain death since I came here, and its bitterness is almost past. If you drag me back, even for a bit, I must go through it all again.”

It was a homely way of expressing the cruelty of raising false hopes; but Grace understood his meaning perfectly.

“I am rich,” she faltered, feeling the error she had committed.

“Money won’t do it,” he answered.

“I have many friends possessed of influence.”

“Influence can’t save me. There is only one thing could help me, Miss Grace; and I need not trouble you with talking about that, because I know no more than the child still unborn who killed the man. I have sat here and gone over, and over, and over the story, and can make neither head nor tail of it. All I am sure of is, I had no act or part in the murder; and how my stick came to be where they say it was found is beyond me, for I lost it the night before; and I never was near the divisional road at all.”

“What does Mr. D’Almarez say?” asked Miss Moffat.

“He says nothing, except ‘tell me the truth,’ as if a man in my strait would be likely to tell his attorney a lie.”

“And what does he think about your having lost your stick?”

“He just thinks I never lost it, because when he asked me about the places I had been the day before, I couldn’t mind. I have been that perplexed, Miss, since Lady Jane died, my memory won’t serve me as it used.”

“But surely, Amos, with trying, you might recollect.”

“I have minded a good many. I was at Rosemont to try to get speech of Mr. Robert; and at the office; and at the Glendare Arms, where a stranger man, seeing I was in trouble, treated me to a glass, bad luck to it! for I had not broken my fast, and the liquor got into my head; and I said things about Brady they’re going to bring up again me at the trial; and then I stopped at a heap of places besides, but I can’t mind just where, except that at the last I called at Hanlon’s surgery for some stuff for the lad. I didn’t forget that, because he went on at me for having had too much, and made me mad because he wouldn’t believe me I had only had one glass to overcome me—me—who could once have taken off half-a-dozen without winking.”

“And on the day of the ——, on the day when Mr. Brady was killed?” Grace persisted.

“Well, Miss, I was that beat from the day before, I did not stir out till evening; and I would not have gone then, but the wife she would have me go to Kingslough and tell the doctor the boy was worse. So I went there and he was out, and I left my message; and in the ordinary way I should have come straight home, but I thought I would go round by Mark Lennon’s, and tell his daughter we had a letter from him she’s promised to; but before I got there I turned that bad and weak, I thought to make my home as fast as I could, and so came across the fields and the Red Stream; and they make that a charge against me too, Miss Grace, because, as you know, the colour of the clay there is the same as the colour of the clay in the water alongside the divisional where Brady was found.”

In spirit, Grace groaned. She believed the man was speaking truly, but what jury on earth would believe it also! There was not a point in his favour. Every statement he made told against him. He could not say where he lost his stick. He could not say where he had been to lose it. He could not account for his time after he left Kingslough on the night of the murder. As to the place where he got the mud found on his clothes, there was only his own word, and of what value is the word of an accused man. Even his own wife imagined him guilty. No one in the world, save Grace Moffat, imagined it within the bounds of possibility that, though circumstantial and internal evidence were all against him, he might yet be innocent; and it was just on the board that had she lived in Ireland for the previous twelve months, and seen his animus to Mr. Brady growing day by day, she might have believed him guilty too.

“All I can say,” she remarked, as she rose to leave, “is this; you shall have the best counsel money can procure.”

“Thank you kindly, Miss,” he answered, “but, as I said before, money can’t do it, and man can’t do it, let him be the best ever stepped in shoe leather; and if God does not do it, and in these later days, as our minister used to say, he has not seen fit to work visible miracles, I must suffer, Miss Grace; that is all. I have made my mind up to that now he is dead, as I never could to giving up the farm while he was living.”

“Amos,” said Miss Moffat, “do not let what your minister said impress you too much. God does still work miracles, or what seem miracles to us; and if he sees fit he will clear you from this.”

“And if He does not see fit, Miss Grace, I must just thole what He sends; that is all. You can say that to the wife if you have a chance. Do you happen to know, Miss, how it is with Reuben?”

For a moment Grace faltered; then she said,—

“Whatever else you are spared to see in this world I am afraid—” she paused, and he calmly finished the sentence.

“I won’t see him. Well then, Miss, it may be we shall meet all the sooner, Reuben and me, when he will know that wrongfully blood-guiltiness was laid to my charge.”

Mr. D’Almarez made no secret of his chagrin at the result of this interview, and it taxed his politeness sorely to listen to Miss Moffat’s account of it with even ordinary patience.

He had hoped that to her Scott would speak openly. He had expected to obtain some information which might bring the crime under the head of accident rather than design, and enable him to fight for a verdict of manslaughter instead of murder. It was known to every one in the county that Mr. Brady had not treated the man well; and if Scott could only be got to state what actually passed on the last occasion he and his enemy ever met, the lawyer felt something might be done, supposing the blow had been struck without premeditation, and that high and passionate words had preceded it.

If a jury could be argued or coaxed into believing Scott did not leave his home with the deliberate intention of murdering Mr. Brady, the man’s chance was by no means hopeless; and there was this in his favour, that the owner of Maryville had actually on the day of the murder started to go to Dublin, although for some unexplained reason he failed to continue his journey, so that it was unlikely Scott could have expected to meet him near the Castle Farm.

