The Haunted Hotel, Page 2

  Doctor Wybrow rose from his chair, determined to close the interview.

  He was strongly and painfully impressed by what he had heard. The longer he had listened to her, the more irresistibly the conviction of the woman’s wickedness had forced itself on him. He tried vainly to think of her as a person to be pitied – a person with a morbidly sensitive imagination, conscious of the capacities for evil which lie dormant in us all, and striving earnestly to open her heart to the counter-influence of her own better nature; the effort was beyond him. A perverse instinct in him said, as if in words, Beware how you believe in her!

  ‘I have already given you my opinion,’ he said. ‘There is no sign of your intellect being deranged, or being likely to be deranged, that medical science can discover – as I understand it. As for the impressions you have confided to me, I can only say that yours is a case (as I venture to think) for spiritual rather than for medical advice. Of one thing be assured: what you have said to me in this room shall not pass out of it. Your confession is safe in my keeping.’

  She heard him, with a certain dogged resignation, to the end.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked.

  ‘That is all,’ he answered.

  She put a little paper packet of money on the table. ‘Thank you, sir. There is your fee.’

  With those words she rose. Her wild black eyes looked upward, with an expression of despair so defiant and so horrible in its silent agony that the Doctor turned away his head, unable to endure the sight of it. The bare idea of taking anything from her – not money only, but anything even that she had touched – suddenly revolted him. Still without looking at her, he said, ‘Take it back; I don’t want my fee.’

  She neither heeded nor heard him. Still looking upward, she said slowly to herself, ‘Let the end come. I have done with the struggle: I submit.’

  She drew her veil over her face, bowed to the Doctor, and left the room.

  He rang the bell, and followed her into the hall. As the servant closed the door on her, a sudden impulse of curiosity – utterly unworthy of him, and at the same time utterly irresistible – sprang up in the Doctor’s mind. Blushing like a boy, he said to the servant, ‘Follow her home, and find out her name.’ For one moment the man looked at his master, doubting if his own ears had not deceived him. Doctor Wybrow looked back at him in silence. The submissive servant knew what that silence meant – he took his hat and hurried into the street.

  The Doctor went back to the consulting-room. A sudden revulsion of feeling swept over his mind. Had the woman left an infection of wickedness in the house, and had he caught it? What devil had possessed him to degrade himself in the eyes of his own servant? He had behaved infamously – he had asked an honest man, a man who had served him faithfully for years, to turn spy! Stung by the bare thought of it, he ran out into the hall again, and opened the door. The servant had disappeared; it was too late to call him back. But one refuge from his contempt for himself was now open to him – the refuge of work. He got into his carriage and went his rounds among his patients.

  If the famous physician could have shaken his own reputation, he would have done it that afternoon. Never before had he made himself so little welcome at the bedside. Never before had he put off until to-morrow the prescription which ought to have been written, the opinion which ought to have been given, to-day. He went home earlier than usual – unutterably dissatisfied with himself.

  The servant had returned. Dr Wybrow was ashamed to question him. The man reported the result of his errand, without waiting to be asked.

  ‘The lady’s name is the Countess Narona. She lives at—’

  Without waiting to hear where she lived, the Doctor acknowledged the all-important discovery of her name by a silent bend of the head, and entered his consulting-room. The fee that he had vainly refused still lay in its little white paper covering on the table. He sealed it up in an envelope; addressed it to the ‘Poor-box’ of the nearest police-court; and, calling the servant in, directed him to take it to the magistrate the next morning. Faithful to his duties, the servant waited to ask the customary question, ‘Do you dine at home to-day, sir?’

  After a moment’s hesitation he said, ‘No: I shall dine at the club.’

  The most easily deteriorated of all the moral qualities is the quality called ‘conscience.’ In one state of a man’s mind, his conscience is the severest judge that can pass sentence on him. In another state, he and his conscience are on the best possible terms with each other in the comfortable capacity of accomplices. When Doctor Wybrow left his house for the second time, he did not even attempt to conceal from himself that his sole object, in dining at the club, was to hear what the world said of the Countess Narona.

  III

  There was a time when a man in search of the pleasures of gossip sought the society of ladies. The man knows better now. He goes to the smoking-room of his club.

  Doctor Wybrow lit his cigar, and looked round him at his brethren in social conclave assembled. The room was well filled; but the flow of talk was still languid. The Doctor innocently applied the stimulant that was wanted. When he inquired if anybody knew the Countess Narona, he was answered by something like a shout of astonishment. Never (the conclave agreed) had such an absurd question been asked before! Every human creature, with the slightest claim to a place in society, knew the Countess Narona. An adventuress with a European reputation of the blackest possible colour – such was the general description of the woman with the deathlike complexion and the glittering eyes.

