path: root/70048-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 70048 ***






 THE GREAT SKENE
 MYSTERY

 BY
 BERNARD CAPES




 METHUEN & CO.
 36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
 LONDON




 [COPYRIGHT.]

 _First Published in 1907_




 [DEDICATION.]

 TO
 A. J. RICE-OXLEY
 IN TOKEN OF SOME DEVOTED KINDNESS
 THIS STORY IS DEDICATED
 BY HIS FRIEND AND CONNEXION
 The Author
 “_Good is a good doctor_”--Emerson




 CONTENTS.

 PROLOGUE. MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN
 I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
 II. I COME OF AGE AND TO A DETERMINATION
 III. THE LODGE IN THE CADDLE
 IV. A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING--PHASE ONE
 V. A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING--PHASE TWO
 VI. MY FIRST ENLIGHTENMENT
 VII. MORGIANA
 VIII. THE WRITING ON THE WALL
 IX. I VISIT CLAPHAM
 X. EDITORIAL
 XI. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL. THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
 XII. AN ODD RECOGNITION
 XIII. JOHNNY DANDO
 XIV. TWO INTERVIEWS AND A DISCOVERY
 XV. THE LETTER IN THE BOOK
 XVI. A STRANGE ENCOUNTER
 XVII. NURSE ELLEN’S “YOUNG MAN”
 XVIII. TELEGRAMS
 XIX. LADY SKENE KNEELS TO ME
 XX. ANTONIO GEOLETTI
 XXI. SNOW AND FIRE
 XXII. A VISIT FROM MR DALSTON
 XXIII. GEOLETTI TELLS HIS STORY
 XXIV. I ACCEPT THE BURDEN OF PROOF
 XXV. JOHNNY AT HOME
 XXVI. I REVISIT MOTHER CAREY
 XXVII. CORRESPONDENCE
 XXVIII. ON THE SCENT
 XXIX. THE BODY IN THE CAVE
 XXX. HARD PRESSED
 XXXI. A NOTABLE INTERLUDE
 XXXII. RUN TO EARTH
 XXXIII. A REST BY THE WAY
 XXXIV. THE GREAT SKENE CASE
 ENVOI




 THE
 GREAT SKENE MYSTERY

 PROLOGUE.
 EDITORIAL.
 MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN

 I

Forty-Five years ago, one February evening, the fog lay thick over
Clapham suburb. Generated in the fat sink of Lambeth, it had come
sweltering up by way of the Westminster Bridge and Kennington Roads;
had poured, like smoke from a range, through the bars of the pike-gate
by the church; had pressed on, rolling up the last levels of twilight
in front of it, past the “Swan,” at Stockwell, and the “Bedford Arms”
beyond--before each of which popular hostelries it had deployed, in
order to post its pickets in a dozen of fuddled brains--and, thence
shouldering its passage densely through the main channel of the High
Street, had flowed out and camped itself sluggishly among the gorse
bushes of the open common to the south.

Incidentally, amongst other obscene “flushings” by the way, it had
entered and packed to the throat a certain White Square, which
already, in that stronghold of Evangelicalism, was of sufficiently bad
odour to need no reinforcement of supplementary brimstone to prove
itself. Like the fisherman’s bottle, this White Square was entered by
a narrow neck or gullet, through which the genie of viciousness could
compress itself into an inadequate house room, or thence issue to
expand into proportions which were a menace to its neighbourhood.
Thieves, harlots, and low Irish rapparees formed the bulk of its
population: costers, and a drunken washerwoman or two, were its
_élite_. How Mother Carey, with at least her better traditions, had
drifted into its fastnesses, let the recording angel note. It was
sacred from the police.

Mother Carey was certainly White Square’s most respectable unit--a
one-eyed queen among the blind. She rented an entire tenement, in
place of the fraction with which the most of her compeers must be
content; she enjoyed an “independence” (paid, quarterly, through a
lawyer, for value received); she had descended, in a cloud, from the
hallowed mysteries of the _tu-tu_ and the dancing sandal. She was a
superannuated coryphée, in fact, and, save for the redeeming grace of
that allowance, had long since sunk into squalider depths than her
present.

The fog made her eyes smart on this February evening, sootily
exaggerating on their rims the work of the “make-up” pencil, which had
not ceased to be a cherished equipment of her ignoble maturity. It
imparted, moreover, a sort of livid iridescence to the pearl powder
smearing her haggard cheeks, which suggested, in their unwholesome
“fishiness,” the under parts of a dead and stale mackerel. Her “front”
was false, her---- Sha! the horrible, sick old spectre of vanity!

But if a spectre, she was by no means dead to her own worldly
interests. Those possessed her, in exact proportion as her watching
and waiting at this moment were turned to the possession of the soul
of another, the latest, and not the least difficult, subject of her
ancient lures. Reversing the accepted ghostly procedure, she was
intent on procuring, instead of revealing, a treasure. Her
persistency, in matters of mean acquisition and blackmailing, was
great for so frail a creature. It had triumphed over decay,
infirmities, disenchantment in the past; yet, after all, she had
withdrawn from public life at a late hour, with a competence which--to
be properly in keeping with her long self-exposure--was only a bare
one. That she resented, of course. Her days were all punctuated with
petty resentments and malevolences, the fruits of a small, greedy
vanity which had been pensioned to retire--through a conspiracy of
jealousies, she would have told you. Wherefore she had since sought to
augment her pittance by a vicious exploiting--at second-hand--of the
arts which had procured it for her.

The rumble of distant omnibuses vibrated in her ears and in the walls,
from which latter gloomed down, dingy and faded, old daguerreotypes of
herself, smirking and ogling in the tights and kid boots and wreaths
of a vanished era--rosy, immoral young life of twenty years past, of
which this dry, stark immortelle was the spectre. As she sat waiting,
she leaned her elbows on the table, and stared at the solitary candle
alight before her, like an old, sharp-eyed hen half hypnotised by the
glow. Yet, if she were asleep, she talked in her sleep, small and
chuckling, as anyone, stooping his head, might have detected.

“Mark! Mark Dalston, O, Mark! O, my dear!” ran the thin strain. “Are
you going to think well of it, Mark--think well of it, Mark Dalston?
Have you started on your way to come and compound with Mother Carey,
Mark, my love? You’ve answered Yes to her message, haven’t you?--but
you aren’t always a gentleman of your word, you know, Mark. Best to be
it in this case, O, my dear, my dear! I could get my teeth into you
here, nicely, now--couldn’t I?”

Suddenly she came alert, pricking her ears to the sound of a quick,
soft footstep outside.


 II

Mr Mark Dalston, a young man of particular ambitions and passions, had
also that hospitability of conscience which can welcome and reconcile
the most antagonistic emotions. He never suffered material
self-interests and moral scruples to fall at odds within himself, but
was the tactful and charming host to all that came to be entertained
within his breast. There one might see grossness and reason,
sensualism and intellectuality, the virtuoso and the Vandal, all table
couples at once, and at perfectly harmonious discourse. They met on
the common ground of sociability, and forbore all destructive
criticism of one another so long as Mark’s lights shone upon their
differences. He was extraordinarily popular with quite a number of
divergent familiars--a man without prejudices, and always ready to
entertain a new emotion.

Mark was of that good nature, in short, that he could never say No to
himself, however much the interests of other people might be affected
by the partiality. His sympathies were wide, but their application was
close. Like the centre of a venous system, he was all heart, and gave
nothing but what he was sure to receive back at compound interest.
Fortune having condemned him, for a brief period, to an ushership at a
suburban grammar school, he had not repined over his lot, but had
sought, quite naturally and amiably, an amelioration of its prosy
conditions in the pursuit of such supernumerary pleasures and
self-indulgences as its off hours could be made to yield. It was
always his principle to eschew consequences until they were upon him,
and insistent. And then he would set his fine wits and intellect at
work to neutralise them.

The young master was well destined, and more than physically, for the
success of his qualities. He was emphatically, according to the
feminine standard of fitness, a “ladies’ man.” His self-assurance, his
ready tongue (or tongues, for he commanded many), his easy
subscription to the correct fashions in dress, assumed in defiance of
the proverbial slovenliness of scholars, his whiskers, his quick
intelligence and his soft impertinences, were all so many _visés_ to
the passport to woman’s favour of which his handsome face and person
were the text. He might have wasted this text upon quite
inconsiderable issues, if Fortune, jealous for his capacities, had not
invited him to contests more worthy of his mettle. The post of
travelling “coach” to a young gentleman of fortune timely offering
itself, he had seized the opportunity to cut some connections, of
which the one which turned upon the training of the young idea had
come to figure as the least undesirable; and, at the present date,
Clapham had not seen him for six months or more.

It is not the purpose of the moment to recount how, once abroad, Mr
Dalston had lost his pupil and married “money”; nor even much to dwell
upon how, returning home a man of substance and position, he had been
brought, at once and sharply, to realise that “of our pleasant vices
the gods make instruments to plague us.” But he was a man of swift
comprehension, resource, and decision; and his brows had hardly drawn
to a pucker over a difficulty suddenly confronting him, before a way
out of it, and a very daring one, had occurred to him.

The message--Mother Carey’s--referring to this difficulty, had reached
him at the house, his wife’s, in Eaton Square, whither he, it was
understood, had, on business grounds, preceded his lady’s return from
abroad by a few weeks. That was, actually, a mystification, a
_suppressio veri_; for Mrs Dalston was at the moment installed in
comfortable but obscure rooms at Kennington, where she was scarcely
arrived before she was delivered, a little prematurely, of a male
child. But so far was this fact from being allowed to interfere with
the fiction of her absence, that particular pains had been taken by
Mark to procure his wife’s confinement in the house of a doctor, a
friend of his, who could be fee’d into any silence, or bought into any
intrigue where irregular services were required. To all practical and
moral intents, Mr Dalston was never so remote from his lately wedded
bride as at the moment when he stepped from her bedside to do an
infamous act upon her child. But even then there was enough sentiment
in his gaze to make the fortune of a mid-Victorian picture.

The young mother’s reason had never fully returned to her since that
poignant grapple, four nights ago, with the great and astonishing
secret. She was sound, unhurt from the contest; but her faculties
slept in a sort of exhausted abeyance. She was very white and
still--incurious--not greatly troubled: so far things were fortunate.
And here was the enwrapping fog for a final cloak, or pall.

As Mark stepped softly from the room, closing the door, a rather
livid-faced, stale-smelling young man in a black frock coat and black
peg-top trousers, revealing frowzy white socks beneath, accosted him
whisperingly.

“Well, sir; all in train?”

Mark nodded, smiling.

“All in train, Blague. It’s really a providence, and your conscience
may sleep sound to-night--as sound as she’s sleeping in there. Don’t
wake her--don’t _let_ her wake, rather--to a sense of her loss, you
comprehend, till I return.”

“Quite so. The _vis inertiæ_--the vegetation of a sensitive plant, no
more; we will see to it. The business shall not miscarry through us,
sir, depend upon it.”

“That’s right. You sha’n’t lose by this little divagation in our
plans, rest sure of that.”

He put his finger to his lips, and tiptoed down to the hall, where
stood a pallid-faced young woman in a shawl and poke bonnet, gently
rocking a bundle in her arms. She looked at the husband gravely,
questioningly; but she was silent. The poor thing, in fact, was
helpless under his dominion. Those dark eyes and ambrosial whiskers,
with the cleft chin between, had, in a few days, brimmed the measure
of her romance. Engaged for nurse to Mrs Dalston, she was fallen a
slave to the lamp of a brighter magician than duty.

The two entered a “growler” of the ancient dimensions, and the fog
lapped them up. Jogging its apathetic course through the smoke, as it
seemed, of a vast glimmering conflagration, the squalid vehicle gained
at length the Clapham Road, and drew near its destination. Then the
pale little nurse spoke for the first time.

“Are we nearly there?”

“Nearly there, my child.”

“Your child!”

She raised the little bundle in her arms to her breast. The pressure
seemed to convey abroad from it a waft of that warm, milky nidor
inseparable from newly born infants. Mr Dalston’s white teeth
glimmered through the fog.

“For the dozenth time,” he said softly, “I must assure you, little
Ellen, that grave issues hang upon the preservation of the tiny life
in your arms. That life is threatened only so long as I fail to
convince a certain person of its actuality. You mustn’t ask me how or
why. It embraces matters above your comprehension.”

“I can’t help it--I’m frightened,” was all she could find voice to
whisper.

He put his arm confidently about her. She shivered, but let herself
settle into it.

“Hush!” he said. “What is there to be frightened about? I shall do
nothing but take it in, show it, and return with it to you.”

“Why do you want me at all?” she protested, half whimpering. “You
might have brought it by yourself.”

“What!” he said, “and had Dr Blague questioning my sanity? Do fathers
generally take their new-born babies for an airing in cabs? You are to
witness, Ellen, if the necessity should ever arise--which, however,
there is not the least probability of its doing--that I returned it to
you sound as I had taken it.”

“Why should it arise? O, Mark, don’t mean me any evil!”

He sighed, shrugging his shoulders. The crawling cab drew up with a
jerk.

“Now,” he said quickly, taking the girl’s burden from her, “stop here
till I return with it. I shall be back before you can count a
hundred.”


 III

Mother Carey raised her bleary face with a start, and looked round.
The owner of the name she had been apostrophising stood in the room
beside her. She twisted an involuntary little shriek into a titter.

“Well, I’m sure,” she said, “to take me like that, in a moment, and
anything possible! Was the door ajar?”

“Still ajar,” said Mark, with a smile--“and the trap still baited as
of old, I suppose?”

“Always the same quick gentleman,” she chuckled venomously. “What has
my lovey got in his arms there?”

“Something for _your_ discounting, old mother,” he said. “I’ll show
you in a minute.”

“_My_ discounting!” she echoed. Her lips tightened on the word. She
looked at him evilly--searchingly. “What do you mean? You got my
message?”

“Yes; I got your message.”

“And you’ve come to answer it?”

“To answer it, yes.”

“That’s as well for you. You know what I want?”

“Do I?”

“And what I mean to have, or show you up, my gentleman?”

“Well, I can guess. I’m to be bled, I suppose?”

“Ah!” she gave a snapping laugh. “You never spoke a truer word.”

“Well,” he said, as cool as she was malevolent, “I’m here to _be_
bled, but on hard and fast conditions. Understand that, you old
Jezebel, or understand nothing.”

She made as if to claw him, but mumbled away her rage. Better than
many worthier she could see into his terrific places.

“I’ll be fair to fair,” she said, cowed and scowling. “You’re
married?”

“Yes,”

“A fine match?”

“Yes.”

“It would go hard with your honeymooning if I spoke out?”

“Harder with you, I think.”

“Ah, I’m salted, my man!”

“You’d need to be. Is _she_ here?”

“_Isn’t_ she!”

“Where?”

“In her bed.”

“Ill?”

“A touch of the fever. She’ll get over it.”

“Very well,” he said. “Now, attend. Look at this.”

She followed the motion of his hand, as, very gently, it lifted a
corner of the wrappers on his arm.

“A living baby!”

“It looks like one.”

She discussed him sombrely a minute, then spoke in a shrewd whisper:

“You’ve got some dark game on here, my gentleman.”

He dropped the shawl again.

“A secret--and a proposal, old mother,” he said. “How much, or,
rather, how little will you take for helping me to keep it?”

“Do you want me to commit murder? I’m an honest woman.”

“I know; that’s why I can depend on you.”

She fawned with her hands.

“Tell me what it all means, lovey dear.”

“I’m going to. Shut that door first.”

She did as she was told. The listening spirits of the fog were
baffled. When the door opened again, Mark was standing in the entry,
the burden still in his arms, while Mother Carey pleaded urgently
behind him.

“A lump sum, deary. Come!”

“No,” he said; “a pension. A quarterly gag on your tongue, or nothing.
You can take or leave.”

“I take!” she whispered shrilly--“I take! Be careful of that step,
deary.”

He vanished into the fog. At the mouth of the passage the cab was
drawn up by the kerb, watching for him like a squat, red-eyed dragon,
and gulping him the moment he appeared.

Half way home the pale little nurse broke suddenly into hysterical
panting and weeping.

“Why don’t you give it me back? Why do you always keep it in your own
arms?”

“I’m afraid of you, Ellen,” he said quietly. “You look somehow as if
you weren’t to be trusted.”

They were passing a lighted shop at the moment. With a quick,
unsuspected action she snatched the veil from the baby’s face.

“Ah!” she screamed--“it’s dead! You’ve had it killed!”

For a single instant the naked soul of him looked
out--obscene--murderous. But he drove it back.

“You little wild fool,” he said deeply. “Wasn’t I right? Your nerves
are anyhow. You aren’t to be trusted, with your fancies.”

She hardly seemed to hear him. All of a sudden she was struggling with
the door handle.

“Let me out! I’m fainting! I can bear no more. I will be good--I want
to go home--I----”

Sore encumbered as he was, she proved too quick for him. In an instant
she had jerked open the door and flung herself into the fog. Some
heavy vehicle was lumbering past at the moment. A scream like the cry
of a rusty axle broke from among its wheels. The cab rolled on, its
driver unnoticing, or diplomatic, perhaps, over an accident which he
connected, if at all, with other than his fare. Paralysed for an
instant, the next, Mark had softly closed the swinging door.

“There’s no help for it,” he thought, momentarily death-white. “I must
go on and play the game.”

He played it, for all that rebuff, so convincingly, that the issue
left him full twenty years’ triumphant enjoyment of its fruits.

That same night his wife woke for the first time to her full reason,
and looked intently into his eyes.

“Am I to be allowed to see it?” she said.

He bowed his head distressfully.

“By my full will, if not the will of a Greater,” he murmured.

“It is dead?”

He rose, and went and brought, and placing the little forlorn shape in
her arms, left her with it a while. When he returned, it was put aside
gently but indifferently.

“Bury my poor past,” she said. “It reproaches me with an altered face.
Yet I can’t help myself--I think I never could. You wouldn’t wish it,
you know; and what you wish or don’t wish comes to happen or to fail.”

He looked at her mildly, but with protesting eyes.

“Why are you so bitter?” he said. “Has not Fate after all been
considerate with us? You can face the world again now, unsuspected, a
spotless wife--no suspicion of our having loved not wisely but too
well. Cannot you forgive me yet, Lucy? And after all I have done to
safeguard your honour? Yet, if Providence had not thus mercifully
intervened, I swear that I would have been a dutiful father to
it--have acknowledged my own, and taken all the blame and burden of
the sin. I can say no more.”

“Nor I,” she answered. “What does it matter now. The money--my
money--that you’ve played to get--it’s all yours to use, and fling
away if you like. Treat me as you will--I’m indifferent----” And she
lay down resolutely, and composed herself to sleep.

As, chin in hand, he stands pondering her a little, curiously, fondly,
cynically, we see the fog droop and engulf him, her, the bed, the
room. Not for twenty years does it lift and roll itself up to the
flies, to reveal the maturing of a drama of which this chapter is the
prologue.




 CHAPTER I.
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

I suppose my days have been involved in as tragic circumstances as
most. It is fair that the truth of them should be set down _en grande
tenue_ by the one whom, after all, it most concerns. Not that for my
own sake I desire for them more publicity, God knows, than they have
received; but there is the question of the moral heirloom. The
sensational Skene claim before the Lords of Common Pleas will be in
the memory of a generation now passing: it is for the benefit of the
generation to come, and the many thence ensuing, that I clothe these
legal bones in the nerves and flesh of living actualities. There is
such necessary omission and distortion in all trials of equity, that
the plainest of their stories is grown a “Russian Scandal” before the
senior counsel who engineered it has gone to his long home on the
Bench. And this was an intricate story, which it is now my purpose,
for the sake of myself and my own, to detail in full.

As to that story, it will be recalled that a Mr Richard Gaskett was,
legally, its protagonist. Very well: I am that person.


At the first and from the first I was something less than nobody. My
mother, as I regarded her, was of obscure origin, but of manners
naturally quiet and refined. A habit of self-guarding, indeed, which
dated probably from her social promotion, had come to make of her even
a cold, colourless, impenetrable woman. She was very pretty, with a
sort of passionless severity in her face, and in her attitude a custom
of what Miss Burney would have called “repulsiveness,” meaning, as we
read it, “repelling.” No gleam of demonstrativeness on her part lights
my memory of her; from my first lispings I always, by her desire,
called her Lady Skene.

As habitually, my stepfather, Baron Skene of Evercreech, called me
Gaskett. I was officially an “encumbrance” to the two, and not always
spared the knowledge. Of the indifferent union which had produced me I
neither was informed, nor thought to ask, anything. Curiosity was the
last thing encouraged at Evercreech. That my stepfather had been a
childless widower when he bestowed the lustre of his name on the
obscure young widow “with an encumbrance,” was the most of my
information, and, even as such, something less, probably, than the
common one. The rakish reactionary (one-time famous judge of the
Queen’s Bench Division, and ennobled for his services during the
Salisbury administration of ’86) who, after the death of his only
child and heir, young Charlie Skene, in an Alpine accident, had
contracted a reckless _mésalliance_ with the lady who now bore his
name, was a figure revealed only to my later understanding.

Very early, I think, Lady Skene had “found religion,” as one may speak
of “finding” the unpleasantly obvious. Ignorance, irreverence, and
vulgarity build on every highway. There is a sort of evangelical
butcher who deals with assurance in things of the flesh, and, on a
simple knowledge of their parts, preaches the constitution of their
spiritual anatomy. He is the purveyor of such theological joints as
the vulgar understanding can recognise. Insight, imagination,
erudition are strange beasts to the popular view.