On the other hand, it was against the accused that he knew Mr. Brady intended to eject him from the house—that he had publicly stated, “Brady should never come into it alive,” and that he expressed his intention of sticking to the old place even if it was pulled down about his ears.

Still, considering what Mr. Brady had been, and the amount of fancied or real injury he inflicted on Amos, considering that the one man had always been a dishonest reprobate, and the other a hardworking decent, well-conducted fellow, who never cheated a neighbour of a halfpenny; that he had a son down in fever, and children clamouring for bread; that he might well be nearly distraught with want of food, and mental anguish; considering what a picture a clever barrister might fill in from these outlines, Mr. D’Almarez did not despair of doing something for Scott, if only he could be induced to confess. And now it seemed he did not intend to confess; and the lawyer, chafing with irritation, had to sit and listen to a woman’s maunderings about innocence and Scott’s religious utterances and other matters of the same kind, all of which Mr. D’Almarez mentally summed up in one word, “Rubbish!”

“It is all very well, Miss Moffat” he said, when she finished, “for Scott to talk goody twaddle—excuse the expression—to a lady or a parson; but that sort of thing will not go down with a judge or a jury. He mistakes his position; the period has not yet arrived for that kind of conversation. Time enough for religious exercises when he has done with lawyers and been turned over to the chaplain. You must pardon my plain speaking. The only hope there is of saving Scott lies with himself, and if he will persist in trying to hoodwink me and playing at this foolish game of hide-and-seek with his own attorney, I am afraid there is not a chance of saving him.”

“But, Mr. D’Almarez,” pleaded Grace, “suppose the man has nothing to tell, suppose he is not guilty, suppose he has really tried to make his peace with God, expecting nothing from man, and that every word he said to me to-day were true, the natural expression of a broken and a contrite heart, in which not a hope, so far as this world is concerned, still lingers?”

The lawyer smiled. It was very right and proper, of course, for a lady to talk in this strain, but it was a style of conversation for which he himself did not much care, and very possibly had Miss Moffat been older and uglier and poorer, he might not have listened to it even with the amount of politeness he evinced.

“I cannot suppose an impossibility,” he answered. “Your own kindness of disposition and Scott’s solemn assertions have, you must allow me to say, blinded your judgment. If you exercise it you will understand that it is a simple impossibility for Scott to be innocent. He may be innocent of intentional murder, and that is the only point we can try to make in his favour, but his hands are not clean in the matter as he tries to make us believe.

“Remember the hatred he entertained for Mr. Brady, recollect all he had suffered through him, recall the expressions he was habitually in the practice of using concerning him, the threats he uttered not farther back than the day before the murder, and then pass on to the murder itself. Mr. Brady is found dead in a lonely road leading straight to the Castle Farm. He has been killed by a blow, and that blow it is not disputed must have been dealt by a stick, and that stick one belonging to Scott, which is found at a little distance as if flung away in a panic. According to Scott’s own account he was not in the divisional road at all that night, and yet it was the most direct route back from Mr. Hanlon’s, where he admits he called. He says he started to go round by Lennon’s, but he never went there. He says he lost his stick on the previous day, but he does not know where or how, and he cannot even remember the places at which he stopped, or whether he missed his stick before his return home, or whether he ever missed it till it was found after the murder.

“Further, admitting he did lose it, there is no particular reason why he should not have found it again. Nor does the evidence against him stop even at this point. It is certain his clothes were wet, and stained with clay of a reddish colour. The banks and bed of the stream running beside the divisional road are, as you know, of that description. Depend upon it, Miss Moffat, Scott is throwing away his best chance by persisting in silence. Nothing in my opinion really can serve him except opening his mouth.”

“I admit the truth and reason of all you say,” she replied, “but faith is sometimes stronger than reason, and I have faith Scott is not guilty.”

“Unfortunately a jury have to decide on facts, not faith,” said Mr. D’Almarez rising to take his leave. “Of course, I shall do all in my power for him, and if he is found guilty, we must try to prevent his being hung; but I really think if he would only have placed full confidence in me, we might have got him off with only a sentence of manslaughter. Perhaps he may still think better of it.”

“No,” Grace answered, “I do not think he will—I hope he cannot. If after what he said to me to-day he were to confess that he did cause Mr. Brady’s death, I should never be able to believe any one again.”

“Ah! Miss Moffat, you do not know how great the temptation is to tell a falsehood if one is afraid of telling the truth. I do not quarrel with his statements on the ground of morality, but only on that of common sense; but then that is lawyer’s way of looking at such things. It is not to be expected that a lady should take the same view. I trust it may all turn out better than I anticipate.”

Miss Moffat drove back to Maryville in a very sad and perplexed state of mind; she had seen none of her friends at Kilcurragh, except that one at whose house her interview with Mr. D’Almarez took place, and she had no desire to see them. Amos Scott’s position would, she knew, be the prominent topic of interest, and she did not possess sufficient moral courage to desire to combat popular opinion single-handed.

