A Dark Night's Work (9 page)

Her father entered, and started back, almost upsetting some one behind
him by his recoil, on seeing his daughter in her motionless attitude by
the dead man.

"My God, Ellinor! what has brought you here?" he said, almost fiercely.

But she answered as one stupefied, "I don't know. Is he dead?"

"Hush, hush, child; it cannot be helped."

She raised her eyes to the solemn, pitying, awe-stricken face behind her
father's—the countenance of Dixon.

"Is he dead?" she asked of him.

The man stepped forwards, respectfully pushing his master on one side as
he did so. He bent down over the corpse, and looked, and listened and
then reaching a candle off the table, he signed Mr. Wilkins to close the
door. And Mr. Wilkins obeyed, and looked with an intensity of eagerness
almost amounting to faintness on the experiment, and yet he could not
hope. The flame was steady—steady and pitilessly unstirred, even when
it was adjusted close to mouth and nostril; the head was raised up by one
of Dixon's stalwart arms, while he held the candle in the other hand.
Ellinor fancied that there was some trembling on Dixon's part, and
grasped his wrist tightly in order to give it the requisite motionless
firmness.

All in vain. The head was placed again on the cushions, the servant rose
and stood by his master, looked sadly on the dead man, whom, living, none
of them had liked or cared for, and Ellinor sat on, quiet and tearless,
as one in a trance.

"How was it, father?" at length she asked.

He would fain have had her ignorant of all, but so questioned by her
lips, so adjured by her eyes in the very presence of death, he could not
choose but speak the truth; he spoke it in convulsive gasps, each
sentence an effort:

"He taunted me—he was insolent, beyond my patience—I could not bear it.
I struck him—I can't tell how it was. He must have hit his head in
falling. Oh, my God! one little hour a go I was innocent of this man's
blood!" He covered his face with his hands.

Ellinor took the candle again; kneeling behind Mr. Dunster's head, she
tried the futile experiment once more.

"Could not a doctor do some good?" she asked of Dixon, in a hopeless
voice.

"No!" said he, shaking his head, and looking with a sidelong glance at
his master, who seemed to shrivel up and to shrink away at the bare
suggestion. "Doctors can do nought, I'm afeard. All that a doctor could
do, I take it, would be to open a vein, and that I could do along with
the best of them, if I had but my fleam here." He fumbled in his pockets
as he spoke, and, as chance would it, the "fleam" (or cattle lancet) was
somewhere about his dress. He drew it out, smoothed and tried it on his
finger. Ellinor tried to bare the arm, but turned sick as she did so.
Her father started eagerly forwards, and did what was necessary with
hurried trembling hands. If they had cared less about the result, they
might have been more afraid of the consequences of the operation in the
hands of one so ignorant as Dixon. But, vein or artery, it signified
little; no living blood gushed out; only a little watery moisture
followed the cut of the fleam. They laid him back on his strange sad
death-couch. Dixon spoke next.

"Master Ned!" said he—for he had known Mr. Wilkins in his days of bright
careless boyhood, and almost was carried back to them by the sense of
charge and protection which the servant's presence of mind and sharpened
senses gave him over his master on this dreary night—"Master Ned! we
must do summut."

No one spoke. What was to be done?

"Did any folk see him come here?" Dixon asked, after a time. Ellinor
looked up to hear her father's answer, a wild hope coming into her mind
that all might be concealed somehow; she did not know how, nor did she
think of any consequences except saving her father from the vague dread,
trouble, and punishment that she was aware would await him if all were
known.

Mr. Wilkins did not seem to hear; in fact, he did not hear anything but
the unspoken echo of his own last words, that went booming through his
heart: "An hour ago I was innocent of this man's blood! Only an hour
ago!"

Dixon got up and poured out half a tumblerful of raw spirit from the
brandy-bottle that stood on the table.

"Drink this, Master Ned!" putting it to his master's lips. "Nay"—to
Ellinor—"it will do him no harm; only bring back his senses, which, poor
gentleman, are scared away. We shall need all our wits. Now, sir,
please answer my question. Did anyone see Measter Dunster come here?"