I think, perhaps, that Lady Skene’s early influences were to account
for her natural inclinations in these respects. When I say that her
marriage had socially elevated her from the ground to the leaf,
without her quite shaking off the dust of her origin, I may be
understood to imply that her beauty, and no exceptional quality in
addition, was her fine recommendation. She had had little education, I
am sure, but the education of a precise observation, which is the most
excellent tutor of mind and manners, though unpossessed of the exact
secret of what constitutes the _comme il faut_. That may be said,
broadly, to be the secret of making a grace of necessity in all
things--the secret of a frank unself-consciousness. Self-suspicion
spells restraint in intercourse, and leads to gusts of mutinous
self-assertion in some wrong directions. Lady Skene at least made no
affectation of adopting creeds which were caviare to her
understanding. She was and remained a raw evangelical through all the
spiritual evolutions of fashion.

There was an unseemly old heathen visited us once upon a time, who
made himself very merry over Lord Skene’s “atonement,” as he called
it. This was Sir Maurice Carnac, ex-governor of Madras, who had been
an intimate friend of his lordship in the sixties, and who now, on his
retirement, after twenty years’ service, came to renew the
acquaintance. From him I learned, at discretion, not a few facts
hitherto unknown to me: how, for instance, my stepfather, in the
matter of his second marriage, had been “cast into a net by his own
feet” in their very hope of going astray, which was to imply that he
had been caught to matrimony in the act of trying to evade it; how
Lady Skene had no sooner conquered him by her beauty, than she had
used it to the subjugation of the old Adam she had entertained, by
holding it the prize to his strict reformation; how, in short, she had
made a tame and orderly spouse out of the most unpromising material
possible.

Sir Maurice had no great delicacy, it is to be feared, though he could
be mum on some points on which I sought enlightenment. Of Lady Skene’s
social status before her marriage he would not speak; though I
certainly gathered from him that it was inconsiderable.

“Take Fortune’s gifts, my lad,” he said, “and hold your silly tongue.
It’s time to question her when she turns on you.”

“Scruples,” I began.

“Scruples be damned,” said he. “What has a ranker need of scruples?
Ain’t you promoted for your mother’s son?”

That was the truth of it, and, to confess myself, the sorrow. I was
not a loved child, conscious of rights or merits. I was an
“encumbrance.” A dreamy, rather morbid temperament oppressed me with
the weight of my own burden on the situation.

Not that I was ever treated unkindly; but there is an endurance that
is harder than neglect. It might be thought that Lady Skene would have
wished to exalt her own, especially as she bore her husband no family.
She was indifferent to me, however, and so I could not but be to her.
We were not kindred spirits, and were antipathetic to one another. Her
soul inhabited a chapel; mine the woods and mountains of a roaming
fancy. I never felt “at home” with her; and I think she had writ me
down early for one of the unelect. Predestination is a comfortable
creed for those who would eschew parental responsibilities. It is vain
carving a brand that is destined for the burning.

I suppose Lord Skene was of the chosen. His lady, at least, took
infinite pains to preserve him to her pattern of respectability. From
my first conscious recollection of him he was the slave to her soft,
monotonous rule. Yet I came early to wonder how much or how little of
his bondage was due to her physical fascination; for he was not
naturally, I felt sure, susceptible to moral influences, or possessed
of a bump of reverence that a threepenny-bit could not have hidden. In
pose, in feature, in colouring, her ladyship was near flawless--an
angel, whose ichor was drawn from the peaches of Paradise. Strange, I
thought, that so ethereal a tabernacle should contain so unimaginative
a pyx. I was not the first to marvel over a common incongruity, or to
overlook the fact that a satin skin often means a thick one. However
that may be, Lord Skene was devoted to his wife, and, I think, not a
little afraid of her. She had lived to convince him that he had taken
her, encumbrance and all, on something better than her merits.

At the period with which this record is mainly concerned she was
rising forty, and he, perhaps, sixty-five years of age. I had passed
my school career, and had alighted on no other. Those vanished terms
of absence from home had been my dearest ones. I have nothing to
relate of them but what is pleasant in the retrospect--one thing in
especial, my friendship with Johnny Dando, which is infinitely
comfortable. At the end Johnny went to a university, and I returned to
Evercreech. I was then nineteen, and already the predestined
protagonist in a drama, the full intricacies of which Fate was to need
but a year or two to unfold. My life, during the interval from boy to
manhood, has no concern in this matter; and therefore I shall say
nothing of it but what is essential to the context. Childhood is a
thing apart and sacred. To come of age is to join posterity and the
detectives.




 CHAPTER II.
 I COME OF AGE AND TO A DETERMINATION

Lord Skene was, as things go, a poor man--poor for an ex-judge, and
poor for a nobleman. His estate was much embarrassed at the time when
his lady started a resolution to nurse it. It was reduced then to the
mansion and demesne of Evercreech, a fair enough property in its way,
but largely neglected, and, in places, fallen to waste. I think that
even her ladyship’s management could do little more than preserve it
to the succession--a vain economy, it seemed; but the seed of woman is
hope. Much before her time the house in Berkeley Square had been let
away on a lengthy lease; and a family hotel must serve her and my lord
on their periodic visits to town.

Evercreech had to serve _me_, summer and winter, the year round; and
in those young, untroubled days it was enough. There was a plenitude
of beauty, and romance, and antique quietude for my utmost needs. I
never realised what I was, or what I signified, to the couple most
concerned in my existence. I think it would have puzzled them as much
to define me--whether for son, or servant, or ward. Perhaps my
position nearest approached that of a _donzel_ in feudal times,
attached to the service of some high relation as his apprentice in
arms and chivalry, and broke to self-reliance by a discipline of
self-help. Certainly I read of spoiling and mothers’ anxious love; but
I never knew them out of books, which were from the first my joy and
solace.

Save during my schooldays, I led a curiously solitary life. I was
neither invited nor expected to take a part with his lordship in the
daily interests of his condition. I did not dine at his table, nor
ride with him with the hounds, nor shoot his sparse coverts, nor whip
his unprofitable streams. He was very tolerant of me, and made me even
a generous allowance, the most of which I hoarded indifferently,
having no use of it but for books. I know that at this pregnant period
of which I write I was the possessor of some hundreds of pounds, a
veritable little treasure chest of gold, which had accumulated to me
during the years of growth. May all my savings return such an account
of interest as did these.

I had my meals with the steward, one Comely, a fellow as excellent as
his name, but comically guarded in his attitude towards me, whether
for respect or familiarity. I had liberty to take my piece from the
gun-room, and spend any whole day, if I chose, in blazing away amongst
the small game of the unpreserves. The stables, the library, the whole
“run,” in short, of Evercreech were free to me on the queer unspoken
condition of “sufferance.” I was always like a “poor relation” let to
holiday in a great mansion during the absence of its owners.

Nor was I ever invited to a more familiar conduct by Lady Skene
herself. Somehow, whatever the reason, I was alien to her trust and
affections. I could have thought she looked upon me as an encumbrance
indeed--even, from the date of the betterment of her fortunes, as a
veritable changeling, who had no inherent right to her motherly
consideration. Well, perhaps I had not.


Evercreech lay back from the highroad between Footover and Market
Grazing in north-west Hampshire--a wild and haunted country, sharing
itself between dense woods and lonely downs. There were enough of both
contained within the estate to serve a young solitary spirit for its
ample wilderness--for day-long wanderings, and fantastic chancings by
stream and thicket, and pretty pastorals won out of high folds on
hillsides, and all the sting and honey of romance. There one might
walk or ride, a squire of the Grael, and taste a county’s venture in
an acre. From farm to ruined byre, from box-hedged garden to the
infinite wild tangle of hedgerows, from stately culture to nature in
her poignant naked savagery, one might pass and play one’s fancy,
quite secure from the banter of the prosaic. There were family
legends, too, each one enough to make a transatlantic reputation. The
two that most occur to me illustrate the terror and the sweetness of
such old-time traditions. The first had its locale in Hags Lane, a
lonely, deep-sunk furrow in the pastures, but after all libelled in
its name; for hag or aggart in Hampshire means nothing less fragrant
than hawthorn. But the figure associated with it was of odour to make
spectral amends, being that of a man astride a great dark horse, which
leapt the hedge in ghastly gloamings before the eyes of any chance
pedestrian, and went tearing up the road on soundless hoofs. Story
connected this apparition with a past lord of Skene, who, riding to
wreak vengeance on a faithless spouse and her paramour, had manœuvred
the guilty couple to their death over the edge of a chalk quarry, and
thereafter had taken the disillusioned Sultan Schahriar for his model,
though with the limited despotism that his more civilised age enjoined
upon him, since the moral ruin of his victims must content him without
their throttling. He was rather a rotten pippin on a tree of
comfortable fruit; for the Skenes altogether had been an easy roguish
race, hot-tongued but affectionate, and, when caught stumbling on a
betrayal of virtue, generally ready to make the _amende honorable_.
Accordingly, perhaps, they had shown a tendency to _mésalliances_,
which had procured them, nevertheless, such a succession of vigorous
heirs, as to extend their main line unbroken from times prehistoric.
Yet, it seemed, at last, that Fate was to intervene for a diversion.
But of that in a moment.

If that first legend smacks of midnight and hellebore, the second is
to my mind a very dirge of rose petals. It relates how a sensitive
little fellow of the race once lost his mother’s wedding-ring, and
died of grief to witness her distress. Thereafter, then, his little
ghost came haunting a particular bed in the garden--a flower-face
caught fitfully among the leaves, or dropping, when one bent to pluck
it, in a shower of creamy petals, like a white peony’s. So that the
mother, weeping and pitiful, was moved at last to sow love-in-a-mist
in the bed, as it were a net to catch that forlorn small ghost for its
kissing and reassurance, and for the speaking to it in flower language
of how mother did not mind her loss a bit. When lo! upon a shoot of
the plant that sprung the following April was found, lifted from the
soil wherein it had been lost, the ring, and the flower spectre
haunted its pretty parterre no more. The fantastic superstition
accorded well, I think, with the traditions of a house which had been
notable as much for its rich maternity as for its fruits of
over-kindness; and the “Baby’s garden”--as the mossy little pleasance,
sacred to the long-vanished phantom, was called--spoke and speaks to
me always of qualities better than wisdom.

Wise, excepting in the one instance of my stepfather the judge, the
Skenes were not; but they never were lacking, I aver, in the essential
poetry of humanity. It neutralised in them, even, the vulgarity of
quite commonplace exteriors.

Time alone has the face which is an index to its nature. The best of
men’s is but a mask. Round, florid, beaming, my stepfather’s was the
face of a vintner. He might have drawn his pedigree from a beer
engine, and advertised it, foaming froth, on a sign. None might have
guessed from its features its age-long inheritance of gentle breeding.

He was a small man, dapper and a trifle horsey in his dress, but after
an older fashion of collar and harness. He wore, typically, a
shepherd’s-plaid tie, and his hat at an imperceptible angle. He always
smelt fresh, and, somehow, of a genial shrewdness; and his manner
towards me was a manner of kindly condescension. It was not until my
school time was well over, and my days drifted into the
purposelessness of an unattached loafer, that I became first conscious
of an alteration in his attitude towards me. And the occasion which
produced it was productive of a yet colder alienation from me on the
part of Lady Skene, which was as significant of her nature as was his
increased consideration for me of his.

One morning his lordship called me into his study. I stood before him,
as I had often done before, vaguely on my guard between submission and
independence, and he smiled on me, a little nervous and excited.

“How old are you, Gaskett--let’s see?” he said.

I answered: “I have come of age, sir.”

“Any plans for your future?”

“None.”

“Nothing thought of--no direction?”

“What could give them a direction here, sir?”

He looked at me a little, speculating.

“Perhaps we’ve let the question drift too long. Think it over and
think it out. We must find a way to independence for you.”

“Thank you, sir. You could do me no greater kindness.”

“What d’ye mean?”

He glanced at me curiously.

“I know I’m here on sufferance, sir,” I said. “I know my presence is
an open sore to Lady Skene. I’ve long been wanting to ask you
something. I think I could find myself sooner, perhaps, if I were
given elbow room. With all your liberality, I feel constrained in
Evercreech. Let me have the lodge in the Caddle to fit up for myself
and live in for the present, and until I’ve come to some decision.”

He stared a bit and laughed, and set to scraping his chin, his pale
blue eyes measuring me.

“You shall have it certainly,” he said suddenly, “for your den, or
hermitage, or what the devil you like. But it won’t do to cut the
house connection, my boy. You must dine and bed at home. What makes
you think you are not welcome here?”

“Not my stepfather, sir,” I said.

He turned to his papers, and dismissed me quickly; but called me back
as I reached the door.

“After all,” he said, “perhaps you’re better out of the way just now.”
His expression was extraordinarily complex. “Its coming to be the era
of pap and flapdoodle--ridiculous, ain’t it, at this date--but----”

“Is that so, sir? I congratulate you.”

“Thank’ee, my boy. Don’t forget I’ve always liked you; and if
circumstances--deuced aggravating things----” He broke off, humming,
and, kicking up his dapper feet, looked at his boot tips.

“I’ll put some fellows in,” he said hurriedly, “and have the place
made fit for you.”

“You’ve always been kind to me, sir,” I said gratefully. “I hope I
sha’n’t trouble you much longer.”

I was going, but he stopped me again.

“Trouble be cursed!” he said. “You must understand that your happiness
and welfare are my aim. You’re welcome to the lodge for ever, or so
long as you’re convinced that they centre in that bogeyish hole. Only
don’t let your fancy run on bitterness. Evercreech is your home.”

I was conscious of an expression in his face, between joy and
mystification, as I left him. It was easy, I thought, to interpret it.
Here, after all this interval, was an heir to Evercreech expected, and
his lady’s long remissness atoned. The thoroughbred was stretching his
neck for home; the encumbrance must clear himself from the course.
“Sufferance,” having made the pace for “Welcome,” must withdraw in
proper pride of his humble share in the event, and be content to eat
his oats in abstraction. Double-distilled nonsense, of course; but a
mother’s slight is poison, and that venom was in my blood. Not all the
investigations of anatomists can connect the heart with the reason.




 CHAPTER III.
 THE LODGE IN THE CADDLE

Once, when I was a boy of twelve or so, there had come to stay at
Evercreech a little lady whom I hated with all my heart. This was Miss
Ira Christmas; but very remote from the charity and goodwill which her
name suggested, she had always appeared to me. She was a ward in
Chancery, as I understood, and as such committed to the custody of her
nearest kinsman, my stepfather. Her mother’s hand, as I came to learn,
had once been coveted by him for his son Charlie; but the lady had
decided to bestow her fortune elsewhere; and, by the very irony of
fate, the residue of her perversity, so to speak, was all that
reverted to him from that abortive scheme. Both she and her husband
died young, in short, and the orphan Christmas, heiress to an
intestate estate, was consigned to his charge for her education and
upbringing.

She was with us for only a few months before her transportation to
France and elsewhere for her finishing education; but the little
interlude of her presence at Evercreech awoke in me such a sense of
shame and mutiny as I had never suffered before. I knew nothing of her
parents but what might be gathered negatively from their reflection in
this detestable child. I call her so with every sense of my
responsibility to the present. She had all the instincts of an
infantile parvenue, and all the hypocrisy of an embryo Pharisee. Her
precocious sharpness was early in discovering the disfavour with which
Lady Skene regarded me, and in affecting a sympathy with the reasons
for that dislike. I was bad, sullen, one of the unelect on her little
tripping red tongue. I had no gratitude for the gifts of Providence in
so raising me from the mire to a position which was none of my
deserts, and which had come to be mine purely through the
instrumentality of an evangelical mother. I should be thankful, on the
contrary, for every crumb of condescension vouchsafed me--a feast, if
I could only come to realise in it a sense of my own insignificance.
She was always poking that in my teeth, viciously and by innuendo. I
wondered even that Lady Skene could stand it, since it reflected upon
herself; but she had truly no snobbism, and valued her creed above all
earthly aggrandisements. The abominable child played up to this
weakness, or strength, in her, and so secured her own position as
prime favourite with the real head of the establishment.

As to Lord Skene, I think, in his equitable old heart, he disliked his
ward as much as I loathed her. But there were other considerations to
influence him. She was at least the daughter of her mother, and might
have been so different had his plans not miscarried. His dead boy,
his shattered hope, for ever figured in the perspective of his past
life. That also, perhaps, might have been so different--might have
come to record no lapse upon ancient rogueries, had his hope duly
taken shape and maturity. But the son had disappeared, and the father
was left derelict. How it had all happened was a topic quite taboo in
these days. A portrait of the boy hung in his room--a fresh, saucy
young face, bright with a wholesome determination to live enjoyably,
but wilful and a little imperious. I used to love to look at it, when
I dared to steal in unobserved. It conveyed a sort of challenge and
help to me in one. And he had been dead--how long? Years piled on
years now; and no one knew where his bones lay. He had been climbing
in the Italian Alps with his tutor, a travelling comrade, and, it was
supposed, had fallen into a crevasse, or down a precipice while
exploring the heights alone, and thereafter had never been seen. Mr
Delane, the tutor, had given evidence of his parting with him on such
and such a day, and there was an end of the matter. Charlie Skene had
been wiped out, and with him all the elaborately compiled record of
his father’s schemes and ambitions for him.

“He was near twenty-one,” said Miss Christmas--“I know: and Lord Skene
wanted him to marry my mother. And where would you have been then, you
little low boy?”

“Where would you have been?” I retorted.

“Here, of course,” she said, “and the daughter of a lord. And my lord
wouldn’t have wanted to marry again then; and I’m sure I shouldn’t
have wanted you.”

“You wouldn’t have got me if you had,” I said. “I hate you?”

“O!” she cried, affectedly aghast, and ran off to Lady Skene to
complain of the dreadful language I had used.

She wore her hair in a bag-net, and I have always detested the
fashion. She might have been called pretty, I suppose, by those who
find a charm in pertness franked by large eyes, and a wicked dimple in
a smooth cheek. But childhood can see no beauty in what it dislikes.
Instinctive sympathy with itself, with its moods and difficulties, is
its criterion of loveliness.

This girl, and a certain Pugsley, were my morbid aversions of those
days. The reverend Mr Pugsley had been translated--through the
instrumentality of Lord Skene and the influence of his lady--from a
suburban cure to the living of St Luke’s, Market Grazing. He had
belonged, I believe, to the “Clapham Sect,” or what, in his time,
constituted the remnants of that dour and depressing body. Its spirit,
indeed, still so dwelt in him, morally and physically--in his narrow
convictions, as in his dismal dyspeptic face, sloping shoulders, and
general joyless aspect--that a question as to his well-being might at
any time have been answered by him in the words of the notorious Dr
Jekyll, “I am very low, Utterson; very low.” Very low a churchman he
was, in fact; so low that he crawled, symbolically, in the dust, and
called himself a worm. I never disputed that half so much as his
calling me one. But his professional terminology gathered no
inspiration with the years, and its eternal limitations were, it
seemed, satisfying to Lady Skene, who was his main prop and patroness.
It began with wrath and the blood of lambs, and foundered in mud among
worms and serpents. The principle of pre-election is very comforting
to one’s sense of moral responsibility. It narrows it to the
consideration of that small body, which, after all, it need not
consider, since it is booked for Paradise. It seems a cruelty of
supererogation to taunt the unelect with their doom. But Mr Pugsley
gave me little hope. I was a worm, a brand; “baptised in fire that I
might inherit ever-lasting fire.” I suppose that very early I showed a
scorn of his nonsense; and that put his spiritual back up. Moreover I
parodied him; and no man, though a priest, likes to be laughed at for
his convictions. Sir Maurice Carnac, before mentioned, happened to
alight on the stuff without my knowledge; and he made a huge
spluttering joke of it. Here it is, founded on a Pugsleyite hymn:

  “When with the heavenly hosts I sit down
  Sure of my dinner and decked with my crown,
  O what a blessing and O what a grace
  To think that my faith has reserved me this place!
    Though enough is as good as a feast,
    Having conquered the gluttonous beast,
    As elect I may stuff on more than enough,
    And not be disturbed in the least.

  “When I am safe on the infinite shore,
  Free to do naught, if I like, but adore,
  O what a blessing and O what a good
  To think I may temper the praise to the mood!
    For enough is as good as a feast,
    In this limited transit at least;
    And I feel more and more that the thing that’s a bore
    In the West, might be so in the East.

  “To sleep or to venture, to feast or to fast;
  No excess possible, boredom, nor caste--
  O what a blessing and O what a bliss
  If Faith at discretion should bring me to this!
    No enough that’s as good as a feast,
    Nor nausea rising like yeast;
    But, free as the air to praise or to pair,
    Quit of the doctor and priest!”

I am remotest from wishing to excuse the doggerel, or to defend its
profanity. But, if not inspired, it was wrung from an intolerable
sense of injury, and its effect was at least to make me feel that I
had won my spiritual attainder at last. Little Miss Christmas came to
hear of it, and was very cross because it had been destroyed. She
wanted substantial proof of my wickedness, and the verbal means to
retort upon my abuse of her dear Mr Pugsley, whom she adored, the
odious little humbug. But, as for me, I gloried in my unregeneracy,
and wrote more verses, which I came to be wise enough to burn.

The little wretch, as I say, came and went; but Mr Pugsley went on for
ever. I grew apart from him, however; and at this day it is a wonder
to me that his memory affects me with anything but a sense of humour.
He spoke what he believed, after all, and I only mention him as an
indifferent detail in the context of great events.

I come now to the time when I retired upon my hermitage in the Caddle
woods.

Evercreech--the house, that is to say--stands on pretty high ground,
which on all sides falls away into dense thickets. It is a fine old
Tudor building, gabled, and with mullioned windows; but the different
or indifferent fancies of generations have loaded it with incongruous
excrescences. Time, however, has assimilated these to a reposeful
uniformity of stain and line, and ivy has welded the mass. It was a
compact beautiful pile in my earliest knowledge of it, fitting crown
to its own verdant slopes.