The more she thought about the matter the more conclusive seemed the lawyer’s statements.

Notwithstanding her own determined advocacy, she felt that away from Amos her belief in his innocency was not strong enough to enable her to discard the extremely ugly doubts raised in her mind by Mr. D’Almarez’s statement of the case.

Scott might believe that his sole chance of escape lay in reiteration of his innocence, and if this were so, Miss Moffat felt she could forgive his falsehood. What she could not forgive, however, was his religious hypocrisy supposing his statement untrue, and with feminine impetuosity she rushed to this conclusion—

“If Amos be guilty he is the worst man in the world.”

As there had been nothing in the conversation of a confidential nature, Grace repeated it to Mrs. Brady, merely omitting Scott’s remarks about the dead man.

In silence Nettie listened to the end, then she asked,—

“Are you sure he said he could not remember where he left that stick?”

“Yes; he cannot even recollect where he went the day he lost it.”

“That seems strange, does not it?”

“I think not, if you consider what he has gone through. He looks starved and ill, and bewildered. Oh! Nettie, the Scotts must have suffered terribly.”

“I suppose so,” said Mrs. Brady absently, as she sat looking out of the window with sad, weary, wistful eyes; and finding she showed no desire to continue the subject, her friend let it drop. Suddenly, however, Nettie rose, threw her clasped hands above her head, and, with a sigh which was almost a groan, hurriedly left the room.

Miss Moffat had become too much accustomed to these demonstrations of restlessness or grief, or whatever else the cause might be, to attach much importance to them, but still she thought it better to follow Nettie whom she found in her own room sobbing as if her heart would break.

Grace softly closed the door, and left her.

“Let her cry, poor thing,” she thought. “It will do her good. After all, no matter what he may have been, he was her husband.”

For the first time since her return to Ireland Grace that night slept soundly; slept a sleep unbroken by dreams; undisturbed by the perplexities that troubled her waking moments.

How long she had been in bed she could not tell, but at length from this depth of unconsciousness she was slowly aroused by little fingers that spread themselves over her face and hair, by a childish voice crying,—

“Oh! lady, please waken, please, please do.”

Thus entreated, the “lady,” for by this name Nettie’s more especial favourite had elected to call Miss Moffat, struggled back to a due remembrance of where she was.

“What is it?” she asked between sleeping and waking.

“Mam-ma, oh! Mam-ma she frightens Minnie,” explained the little one.

With an effort Grace roused herself fully.

“Minnie darling, is that you?” she asked, taking the child in her arms. “What has frightened you?”

“Mam-ma,” repeated the shrill treble. “She talks so funnily—”

In an instant Grace had on her slippers and dressing-gown.

“I will go to your mam-ma, dear,” she said; “but you must be very good and stay quietly here and go to sleep.”

Then she laid the little creature’s head on her own pillow, folded the sheet under her chin, gave her a parting kiss, and went into the next room closing the door behind her.

Dawn was just breaking, and without striking a light, Grace walked over to where Mrs. Brady lay, moaning and tossing, muttering words too indistinct to catch.

“Nettie,” and her friend shook her vigorously; “Nettie,”—but no sign of recognition came. “Nettie dear, do speak to me,”—not a word of reply was uttered.

For a moment Miss Moffat stood helpless, then she went to that part of the house where she supposed Susan slept.

“I am so sorry to disturb you,” she said, after awaking the woman, with that courtesy which was a part of her nature when addressing those below her in rank, “but I fear Mrs. Brady is very ill. Do you think you could go to the house of one of the men and send him for Dr. Girvan?”

“What is the matter with her?” asked the woman brusquely.

“I cannot tell; she is moaning and restless and does not seem to know me in the least.”

“It’s the fever, God help us,” said Susan. “I’ll waste no time, but go for the doctor myself.”

“What! in the middle of the night?” exclaimed Grace.

“Ay, just as soon as if it was in the middle of the day,” she answered, and proved as good as her word.

It was a long walk and a lonely to Kingslough, but Susan accomplished it, and brought back Doctor Girvan by the time the sun was rising.

Miss Moffat went down to speak to him, and asked Susan to stay with her mistress for a few minutes while she did so. Then the doctor said he would see the patient; and as Grace walked up and down the once neglected garden trifling away the time, he went into Mrs. Brady’s room, the servant crossing him on the threshold.

He remained there a quarter of an hour or more, and when she met him Miss Moffat saw he looked ill at ease.

“Do you think there is anything serious the matter with her?” she asked anxiously.

“I cannot tell—yet,” he replied. “You have been with her all night?” he said interrogatively.

“Yes, since I first knew she was ill.”

“No one must go into the room but yourself and me.”

“Why not?”

“You will know time enough. Amos Scott never murdered her husband at all.”

“Then who did?”

“If you listen she will tell you.”

And Doctor Girvan, looking grey and old and haggard in the morning light, drove away so utterly amazed and horror-stricken at Mrs. Brady’s ravings that he forgot, if the fever were infectious, Miss Moffat stood a very fair chance of catching it herself.