"I don't know," said Mr. Wilkins, recovering his speech. "It all seems
in a mist. He offered to walk home with me; I did not want him. I was
almost rude to him to keep him off. I did not want to talk of business;
I had taken too much wine to be very clear and some things at the office
were not quite in order, and he had found it out. If anyone heard our
conversation, they must know I did not want him to come with me. Oh! why
would he come? He was as obstinate—he would come—and here it has been
his death!"

"Well, sir, what's done can't be undone, and I'm sure we'd any of us
bring him back to life if we could, even by cutting off our hands, though
he was a mighty plaguey chap while he'd breath in him. But what I'm
thinking is this: it'll maybe go awkward with you, sir, if he's found
here. One can't say. But don't you think, miss, as he's neither kith
nor kin to miss him, we might just bury him away before morning,
somewhere? There's better nor four hours of dark. I wish we could put
him i' the churchyard, but that can't be; but, to my mind, the sooner we
set about digging a place for him to lie in, poor fellow, the better
it'll be for us all in the end. I can pare a piece of turf up where
it'll never be missed, and if master'll take one spade, and I another,
why we'll lay him softly down, and cover him up, and no one'll be the
wiser."

There was no reply from either for a minute or so. Then Mr. Wilkins
said:

"If my father could have known of my living to this! Why, they will try
me as a criminal; and you, Ellinor? Dixon, you are right. We must
conceal it, or I must cut my throat, for I never could live through it.
One minute of passion, and my life blasted!"

"Come along, sir," said Dixon; "there's no time to lose." And they went
out in search of tools; Ellinor following them, shivering all over, but
begging that she might be with them, and not have to remain in the study
with—

She would not be bidden into her own room; she dreaded inaction and
solitude. She made herself busy with carrying heavy baskets of turf, and
straining her strength to the utmost; fetching all that was wanted, with
soft swift steps.

Once, as she passed near the open study door, she thought that she heard
a rustling, and a flash of hope came across her. Could he be reviving?
She entered, but a moment was enough to undeceive her; it had only been a
night rustle among the trees. Of hope, life, there was none.

They dug the hole deep and well; working with fierce energy to quench
thought and remorse. Once or twice her father asked for brandy, which
Ellinor, reassured by the apparently good effect of the first dose,
brought to him without a word; and once at her father's suggestion she
brought food, such as she could find in the dining-room without
disturbing the household, for Dixon.

When all was ready for the reception of the body in its unblessed grave,
Mr. Wilkins bade Ellinor go up to her own room—she had done all she
could to help them; the rest must be done by them alone. She felt that
it must; and indeed both her nerves and her bodily strength were giving
way. She would have kissed her father, as he sat wearily at the head of
the grave—Dixon had gone in to make some arrangement for carrying the
corpse—but he pushed her away quietly, but resolutely—

"No, Nelly, you must never kiss me again; I am a murderer."

"But I will, my own darling papa," said she, throwing her arms
passionately round his neck, and covering his face with kisses. "I love
you, and I don't care what you are, if you were twenty times a murderer,
which you are not; I am sure it was only an accident."

"Go in, my child, go in, and try to get some rest. But go in, for we
must finish as fast as we can. The moon is down; it will soon be
daylight. What a blessing there are no rooms on one side of the house.
Go, Nelly." And she went; straining herself up to move noiselessly, with
eyes averted, through the room which she shuddered at as the place of
hasty and unhallowed death.

Once in her own room she bolted the door on the inside, and then stole to
the window, as if some fascination impelled her to watch all the
proceedings to the end. But her aching eyes could hardly penetrate
through the thick darkness, which, at the time of the year of which I am
speaking, so closely precedes the dawn. She could discern the tops of
the trees against the sky, and could single out the well-known one, at a
little distance from the stem of which the grave was made, in the very
piece of turf over which so lately she and Ralph had had their merry
little tea-making; and where her father, as she now remembered, had
shuddered and shivered, as if the ground on which his seat had then been
placed was fateful and ominous to him.