Nowhere are its surrounding thickets denser than to the north, where
the Caddle, or wildered, woods press up against the high road to
Footover, turning a steep, naked shoulder of turf to the view of
passers-by. Here had once run the main drive to the house, now, in the
time of which I write, long abandoned in favour of a shorter approach
southernward, and primeval tangle had utterly reclaimed the spot to
Nature. But the ancient iron gates, moss-eaten and corroded, yet hung
purposeless in the hedgerow, and gave some direction to the trend of
the green track which passed under the tree branches within. A little
wicket, for private coming and going, had been set thereby, high on
the bank above the road, to which grassy steps descended; and at a
short stone’s throw from the wicket stood the old lodge.

It was so embedded in foliage as to be hardly discernible from the
gate--a little square stone building, and stone-tiled. There had never
been a time when I was not familiar with it--its cold chimneys, its
abandoned little rooms, the growth, and development, and flight, and
renewal of the myriad insect life with which it swarmed. The dank
brooding little place had always had a curious attraction for me; and
now it was my own, my retreat, whose stagnant solitudes I could use to
whatever processes of thought and reflection they might inspire. They
surged formlessly in me the first time I stood to claim and regard my
acquisition. The place had been cleaned, ordered, furnished, of
course. All my scant belongings lay heaped within disorderly. But,
beyond necessary clearances, I had insisted that its green
surroundings should be respected. No ruthless loppings had disgraced
my advent. The lodge remained the undesecrated shrine to this haunt of
leaf-loving spirits--an old, old moss-grown temple to the eternal
antiquity of Nature.

The fantastic note which speaks in me here I felt throbbing in my
veins, soft but enchaining, from my first possession of the place. It
was to speak strange things to me before it was done. Already it was a
call, but at first far and faint, to a green resolution of
independence. At the outset I had no thought but to spend my days
here, as a good Catholic goes into retreat, and to return dutifully to
the house at night, like any other homing cattle. But that purpose
came early to dissolve. The arrival of the little stranger--which
happened in the second week of my self-exile--banished all thought and
consideration of me from the central _ménage_. I came to my resolve
instantly, procured a camp bedstead, food, drink, and cooking utensils
from Footover, and settled permanently into my hermitage. No one
observed or protested. My heart was justified of its utmost
bitterness, my will of its emancipation. Henceforth I would possess
myself--no profitable acquirement for one in my then condition of
mind.

Yet, on the whole, these days were the happiest I had known since I
left school, though what termination I proposed to them did not figure
in my wild philosophy. That, I am afraid, was not sound, for it harped
on grievance. It was nourished on the sense of a hundred wrongs, fruit
of lovelessness. I was moved for the first time to marshal these
resolutely before my mind’s eye. I did not believe in original sin,
Some babies were saints and some demons at a month old. I was
conscious of no inherent baseness in myself, nor of a necessity to
apologise for my own existence. Yet the impression enforced upon me,
the atmosphere in which I had grown, had always seemed weighted with
the necessity of that self-consciousness. I had been tolerated, and
made to feel the fact; and lack of servile acknowledgment on my part
had been counted to a graceless disposition. Yet was I not my mother’s
son? And what manner of mother was this who would not have her child
share in her exaltation, but was perpetually reminding him by
implication of the baseness of that beginning which he owed to her?
And I could have been slave to her loveliness; her patient catechumen,
even, in the vulgar pietistic creed which sufficed her soul, had she
ever once spoken a word of affection, played a mother’s part to me.
But when I suffered, her eye was as cold as Cleopatra’s. She neither
read me, nor could, perhaps, nor wanted to. I thought myself the
perpetual hateful reminder to her of something she would forget; and I
would not cringe, nor be mean, nor play the self-obliterating part
expected of me, except in so far as my love of nature and solitude
kept me aloof. But as I grew up strong--even wonderfully strong, I
think--and tall and brown and passable in the face, with no
hypocritical sense of shortcomings, but a feeling that at least I
might be held to do a parent no discredit, I believed I should come to
hate where I was hated; and, if so, I would shrink from using no part
of the strength, mental and physical, with which Nature had endowed
me. I wonder Lady Skene never saw the danger of her system; but her
perceptives were narrow to a degree.

Now I did not know who she had been, nor how married before made a
widow, nor what had been my father’s character or business. But all at
once these things began to exercise my mind, when, in the first days
of my complete separation from the house, I seemed to realise myself
as something cut away from the main stem, a runner pinned down and
then severed, and responsible for its own future development. In fact,
I began to think on my own account, as was my engagement with Lord
Skene; only, at the outset, I am afraid, with little concern for a
possible vocation. Choice of that, I considered, whether for brain or
hand, might follow on a certain knowledge of my origin; and whoever my
father had been, I had no intention to insult his memory by a pretence
to better dues than his. On the contrary, I rather hoped, in my savage
misanthropy, to discover how my origin justified me in digging for my
living.

But in truth, for all my mood I spent my time as much in dreaming as
in brooding. I was at the romantic age, the soft shadows of life on
one side, its infinite heights on the other. The repinings of
misunderstood youth appeal, I think, much more sentimentally to the
kind observer than they deserve. A thousand compensations of wonder
and expectation are always at the service of the most oppressed young
manhood. I found plenty for myself in that strange solitary life--the
knowledge of woods at dawn; the intimacy of venturesome birds; the
cosy lamp-lit room, my own, and shelves of glistening books. I owed
most of the last to the good-natured kindness of Lord Skene, who had
sent me down a small library of volumes at the latter end of my
furnishing. These were generally tied into bundles of a dozen or so,
and had been bought years before, as he told me when I went to thank
him for his gift, at a sale following the decease of a young neighbour
of his. They had never, for the most part, been opened since, and it
was my pleasure to untie the dusty strings which restored their
treasures to the light. They have their part in the development of the
strange story, whose opening chapter was now to date itself from the
date of my entrance into the lodge in the Caddle.

I shall never forget the weird experience of my first night there--the
intense humid darkness; the awful emphasis the dead silence received
from the fitful creeping and falling sounds incidental to a wooded
solitude. I hardly slept at all. The echo of a rare footfall in the
highroad beyond was always first a solace and then a terror. I would
listen for its coming, mark its passing, and when that, owing to the
muffling foliage, was seemingly halted or delayed, my heart thickened
to a panic of expectation that the thread would be taken up close
by--stealthy shufflings about the walls; a scratch on a window-pane.
Yet, after all, nothing visited me but ghosts, and with those I was
familiar. They came out of dusky nooks and corners, taunting me with
my inefficiency, my loneliness, speaking unutterable things of my
despicable position, and the neglect which had devoted me to it. Faint
glimmering vistas into the past they showed me--glimpses of memory,
which flickered only to close. Had I, indeed, always been thus, a
burden, an intruder? I knew nothing of it all. My mother, in all my
conscious memory of her, had never been my mother but in name. And was
there nothing behind her--no shadow, even, of a father’s brief
devotion? Sometimes a strange old face, evil and curious, would seem
to bend down over me; but it always dissolved before it could be
secured. I did not like to think I owed my life to that. And when I
slept, I fought and sobbed and struggled in bewildering mists; and the
cry was for ever in my heart: “Who am I? Who was my father? Why does
she hate me so--on his account or my own?”

Well, enough of these moods. I am not built of the stuff which harps
on self-grievances to win sympathy. Soon, and very soon, I was to
become “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,” and from the
first moment of my command, I never voluntarily relinquished it.

The baby, a poor peakish little male fellow, was born, I say; and I
was forgotten. When at last I was remembered, development of nerve and
character had so fastened me to my position, that there was no
question of ousting me from it against my will. Nor was there much
attempt. Lady Skene ignored me; her husband, fatuous father now,
laughingly acquiesced in my wilfulness.

“Go your own way, Gaskett,” he said. “You’ll come to me when you want
me, no doubt.”

No doubt at all; but not in the way he foresaw. In the meantime I led
the life of a free-forester, and was more genially content than I had
been for long. And then one day came the first of the change.

It was October, and the baby had been born in March. I had seen him
once or twice at a distance, and that was all. There was a path
running through that slope of the thickets which led up towards the
house, and this path ended in the pleasant bosky sward known as the
“Baby’s Garden” before mentioned. It was a lovely quiet spot, and
thither the honourable Master Skene was often carried by his nurse for
air and exercise. I could easily at will command a view of them
without being seen myself. The life of the wild man had taught me many
a trick of cunning concealment, and I never scrupled to practise an
espionage which was, after all, only a necessary habit of savage
precaution. There was an old dead ash, bordering on the thin fringe of
the woods, into whose hollow I could slip from above, and thence
observe through a spy-hole in the trunk. It was so close and
unregarded in that silent chamber of green, that every word spoken
from the latter was audible to me in my eyrie.

One morning I was watching thence (for I had a morbid attraction to my
successor), when he and his nurse appeared before me. She was singing
to him, as she walked in a sort of rhythmical march. An odd pang of
jealousy, as always, seized me in their nearness, Was I not his
mother’s son, too? I felt a thickness in my throat, and swallowed it
down fiercely. Presently the nurse, carrying her charge, went away at
the farther end; and I came out of my hiding and stood at the foot of
the tree, my eyes bent on the place of their going, though, indeed, my
eyes saw little. A feeling of shame and melancholy dimmed them; even
obscured their vision so far that it was not for a moment or two I
realised that the pair had come back, and that I was discovered. I
started, and bent my brow in a fury; and then I saw to my wonder that
it was not the nurse who carried the child, but a young woman--a young
lady, in fact; a vision of frills, and golden hair, and heliotrope
raiment. She had evidently met the nurse on her way out, and taken the
baby from her, and returned with it to the garden, the other
following.

Now all of a sudden she saw me, and came towards me at once, holding
out her burden. Her eyes were mirthful and conciliatory; a smile
quivered on her lips.

“Won’t you kiss your brother?” she said.

My brother! I had never yet realised the relationship. My heart
drummed thickly. All of a sudden I caught her eyes fixed on mine.

“Yes, I am Ira,” she said, “educated, and repentant, and come back to
be punished.”

Without a word, I turned on my heel and went away through the woods.




 CHAPTER IV.
 A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING--PHASE ONE

That afternoon I was sitting glum and glowering in my lodge, while
the water for my tea was boiling on the fire, when I heard a light
step in the passage; and the next moment she stood before me. I had
the will and the opportunity now to regard her, here in secure
possession of my own. She, not I, was the intruder. But my steady
inquisition failed to abash her. She was too confident of her own
charms, I suppose.

“Pray forgive me, Mr Gaskett,” she said, with a twinkling civility. “I
wanted to see the hermit with my own eyes.”

“And not with Lady Skene’s or Mr Pugsley’s?” I asked.

She laughed.

“You bear a grudge long.”

“I have so little else to bear out of the past,” I said.

Her eyes became serious.

“Well, I was a beast,” she said. “And now I’m a young lady.”

“Excuse me. The distinction may be without a difference.”

“And wasn’t I right then,” she cried, with a flush, “to question your
gentle origin!”

“I daresay,” I said. “But I owe you no consideration for the question.
It was none of your business; and I haven’t forgiven you for it, and
never shall.”

She seemed to breathe a little quickly, as if distressed. Then she sat
down in a chair, and crossed her legs, and bent forward to scrutinise
me.

“Richard,” she said, “what a brown strong man you have grown into; and
rather taking-looking, too! I _was_ an odious little pig--there! but
girls grow up, you know. I don’t remember my little past self with
pleasure, I can tell you. Won’t you forgive me and be friends?”

“What have you come home for? To be married?”

“O! What a question!”

“The sooner the better, for me.”

She bit her underlip. I could have thought it was a swollen red enough
little affair already.

“Why for you?” she asked.

“You can’t expect me to welcome your reappearance,” I said.

“Can’t I?” she answered. “Well, looks ought to count for something
with you by now. Don’t they?”

“I mature slowly, Miss Christmas.”

“Call me Ira.”

“Certainly I sha’n’t. It would be presumption.”

“I don’t know that it would. My father’s father was a chemist. I have
found that out. He kept a shop and invented a pill and made a fortune
over it. People would take it. It became a sort of infection. A royal
princess caught it, and then it was all over with him. He bought a
pedigree, in Wardour Street, and imposed it on the world. It would
swallow anything from him.”

“Well, my father’s father never invented anything that I know--not
even a family. I date from yesterday; and, as to pills, the
pillmaker’s granddaughter was the bitterest I ever had to swallow.”

She was not offended, it seemed.

“That’s right,” she said. “I told you to punish me. I have deserved
it, I know. But tell me if I’m pretty.”

I looked at her calmly. It was certainly wonderful how the _petite
drôlesse_ in her had developed, amplified into something bewitching;
but it was the adolescence of a witch, I thought. Her hair was umber
gold, with pale green lights in it, and drawn back in loose wings from
her forehead, and tied into a club at the nape of a very white neck.
Her cheeks were a little lean, but pitted with the old dimples at
pleasure; and the whole contour of her face was frankly girlish--soft
and kind but for the eyes. Or at least I thought so. There seemed a
knowledge in their artless honesty, born of depths below the blue.
Blue, I say! I don’t know to this day if they are blue or green. It
depends upon their point of view, whether it be sky or verdure.

She was slender and smooth-limbed; a fragrant enough creature but for
the odour of memory. I answered her deliberately.

“Not to me. _I_ have had no finishing education. I am still governed
by childish prejudices. I daresay you will be a success elsewhere.”

She sighed a little, and got to her feet.

“It is a shame,” she said, and very handsomely. “You have been
neglected shamefully, I know. But I’ve no right to speak. I wish you
thought me pretty.”

“Well, so do I,” I said. “But, what does it matter? You are an
heiress.”

She stood regarding me seriously for a little. Then all of a sudden,
to my amazement, her eyes blinked with tears. I stared at her,
speechless.

“Yes, I know,” she said; “it’s very silly. But you’ve no idea how
you’ve been on my mind. It was at Dinan, first, and then in London,
where I began to get things into their proper proportions--my own
insignificance among the number. You were somehow always in the
background of my thoughts--wasn’t that funny? You know, you were a
very good-looking child, Richard; or perhaps you don’t know. I was
horribly jealous of you, anyhow.”

“Well, well,” I said. “And how about Lady Skene, Miss Christmas? Are
you still in favour with her and Mr Pugsley?”

“_Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut_,” she answered, laughing with a
little twinkle through her tears. “She is a very beautiful woman, and
therefore what she thinks must be right. I wish you would show me your
poem after Mr Pugsley.”

“What poem? But all that stuff is over. I have burnt everything I ever
wrote.”

“What a misanthrope you have become. But I don’t wonder. Am I to go
now?”

“You are keeping me from my tea.”

“Won’t you let me serve it for you?”

“I serve myself; and I intend to for the future.”

“There is a story--did you ever read it?--of a shepherd who plucked a
flower in a field, and brought it home and put it in water; and every
night the flower turned into a beautiful girl, who swept and dusted
his room for him, and set his meal, and was a flower again by the time
he came down. But one night he caught her, and after that she had to
remain a woman and serve him.”

“Thank you. But I don’t see the point, for I haven’t plucked you, and
I don’t think you beautiful. You had better go. What would Lady Skene
say?”

“I am my own mistress. Lady Skene can say what she likes. Do let me
wait on you.”

A sudden mutiny of retaliation seized upon me. What did it matter? I
felt quite hard and cold to the girl. “Very well,” I said, and sat
down.

She busied herself at once; poured the hot water; made the tea; stood
behind me while I ate and drank. I took pains to do both imperturbably
and at length. She never spoke the while. At the end I got up, and
pushed the fragments together.

“Now,” I said, “you can have your tea on the scraps, if you like. I am
going out.”

I left her seated quietly at the table.




 CHAPTER V.
 A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING--PHASE TWO

She came to the lodge often after that, and amused herself putting
the place in order, sometimes while I was present, but more often
during my absence. I knew nothing of what was in her mind; but I
confess it came, just at first, to give me a sort of gloating
satisfaction thus to accept without comment these ministrations of
what was intended, I suppose, for imperious beauty’s atonement to the
poor beast whom she had wounded herself by insulting. She did not
speak much, going about her duties with a young elastic confidence;
but a consciousness of unuttered protest over my indifference, of
wistful glances and deprecations of my blindness, began soon to grow
irksome. She wanted to put herself right with herself, I supposed,
rather than with me. I was ready enough to tell her so, yet somehow
could never find the words.

One day, on entering my den, I was surprised to encounter the figure
of Lord Skene seated therein.

“Where’s Ira?” he asked at once.

“How should I know, sir?” I answered. “She isn’t here.”

“But she comes here at times?” he said.

“That’s her affair. She’s her own mistress, and has told me so. I
can’t command even the lodge, it seems.”

“Don’t be bitter, my boy,” he replied. “Only, if I were you, I
wouldn’t encourage these visitations.”

“I don’t.”

“That’s right. You see, she’s a great catch--rather a unique young
party with her looks and her fortune.”

“I quite understand. I assure you, sir, I shall be only too glad if
you’ll keep her away.”

“What a misogynist it is!”

He looked up at me suddenly, seemed to catch his breath, and put his
hand to his forehead.

“What is it, sir?” I exclaimed.

“Eh!” he said vaguely. “Nothing--O, nothing!”

He appeared to make an effort to recall himself, and was presently
smiling genially, though his loose old underlip trembled.

“What a great fellow you have grown, to be sure,” he said--“a fine
personable fellow and a credit to us, too.”

“You’re very good, sir. I wish I could think the same.”

“Ah!” he said nervously. “I fancy I know what you mean. It’s that that
I came about, Gaskett. You mustn’t go on brooding by yourself for ever
in this infernal swamp. It reflects upon me, my boy, and upon Lady
Skene. Besides, you’ve got a--a brother up there, you know” (he
uttered the word with an obvious effort); “and it won’t do to have
scandals started about the proverbial step-relations. You come up to
the house, if you want to keep the young lady from coming down here.
Its the wise alternative. Let her feed her wilfulness in company--eh?”

“What do you want me to do, sir?”

“Why, take your seat at my table, like a gentleman and a man of sense.
We sha’n’t poison you.”

“Forgive my asking, sir. Didn’t she suggest this to you?”

“Who? My wife?”

“O no! Miss Christmas.”

“Why, now I come to think of it, she did mention it--a well-merited
reproof, perhaps.”

“I’m beholden to her, of course.”

“You ought to count yourself beholden to me, I think. I don’t know
that I’ve ever given you cause, Gaskett, to doubt my friendship.”

“No, sir. I’ll do what you wish, of course.”

“That’s right. Shoo! the place smells like a well. We must get you out
of it.”

So I donned a dress suit, and played the dutiful respectable, and took
my place at my lord’s table--an odd new experience for me. I felt some
natural awkwardness about it at first, and bungled a little over
taking wine with my stepfather, for he held to the old-fashioned
customs; but his cellar was good enough to be an education in itself;
and, for the rest, the ladies did not embarrass me with their notice
or attentions. Indeed, from the date of this my first step towards a
social reformation, Miss Christmas ignored me entirely, and took pains
to impress me with the fact. I was duly impressed--and amused. I
supposed, quite correctly, no doubt, that his lordship had given her a
hint as to the inadvisability of her visits to me, backed by a pretty
literal quotation of my own expressed wishes in the matter, and that
the insult by deputy had instantly effected what the insult direct had
failed to do. Women, I fancy, have no objection to being bullied in an
exclusive and complimentary sort of way; but the passion of brutality
loses all its charms with them when it takes an agent into its
confidence. Miss Christmas was deeply offended, and let me know by
implication the raptures I had forgone. She literally sparkled o’
nights, frolicking like a will-o’-the-wisp before my hopelessly
unravished eyes. Her dress, her jewels, her manner, her imperious
caprices, all expressed, and were designed to express, the spoilt and
whimsical child of fortune--leagues overhead a nameless pensioner on
that same partial goddess’s bounty. She sang--not so badly on the
accidental strength of a pure little contralto voice, which of all
sorts finds it easiest to keep in tune; she displayed, in the childish
abandonment of her caressings of dogs and cats, the passion of thin
white arms, lures wickedly unattainable to my supposed swooning
senses; she talked, sweetly serious, with Lady Skene, on the subject
of the divine goodness in damning three-fourths of the world for the
sake of the other quarter, and dropped texts from her lips as daintily
as cherry stones. If it was all designed as a sharp lesson to me, it
was all signally successful. “The girl is mother to the woman,” I
thought. She is a humbug here as she was a humbug in my lodge. It is
nothing but her puckish instinct to play a part to desire.

I never came to the house but of nights to dine, conforming only, in
its strictly literal sense, with Lord Skene’s expressed wish; and then
I would dawdle out an impatient hour in the drawing-room, and the
moment the clock struck ten be off to my woods again. Lady Skene had
accepted my reappearance with no comment but the briefest greeting;
but I thought her manner to me was more chilling than ever. She seemed
resolved upon disallowing my last claim to her consideration. As a
child it had always been as if, coldly and softly, she had disengaged
my fingers one by one from her skirts to which they clung. Now we were
utterly dissevered; but I cried out still that I might not hate her.
She did not hate me, I am sure. She only looked upon me as a brand, a
thing foredoomed, whom it were useless to shape for a destiny which
could never be his. Perhaps in her deepest heart there may have lurked
a terror of herself, were she once to permit herself to think of me--a
fear that after all, in some quick frenzy, she might be moved to
disown the pietist for the mother. I will believe it. Such inhumanity
as hers seems incomprehensible without.