  Descending to particulars, each member of the club contributed his own little stock of scandal to the memoirs of the Countess. It was doubtful whether she was really, what she called herself, a Dalmatian lady. It was doubtful whether she had ever been married to the Count whose widow she assumed to be. It was doubtful whether the man who accompanied her in her travels (under the name of Baron Rivar, and in the character of her brother) was her brother at all. Report pointed to the Baron as a gambler at every ‘table’ on the Continent. Report whispered that his so-called sister had narrowly escaped being implicated in a famous trial for poisoning at Vienna – that she had been known at Milan as a spy in the interests of Austria – that her ‘apartment’ in Paris had been denounced to the police as nothing less than a private gambling-house – and that her present appearance in England was the natural result of the discovery. Only one member of the assembly in the smoking-room took the part of this much-abused woman, and declared that her character had been most cruelly and most unjustly assailed. But as the man was a lawyer, his interference went for nothing: it was naturally attributed to the spirit of contradiction inherent in his profession. He was asked derisively what he thought of the circumstances under which the Countess had become engaged to be married; and he made the characteristic answer, that he thought the circumstances highly creditable to both parties, and that he looked on the lady’s future husband as a most enviable man.

  Hearing this, the Doctor raised another shout of astonishment by inquiring the name of the gentleman whom the Countess was about to marry.

  His friends in the smoking-room decided unanimously that the celebrated physician must be a second ‘Rip-van-Winkle,’ and that he had just awakened from a supernatural sleep of twenty years. It was all very well to say that he was devoted to his profession, and that he had neither time nor inclination to pick up fragments of gossip at dinner-parties and balls. A man who did not know that the Countess Narona had borrowed money at Homburg of no less a person than Lord Montbarry, and had then deluded him into making her a proposal of marriage, was a man who had probably never heard of Lord Montbarry himself. The younger members of the club, humouring the joke, sent a waiter for the ‘Peerage’; and read aloud the memoir of the nobleman in question, for the Doctor’s benefit – with illustrative morsels of information interpolated by themselves.

  ‘Herbert John Westwick. First Baron Montbarry, of Montbarry, King’s County, Ireland. Created a Peer for distinguished military s
ervices in India. Born, 1812. Forty-eight years old, Doctor, at the present time. Not married. Will be married next week, Doctor, to the delightful creature we have been talking about. Heir presumptive, his lordship’s next brother, Stephen Robert, married to Ella, youngest daughter of the Reverend Silas Marden, Rector of Runnigate, and has issue, three daughters. Younger brothers of his lordship, Francis and Henry, unmarried. Sisters of his lordship, Lady Barville, married to Sir Theodore Barville, Bart.; and Anne, widow of the late Peter Norbury, Esq., of Norbury Cross. Bear his lordship’s relations well in mind, Doctor. Three brothers Westwick, Stephen, Francis, and Henry; and two sisters, Lady Barville and Mrs Norbury. Not one of the five will be present at the marriage; and not one of the five will leave a stone unturned to stop it, if the Countess will only give them a chance. Add to these hostile members of the family another offended relative not mentioned in the “Peerage,” a young lady—’

  A sudden outburst of protest in more than one part of the room stopped the coming disclosure, and released the Doctor from further persecution.

  ‘Don’t mention the poor girl’s name; it’s too bad to make a joke of that part of the business; she has behaved nobly under shameful provocation; there is but one excuse for Montbarry – he is either a madman or a fool.’ In these terms the protest expressed itself on all sides. Speaking confidentially to his next neighbour, the Doctor discovered that the lady referred to was already known to him (through the Countess’s confession) as the lady deserted by Lord Montbarry. Her name was Agnes Lockwood. She was described as being the superior of the Countess in personal attraction, and as being also by some years the younger woman of the two. Making all allowance for the follies that men committed every day in their relations with women, Montbarry’s delusion was still the most monstrous delusion on record. In this expression of opinion every man present agreed – the lawyer even included. Not one of them could call to mind the innumerable instances in which the sexual influence has proved irresistible in the persons of women without even the pretension to beauty. The very members of the club whom the Countess (in spite of her personal disadvantages) could have most easily fascinated, if she had thought it worth her while, were the members who wondered most loudly at Montbarry’s choice of a wife.

  While the topic of the Countess’s marriage was still the one topic of conversation, a member of the club entered the smoking-room whose appearance instantly produced a dead silence. Doctor Wybrow’s next neighbour whispered to him, ‘Montbarry’s brother – Henry Westwick!’