Those below moved softly and quietly in all they did; but every sound had
a significant and terrible interpretation to Ellinor's ears. Before they
had ended, the little birds had begun to pipe out their gay
reveillee
to the dawn. Then doors closed, and all was profoundly still.

Ellinor threw herself, in her clothes, on the bed; and was thankful for
the intense weary physical pain which took off something of the anguish
of thought—anguish that she fancied from time to time was leading to
insanity.

By-and-by the morning cold made her instinctively creep between the
blankets; and, once there, she fell into a dead heavy sleep.

Ellinor was awakened by a rapping at her door: it was her maid.

She was fully aroused in a moment, for she had fallen asleep with one
clearly defined plan in her mind, only one, for all thoughts and cares
having no relation to the terrible event were as though they had never
been. All her purpose was to shield her father from suspicion. And to
do this she must control herself—heart, mind, and body must be ruled to
this one end.

So she said to Mason:

"Let me lie half an hour longer; and beg Miss Monro not to wait breakfast
for me; but in half an hour bring me up a cup of strong tea, for I have a
bad headache."

Mason went away. Ellinor sprang up; rapidly undressed herself, and got
into bed again, so that when her maid returned with her breakfast, there
was no appearance of the night having been passed in any unusual manner.

"How ill you do look, miss!" said Mason. "I am sure you had better not
get up yet."

Ellinor longed to ask if her father had yet shown himself; but this
question—so natural at any other time—seemed to her so suspicious under
the circumstances, that she could not bring her lips to frame it. At any
rate, she must get up and struggle to make the day like all other days.
So she rose, confessing that she did not feel very well, but trying to
make light of it, and when she could think of anything but the one awe,
to say a trivial sentence or two. But she could not recollect how she
behaved in general, for her life hitherto had been simple, and led
without any consciousness of effect.

Before she was dressed, a message came up to say that Mr. Livingstone was
in the drawing-room.

Mr. Livingstone! He belonged to the old life of yesterday! The billows
of the night had swept over his mark on the sands of her memory; and it
was only by a strong effort that she could remember who he was—what he
wanted. She sent Mason down to inquire from the servant who admitted him
whom it was that he had asked for.

"He asked for master first. But master has not rung for his water yet,
so James told him he was not up. Then he took thought for a while, and
asked could he speak to you, he would wait if you were not at liberty but
that he wished particular to see either master, or you. So James asked
him to sit down in the drawing-room, and he would let you know."

"I must go," thought Ellinor. "I will send him away directly; to come,
thinking of marriage to a house like this—to-day, too!"

And she went down hastily, and in a hard unsparing mood towards a man,
whose affection for her she thought was like a gourd, grown up in a
night, and of no account, but as a piece of foolish, boyish excitement.

She never thought of her own appearance—she had dressed without looking
in the glass. Her only object was to dismiss her would-be suitor as
speedily as possible. All feelings of shyness, awkwardness, or maiden
modesty, were quenched and overcome. In she went.

He was standing by the mantelpiece as she entered. He made a step or two
forward to meet her; and then stopped, petrified, as it were, at the
sight of her hard white face.

"Miss Wilkins, I am afraid you are ill! I have come too early. But I
have to leave Hamley in half an hour, and I thought—Oh, Miss Wilkins!
what have I done?"

For she sank into the chair nearest to her, as if overcome by his words;
but, indeed, it was by the oppression of her own thoughts: she was hardly
conscious of his presence.

He came a step or two nearer, as if he longed to take her in his arms and
comfort and shelter her; but she stiffened herself and arose, and by an
effort walked towards the fireplace, and there stood, as if awaiting what
he would say next. But he was overwhelmed by her aspect of illness. He
almost forgot his own wishes, his own suit, in his desire to relieve her
from the pain, physical as he believed it, under which she was suffering.
It was she who had to begin the subject.