As I held to my wild habits by day, playing only in the evenings up to
polite convention, I was certain to encounter Miss Christmas about the
grounds, and as a matter of fact I did, many times. On such occasions
she would always pass me with a warble and a stare, or a cock to her
kittenish nose, as if I were an odorous stable-boy, which as regularly
tickled me, until one day I felt tired of it. I had run upon her at
the head of the thicket path which opened into the “Baby’s Garden,”
and I suddenly barred her way, so that she could not get round me
right or left.

“Were you going down there?” I asked, signifying the lodge.

Fury flew into her eyes.

“How dare you--how dare you suggest it!” she cried.

“Why, it wouldn’t be for the first time, you know,” I said.

She looked in helpless anger about her a moment; then faced me like a
young harpy.

“I thought, perhaps, in spite of all--of all the misfortune at your
birth--you might be a gentleman at heart. But I was mistaken, and you
are the very farthest from it; and I see now that it’s impossible ever
to hope to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

“Thank you, for my father. My mother can answer for herself. The
pillmaker’s granddaughter is the best judge, of course.”

“Let me pass, please.”

“Not just for a minute. What did you mean by the misfortune at my
birth?”

She was still white with fury.

“Don’t you know? Don’t you know that you’ve no right to a name at all?
You might have guessed, I think.”

“How do _you_ know?”

“I know well enough. I once heard Mr Pugsley say so to Lady Skene,
when they were discussing what to do with you, and didn’t guess that I
was hidden behind the curtains. I have never forgotten it, you may be
sure.”

“I am quite sure. You listened behind curtains like a born lady. Do
you wonder that I have always instinctively detested you?”

“No; I have shown you I don’t.”

The storm in her had subsided in a moment. I wondered, but was not in
the least mollified.

“You have shown me nothing,” I said, “but the way to right myself at
last with my relations. Now you can go.”

She did not move, however, but turned as pale as her frock.

“Richard!--O, Richard!” she implored. “Don’t hit me like that. You are
so strong; and I am only a girl. I had no right to say it; it might
have meant nothing; and Lady Skene has always been so good to me.”

“What reason have you--or has she, for that matter--to expect any
consideration from me? I will know the truth.”

“Richard, make some allowance. You had insulted me too, you know.”

“I had not.”

“You had. You asked Lord Skene to stop me from going to you.”

“I didn’t. He came and asked me himself. He told me to remember you
were an heiress, and I answered that you didn’t visit me by my wish.
_You!_”

“It was detestable. I didn’t know. Do, for pity’s sake, forgive and
forget.”

“No; I have forgotten too long. I want to remember.”

“Richard! O! O!--Richard, I hate pills--I’m not a lady--won’t anything
soften you!”

And at that moment the nurse, carrying the child, came round a bend of
the garden. She stared and rocked, singing something tuneless; but
Miss Christmas, darting past me, seized the infant from her arms, and
carried it to the path.

“Richard!” she whispered, “for his sake--your little brother’s!”

My brother again. Never had anyone but this girl voluntarily assumed
the natural relationship. I wavered for the first time. She saw it,
with her sex’s quick intuition, and held out the warm soft bundle.

“Have you never taken him in your arms?” she said. “He’s so small and
weak. There, hold him, and let him plead for me.”

“Miss Christmas!” cried the nurse.

Her tone, all the immeasurable menial warning it conveyed, stiffened
me instantly. I held out my arms and received the burden.

I could have laughed at its insignificance. The apparent proportions
of it had made me expect something staggering. It lay on me like a
doll. Before I knew myself, I was smiling into the little red puffy
face.

There followed a sharp exclamation, and on the instant Lady Skene had
snatched my brother from my hands. She had come upon us unobserved.
Her face was alight with an expression I had never seen there before.
The statue had blazed into momentary life. She was a woman, and a
cruel woman confessed for the first time in my knowledge of her.

“Not yours,” she said, deep and resentful. “He has no part or concern
with you. Don’t dare to touch him or contaminate him again!”

I stood facing her without a word. In that moment my utter hate and
vindictiveness were born. As she had dealt with me, so would I deal
with her. The first card was in my hand. I turned quietly and left
them.




 CHAPTER VI.
 MY FIRST ENLIGHTENMENT

Mr Pugsley sat in the study of his vicarage at Market Grazing. He
was composing a sermon--no doubt on the eternal lines of pre-election
and the divine partiality. He never gathered how his principles made a
comfortable sinecure of his living; but a sinecure it was--a sort of
well-furnished limbo, his complete enjoyment of which was only marred
by a chronic dyspepsia. He looked up, as I entered, and greeted me
with a frown.

“Gaskett!” he exclaimed. “I was somehow thinking of you, and here you
are.”

I acknowledged the compliment promptly.

“Yes, I’m the devil, sir,” I said; “and for once in your life you’ve
got to answer to me.”

He started, and turned a little yellower.

“This is a strange beginning,” he wondered. “For what, boy, do you
hold me answerable to you?”

“For concealment, sir, amongst other things. Mr Pugsley, will you
please to tell me if I am my mother’s son?”

He shifted a paper or two on his desk. I could see he was staggered,
and thrown for the moment off his balance. I had no object in hurrying
him. After all, if he had the elective licence, he had not the
instinct to tell a lie.

“Answer at your leisure, sir,” I said. My tone, I quite felt it, took
command. This narrow mind had no longer any terrors for me. I had
come, in a day, of a very stern and sorrowful intellectual age. He
turned to me presently, almost propitiatory.

“What a very curious question, Gaskett! Lady Skene has surely always
done her duty by you?”

“That wasn’t what I asked. I asked if I were her son.”

“How can you doubt it?”

“I can’t, sir, to my grief.”

“To your grief? O, this is sad!”

He fidgeted with the lamp--it was evening--and tried to meet my eyes
again, but avoided them.

“It is very sad,” I said. “But why should you deplore it, when from
the first you have fostered and encouraged in her that spirit which is
responsible for all the sadness?”

“_I_, Gaskett?”

“Have you not? Have you not always, sir, accounted me a child of sin?”

“Which you are, in the fullest sense.”

The admission seemed to slip out of him, in his agitation,
unintentionally. Having made it, he stooped, and hurriedly took a
nerve pill. He always carried a box of them about with him.

“It is what I understand,” I said quietly. “Of whose sin, in the first
instance? Mr Pugsley, who was my father?”

He was very much upset. His hands on the paper shook like leaves.

“What has happened?” he said. “Why are you asking me these questions?”

“Let it be enough, sir, that I am asking them.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Think again, sir.”

“Do you doubt my honour, young man? I tell you I don’t know.”

“Where did it happen? You hail from Clapham, I believe. Was it there?”

“Yes, if you will ask.”

“Where is Clapham?”

“It is a suburb of London.”

“And she came under your administrations there--officially, I
suppose.”

He rallied a little, struggling to assert himself.

“Do you bear in mind, Gaskett, of whom you speak--who it is whose
errors--whose long-repented errors--you are probing?”

“The repentance came too late for me, sir; and, in any case, if it is
religion, it is not reason to make me its scapegoat.”

“You were a child of wrath--a pledge of sinfulness foregone.”

“I see--a sort of whipping-boy to Grace. But I have ceased to be a
boy--there’s the devil of it, Mr Pugsley. If _you_ don’t know who my
father was, does Lord Skene know?”

He shook his head, with an odd little gasp. I saw him making for the
pill-box again.

“What!” cried I. “Did he, too, accept me as a pledge?”

Something in his face enlightened me. The man was too shallow to hide
a guilty self-consciousness.

“Did he?” I said sharply; “or was he never told perhaps that there was
any question of sinfulness?”

I could see him hesitate, and it decided me.

“Was Lord Skene told?” I said, and took a step towards him. “Was he
told?” I read the answer in his perturbed eyes. “Is this how you
reconcile your conscience with your interests?” I cried scornfully.

Having yielded, like a weak creature, to resolution, he took refuge,
like a woman, in personal grievance. He rose, quivering all over.

“How dare you come and bully me like this!” he cried. “What instigated
you to it, I say?”

“A desire for the truth, sir. I understood parsons made a speciality
of it.”

“Not at all,” he retorted angrily--“at least there are truths and
truths. To withhold some for a worthy purpose is not to lie.”

“Yes,” I said. “I have read about that; but I never knew till now it
was a principle of Evangelicism.”

He looked at me balefully.

“And, in any case, what was the worthy purpose here?” I asked.

“You cannot be expected to appreciate it,” he said. “Your mother was a
vessel potential for holiness. As you have the indelicacy to question
of her past sorrows, you shall be given the truth in full. Better that
than the half measure, which would only instigate your base spirit, I
fear, to distortion and exaggeration. She had been ensnared by a
villain whom she had lent herself to reclaim. It was the usual case of
a promise given and forsworn. I never asked or learned his name. In
the eyes of Heaven she was a wife; and any confession of the truth
would, with such a man as Lord Skene, have been held merely to justify
him in his attempts to claim her to ungodliness. As a fact, he was
greatly infatuated--accepted the assumption that you were born in
wedlock--engaged tacitly to ask no questions, but to accept on its
merits the blessing which had been vouchsafed him.”

“Then, at least, in the eyes of Heaven, which you represent, Lady
Skene is a bigamist.”

He seemed, to my surprise, to accept this casuistry with a certain
relief.

“Put it that way if you like,” he said. “She was distinctly, from the
moral point of view, a wife already, though legally unbound.”

“Then why, from the moral point of view, am I a child of sin?”

He began to stammer hopelessly.

“I will tell you,” I said. “It is because of the wrong she has done
me, and would visit, like a woman, upon the innocent head of her
disgrace. And you hate me because she does, and because you have made
her interests your own. I think you have played your cards very well,
Mr Pugsley.”

He bristled through all his yellow skin.

“Leave my house,” he said.

“I will leave it,” I answered, “but I will ask you another question
first. What was my mother’s position, occupation, when she married?”

“Not another word,” he cried. “I have said too much already. O!”--he
shook a wild finger at me--“why would she never accept my advice,
given long ago, to place you out in some respectable family! I always
foresaw that the time would come when you would begin to quarrel with
your bread and butter--to bite the hand that fed you--to----”

“To put myself right with my stepfather,” I said.

“If you attempt it,” he cried--“if you dare--the wrath of the Almighty
will fall upon your presumptuous head!”

I laughed.

“Well, I will think it over,” I said, and turned and left him.




 CHAPTER VII.
 MORGIANA

Near all that night I sat out in my den, wakeful and deeply
meditative. Was I glad or sorry to have wormed out thus much of the
truth? And of what potential profit to me was my new knowledge? As to
the former, _noblesse oblige_: better be an unchristened vagabond than
the legitimate hope of Mr Snooks, roturier. Nameless, I could make a
name of my own; not be condemned all my days to the task of redeeming
a vulgar one bequeathed me. Therein was signified, I thought, the true
moral of all nomenclature. Why, for instance, should the son of Mr
Rottengoose be handicapped from his birth with that imposed label and
libel; be forced to carry throughout his blameless life that unasked
and unmerited stigma of an ancestor’s villainous sobriquet; have to
steel himself to the torture of the titter pursuing him over the edge
of the dancing-card on which he had just impressed his awful identity;
be obliged, perhaps, to advertise his ignominy on a brass plate, to
stultify his fondest ideals, his most romantic passions, over the
sign-manual of a decayed fowl--a name bestowed, probably, in the first
instance on a village idiot; finally, be called upon to cheapen the
nobility of his Last Will and Testament in the terms that “I, Robert
Rottengoose, being of sound mind and in full hope of the resurrection,
etc.”?

Resurrection of whom, forsooth! Why, of Robert Rottengoose. “Do hereby
bequeath my curse,” _I_ would add, “to a system which imposes honour
or ridicule, either undeserved, on a new-born child. Let a man be
christened into his surname, such as he shall make or choose it, only
when he comes of age. Amen!”

Well, I was Richard Gaskett--not so bad on the whole; but why was I? I
wondered if Lord Skene would tell me; I wondered if it were Lady
Skene’s maiden name--yet hardly that; for would not the admission have
betrayed her to her noble suitor? Perhaps it was my father’s, since,
“from the moral point of view,” she was his wife. Yet, somehow,
morality did not seem to me to be much in question in the matter; and
on the whole I was inclined to think that my name was as illegitimate
as my birth. The fact disturbed me only in so far as it afforded me,
probably, no clue to my father’s identity; for it was to that that my
thoughts were now turning with a very resolute purpose. I would
discover it by hook or crook; learn to whom I was indebted for my
disgrace; gain into my own hand the knowledge which could make this
cruel puppet of a mother move to my will. I possessed already the germ
of the truth: I was base, and my stepfather did not know it. Proof,
clinching and double-wrought, would come with that further discovery,
could I alight on it. I would hold it over her head, bowing that under
an eternal horror of exposure. As she had been an unnatural mother to
me, so would I be an unnatural son to her.

And all of a sudden the tears were crowding into my eyes. I could not
tell why; and I rose quickly and went to the door. It was a lovely
quiet night, with a moon somewhere behind the trees, and all the sky
marbled with dove-grey clouds. And I held out my arms to them; neither
did I know why; but, like a child, I wanted something or somebody to
comfort me.

“It is no good,” I muttered, and dropped my chin heavily on my breast,
and returned to my brooding, but this time over a pipe and a glass of
toddy. They helped me to brighter, if no less defiant, thoughts. Would
Mr Pugsley whisper awfully to his patroness of my visit, and put his
head to hers in some design to bridle me? I cared nothing. I felt
strong as Atlas to bear the world my new emancipation had opened out
to me; my head rang with a hundred purposes of do and dare; I was my
own utter master, by virtue of that discovery, and free. Let those who
had ridden me look to their own harness.

Early on the following morning, coming home from a brisk stroll in the
November woodlands, I found Miss Christmas in my room. She had a brown
fur boa round her neck, and a little fur cap on her head like a
Zouave’s busby in miniature, with a pert plume. Under the boa was a
glimpse of scarlet handkerchief, which contrasted rather pleasantly
with the gold of her hair, and her cheeks were pink with walking. She
greeted me with a troubled look, as she noticed how I paused and my
face darkened seeing her there.

“Am I so horribly _de trop_,” she said, “when you have nothing but
your own thoughts to live with?”

“That’s the reason,” I answered grimly.

“You don’t make it easy for me,” she said. “And I had come to beg your
pardon, Richard.”

“Why should I help you out in anything, unless it were the door?”

She flushed; she bit her lip; it was as much as her temper would allow
her, I could see, to stand and listen.

“You are really horribly rude,” she said.

“I daresay I am. As a cultivated young lady of family, you should have
more prescriptive tact than to provoke the natural boor in me.”

“I don’t believe it is natural. I believe, in your bitterness, you are
resolved to make yourself out much worse than you are.”

“That is very generous of you. And you have come, moreover, to beg my
pardon--for what?”

Her mouth opened a little. She seemed to deprecate my expression very
entreatingly. Her eyebrows took a pained arch, her eyes a speaking
wistfulness.

“Richard,” she said--“don’t be so angry, so unforgiving with me!”

“Why do you think me either? I ask you again, what have you come to
beg my pardon for?”

Her lips quivered as she looked up at me. She seemed unable to speak
for a moment.

“It was cruel,” she whispered at last--“so cruel and ungenerous, that
I could only wish at the moment that I wasn’t bound to her by so many
ties of affection. But I am, and I will be loyal.”

“Are you apologising for Lady Skene?”

“No; I am asking pardon for myself, because I was the unwilling cause
of it all. Won’t you forgive me, Richard?”

“If I thought,” I said, “of calculating up all you have to answer to
me for! I don’t feel very kind to you.”

“Be unkind, then,” she said. “Only forgive me.”

I struggled with myself a little.

“I can’t,” I said at last. “I’m afraid I’m very vindictive, and must
have my pound of flesh first.”

“Take it of me,” she said at once, “in whatever way you like.”

I laughed.

“Fine heroic words! Would you submit to the process? I’m in the way to
humble some folks.”

“Richard,” she said, “remember who she is. Spare your mother. I’m
ready to take the blame and the punishment for both.”

She was certainly a young slight thing; prettyish in a fancy way; easy
to bend or break.

“You speak rashly,” I said. “I remember your story about the shepherd.
Your petals would be pretty well rubbed by the time I’d done with
you.”

“Very well,” she said. “I’ll take the risk. I believe I know you
better than you do yourself.”

“Do you? I’ve half a mind, you little flower of fortune, to put you to
the test.”

“I’m waiting.”

A stubborn devil was awake in me.

“Are you offering yourself my slave, or what, Miss Morgiana?”

“Your slave, if you like.”

“Very well. The floor wants scrubbing, and there’s a well outside. Get
some water and scrub it.”

I thought she would fling away at once; but, instead, she took off her
hat and jacket, found somewhere a pail and brush, and went outside
very meekly. I listened wickedly. The windlass, I knew, would be a
task for her chicken arms; and, indeed, I heard her plainly enough
panting and struggling with it. But, for all that, she appeared
presently, staggering, with her pail brimful; and I made no offer to
relieve her of it.

“Now,” I said, “I won’t be witness to your awkwardness. I’m going for
a walk, and to think over more important difficulties than yours. But,
when I come back, I shall expect to find the place cleaned and tidied,
and you gone.”

And I did. I gave her a couple of hours, before I returned whistling.
The floor was white, the table laid for lunch, two eggs put in a cold
saucepan by the grate, the fire piled up to smoulder, and a nosegay of
red leaves and berries placed in a tumbler on the windowsill. The
place looked neater and homelier than I had ever succeeded in making
it, and Morgiana was gone. Of the eternal instinct are Eve’s
daughters; and this one, it appeared, had no difficulty in “throwing
back” from silks to homespun.

That night came a very strange experience to me.




 CHAPTER VIII.
 THE WRITING ON THE WALL

On entering the dining-room at Evercreech, I found company
assembled. I had not been warned, and I was not introduced. I came in
late, and took my seat at the table quietly, being placed between Mr
Pugsley and a lady whom I did not know. I learned, however, in due
course, that she was a Mrs Dalston, who, with her husband, also
present, was a new-comer in the neighbourhood. The two had taken the
Lone Farm, a decent but rather decayed property situated on the
outskirts of Market Grazing, and foolishly reputed to be haunted. But
it was inexpensive--perhaps because of its reputation--and fully
adequate to the needs of a childless couple. The only other guest was,
to my pleasure, Sir Maurice Carnac, who had earlier shown me
friendship, and who was down somewhere in Hampshire for the shooting.
But he looked little capable of shouldering a gun, and was altogether
sadly altered from my memory of him, having but lately, as I learned,
recovered from a paralytic stroke, whose passing had left him much
debilitated. He lay sunk in his chair, like a heap of human ashes, and
with all the old fire of roguery smouldering low in him. But he seemed
to awaken suddenly on my entrance, and looking across at me as I sat
down, treated me to a leer and wink.

“Hillo, Charlie, my boy!” he chuckled. “What sport with the girls,
hey!”

Consternation sat on every face. My lord, looking much perturbed, bent
to the old rascal, and enlightened him.

“Gaskett, Carnac; Gaskett!” he said. “You remember Richard Gaskett?”

“Hey!” The old man sat up. What link of memory had slipped in him,
obliterating a whole score of years? “Richard, hey?” he said,
immensely sly. “I know, I know. The lovely one’s pledge--earnest of
widowed respectability. But mum, mum, my boy--I know. What days, hey!”

The soup engaged and silenced him--at least in everything but its
absorption. It was some moments before the talk could find itself an
embarrassed vent. But Sir Maurice brightened as he fed. Good fare was
the natural aliment to that impoverished soil. He had only wandered
and lost himself when hungry. In a little he had forgotten all about
his _balourdise_, and was paying senile compliments along the table to
his hostess.

In the moment of its delivery, however, the strange lady next me had
turned quickly and looked me in the face. She appeared to me an
utterly colourless person, _fade_, thin, dowdy, with hardly a sign of
spirit or expression--a condemned ghost of womanhood. I wondered
presently at the fond attentions with which her husband treated her,
at his efforts to win a smile from her unresponsive face, and his
patience when habitually baffled, since he himself was a fine bold
figure of a man, white-teethed, black-whiskered, for all his
forty-five or so years. And I wondered still when I came to learn how
persistently she had disappointed his hopes of an heir, the few
children she had born to him having died one by one on the very
threshold of their existence. But perhaps all those fruitless pangs
were accountable as much for his manly devotion as for her
insensibility. She might have held him responsible for that seed of
death which had stultified all the rich Woman in her. In any case,
that he was more attached to her than she to him was obvious.

She spoke little--nothing to me; and, I noticed, ate little, but
crumbled her bread all dinner-time. I was not concerned, inasmuch as
it gave me the opportunity to observe elsewhere, which I had the
inclination, and the provocation now, moreover, to do. Though the
object of the old ex-governor’s misbegotten attention, and the
immediate brief cynosure of all eyes, I was the only one, I think, not
momentarily confounded. A curious self-possession, a sort of conceit
of masterfulness, had come to claim me of late. A kind of cold and
scrutinising philosophy had found me out of the old dependence. Having
had long the will to counter my allotted destiny, a very little of the
means had encouraged me to something like effrontery. I felt already a
sense of power; a truculence in the face of the least supposed
imposition on me of superiority.

While, therefore, they were all looking at me, I was coolly intent on
Lady Skene. One hurried glance my way she gave; and then her eyes were
lowered to the cloth, as she drew off her gloves and addressed some
commonplace remark to Mr Dalston, who sat on her right. Her voice, I
have not yet observed, was marked by a slight Cockney
intonation--hardly to be gathered from its softness--just a twang from
Cheapside, like the faintest distant whine of Bow Bells. But it was
enough to imply her origin.

Looking away from her, my eyes travelled to Mr Pugsley beside me. He
was obviously flustered and annoyed--shifted his shoulders, pinched
his nose, defied, self-conscious, my stare, and failed utterly to
stand up to it. Then he cleared his throat with violence, and
affected, ostentatiously, to prefer the menu card to my company.