  The new-comer looked round him slowly, with a bitter smile.

  ‘You are all talking of my brother,’ he said. ‘Don’t mind me. Not one of you can despise him more heartily than I do. Go on, gentlemen – go on!’

  But one man present took the speaker at his word. That man was the lawyer who had already undertaken the defence of the Countess.

  ‘I stand alone in my opinion,’ he said, ‘and I am not ashamed of repeating it in anybody’s hearing. I consider the Countess Narona to be a cruelly treated woman. Why shouldn’t she be Lord Montbarry’s wife? Who can say she has a mercenary motive in marrying him?’

  Montbarry’s brother turned sharply on the speaker. ‘I say it!’ he answered.

  The reply might have shaken some men. The lawyer stood on his ground as firmly as ever.

  ‘I believe I am right,’ he rejoined, ‘in stating that his lordship’s income is not more than sufficient to support his station in life; also that it is an income derived almost entirely from landed property in Ireland, every acre of which is entailed.’

  Montbarry’s brother made a sign, admitting that he had no objection to offer so far.

  ‘If his lordship dies first,’ the lawyer proceeded, ‘I have been informed that the only provision he can make for his widow consists in a rent-charge on the property of no more than four hundred a year. His retiring pension and allowances, it is well known, die with him. Four hundred a year is therefore all that he can leave to the Countess, if he leaves her a widow.’

  ‘Four hundred a year is not all,’ was the reply to this. ‘My brother has insured his life for ten thousand pounds; and he has settled the whole of it on the Countess, in the event of his death.’

  This announcement produced a strong sensation. Men looked at each other, and repeated the three startling words, ‘Ten thousand pounds!’ Driven fairly to the wall, the lawyer made a last effort to defend his position.

  ‘May I ask who made that settlement a condition of the marriage?’ he said. ‘Surely it was not the Countess herself ?’

  Henry Westwick answered, ‘It was the Countess’s brother’; and added, ‘which comes to the same thing.’

  After that, there was no more to be said – so long, at least, as Montbarry’s brother was present. The talk flowed into other channels; and the Doctor went home.

  But his morbid curiosity about the Countess was not set at rest yet. In his leisure moments he found himself wondering whether Lord Montbarry’s family would succeed in stopping the marriage after all. And more than this, he was conscious of a growing desire to see the infatuated man himself. Every day during the brief interval before the wedding, he looked in at the club, on the chance of hearing some news. Nothing had happened, so far as the club knew. The Countess’s position was secure; Montbarry’s resolution to be her husband was unshaken. They were both Roman Catholics, and they were to be married at the chapel in Spanish Place. So much the Doctor discovered about them – and no more.

  On the day of the wedding, after a feeble struggle with himself, he actually sacrificed his patients and their guineas, and slipped away secretly to see the marriage. To the end of his life, he was angry with anybody who reminded him of what he had done on that day!

  The wedding was strictly private. A close carriage stood at the church door; a few people, mostly of the lower class, and mostly old women, were scattered about the interior of the building. Here and there Doctor Wybrow detected the faces of some of his brethren of the club, attracted by curiosity, like himself. Four persons only stood before the altar – the bride and bridegroom and their two witnesses. One of these last was an elderly woman, who might have been the Countess’s companion or maid; the other was undoubtedly her brother, Baron Rivar. The bridal party (the bride herself included) wore their ordinary morning costume. Lord Montbarry, personally viewed, was a middle-aged military man of the ordinary type: nothing in the least remarkable distinguished him either in face or figure. Baron Rivar, again, in his way was another conventional representative of another well-known type. One sees his finely pointed moustache, his bold eyes, his crisply curling hair, and his dashing carriage of the head, repeated hundreds of times over on the Boulevards of Paris. The only noteworthy point about him was of the negative sort – he was not in the least like his sister. Even the officiating priest was only a harmless, humble-looking old man, who went through his duties resignedly, and felt visible rheumatic difficulties every time he bent his knees. The one remarkable person, the Countess herself, only raised her veil at the beginning of the ceremony, and presented nothing in her plain dress that was worth a second look. Never, on the face of it, was there a less interesting and less romantic marriage than this. From time to time the Doctor glanced round at the door or up at the galleries, vaguely anticipating the appearance of some protesting stranger, in possession of some terrible secret, commissioned to forbid the progress of the service. Nothing in the shape of an event occurred – nothing extraordinary, nothing dramatic. Bound fast together as man and wife, the two disappeared, followed by their witnesses, to sign the registers; and still Doctor Wybrow waited, and still he cherished the obstinate hope that something worth seeing must certainly happen yet.