I laughed to myself, speculating on the idyllic guilt-consciousness
which must be flowing between these two. The baronet’s malapropism had
followed curiously pat on my recent enlightenment. I recalled the
stories of his ancient intimacy with Lord Skene, of his reputed
co-partnership with that nobleman in a rollicking adventure or two.
Were they, my lady and her pious accomplice, hearing, in their hearts,
the first creaking of the wheels of retribution? Poor panic-struck
conspirators!

Yet I was sorry that Fate had imposed on Lady Skene so vulgar a
confederate; for I could not but think the man vulgar, ordained priest
as he was, and quite sincere, I believe, in his evangelicism. But,
apart from him, and her subscription to his ugly phraseologic cant,
she was so lovelily one of those presences whom age cannot wither (the
rest of the quotation hardly applied to her); so perpetual a
provocation--and aggravation--to the worshipper of beauty; so serene a
thing, so coldly tantalising, so refinedly a figure for the sweet
altitudes of romance! Ah, that she would make me her knight
indeed--champion of a mother’s fame, dearer even than a wife’s! No
need, then, to dread the consequences of an infamy atoned through
love. I would have struck for--not against her. But she had preferred
the inhuman part. So be it.

I ended my scrutiny with an inward sigh, and turned it elsewhere. I
had plentiful opportunity. No one addressed, or appeared even to
consider me. Right opposite, Miss Christmas, who sat between Sir
Maurice and Mr Dalston, was engaged in rallying her either neighbour
charmingly. She was quite at her ease with both, confident of herself
as the most attractive of social siderites--a star of unquestionable
magnitude. And they responded, of course--men of the world, and quick
in persiflage. They laughed at her butterfly sallies, and humoured
them because she was pretty and an heiress They were patently
captivated. “Ah!” I thought: “if you knew how this very morning she
has been scrubbing my floor for me!”

No one would have thought it possible. She was gay as a fairy;
flower-complexioned; her hair like a misty aureole. A string of pearls
was round her throat, and pearls were in her ears--“wicked little
shells for recording scandal, and answering to it with pearls of
price, too,” said Sir Maurice, after she had retorted upon some
society calumny of his.

“O!” she cried; “to compare my poor ears to oysters!”

“Natives!” said Mr Dalston. “There are no oysters and no ears in all
the world like our English breed.”

She asked him seriously how he knew--if he had travelled much?

“Far and wide,” he said, “and in all countries except Italy, I
believe.”

I wondered why he made, or had made, the reservation.

“A sentiment,” he said, as if I had put the question to him. “I lost a
dear friend there once.”

Actually I found his eyes fixed on mine. They were a dark penetrating
feature in his face, set under strong brows, and somehow quite at
variance with the smiling good humour of his mouth. His hair, though
almost white, was full and wavy as a boy’s, and contrasted strangely
with his jet-black mutton-chop whiskers, and those again with the
strong white line of his teeth. He was tall and excellently compact,
with broad shoulders and narrow hips, and had altogether the
appearance of a man entirely at his ease with himself and the world.

“Do you know it--Italy?” he asked of me.

“I have never been from here but to school,” I answered.

“Ah!” he said: “what visions! what a prospect! That emancipation from
tutelage, and all the world to follow!”

He was interrupted by a quick shrill exclamation from his wife:

“Look! What has happened? What is the matter with him?”

She was on her feet, we were all on our feet, in an instant. Sir
Maurice Carnac was fallen heaped back into his chair, his shapeless
old face all wryed as if in an exhaustion of horrible laughter,
incoherent sounds coming from his lips.

“Carnac!” cried Lord Skene.

_For to-morrow we die!_

“This is my business,” said Mr Pugsley, in an agitated voice. All
honour to his creed so far, for he was terribly unnerved.

The stricken man was carried upstairs by the servants, followed by the
minister and his lordship. We all waited, huddled into a silence
unbroken but for the whimpering of the women. Only Mrs Dalston
remained quite passionless and unmoved. Once I saw her husband quietly
offer to take her hand in his, and I saw her as quietly repulse him.
His, according to the feminine persuasion, was an irresistible
personality, all black and white and pink, and inevitably suggestive
of past triumphs. She was the only one, I dare swear, who had ever
been able to keep him at arm’s length; and that, perhaps, was the
secret of her hold over him.

Presently Lord Skene came down. His hand was shaking and his lips, as
he spilt out a glass of wine and swallowed it.

“Pugsley asked him if he was saved,” he stuttered, “and he answered
that he’d be damned if he wasn’t. There was no refuting that. Poor old
Maurice!”

Presently he recollected himself, and begged his company to stand not
upon the order of their going, but to acquit him of any suspicion that
such an awful calamity had been imminent.

It was Mr Dalston who reassured and commiserated him in terms of the
readiest and most delicate sympathy.

Sir Maurice Carnac died that night.




 CHAPTER IX.
 I VISIT CLAPHAM

On the second morning after its seizure, the body of the old
ex-governor was carried away in a hearse to Footover Station, thence
to be conveyed to its London home. I had avoided the house in the
interval, being jealous of the least suggestion of intrusion; but I
hung about the drive on the day of the removal, and threw a little
spray of thyme upon the hearse as it passed. So much for a beggar’s
remembrance! He had always accepted me fairly, old prosperous
worldling as he was, on equal terms. Then I put him resolutely out of
my thoughts, and went back to my hermitage, there to mature a little
scheme of adventure which I had had in my mind ever since that moment
when Mr Pugsley had confessed to me the theatre (presumptive) of a
certain event in which I was interested.

An American humourist relates somewhere of a prisoner who had been
confined for thirty years in a loathsome dungeon, when a bright idea
struck him--he opened the window and got out. Now some such
inspiration had seized me all in an instant. Why, in the name of
perversity, was I eating my heart out in an aggrieved solitude, when
simply at will I might be a traveller--a tentative explorer, at
least--and be learning to ride my own destinies instead of being
ridden by them? I had not yet sat, like the mythological gentleman, so
long upon a rock that I had grown to it. I had means, and certainly at
least a definite object in breaking into them. I would wing my test
flight for that Clapham suburb which Pugsley had mentioned, and
examine the ground there, at least, for subsequent exploiting.

A tingle of adventure was in this as well as a vengeful resolution. It
would be something, after all, to breathe a novel air into my stagnant
lungs. I had lived so long remote and self-contained, that the
prospect of even a Cockney suburb was a prospect potential of romance
to me. No one would note my absence, and, if anyone did, how would it
concern me? I was free, and my own master.

And so, the very next morning, valise in hand, I strode away, walking
determinedly, with no effort at concealment. I went out by the wicket,
and took the road to Footover, and thence a train to Waterloo. I was
young, green, gullible, no doubt; but a certain hardness of muscle and
disposition was always at my service and that of others. Few minor
mishaps of the way have befallen me through life, and I was early in
expanding to the practical knowledge which overrides difficulties. I
mention this merely to explain the ease with which my inexperience
resolved these first small problems of self-dependence--my
introduction to the roaring traffics of existence, to the wiles and
hypocrisies of men. I spent that night at an hotel in the Waterloo
Bridge Road; and my initiation into its ways profited me.

Early on the following day I walked through the seethe of the streets
to the Victoria Station, and so, by the local service, reached Clapham
Road. I will not say that I greeted this goal to my adventure,
shapeless as that was, without a certain excitement and hurrying of
the blood. Here, somehow and somewhere, had been enacted the prologue
to my young unprofitable life. This same busy street, going up
southward through a dull avenue of bricks and windows, had housed,
perhaps, the germ of that secret, which, dark and poignant a one as it
appeared to me, was nevertheless of the commonest breed of secrets all
the world over. And, indeed, its setting here seemed prosy
enough--monotonous, respectable, unlovely--houses built for the most
part in the sober chocolate hue of a century earlier; staid rows of
shops; moderate traffic of omnibuses passing back and
forth--everything betokening a condition of decent prosperity.

But, coming presently into a sort of little open place or circus,
where the single road split out into a fan of three, I was
refreshingly struck by some more definite suggestion there of an
atmosphere which had already thinly appealed to me. This atmosphere
was faintly redolent of past coaching days. It breathed from the
tavern doors of the old “Plough Inn,” about which were congregated a
half dozen or so of the very legitimate descendants of Tony Veller,
but fallen, alas! upon degenerate times. The omnibuses, which they
drove in these, stood ranked, yellow and green and red, by the kerb.
When any one of the loiterers, detaching himself rubicundly from his
fellows, would mount a box, and gather the greasy ribbons into his
gloved hands, a whiff of Henry Alken, of his coachmen and stable-tubs
and ostlers, would seem irresistibly borne into one’s senses. So, too,
the rows of white posts and rails, skirting that side of the common
which made for Tooting (Tooting! What suggestion in the very word of
windy horns and galloping mails!), seemed to carry one into far
perspectives of dead and past adventure. It was this way--though I did
not know it then--streamed the enormous traffic of the Derby week, a
page snatched out of the Regency eld, and still keeping the gay
characteristics of that reckless hard-drinking era. But now the road
appeared peaceful enough--a sunny road skirting a great sunny common,
where lazy gipsy men, of the true Romany Chal type, kept a paddock of
donkeys for hire, and little rookeries of crazy tenements marked at
intervals the camping-grounds of dead and gone squatters.

Perhaps it was the result of my reading, or of a purposeless
sentiment, or of Fate--let it be what you will; but I was moved to
take that road, in an easy sauntering mood. Its freedom, its inviting
openness appealed to me. I am no believer in the divinity which hedges
kings or exacts its wages of sin; but I _am_ a believer in Luck. Luck
is the only power, so it seems to me, who can reconcile the discordant
claims of the creeds. Some men--most, one may say--pray to him in
vain. I have an idea that he was the nameless, the unknown God of the
Greeks.

And, no doubt, of his nature, it is fruitless to appeal to Luck.
Perversity is his rule of Godhead--his rules prove the exception. He
smiles not on his votaries, nor frowns on his maligners. Incuriousness
about him is the only way--but by no means the inevitable one--to
attract his notice. Whereby, I really think I became his casual
protégé. In all these days my creed was never other than a creed of
indifferent and independent fatalism--if to fatalism can be applied
such a term of belief. In any case it was near enough to aggravate
Luck into seeking to win me to _his_ worship instead. He made a first
tentative bid for my suffrage on the present occasion.

I had sauntered a half mile, perhaps, up this pleasant old coaching
way, the open common, with its ponds and trees and gorse thickets, to
my right hand, to my left a long rank of houses, comfortable, mellow,
prosperous, having for the great part bushy gardens in front, when my
eye was caught by vision of a cosy tavern, standing across the way in
a copse of elm-trees, and bearing in its every appointment and
circumstance the tokens of a vanished era. The little paddock of turf
in front, planted with the sign of the “Windmill,” and having its own
private posts and rails, round which the drive swept; the wooden horse
trough; the brown of the walls and the gold and grass-green canvas
hung up on them, inviting irresistibly to somebody’s “Entire”--here
was the right Regency travellers’ rest-and-be-thankful. It was mild
bright weather, and a water cart went by sprinkling up an aromatic
scent of dust. I thought of beer, beer in a glass, amber and
sparkling, with a kiss of foam at the lip, and I crossed the road to
the tavern. _And there, over its door, stuck up before my eyes, was
the legend_ “_Richard Gaskett, licensed dealer in beer, tobacco and
spirits._”

A sort of catalepsy seized me, as I looked and gaped. The coincidence,
of course, _might_ be just a coincidence. Yet Gaskett was not what one
might call an everyday name--and then _Richard_ Gaskett, and to occur
in this place of all places!

Suddenly the thought rushed into me, as if a plug had been taken out
of my brain: “Gaskett! Was it, perhaps, after all, my mother’s maiden
name, and my dishonoured grandfather a publican?”

Here, indeed, would be discovery, though not the most flattering
possible to myself. I came out of my trance with a little gasp and
giggle. “_Noblesse oblige_,” I thought again. “Very likely I am suited
above all things to be a potman. But in any case I must set this at
rest.”

I drove open the door of the private bar and entered. There was no one
there but, behind the counter, a plump short man of the conventional
Boniface type. He was a bleary, rather unctuous-looking fellow, with a
mole near his mouth like a faded patch, an obvious wig (both
suggesting anachronisms on an earlier date), and a snow-white apron
bent about his portly form. He, also, it appeared, was in right
succession from the Regency, though he might not have been more than
sixty or so. I looked at him with a fearful speculation, as he lifted
a pot or two to wipe the counter underneath. Was there a family
likeness here? Who could say? Lady Skene was a teetotaller.

“Richard Gaskett,” I murmured, hardly articulate.

“That’s me,” he said, going on with his work.

“That’s _me_, too,” I said, snatching at resolution.

He glanced up a moment.

“O!” he said. “Then that makes three of us.”

“Three?”

“My name, your name--and the other chap’s,” said he. “I shouldn’t a’
thought it in reason, and all to happen here. But it seems it is. Now,
sir?”

The last was an invitation to me to order something. He drew me my
beer from an engine whose handle was worn from his oozy grip.

“Who _is_ the other chap?” I asked him. “Do you mind telling me?”

“Why not?” he said, and crossed his legs and leaned one elbow on the
counter, like a pottle-bodied Leicester Square Shakespeare.

“Leastways,” he continued, “I will and I won’t, and I can and I can’t,
seeing as how he was christened, _if_ he were, a matter of what--why
it must be twenty year ago.”

“Who was christened?” I asked.

“The other one,” he answered. “Let me think now.”

He crossed and tapped together ruminative the fat forefinger of each
hand, as if he were numbering up a score of notches in his memory.

“I misremember the exact date,” he said suddenly: “but the old lady
she stands as clear as a Pepper’s Ghost in my mind. Mother Carey they
called her; and she lived in White Square down there; and every
morning, reg’lar as the postman, she’d come in here at eleven o’clock
for her gill of gin and peppermint, like a very particler old duchess.
She’d been on the stage in her time, I understood, and wasn’t to be
put off with anything lower than the genuine London Old Tom. God bless
me! How she comes back!”

He basked a little, in a glow of memory, before he continued
luminously:

“I recollect the very day she bought it of me--just as plain I do as
if it was print.”

“Bought what?” I ventured.

“My name, sir,” he said. “She come in here, as excited as Punch; and
we got talking together. ‘Mr Gaskett,’ she says, ‘I want a name.’
‘Well,’ I answers, ‘there’s plenty agoing for choice. What do you want
it for?’ ‘For a babby,’ she says, ‘as hasn’t got one of his own.’
‘O-ho!’ I says: ‘that’s the game is it? Well, shall I sell you mine
for a pint?’ ‘Done,’ she says; and done it was. She’d a superstition,
she said, about giving him one that wasn’t his by right of birth or
purchase, and that settled the matter. I don’t know if he was
christened that way. If he was, you’re the third; and that makes it
funny.”

Not so odd, nevertheless, I thought, by two-thirds of its oddity, if
the tremendous suspicion sprung suddenly into my mind were justified.
But anyhow it was a certain relief to find that this beery Amphitryon
was not my grandfather.

“And you--you never saw your godson, so to call him?” I asked.

“Not I,” said Mr Gaskett stoutly. “But, whoever he was, he might ha’
been worse called--that I _will_ say. I never see the old lady again
neither, and that fixes it in me. Now you yourself, sir. I suppose you
was called after your father?”

I detected a sudden insolent curiosity in his eye. To be sure, what
with my age and inquisitiveness, there seemed a certain coincidence
here. But I kept my nerve, and put his question aside with another.

“Where _is_ this White Square?”

“Down yonder,” he said coolly--“off the High Street. But she won’t be
living there now.”

“Won’t she?” I answered, as coolly for my part. “But I don’t know that
it matters to me whether she is or isn’t.”

“Nor to me,” said the landlord, moving away with a sudden repudiation
of me and all my concerns. I had offended him, and was not sorry to
have done so. He scowled at me balefully as I finished my beer and
left the bar.

Once outside, I retraced my steps, with a very sombre mind. I had an
overpowering suspicion that there was only one legitimate Richard
Gaskett after all. The other two had been resolved into one, and he
with nothing but a “pint-pot” claim to the title. Well, so far so
good, at least, for romance. Luck had brought me something.

I strolled down again by way of the posts and the rails and the busy
old-air circus. Going for a short distance down the High Street
beyond, I encountered a policeman and questioned him.

“White Square?” said he; and wheeling stolidly, signified the very
passage by which he was standing.

I looked down the gully curiously. It went, on a basis of trampled
filth, into an open space a hundred yards beyond, whence came a sound
of quarrelling women and squalling children.

“O!” I said. “Do you happen to know if a Mrs Carey lives there?”

He conned me a moment, as if speculating on my possible purpose in
asking; then hailed authoritatively an ancient inhabitant who was at
that moment shuffling up the lane.

“You, Mullins! Anybody of the name of Carey living in the Square?”

Mr Mullins leered up, fondling his hands obsequiously. The privileges
of this Alsatia, it was evident, ended at the passage mouth. He was an
obscene-looking old rascal, with a face like a half-blind sheep, and
the gaunt framework of once powerful shoulders.

“Carey is it, sir?” said he--“Carey, your honour? I remimber a lady of
the name. Mither Carey we’d be afther callin’ her; but she’s gone long
sin.”

“When gone?” demanded the officer.

“It’ll be a matther of twinty year, maybe,” said the old man. “My
mimiry’s bad.”

“That’s it,” I put in hurriedly, seeing the law about to protest.
“It’s of her I want to know.”

Mr Mullins considered me astutely from under his lids. Honour amongst
thieves, sure enough; but wasn’t there such a thing as a statute of
limitations to the duties one owed? Besides, a reward might be in the
air. I pride myself so far on my worldly precocity, that I tipped him,
moderately, on the spot. The act refreshed his memory wonderfully.

“I recall she came into money, did the ould lady,” he said; “and tuk
herself away. There was a daughter she’d be owning; a fine handsome
girl, that had her throuble and married a lord despite. He saw her on
the stage, twas said, a young jule of a thing, and lost his heart to
her. But there was a parson in them days up at the tin chapel
yander--Pugsley was his name, the heretic--and he made her
religious--Musha! the scoundrel--and brought her ould lord to terms,
and married them.”

He stopped, and covertly bit the coin I had given him to test it.

“And what became of the mother?” I asked, seeing that he proffered no
more.

“She tuk herself arrf, your honour,” said he.

“You don’t know where?”

“No, by the powers, I don’t; and that’s the thruth,” he said; and
indeed there could be no purpose in his lying.

Then I had only one other question to ask, and out it came:

“Do you remember who was her partner in that--that little trouble you
mentioned?”

Mr Mullins leered horribly.

“There was quare tales,” he said--“I recollect that same. One would
call him here, and another there; and a third would be whispering of a
master in the Grammar School beyant. But that was just talking. Mother
Carey could be close, when she wanted.”

“What was _his_ name--the master’s?”

“It’s clane gone from me,” said Mr Mullins, blankly.

“One might trace it out at the school itself, perhaps?”

I turned to the policeman.

“Gone, too,” he said. “It was all closed before my time. There’s shops
there now.”

So I was temporarily baffled; but, as, having invented something
plausible to the men to account to them for my curiosity, I went on my
way, I was taking a fierce oath in my heart that not stone nor briar,
nor water nor fire should turn me now from a pursuit to which
accident, or Luck if you like, had already hallooed me so promisingly.
If this Mother Carey lived, she was my quarry. But where and how to
find her!




 CHAPTER X.
 EDITORIAL

The mention of stone and quarry by Mr Richard Gaskett fits
significantly enough here into the context of sinister events. They
are to be found nowhere in more suggestive juxtaposition than in the
island of Portland, where the great prison is.

One fair November morning the gates of this terrific stronghold were
opened to discharge a time-expired convict. The man walked plump out
of Hades into Elysium. Like many another expurgatus, he bore the scars
of his cleansing indelibly printed on him. The governor of Hades, it
must be remembered, fathered the Furies, and the business of the
Furies is to lash, lash, irrespective of any consideration of moral
deserts.

This prisoner had, for full twenty years, been persistently clamorous
of his innocence--at first in Italian; later in Italian English;
finally in a dialect hybrid of English and despair. He had forgotten
his tongue, his personality, his meaning in the world: only the sense
of a gigantic wrong remained with him.

For some time prior to his discharge he had been permitted to resume
himself, to grow his hair and beard, so that he might never protest
that he had been restored to existence a marked man. His hair and
beard came white where they had been black; his face was the drawn
grey face of an old man; he could resume nothing of his past whatever,
not even that deadly conviction of injury, for that indeed had dwelt
with him throughout. Save for it, he walked out of the gates reborn to
age, not youth.

They had been glad enough to get rid of him. Even prison officialdom
grows weary of kicking back into its kennel the caged and struggling
wolf, so helplessly barred from his natural diet, and so naturally
seeking an escape to it. This Antonio Geoletti had made more than one
such attempt, and been ruinously flogged for it. He had suffered
darkness, famine, solitary confinement, more than reason, his own or
others, could comfortably consider; yet what was to be done with a man
who could not be induced to accept an error of the law--if such,
indeed, had been committed--with an accommodating philosophy? As a
convict--which was solely how officialdom was called upon to regard
him--he had been unspeakable--a very bad egg indeed. His good marks
were nil; his livery of disgrace, when he was summoned to doff it, was
still of the most conspicuous colour--the bright yellow which betokens
the irreclaimable standard; it had been to the official discomfiture,
no less than to his own, that his conduct had obliged the law to exact
of him his full term of punishment. And in the end, the only profit
was his: he crept out of Hades an unticketed man, free to pursue,
unwatched, the solitary purpose that survived to him--vengeance on the
authors of his unheard-of sufferings.

The question remained, were those beings still in being? Antonio never
even put that question to himself. Vengeance is timeless. For all
those twenty years of elsewise obliteration, the lust for it was as
red in him at this day as when he had heard himself convicted on false
evidence of a heinous offence, and had vainly striven, a foreigner and
incoherent, to explain to the Court the real purport of a villain’s
traducing. He could not believe for an instant that the God of his
superstition had let the work of his legitimate hands be anticipated
by another. No; the men remained to him somewhere. Only to find them!

I do not ask your sympathy for this Antonio Geoletti. If he had been
convicted unjustly, he had been purposing a crime at the moment which
merited a just conviction. He may have got his deserts indirectly;
though, to be sure, there was no automatic standard for apportioning
its exact term of punishment to either offence. The measures of the
law are not even comparative measures, and many men all over the land
are suffering under widely different sentences for a like crime. Only,
self-consciousness of one evil-doing does not reconcile one to
punishment for an imaginary other. That is human nature; and for all
the moral purposes of this record, Antonio felt himself the divinely
commissioned, though long wickedly withheld, minister of retribution.
But at last his time was come.

It was the sense, the indelible haunting of this obligation which
upheld him through all the terrific experience of his first
re-emergence into the arena of living things. The pale November
sunlight smote upon his eyes like the blast from a sudden-opened
furnace; the speech of free people struck him as almost a sacrilege,
being uttered unconcerned in this boundless temple of God’s own
liberty; he blinked and staggered like a disentombed miner.

The prison frowned behind him; the island with its quarries smiled
before. How often had he cursed those indurate blocks, symbols of the
system to which he appealed in vain--thrown down his ringing tools
upon them in a monstrous rage of helplessness, and turned to find a
warder’s gun barrel at his head! Now they lay in the mist as soft as
fairy bales, all their sinister weight drawn out of them, objects
potentially suggestive of the noble fabrics in which each was to have
its place. He heard a robin singing, and his eyes came wet with tears.
Sobbing, God help him, like a woman, and always, and never changing,
with that dream of blood in his heart, he crept out into the world.

How beautiful a thing it was, apart from its people! He had forgotten
how soft the sunlight lay on it, how green the grass could grow, how
fathomless was the blue of heaven. Limit and close obstruction were
all he had known for so long. Even the daily tramp to the quarries had
entailed a guard on speech and sight. Now he was free to gaze to
drunkenness; to sing, if he would.

Yet it was a world no newer to him relatively than when he had last
left it a double decade ago. He had not awakened like Rip Van Winkle
to the repossession of his own. It was England the strange island
which, in those far-distant days, he had scarcely crossed the Channel
to see, and exploit, before he had been caught into the toils of its
inexplicable laws, and put away to rage out his heart in an age-long
confinement for a crime which he had never committed. Once, he
recalled, he had been an astute Piedmontese rascal, a guide and porter
at an hotel in the High Alps, who had suddenly, in bad times, elected
to travel, with the purpose to sell to a certain person a certain
secret, of which Fortune had made him the possessor. That was all done
with; only the sense of the blood-lust, of the inherent vendetta,
existed to identify him with that old Antonio Geoletti.

For the rest, he had seen so little of this England, that a twenty
years’ hiatus in its history made no difference to him whatever. It
was no stranger to him now than it had been then. He had found useful
compatriots in it; he would find them, or others like them, again. One
or two he had encountered in the course of his long punishment. He had
their approximate addresses, and the addresses of a score of English
“pals”--scoundrels, whose sympathies had naturally gravitated towards
one who had not only been imprisoned for breaking the law, but who had
broken over and over again the laws of imprisonment.

But he did not need these at present. One and all he dismissed them
from his mind. To seek any out would be, he knew, to attract the
attention of the police to himself. And he desired only to steal away
and be forgotten--to pursue, unobserved and unsuspected, the single
deadly purpose which haunted his soul. White, haggard, unmanned in all
else but this, he might, as he stole on his way, have passed for the
very personification of an inhuman Nemesis.

In his hugging and caressing of his monomania, it occurred to him
presently that Fate had at least vouchsafed to him one compensation
for his sufferings. They had disguised him effectively from
recognition by his enemies. Who would think to identify this grizzled
time-worn beast with the vigorous rogue who had been haled from the
dock to a living death? He wondered sometimes that his enemies had
never foreseen this crisis to their villainy--late, but inevitable in
its arrival. Yet perhaps they had foreseen it, and calculated
contemptuously upon the thousand possible accidents of time, or at
least upon the taming influence of penal servitude. If that were so,
that were well. He would not for all the world have his purpose
suspected or provided against. Craft--a patient, unsleeping,
unobtrusive craft--must guide all his footsteps henceforth.

He had some money in his pocket, hardly earned, but still in human
justice not withheld. The last thing they wanted was to see him back
at Portland. He would nurse every penny of it as if it were a jewel.
Beyond this he had his railway ticket to London. It was there he
wanted to go, he had said, and thither they had sent him. But not to
Soho: no more of Soho for him!

 * * * * * * * *

One wintry afternoon, a certain doctor came striding back from his
rounds to his house in Doddington Grove, Kennington. It was a highly
respectable street, with substantial dwellings on either side, and a
double plantation of lime-trees on the pavement in front to justify to
the world its title. The doctor was of a brisk, impatient manner, and
he opened his door with a latch-key as if the second the act lost him
were a second made unprofitable. Once inside, he turned up the gas in
the hall--it was foggy twilight without--and hurriedly examined a
slate, for engagements made during his absence. While he was reading,
hat on head, his housemaid appeared.

“There’s a man waiting in the consulting-room, sir,” she said.

The doctor nodded, pondered a case or two, put the slate down, and
went to his visitor.

“Hey!” he barked. “What’s your name?”

The man, who had risen on his’ entrance, stood motionless before him,
his left hand pressed heavily upon his right, which, thickly bandaged,
it seemed, he held against his chest. The fingers of the exposed hand
were scarred and stunted; the face of the man was grey and rigid as a
corpse’s--showing a grin of teeth, too; only the eyes in the face were
piercingly alive like a crouching cat’s. He muttered something
inaudible.

“What!” snapped the doctor. “Speak out. I can’t hear you.”

Again the stranger murmured.

“Hey!” said the doctor testily. “Can’t you speak louder? What is it?
An accident--something the matter with your hand?”

He was of a quick nervous temperament, and harassed with much
business. The figure before him was decent and respectable enough, but
quite uneloquent of any sumptuary promise. And time with him meant
money. He was opening his lips to speak again, and pretty summarily,
to finish, when something in the stranger’s aspect, or attitude,
arrested him. In an instant he had leapt, and, after a brief vicious
struggle, had wrenched a knife from the man’s right hand. The apparent
bandage on that had merely covered, it seemed, a deadly purpose.
Geoletti, disarmed, stood quivering slightly, but otherwise impassive.

“I see,” said the doctor softly--“I see.” Watchful of the other, he
glanced at the blade he had secured. It was a waspish sting of a
thing, keen-tempered, folding into a handle which, when needed, became
a hilt.

“Meant for me?” he inquired, lifting his brows. When bearded by a
patient, he became frost and whipcord.

“No, no--not.” The words were spoken low, but distinct enough at last.

“For whom, then?”

The tip of Geoletti’s tongue travelled between his lips. He was
evidently trying to master the reaction from a tremendous strain, and
at the same time to find speech to lay the suspicion of any.

“For no one--no, that is the truth,” he whispered out at length.

The doctor tapped the blade in his hand peremptorily.

“A lie! Have you ever seen me before?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been to this house before?”

He dismissed the coming denial with a flick of his hand. His sharp
merciless penetrativeness had its instant effect. The Italian
responded to it automatic, like a close echo to the tap of a drum.

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“When? How long ago?”

“Twenty year.”

The doctor was always one of those lucky downright people, who, quite
scornful of the laws of defamation when they find a man meriting their
chastisement, go through life speaking their minds with impunity.

“That was when my predecessor lived here,” he said shortly. “He was a
drunken blackguard and worse--a disgrace to his calling. It has taken
me fifteen years to build up a practice on the ruins of his infamy.
His name was Blague. Was it him you knew?”

“Yes.”

“And meant to knife?”

“Yes.”

“I daresay. What had he done to you?”

The stranger’s eyes seemed suddenly to roll in his head. He clasped
his hands convulsively to his breast. Words come from him in a broken
stream:

“It was in this ver’ room--yes. I arrive by appointiment to meet wonn
ozer--a zhentleman, yes, that I want to see--ver’ much I want to see
him. I have a little word I wish to spik to him; and he send me
message to com’ here, and he will follow to me. He not arrive when I
arrive--no. I told to wait for him in zis room; and still it is a long
time, and he not come. Zen presently there enter a yong woman, a
paziente of Blague, and he shut us in togezer; and all quite sudden
she begin to scream and tear herself. Then Blague he rush in, and I am
accuse; and the coppar he com’ and drag me to the stazione, and I am
accuse; and again before the judge I am accuse. And I try to spik the
truth of what I com’ to Blague’s house for, and I am told it
nozzing--no bearing on the case whatever, except it show me bad
character. And the yong woman she swear against me--lies, lies, all;
and I sent to prison for twen-ty year--for twen-ty year I sent. Zen I
know zat Blague and ze zhentleman make zis op togezer, so to get rid
of me; and I swear vengeance on zem. For twen-ty year though I wait,
it sall com’ at last.”

The doctor was shutting up the dagger-knife very coolly as he
listened.

“Not to one of them, at least, my friend,” he said. “Blague’s been
dead of the horrors this ten years, and a good riddance to him.”

“Dead!”

The word seemed to stun the man.

“Yes, dead.”

“And ze ozer?”

“I know nothing of him, and don’t want to know.”

“His name----”

“I don’t wish to hear it. That’ll do. Here, take back your knife.”

Geoletti received the weapon in silence.

“You no help me?” he said presently in a slow voice.

“Certainly not. I become no party to this business. Besides, what were
you here for?--blackmail it smells like. I daresay you got your
deserts. Now be off with you.”

He made a rapid step, opened the door, and imperiously beckoned the
man out. Geoletti, after a moment’s hesitation, stole softly into the
hall, and disappeared thence into the fog.

“H’m,” thought the doctor, returning: “victim or not, there’s been
black work there. I shouldn’t grudge that knife, I think, in the ribs
of one of Blague’s confederates. Like as not he’ll get it; but I’ve
neither business nor inclination to interfere. So far as I’m
concerned, the matter’s ended.”

 * * * * * * * * *

There was a board “To Let” up before a certain house in Eaton Square.
Both the board, and the house which it advertised, appeared
particularly decayed and out of repair. There were even windows broken
in the latter; and what with its dingy walls, and flaking stucco, and
the vision of a wrecked venetian blind or two dropping forlorn slats
across the inner obscurity, the house looked actually frowsy for such
a neighbourhood. Thither one morning came Geoletti and stealthily
examined the legend painted on the board. “Apply to Foot & Liddel,
Poultry,” he read with difficulty; and straightway, or as direct as
persistent inquiry and answer could help him, betook himself to the
house agent’s offices in the city. He was about to enter, when his
hand on the varnished door caught his attention. After an instants
thought, he withdrew, bought and donned a pair of cheap woollen gloves
from a shop hard by, and returned to the swing doors.

A clerk at the broad counter within accepted him with an encouraging
courtesy. It was the rule at Foot & Liddels. On the principle that
dirt may hold much gold in solution, unexpected affluence was often
found in the most unpromising-looking customers. Grubbiness, in
consequence, was no bar to the firm’s affability. The youngest
employé could quote of his knowledge the instance of a would-be
client, who had shed fleas on the order-book all the time he was
cheapening a marble mansion in Park Lane. He had had a nose like a
tapir’s, and might have been held for a first example of gold dust in
deposit, if he had exhibited any sign whatever of its ever having been
washed out of him.

Geoletti asked if he might have an order to view the house in Eaton
Square, and was answered, “Certainly,” by the polite young gentleman
whom he accosted. Here, probably enough to the auctioneering view, was
one of those self-made _contadini_, who, like the Brothers Gatti, had
turned, in the profitable processes of time, a little ice-cream shop
into a gilded and bemarbled saloon. Moreover the house in Eaton Square
had for long, and for some inexplicable reason, remained a drug in the
market. It would be a good stroke of business to let it to an Italian
parvenu.

Geoletti, being asked for his name and address, gave both glibly,
without a hint of premeditation. He was Antonio Geoletti of Portland;
a quarry master, he said. Not the shadow of a chuckle in himself
answered to this _espièglerie_ as he received his ticket. He looked
across steadily at the young gentleman.

“Who own ze house? Who it belong to?” he asked.

“There is no tenant there at present,” said the clerk. “A Mr Dalston
is the landlord.”

“Yes, yes,” said the Italian, a trifle too eagerly. “Can I see him--ze
landlord--personally?”

The clerk became a little cold.

“We act for him, sir. You can approach him through us.”

“Ah! Zen he live--som’wheres near?”

“I am not at liberty to give his address. We are in a confidential
position in these matters. If you like to write, we will forward your
letter with pleasure.”

Again baffled!

Geoletti considered gloomily: then shook his head.

“Wait, while I see ze house,” he said; and walked off with his order.
It directed him, for the key, to a caretaker on the opposite side of
the Square. The woman offered to come with him; but he insisted on
being alone. It was with a queer fury of the blood that he mounted the
unwashed steps, and prepared to enter the deserted house.

The door, stuck to its lintel from disuse, snapped open with a dusty
jar. Turning as he closed it, Geoletti saw an addressed letter lying
among a litter of circulars and advertisements on the floor. He took
it up, and read its superscription--M. Dalston, Esq., Eaton Square,
London. Was there a possible way here to the knowledge he desired?
Pondering a few moments, he suddenly woke to action, left the house,
closing the door behind him, and, with the letter, found his way to
the nearest post office.

“I find zis behind ze door--zere,” said he, pointing to the address on
the envelope.

The clerk, who received the letter from him, glanced from it to him
and back again suspiciously.

“Don’t understand,” he said. “_Where_ did you find it?”

“Zere,” said Antonio. “I go, wiz an order, to view an empty ’ouse, and
zis have fall through the letter-box.”

The clerk whispered with another, nodded understandingly, and threw
the letter on a shelf.

“All right” he said. “Should have been readdressed,” and prepared to
go on with his work. That, one might say, was the post-office servant
all over.

Antonio, patient and unoffended, essayed a hopeless question.

“Should be readdress?” he asked. “To where, zen?”

The clerk sniggered aloud to his next companion, a young lady, one of
the newly emancipated sisterhood with a nose already above her
station.

“That’s not your business,” said she. “We’ll see to it,” and the two
ignored him ostentatiously.

Baffled again, and yet again!

Geoletti went back to the house. This time he made a thorough
examination of it. It appeared just a repository for old dust and
echoes. The only living things that inhabited there were mice and
spiders; and what they thrived upon the Lord knew. The nozzles of the
scullery taps were thick with brassy scum; the edges of the broken
window-panes were yellow and blunted with the weather; there was an
acrid deserted smell about everything. It was a large house, a
property suggestive of handsome returns to its landlord; yet the
atmosphere of it seemed costive with uninhabitableness. There are many
such places in London, which, having every apparent advantage of
position and accommodation, fail and fail to find a tenant. Certain
ghosts, perhaps, are their bodiless caretakers; and these may resent
the intrusion of their possible ousters. They do not want the scent of
their hauntings crossed by lovelier and more desirable spirits.

Antonio went wandering, with a dull half aimlessness, up and down.
Presently, in a small ground-floor room to the rear, his foot kicked
against some paper. He wrenched up the rusty bar of the shutters, and
let in a flood of squalid light.

The thing he had encountered was a torn catalogue. He stooped and
secured it. It was a thickish quarto of flimsy paper, a long
dictionary of houses, many illustrated with plates, advertised for
sale or lease by the firm of Foot & Liddel.

A hope gripped him. Rapidly and hungrily, moistening his right-hand
second finger, he swept over the pages. Suddenly, a mark arrested his
eager review of them. It was pencilled against an entry, describing a
property, the Lone Farm, situated in the neighbourhood of Market
Grazing, Hampshire. The place was described as desirable, and cheap.
Geoletti looked all round the room, noted its time-stained paper and
ragged skirting, and came back to the catalogue. Then, very carefully
and comprehensively, he went through the whole book page by page, and
convinced himself that there was no other marked entry whatever.

Very jealously, then, he extracted the page containing this solitary
clue, folded, and put it into the pocket which contained his folded
knife. Two secret things, potential, possibly, of retribution. There
was at least the hope.

He went quietly about the house, effacing every sign of his
examination; then passed out into the street, crossed the Square, and
returned the key to its custodian.

Thenceforth he was seen no more in London.




 CHAPTER XI.
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.
 THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

When I got back to my woodland hermitage--which I regained, as I had
foreseen I should, without my absence from the house having excited
any comment--I put up, in a little frenzy of mockery, an altar to the
God of Luck. I drew a picture of a clergyman (Mr Pugsley it was meant
for) christening a baby out of a pint pot, and turning to demand of a
villainous old pew-opener (my imaginary presentment of Mother Carey),
who stood beside, the infant’s proposed title. The question, within a
scroll, issued from his lips, and the answer--“Richard Gaskett, godson
of the publican of that name”--from hers. I had bought in Footover, on
my way back, a bottle of gin and one of peppermint essence; and these
I clasped round with a single label bearing the motto “In vino
veritas,” and stood them on a little table underneath the drawing,
which I nailed to the wall. No one but Miss Christmas--barring my
stepfather on a rare occasion--had ever invaded, or was like to
invade, my snuggery; and, if anyone did, I was reckless about
consequences. Then I sat down to consider, over a pipe, my present
position and gains.

These amounted to something at least. The discovery that my mother,
and my mother’s mother (I could hardly bring myself to acknowledge the
old bibulous harpy for my grandmother) had both been on the stage; the
discovery that their name was Carey; the discovery that the elder had
“come into money”--been pensioned off, belike, by Lord Skene--and that
the younger had “found religion” at the hands of Mr Pugsley of the tin
tabernacle--all these little enlightenments and confirmations made a
certain definite “grounding,” on which I might hope to embroider that
web which should catch Lady Skene’s feet tripping. True, the main
object of my venture was not realised. Yet even there Luck was shaping
me out a promise. An usher at the Grammar School!--that villain who
had taken base advantage of a poor ingénue’s warmth over his
reformation! It was as much in reason as anything else. That a
pedagogue _could_ be something less than immaculate, quote Eugene
Aram, not to speak of the Stockwell schoolmaster who chopped up his
wife and put her in a box. But, whether it were a pedagogue or his
pupil, a learned Theban or a scented puppy, I was confident that time,
served by cunning and caution, would betray him to me soon or late. I
had learned much already; and knowledge is always an investment which
pays itself automatically at compound interest.

Nor were my discoveries the only profit I had brought back from my
journey. A firmer confidence in myself; a more obdurate determination;
a certain newly realised sense of humour--these were to be included in
the gains. I felt a reinvigorated sense of mastery, a larger grasp of
the world; I felt an insolent sense of security in Luck’s favouritism;
I felt somehow like a weasel that watches a rickyard from cover. How I
could make the rats squeal and run if once I elected to show myself in
the open! I was in a very detestable humour, that is the truth.

On the morning after my return I took a long stroll round about the
skirts of the estate, beginning with the “bare ruined choirs” of the
woodlands, and coming round by Hags Lane, where the hawthorns had been
stripped stark by the wrecking winds. Winter, with all its moan and
mystery, shivered upon the air; the sheep on the pastures seemed to
crop, with haunted ears pricked to it; there was a stiffness as of
dread expectation over all the land.

To the many figures which danced and crowded into my mind throughout
that lonely tramp, the figure of the girl whom I had hated and scorned
would sometimes, my scorn despite, add itself. It even became, all at
once, a persistent demon, thrusting itself forward, pleading for a
monopoly of my attention. An impudent, outrageous claim. What was the
creature to me, or I to her, in this play of “leading parts”? My
concern was with the real actors and actresses--not with the skipping
figurante, who came to fill the interludes of scene-shifting. This
Ira, good Lord, of the Hebraic name! Was she a “watcher,” as her name
implied? Perhaps she was; perhaps--all in an instant the thought
struck me: what if she were Lady Skene’s spy--the agent of a guilty
conscience, deputed to discover the reasons for my withdrawal from its
control?

The thought was so sudden, so ineffable, that it made me gasp. She had
been down to my lodge during my absence, that I knew. The signs of her
woman’s handiwork there were unmistakable. I will even admit that my
instant recognition of them had given me an odd little thrill,
compound of triumph and something like pity. That she should have
continued true to her principles of expiation, though I was not there
to witness, had gone some little way towards forcing from me a
grudging belief in her sincerity. But now!--if there was all the time
a method in her humility!

On the thought, the memory of my altar came into my mind. Had I been
already fool enough, in my boasted emancipation, to give my case away
to a spy? I hurried, with all speed, back to my den--and there was the
girl standing before the picture.

She had on a blue-sprigged apron with a tucker. A broom was in her
hand, and her furs and jacket were thrown upon a chair. She turned
round instantly upon hearing me, and her face flew pink with some
sudden emotion.

“Richard!” she said, pointing to the caricature. “What on earth is the
meaning of that?”

“Go on with your work,” I answered savagely. “I shouldn’t have come
back if I’d known you were here.”

She bit her underlip, but obeyed at once. I sat down, watching her
morosely from under my lids as she swept, and dusted, and laid the
cloth for lunch--all silently. Then I called her to me.

“Come here.”

She left the table and stood before me.

“Kneel down.”

She knelt at my feet, looking up, and panting a little. I took her
soft chin in my hand; and she did not move; and I kept her so, glaring
into her young eyes.

“You are very loyal to Lady Skene, are you not?” I said. “You told me
so, you know.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Were you instructed by her to take this means to come and spy on me?”

“No. How could you think it!”

“If you cry, I shall turn you out at once. You aren’t watching me,
then, to find out what I’m up to?”

“No, indeed.”

“Why do you come here?”

“I’m so sorry for you.”

“Is that all?”

“And so anxious to earn your pardon.”

“You needn’t worry yourself about that. I don’t take the tricks of
such midges as you into my philosophy.”

“But you haven’t forgiven me.”

“I don’t consider you at all. Are you offering to cry again?”

“No, I’m not--I’m not really.”

“Well, what did you make of that picture?”

“Nothing whatever.”

“Its a picture of my christening--the christening of Richard Gaskett.
I got my name out of a pint pot. That old woman’s my grandmother.
She’s fond of gin and peppermint; that’s why I put the bottles
underneath. You know I’ve been away?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my journey was useful to me. I found out things. Would you like
to go and tell Lady Skene about the picture, or do I come first in
your loyalty?”

“You do.”

Her answer took me like a sting, sweet and piercing. I don’t know what
madness, what revolt was in my blood; but I bent down suddenly and
kissed her lips. And then, having done it, the instant revulsion came,
and I thrust her rudely from me. She sank back, sitting on her heels,
and hid her face in her hands.

“There, go!” I cried, jumping to my feet. “I took that, not for
myself, but--damn it! don’t you know that Lord Skene disapproves of
your coming here? I told him you came by your own will, not mine; and
if your will isn’t his, he can just look after his own. But you take
the risk of any consequences if you come. I warn you, I’m master here,
and I kiss or ill treat whom I choose. Do you understand? You’re a
‘unique young party’ according to him, and you’ve been kissed by the
grandson of that old pottle-pot yonder. How do you like the thought?
You’ve bound yourself slave to something worse than you expected,
haven’t you! But I’ll manumit you. Take your furs and go, before you
find out how dangerous I can be! Do you hear? Go, while there’s time!”

I was half beside myself with rage and scorn for my act. I had never
in all my life kissed woman before, and this first fierce contact
smote me like a blasphemy against my clean youth. Nor had I had in my
mind at the moment a thought of all that rage of justification for my
deed which had afterwards suggested itself. It had been just the leap
of a mad impulse, born of the girl’s soft and emotional submission.
And, having torn that unresisting flower, I was ashamed.

I went and leaned against the mantelshelf and turned my eyes from her.
She did not rise at once; but presently I heard her go and take her
things from the chair. Then, somehow, I hoped that she would dwell
just the little minute necessary for putting them on. I suppose the
bully’s instinct is always to keep by him the thing he has just
injured, perhaps in the sneaking hope that it will justify in some way
his brutality to himself. He hates the frightened thing for trying to
escape from him, silently and tremblingly after the deed.

But Miss Christmas did not linger that minute. She swept up her jacket
and furs, as I knew by the sound, and ran with them out into the cold.
A wild impulse to stride and stop her surged up in me. I even followed
her footsteps into the passage; but there I checked myself, and flung
to the open door with a resounding slam that must have caught her
heart for a moment. Then I went back to my room, biting a savage curse
between my teeth.

I was furious with myself; furious with the girl; furious with the
means I had seized to misrepresent my feelings towards her. Why had
she put herself in my way, just to awaken the beast in me? She had no
proper pride of womanhood; and, if for that only, was beneath my
notice. And yet I had kissed her--why? because I despised her; and all
the time the fragrance of that contact hung on my lips like a sweet
poison.

I could eat no lunch, I was so angry and disturbed. And all the
afternoon I sat idly with a book, affecting to read, but seeing
nothing on the page. Dusk came on, and with it sharp squalls of wind
and sleet that brought the dead leaves whirling about my windows. My
fire had gone out, and I sat and shivered, not finding the energy to
relight it. It grew uncanny sitting there in the white gloom, not a
living soul within a half mile of me, the deep and sodden woodland all
around. The storm, with its loaded flakes, rushed upon the glass in
swoops and charges; and, when it fell back, I always seemed to hear a
small and urgent whisper rallying it. Sometimes, I felt tinglingly, it
would burst in, and then--what would come with it! And at that very
instant, glancing up, I saw a face pressed against the glass.

It had risen, swiftly and silently, like death in the night--a
horrible sinister face, I thought it, in the first shock of discovery.
The eyes were searchingly alive; the upper lip was lifted, showing the
teeth; the mist of its breath shrank and dilated on the pane as the
wind took it. I held my own, staring in a sort of awful trance. The
eyes in the motionless head whipped to and fro, as if hurrying to
penetrate and devour the substance of the room’s every shadow.
Fortunately the one in which I sat was too dense for their resolving.
I congratulated myself on my dead hearth, though, for whatever reason,
I was shivering all through. But over and over again the eyes passed
me by, and I knew that I was not yet discovered.

And then suddenly they were gone, and I heard stealthy steps coming
round by the door; and I rose quietly, with a shamefaced oath for my
cowardice, and waited to see what would happen. Reassurance as to the
human nature of the apparition had broken all the spell; and now I
feared nothing but to be balked of recognition in my turn.

The man tried the door, gently but unavailingly, for I had bolted it,
and then in a moment I heard him going away through the woodland. At
that I stole upstairs, and, peering warily from my bedroom window,
made out his figure pressing up the path towards the “Baby’s Garden.”
And even in that first glance I recognised him. It was the man
Dalston, who had been of the company on the night of old Carnac’s
seizure.

I stuck there a little, smitten with astonishment. What on earth was
the fellow doing here, prying, and using the place as if it were his
own? Then, too, I had not on that one occasion read into his face any
such suggestion of evil--naked and incontinent--as it had seemed to
convey to me through the window. On the contrary, it had appeared a
fine and handsome face, bold, if bold at all, with the natural
self-reliance of a favoured worldling. But, no doubt, my overwrought
fancy was to account for the present impression.

It could not account, however, for his presence here--or could it? An
idea, half whimsical, half stunning, seized me. I had heard of
plausible rogues imposing themselves on quiet neighbourhoods,
insinuating themselves into the leading society, and then, their plans
having matured, disappearing with the plate and family jewels of Lord
this or Sir thingummy that. Was it possible that Mr Dalston was such
an impostor? His quiet arrival in the district; his renting of that
remote uncanny farm; his strange silent wife--or accomplice; finally
the vision of him here, stealing up through the woods--for what? All
these things smote me with a double edge of suspicion. Possibly he was
even now on his way to examine the house with a view to its
burglarious entry. Whatever the extravagant thought was worth, it
decided me. In another instant I was down and on his heels. The wind
and the flying sleet, no less than my long experience of the way,
served me well. He had no suspicion, I felt sure, of the shadow
creeping in his wake, slipping from tree to tree, taking advantage of
every shriller whine of the squall to decrease the distance between
itself and its quarry.

He went up unhesitating towards the “Baby’s Garden,” though often
having to battle his way with his head down; and having reached there,
came to a halt, leaning against a tree. And in the same moment I had
slipped undetected into my eyrie of espial in the withered ash.

He was then so close to me that I could hear him panting from his hard
ascent. But even with our arrival the squall had passed, and the
little close pleasance was full of nothing but cold dripping sounds.
That was my Luck again. It had muffled me in wind and rain while I
needed privacy, and withdrawn them only when I needed nothing but
clear hearing and clear vision.

Now I had leisure to wonder how, if secret watching were his business,
this Mr Dalston made no nearer approach to the house, which, indeed,
stood nowhere within the range of this part of the garden. But he
showed no intention of moving farther, and, for all the wet crust of
snow under his feet, established himself serenely where he stood,
flicking his boot with his cane, and breathing softly into the air a
little sentimental ditty about moons and lagoons. And then, all of a
sudden, the figure of a woman had appeared on the opposite side of the
garden, and, after a moment’s hesitation, was coming hurrying towards
him.

Now, at that, I was not, at the first, so shocked as amused, because,
it seemed, I had been stalking for a burglary what appeared to be just
a vulgar tryst. But what was my astonishment upon discovering, on its
nearer approach, that the figure was that of Lady Skene.

The man did not move at all until she was close upon him; and then he
only detached himself a step or two from his support, and laughed
gently as he gave his boot a harder switch.

“Well answered, Georgie!” he said in his soft voice.

She shrank back from him, clutching her fingers into the shawl which
she held over her face and bosom. I could see that she was deathly
white.

“Not that--no!” she whispered, as if half choking. “What right have
you?”

“I should really be the last to insist on it,” he said. “You know my
easy good nature, I congratulate you on your position with all my
heart; and should never think of crossing your legitimate title to it,
unless----”

“Unless what?” she said with difficulty, seeing he prolonged the pause
wickedly.

“Unless you oblige me to, that’s all,” he said.

Now though she had been, as I considered, an inhuman mother to me, to
see her, so obviously and so amazingly, held at the mercy of this man,
filled me with a rage of fury. Not he, nor anyone but myself, I
thought, should have the right or the power to exact retribution of
her. If I hated her, I already hated him with a tenfold violence. What
title had he to come between me and my vengeance?

“Why,” she cried, with one little broken note of protest, which she
instantly subdued, as if knowing its uselessness, “have you come into
my life again?”

“I am really sorry,” he said. “It became necessary, that’s all. I
wouldn’t otherwise for the world have disturbed this dream of
evangelical and aristocratic peace in which your soul has so long
found its security from troublesome memories. But the plain truth is I
_had_ to look you up. It’s a vulgar confession; but I want money.”

“I thought--I heard--you married it.”

“My charmer, I did. But love, though a perpetual investment in itself,
is far from guaranteeing the immaculateness of its brokers. From one
of Mrs Dalston’s we suffered shattering losses. Nothing throughout our
married life, in fact, has prospered with us. The heir I longed for
has been persistently denied me” (a momentary emotion seemed to shake
his voice; but he gripped and stilled it); “our house in London,
heavily mortgaged as it is, refuses for some inexplicable reason to
let; we have come down, down, down. Why this should be so, in the
designs of a just but inscrutable Providence, I cannot pretend to
explain. Our deserts have not been less than most men’s; our sins like
others may be called the natural fruit of circumstance. At this
moment, I am ashamed to say, I have not positively the wherewithal to
meet a bill, which, dishonoured within the week, will ruin me. I speak
most, of course, of the moral wreck which will result. To you, knowing
you as I do, that will serve for my paramount appeal.”

“How much do you want?”

He seemed to ignore her question for the moment intentionally. It was
his policy to specify at its fullest value his claim on her. That must
amount inevitably, as I foresaw, to his possession of the very secret
which I had made, as I thought, my own. He knew somehow that she had
been no widow when she had married Lord Skene; and, indeed, his next
words proved the justice of my surmise.

“Compare our positions,” said he. “Here am I--as I have described.
Here are you--started from exactly similar premises--the mistress of
all, or nearly all, that your heart could desire--a fortune, a title,
an unsullied reputation; the respect of a noble husband, the love of a
beautiful child--born in wedlock, too, that holy institution, and
destined in the future to regard his mother as the pure fount of
honour.”

She gave a sudden little cry.

“Why won’t you say? What do you want of me?”

But still he would drive the anguish home.

“And to think,” he went on steadily, “that one little word from me
could shatter at a blow all this elaborate fabric of respectability!
It must necessarily have a value, that word--a high value, if the
truth must be spoken.”

“I have nothing of my own. You know it.”

“I know it, my dear girl, as surely as I know that you are wedded to a
man who has always been as lavish a spouse as he promises to be an
infatuated father. He would not question, I think, for his own and his
heir’s sake, the morality of your keeping his eyes sealed.”

“You _will_ not speak it. We are not as rich as you think.”

“Well suggested, Georgie--I really beg your pardon. But we are quite
remote here. That’s why I ventured to suggest the place for a
rendezvous, after your husband, on the afternoon I called here, had
shown me over his estate. A very pretty legend, and a very pretty
setting for it--the ‘Baby’s Garden’! and very aptly named for our
interview.”

She fell back a little, holding her hand to her forehead terribly;
seeming to speak to herself.

“After all, it is only your word against mine.”

“Well, not quite,” he said--“not quite. Aren’t you forgetting Mother
Carey?”

She stared at him, gulping once or twice.

“I never lose sight,” he said, “of possible witnesses to my interests.
It’s not been to those to lay that dear old ghost of our past, though
you would seem to have thought it to yours. A bad policy, child. Do
you even know if she is living or dead? You should, if you were wise.
But I can see you don’t. An undutiful daughter, to be sure. But she’s
living, Georgie--I don’t even mind telling you where. She’s living
down in Lambeth--in Old Paradise Street, bless her appropriate
quarters--and always ready to testify, at _her_ reasonable price.
She’s degenerated into something of a miser, too, I understand, and
hoards her ill-gotten gains. How do I know? Why, through some lawyers,
my dear, friends of mine, who happen to pay her one of her little
quarterly stipends of hush-money. (You, I believe, compromised with
her for a lump sum--again a poor policy.) O, you may take my word for
it! and do what you like with the information. Lady Skene, I think,
will hardly rush to establish her claim to that connection. And, even
if she did, I’ve means of controlling Mother Carey. What if I say
three hundred pounds?”

“You shall have it.”

“So I supposed. Then we’ll say five hundred.”

“Ruin me, if you will.”

“Hush, my dear! What an inference! To esteem me capable of such a
blind villainy! You’re still a very beautiful woman, Georgie.”

“Will you leave me now?”

“It would be safer, perhaps. God bless you, Georgie!”

He was going, when she ran to him and touched him for the first time.
I could see her little shoes, frail and delicate, sopped by the frozen
slush.

“Your wife!” she said hoarsely. “Is she your accomplice?”

He started and turned round; and, on the instant, his face was like a
devil’s.

“Leave her out of this,” he said low and fierce, “if you value your
soul. She’s innocent--as innocent as heaven, I tell you. If----”

He broke off--seemed to make a menacing gesture, and again was going.
And again she stopped him.

“Not that way!”

He was himself directly.

“Why not? It’s private. It’s the way I came.”

“The way!” she said, choking. “Do you know who lives down there?”

He laughed.

“I make it my business to know everything. Perhaps _you_ don’t know
that he’s away for the moment--gone to take a trip on his own account.
Boys will grow up. Rest satisfied, I made sure of his not being there
as I came by the lodge.”

Then she stepped back, and I heard him going lightly down the path
into the Caddle. And presently she turned, and, pulling her shawl
about her face, moved towards the house, but suddenly stumbled and
stood swaying.

My heart beat as if it would break. “Mother, mother!” I whispered in
an agony, “why don’t you ask for me--trust me--love me!”

But in a moment she recovered herself, cold, self-willed spirit as she
was, and went off quietly through the trees.




 CHAPTER XII.
 AN ODD RECOGNITION

I was so stunned, so amazed by this sudden and utterly unexpected
turn of events, that, for a time, only a monstrous sense of
indignation could make room for its consideration in my brain. That
another should be found to have a title equal with mine, and a
knowledge obviously greater, to claim those preserves of retribution
which I had considered my exclusive property, was sufficiently
disturbing; that I should be brought to realise how, to all the
intents and purposes of this inquisition, I was suddenly confessed the
confederate, the mean subordinate even, of a common blackmailer, was
infinitely, sickeningly worse. For the first time I was awake to a
healthy scorn of myself for ever having condescended to a habit of
espionage. That it should have reduced me to something the level of
this fellow!--no outright, hard-fisted burglar, as, to his better
credit, I had assumed him to be, but just an obscene Jerry Sneak! It
had been awful to me to see that cold exclusive beauty writhing in the
grip of such a scoundrel. I felt fouled, humiliated, ashamed. There
and then I swore an oath that I would let Lady Skene understand, on
the first reasonable opportunity, the nature of my claim on her--not
to bleed her pocket but her heart.

And, in the meanwhile, how to engineer my discovery? Should I use it
to my more crushing indictment of a guilty woman--a bludgeon in my
already loaded hand? A gentle son! a human merciful spirit! To admit
myself one in purpose with this vulgar conspirator? Never, never! To
convince her, rather, of her insensibility to the means for reprisal,
for defence, at least, which lay ready to her hand. What was her sin
to me, if only she would once expiate it in a word, a look of remorse?

I asked for no more. Yet, lacking it, she must lack a faithful
Paladin. I had thought I hated her; and it had needed only this menace
from another quarter to reawaken all my maddest cravings. She was my
mother, and in direful peril. The pity and the sorrow of it quite
blinded me for the moment to all subordinate issues.

Yet Luck again had served me well for these. I remembered, when the
passing of my moody grief left room for other thoughts, how it had put
into my hands the one and very clue I needed. I knew at length where
to find the old creature--godmother, grandmother, what you will--who
alone, it seemed to me, could be induced, or bought, to make the
revelation which I desired. Well, even so, that secret were safer in
my keeping than solely in a villain’s. Though shared by another, or
others, its possession by me could hardly weaken my position as a
threatened mother’s champion. For all my wild pity, I was inexorably
resolved to take an early opportunity of putting that discovery to the
test.

And so I fell upon harder reflections. Who was this plausible dog,
with his soft voice, his sentimental gaze, his compelling personality?
Who was this astute villain--yet none so clever, nevertheless, but
that Luck, my Luck, had been able easily to hoodwink him? His hold on
Lady Skene must be a substantial one--one so potential of profit, it
would appear, that, after all this lapse of years, it was still worth
his while to take a house--a gambling office, one might call it--in
the neighbourhood, for the sole purpose of exploiting her. How and
where had he acquired an incriminating knowledge of her so damning?
Alas! had I not learned enough already of her “maiden meditations” to
be sceptical of their singleness? She had been an actress--on the
stage, at least--and presumably a true child of her traditions. I
could not forget Sir Maurice Carnac’s roguish innuendoes--his
allusions to my stepfather’s feet “netted” to matrimony in their
intended frolic over a wilder course; his sly maudlin reference to me
as a pledge of “widowed respectability.” Likely enough he too had
known, or guessed, the truth. Likely enough Lord Skene himself had not
been so blind to it as the pious throwers of dust in his eyes had once
assumed. Nor did I feel convinced that the question of it would much
have affected his lordship in those days of his relapse from virtue,
so long as its pretensions appeared to justify, in the worldly view,
his marriage with the beautiful creature who had ravished his heart.
Grant all that, and it made no difference in the present
situation--offered Lady Skene no less a bait to vile persecution. If
her husband had not been blind, she had been blind to his shrewd
seeing. If he knew, she did not know he knew, and her ignorance of
that inference of his, did it actually exist, constituted her real
accessibility by scoundrelism. She never thought, one must conclude,
but that she possessed a secret which, if revealed, would spell her
social and domestic ruin; and, so long as she could be kept in that
belief, the bloodsuckers might have their way with her. Had she not
the traditions of eighteen or so years of a spotless and dignified
wifehood to vindicate? It was for the very reason that she had
justified her exaltation so nobly, that she figured such a helpless
victim to the beasts of prey. She was a woman of position--a fact of
which her religious world took strict account; and she had come to
pledge herself to that world, and to be quoted for its local light. It
was there, I knew, and she knew probably, that her downfall would be
criticised most ruinously. Her husband, it was conceivable, she might
win over to her sin’s condonement; that narrow world never. There, in
any question of her victimising by a blackguard, was confessed her
main vulnerable point--or it had been. For, indeed, at the last there
had come to expose itself one more infinitely sensitive. She had borne
a son, heir to his mother’s fame or infamy.

I declare that my heart bled for her, as I reviewed her present
position, or such as I presumed it to be. What was it to me that she
had been a sinner--even a reckless sinner? Circumstance makes evil, as
it makes virtue. Let the righteous plume themselves on circumstance.
If I were a child of sin, I would be loyal to the maternity which
suffered for me. Only I wanted time to think and plan.

I dreaded more than I can describe the ordeal of the dinner hour that
night. Yet I was resolved to put in an appearance at the table. As
likely as not Miss Christmas had spoken of my return; and what
reflections would that induce in Lady Skene! and, if I kept away, how
would she regard my absence--with what suspicion, what fearful
apprehensions for her secret’s safety! For had she not believed me far
removed from the scene of her recent humiliation? I must face the
music, at once and boldly.

I faced it; and with what immediate result? As I entered the
dining-room, she was standing by her chair before taking her seat,
and, as I passed her by, going to my own, withdrew her skirts from my
contact. It was the instinctive act of a moment, and regretted, I
think, as soon as done; but it hurt me so cruelly, that my devil, for
an instant, returned uppermost. “Very well,” I thought, “if you _will_
have me your Nemesis!”

Lord Skene greeted me kindly but abstractedly. He made no comment on
my late absence, except to ask me where I had been gone these three or
four days.

“To Clapham, sir,” I said, perfectly self-possessed. “It occurred to
me to explore the field of Mr Pugsley’s early ministrations. I am
thinking of writing his life.”

He grinned first; then looked a little startled, glancing across
uneasily at his wife. She had suddenly put down her spoon, I observed,
leaving her soup unfinished.

“What!” said his lordship. “Are you thinking of turning author?”

“No, sir,” I answered. “Only of studying truth and godliness at first
hand.”

“Well,” he said, “you might occupy yourself worse.”

He was fairly puzzled, I could see, and, to protect himself, turned
the talk in other directions, leaving me to my own cogitations. Miss
Christmas, sitting opposite me, seized the opportunity to engage him
to herself--no great task, for the old man was genuinely attached to
her.

“What do you think of my frock, dear?” she said. “I want your opinion,
because you are a judge, you know.”

But he accepted her banter seriously. He was in an oddly sober mood.

“I think,” he said, “that, like charity, it covers a multitude of
sins.”

“O!” she cried, “how terribly severe! I am only a whited sepulchre
after all. In the midst of life we are in death.”

“I’ll make a note of that,” I said. “It sounds like one of Mr
Pugsley’s original reflections. But of course we are. Don’t you feel
it, my lady?”

I don’t know what demon was urging me. Lord Skene suddenly exclaimed:
“Georgina! is anything the matter?”

She was leaning back in her chair, looking white and faint; but she
rallied immediately.

“Nothing whatever,” she said. “What makes you think so? Go on with
your dinner--please do.”

He obeyed uneasily. I saw Miss Christmas steal her hand under the
cloth, and “poor” her hostess’s with a little lovely look of sympathy.
It meant nothing, of course, but sex. What could she know of the
other’s real indisposition? But a sudden unaccountable pang of
jealousy shot through me witnessing the act.

I had put the girl utterly out of my mind. She had become nothing, and
less than nothing, in the tragic sequence of events. Now, all in a
moment, I was moved to reconsider her--wonderingly, even. I thought
her face was pale--white, with a sort of pathetic sickness which
follows after much crying; and I was sorry for her, sorry, with a
sudden strange turmoil of the heart, which spoke most, I think, of
sorrow for myself. What was she to me? Nothing. I had taken brutal
pains, indeed, to convince her of the fact; and she must surely feel
convinced at last, and hold herself acquitted of any further
obligations to me. Yet, is it not human nature to view with jealousy
another’s fond appreciation of the thing we have held too cheap for
our own use? The value of it, it may be, has never struck us until we
have lost it. I don’t mean to say that I had arrived, already and at
once, at that extravagant pitch of regret; but I was certainly awake,
and suddenly, to points of attraction about the girl which had never
appealed to me before. Her hair grew very prettily on her forehead,
dividing from it in wings of the softest fawn. There was an unspoiled
frankness in her face, for all its temptation to chartered coquetry,
and her eyes had grown honest. She had developed into a little being
quite remote from my early conception of her. Her complexion was of an
unsoiled purity, just the natural maturing of pink-skinned babydom,
when its cheeks have ripened to a contour and moulded themselves to a
meaning. Her lips were always as red as if a Cupid had just left
kissing them, and there was an attractive robin note in her voice,
whether it spoke or laughed.

Now, noting all this, a quick sharp feeling as of loss, as of an utter
loneliness never until this moment fully realised, smote into me. What
possible sympathy, in all this turmoil of my hates and loves and
grievances, had I willingly foregone! But it was of no use: I _had_
rejected it, and I must take the consequences. She was even at this
moment ostentatiously ignoring me, and I saw that my hold on her was
gone.

What did I care? Why should I? Yet, I confess, to see these gentle
feminine spirits leagued together in revolt against my brutality
wounded me smartly. I had thought myself their master, and I was
master of nothing but their fear. Bill Sikes could better me there.
Something gained from that consciousness--call it what you will--was
promising to educate me finely.

Not once during the dinner did either of the ladies speak to me. I
chose bitterly to put their neglect down to the presumption of a
“by-blow” in assuming a claim on their notice. I was glad, though with
an impotent rage of jealousy, when they rose and left me alone with my
stepfather.

There was a gravity that night about Lord Skene which was new in him.
The sudden death of his old comrade, taken with the glass of joy at
his lips, as it were, would seem to have had a curiously sobering
effect on him. No doubt the mood was fleeting; but it had all the
force of a reformation while it lasted. He questioned me more
seriously than he had ever done yet as to my prospects and intentions;
dwelling, even, upon the necessity of prayer as a medium for exhorting
from the Deity the truth as to one’s vocation. Once or twice, as I
noticed, he put out his hand to the decanter, and withdrew it empty.
And presently he fell into a fit of musing, in which I did not venture
to disturb him. Then suddenly he looked up.

“I haven’t seen you since that night, Gaskett,” he said. “What a
shocking experience! And to risk damnation with a joke on his lips!
But that was Maurice all over. Do you remember how he greeted you, my
boy? It ought to have warned us, perhaps, and----”

I was smiling at him, as I leaned, playing with a knife, on the table.
He broke off quickly, rose, not altogether steadily, to his feet, and
stood staring at me.

“By the Lord, Gaskett!” he said, “what was in your mother’s mind when
she pupped you?”

I was so taken aback that I could not utter a word in reply. And the
next instant he had recovered himself, and was forcing an embarrassed
laugh.

“I think since that night my brain’s full of ghosts,” he said. “Come
along now to the drawing-room.”




 CHAPTER XIII.
 JOHNNY DANDO

As if Fate were moved to introduce some “comic relief” into a drama
grown almost intolerably serious, there re-entered astonishingly upon
the stage of my affairs at this pass my old chum and schoolfellow,
Johnny Dando.

I call him Johnny, and Johnny he was, and so would remain to the end
of things. There are Jocks and Jacks and Jackos innumerable in the
world. The Johnnies (not the inane breed) form a race apart, and are
not to be confounded with any other. They are artless, beaming little
men, who never, from cradle to grave, qualify in world-wisdom; but
who, at sixty as at six, use the terms of childhood in their dealings
with mankind. They are everywhere and at all times simple, modest, and
impregnably loyal in their attachments.

_My_ Johnny, as I recovered him, wore mittens on his dumpy hands, and
on his head an odd fur bonnet with flaps to cover his rosy ears. He
was wadded all over, and suggested to one a little fat Esquimau. As he
swam, like a full moon, into my ken, he might have taken but one step
across the years from “Baxter’s” to Evercreech. He had no more hair on
his face than when I had last parted from him; no less an appearance
in it of a perpetual suppressed laughter. What amused, or appeared to
amuse him so inextinguishably, no one had ever been able to discover.
He had a manner as of some secret understanding with himself which was
based on the eternal hilarity of things. When he shook hands with you,
you had a feeling that it was only by gripping hard hold of that
support that he could stop himself from exploding in your face. And
there he would stand, seemingly fighting down his risibility, until he
could emit a “How-de-do?” or “How are you?” with the air of asking a
social conundrum while he chuckled inwardly over your inability to
answer it. He appeared, somehow, to be always swelling with
communicativeness, on which, strain as he would, he could not get a
start. It was this consciousness of his conversational disability,
perhaps, which made him wont to passing utterances of a fearful and
cryptic nature--utterances which had no known bearing on anything that
had happened, or was happening, or was ever likely to happen. Thus, it
might be, as he passed one fielding at cricket, he would swoop into
one’s ear with, “How much for a chirp, Plummer? Hoots!” and pass on
his darkling way, leaving one prostrate. Or his head, perhaps, would
come round a door, utter the inquiry “Which way to the steamers?” and
vanish. Although I was, without doubt, his closest friend, I had never
succeeded in fathoming the exact source of any of these recondite
inspirations. To question him as to them, was to subdue his expression
into one of patient tolerance over your inaccessibility to esoteric
suggestion.

It was a chill morning, a day or two after my last recorded
experiences, when he was returned upon my hands, like the most
surprising of boomerangs or india-rubber balls. I was sitting cowering
and glowering over my fire, when I heard his voice at the door, and I
started amazed, and “Johnny!” I cried: “that must be Johnny Dando!”
And Johnny it was.

He came in smiling, and seized my hand without a word. His eyes
dilated; his cheeks, like shining polished apples, seemed to stretch
to cracking.

“Johnny,” I cried; “take care!”

His face split at the mouth, easing the pressure.

“Hullo!” he said. “How much for ‘Grafto’?”

We pumped out our salutations, hand in hand, grinning and speechless
like a couple of veritable Britons.

“Where have you come from?” I cried at length. “How did you find me
out?”

“A young lady brought me down from the house,” he said, and could say
no more. “Hullo, Dick!” he added presently, and immediately turned,
tiptoed to the door, looked out, and came back.

“She’s gone away,” he said--“_such_ a beauty, Dick! She told me you’d
taken to living in a hermitage, and offered to show me the way.”

“O!” I said. “It was Miss Christmas, I suppose. She’s a ward of Lord
Skene’s. But don’t bother about her. Come and tell me about yourself.”

I got him to the fire, filled him a pipe, and put a light to it for
him. As he pulled, letting it out every two minutes, he kept
chuckling, like one immensely tickled over something.

“O, I’m nothing!” he said, bursting suddenly into a laugh, and
snuggling his head into his shoulders and his hands between his knees.
“I’m only ‘Grafto,’ you know--how much for the hair of the dog that
bit you, eh, Dick? It’s just delightful to see you again; and you’re
not a bit altered either, only for that scrub of yellow on your lip!
Rub-a-dub-dub, eh?” The joy in his face moderated an instant. “_I_
can’t grow one,” he said. “It all comes out in perspiration.”

“Never mind, Johnny,” I said. “You’ve got other compensations, haven’t
you?”

“Well,” he answered, “I’ve got money enough to ‘corner’ all the
moustaches in London, if that’s what you mean. But what’s the good,
when I can’t grow one of my own?”

He squeaked over the admission; then relit his pipe joyously.

“And what have _you_ been doing with yourself all this time?” he said.

“We’ll come to that,” I answered. “I want to hear about you first.”

“About me!” he said, surprised. “O! there’s nothing to tell. Daddy
made it all right for me, you know. He was ‘Grafto’--you remember
that? _What_ a man he was, to be sure--_old_ daddy! His ‘Grafto’ would
put a hair-spring into a watch, they used to say. He was a Government
analyst when he invented it; and afterwards he became a person. I
never knew, Dick, until he died, that he’d worn a wig himself for
years.” He looked at me tragically. “Wasn’t that awful? And I
inherited ‘Grafto’!”

“How did you like Oxford?” I said.

“O, bully!” he answered. “But I wasn’t there long. There was the
estate to take up, you see; and mamma wanted me. She’s the only woman
who ever did.”

“O! I can’t believe that.”

“Can’t you? I don’t know what keeps me laughing so. O, the bells,
bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells! Hullo, Dick! I say, ain’t
you fond of poetry?”

“Just.”

“So am I; especially Christmas carols, they’re so comforting. Look
here, why did you never answer any of my letters?”

“What letters? I’ve never had a line from you that I know!”

“Not? Good Lord! I remember now we had a beastly Swiss courier, a
rascal who tapped our correspondence, and put us to no end of shifts.
It must have been he.”

“Very likely. So you called for me at the house?”

“Yes. And the young lady--Miss Christmas did you say it was?--told me
that you had taken to living down here like an anchorite, and offered
to show me the way. What’s happened to you, Dick? You used to be such
a free and open chap.”

I looked into his honest glowing face. The craving for comradeship,
the craving to pour out my heart of sorrow and difficulty to a friend,
tried, sympathetic and attached as I knew this one to be, rose
suddenly in me with an irresistible force. I had dwelt so long,
corroding, perishing, in my own fateful atmosphere. In confessing to
this dear fellow, I knew that I should only be halving my own burden
of secrecy, not imperilling it. I hardly gave a thought to its unfair
imposition on shoulders so generous and so undeserving. He would not
have wished that I should. In a quick impulse of passion, I told him
everything--the whole story of my life with its shames and discoveries
and humiliations--all the barrenness and impotence of the thing--since
I had last parted with him. And when he had listened to me, silently,
wonderingly, lovingly, at the end he only thanked me for my beautiful
confidence in himself.

He was all immediately that I could have wished and expected him to
be--all, and more--unfortunately a good deal more. His head was not
built for plots and counter-plots. A sense of his magnified importance
in the world, being chosen the trusted accessory of such a man and in
such a secret, puffed him out magnificently. He was eager to be at
once not only my confidant but my coadjutor--to work for me, spy for
me, be my humble auxiliary and comrade in this work of righting a
wrong and forcing retribution on the guilty.

“I’ll watch this Pugsley,” he said, to my astonishment. “I’ll bring
him to his knees, and make him confess what he’s up to. If I ain’t got
much cleverness myself, I’ve the means to buy up a whole Scotland Yard
of it.”

“No, no,” I cried hurriedly. “That would never do, Johnny. I’m playing
this off my own bat, you understand. The dodging of open scandal is to
be our first consideration.”

I seemed to realise in a moment, the danger of the confidence to which
I had committed myself. The thought of Johnny as amateur detective was
impossible. It would be necessary, I foresaw, to divert his enthusiasm
into some harmless channel.

He was greatly gratified, I could see, by my pluralsing of the
personal adjective.

“Of course,” he said. “We’ll keep it all between ourselves, Dick.”

“Yes, indeed,” I said; “we must”--and, on the word, pricked up my
ears, hearing a footstep.

But it was only a man come down with a message from Lord Skene,
requesting the favour of Mr Dando’s company to lunch.

Johnny, in his severe position of ally, looked across at me
doubtingly.

“Of course,” I said. “Thank his lordship from Mr Dando, Williams, and
say he will have much pleasure.”

“For it ought to be as great a pleasure as it’s an honour to you, you
know, Johnny,” I said reproachfully, when the man was gone; “seeing
how it’s meant to imply the just claim of any friend of mine on his
lordship’s hospitality.”

Johnny blushed.

“I didn’t mean that, Dick,” he said--“not to question his lordship’s
condescension. Only----”

“You see, Johnny,” I pursued, twinkling, “you mustn’t begin by tarring
them all with the same brush. I owe Lord Skene very much, if I owe his
lady very little. He’s been a good second father to me, if she’s been
an indifferent first mother. All I want to find out is why she has
been. I want to know why, Johnny; and I want to know who my first
father was, and how this man Dalston knows what I don’t know, and why
he is able to make such crushing use of his knowledge. That’s all it
comes to at present; and you mustn’t be looking for reasons in their
company, but behave just like an ordinary polite little Johnny as you
are. There’ll be time enough to discuss our campaign by-and-by.”

He was obviously relieved, and not in the least offended.

“I can assure you, my dear fellow,” he said, “that I shall be only too
glad to put it all out of my mind for the moment. It would be jolly
unpleasant sitting there and acting the spy--and with Miss Christmas
in the room, too. By-the-by, _will_ she be there, Dick?”

“O yes! I expect so,” I said, with a snigger. “But I don’t often turn
up to lunch, myself; and am rather out in the young lady’s customs.”

“You don’t seem to like her much?” he said.

“No,” I answered. “I don’t know that I do----” At which he gave an
unaccountable sigh, as of a burden discharged.

Lord Skene accepted my friend genially, as I had expected; but not as
I had expected was Lady Skene’s reception of him. If not actually
warm, it was gracious and attentive. She made him sit at her right
hand, and she placed me opposite on her left. There was no drawing
away of her skirts this time. She even asked me if I would _mind_
sitting there, calling me, nervously, and with a heightened spot of
colour come to her cheeks, by my name. It was not so frequent on her
lips but that the novelty could give me an actual little physical
shock. There was a shadow of pathetic propitiation in her manner
towards me, I could have thought. No doubt, what between Pugsley’s
awed confidences and my own newly encountered and most significant
spirit of mutiny, she was beginning to realise the Nemesis her neglect
had cast away to flourish of itself. I was like the little weed thrown
carelessly into a river; and, lo! when the thrower returned to pursue
her course upon the water, there was only a vast hideous tangle of
growth where had been an easy stream.

I looked at her boldly, and her eyes fell before me, Good God! how
beautiful she was! She might have been no more than twenty-seven or
twenty-eight--girlhood at its full flood. It hurt me, in the very face
of that remorseless thing I had set myself to do, to see her so afraid
of me. What she must be suffering under that cold and lovely mask!
What horror of the black abyss torn suddenly across her path! And for
him she had borne to be adding his wild voice to the jangle of the
chase--helping to drive her over the brink into that night!

Though she had deserved it; though she had lied to procure her
promotion to a noble position; though she had sinned her sin, and
condemned the innocent pledge of it to bear the penance, I could not
think of her so haunted and so helpless, and endure the thought. The
vision of that tiny life upstairs quite upset me. If I wanted
justification for my relenting, where could I find a sweeter one or a
more opportune? For God and my brother be my banderole’s motto. One
only proof more--or at least the bid for one--and I would speak, and
end this terror of her shadows--that I swore.

She asked Johnny some questions about his school days, deprecating her
own ignorance of his great friendship for “Richard”; but attributing
it to “Richard’s” silence on the subject. She took the dear boy quite
captive. He answered: “Of course, what could I have had interesting to
say about him?”; and he set to expatiating on my virtues instead. I
didn’t even attempt to stop him. It was such an amusing novelty to me
to hear my existence so much as admitted, much less absurdly
flattered. I laughed out aloud once or twice; but he would not be
stopped until he had given me his whole salute of twenty-one guns.

He was all during lunch completely under the spell of loveliness. His
hostess awed and subdued him, like the rich glooms of a cathedral; but
to Miss Christmas he turned as if to the sunshine without its doors.

The girl was in a mischievous mood--I could see that, though she
studiously ignored me throughout the meal. She would angle with great
eyes for my friend, and, when he caught the bait, would look down with
a start as if confused.

“What did they call you at school, Mr Dando?” she asked once. “All
schoolboys have nicknames, haven’t they?”

“Don’t tell her, Johnny!” I cried.

He blushed furiously.

“Yes, I will” he said. “They called me Dandruff, Miss Christmas.”

“Hey! Dandruff? What the deuce did that mean?” demanded his lordship.

“My father invented ‘Grafto,’ sir,” said Johnny; “the--the hair-wash,
you know. And he--his name was Dando, you see.”

Lord Skene stared bewildered, but Miss Christmas clasped her hands
tragically.

“‘Grafto’!” she exclaimed. “Are you really the son of ‘Grafto’--the
‘Grafto’ that has crowned more heads than Warwick the Kingmaker?”

“Yes,” said Johnny. “That was one of the advertisements. There are
lots of others as good or better.”

“Ask her what _she_ owes to advertisements, Johnny?” I said rudely;
but her mockery of him annoyed me.

He looked all agape.

“Everything, Mr Dando,” said the girl sweetly. “My grandfather made
all _his_ money out of a pill. What benefactors to the human race we
both come of.”

His lordship picked up a late clue.

“Pills, pills!” said he; “and a hair-wash! Tell me the man in the
world who wouldn’t rather have a crop of hair on his head than a crop
of wisdom _in_ it, and hold a pill that settled his liver a better
thing than salvation.”

He stopped, and looked across at his wife, with a sudden comical
tongue in his cheek. That was a bit of the old Adam slipped out. But
Lady Skene did not appear to have heard him.

“I hold old Jack Christmas amongst the archangels,” said his lordship.

“You hear, Miss Christmas?” I said. “There’s a pedigree for you!”

She did not take the least notice of me.

As I walked down with Johnny to the lodge by-and-by, the little man
seemed depressed--or, at least, alternately depressed and elated, with
the balance running to the down mood. I could see how it went with
him. He was in love. It was _veni, vidi, victus sum_, with a
vengeance. It had become hard for him, and all in an unexpected
moment, to reconcile his attraction to the Evercreech ménage with his
loyal duty to me. He could not guess, of course, how I rather welcomed
the difficulty. It tied him in a manner by the leg, and narrowed the
issues of his friendly ardour.

I knocked him up a bed somehow later on, for I had insisted on his
being my guest for the night--and we sat and talked into the small
hours. I had to go a journey on the morrow--that was inevitable; but I
refrained from even hinting its direction to him. Let sleeping
Johnnies lie, I thought. It was arranged that we should walk into
Footover together, and there part for the time being, I to go to
London, he to remain in the neighbourhood, and “keep an eye on my
interests.” I trusted to that compromise for safety. “My interests,”
I had a shrewd idea, would be found to gravitate largely about the
person of Miss Christmas; and why should I grudge him that fiction?
The two would make a very good match.

He had sat silent for a long time, when he suddenly looked up with a
sigh.

“O! it’s hard, Dick, it’s hard,” he said, “to be born to ‘Grafto’ and
an unromantic figger!”

For the first time in my knowledge of him, I noticed that the
perennial smile had withered from his face.




 CHAPTER XIV.
 TWO INTERVIEWS AND A DISCOVERY

It was with a feeling of intense suppressed excitement that I came
down into the courts surrounding the inner tabernacle of that mystery
which my heart was set and my nerves were strung upon resolving. I had
had no difficulty in finding the place. Luck, the old spoiler, was in
the way to smooth every present obstacle from my path. The ridiculous
ease with which I had hit my goal, left me no lack of self-confidence
in the question of successfully exploiting it. But there, it will be
seen, I reckoned without my host; and in the meanwhile there were some
surprises in store for me.

It was a most bitter morning. A north-east wind slashed at Old
Paradise Street like the sword of the archangel. The flood moving
beyond its outlet--the river of the land of gold--was as unlike Pison
as one might conceive. Thick and resistless, it went by with a
gloating sound, a sewer rather than a stream. The old palace on its
embankment looked numb with cold. There was more life in the
fried-fish shop round the corner than in all its historic stones.

I had inquired at this shop for Mother Carey’s number in the street. A
slipshod girl, who was sweeping up the floor, gave it me, but with a
reservation.

“Do you mean the old miser lady, ai?”

She was a dirty girl, but insolent with life--a reassurance in that
deadly climate of Paradise.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Very likely. I only know that her name’s
Carey, and that she lives in this street.”

She came to the door, broom in hand, and pointed me out the house. It
was not far beyond--a dirty-faced little tenement, between a frowzy
barber’s and a frowzy cobbler’s, but having a door and parlour windows
of its own instead of a shop front.

“There’ll be what you want,” said the girl--“number six: but you won’t
get in.”

“Why not?”

“Nobody does. She lives private and takes her beer on the chain.”

Her beer! Lady Skene’s mother! the parent of that cold and stately
apparition--the stem from which that lovely rose had flowered!

Here was a startling beginning! But there was worse to come.

“Well,” I said stoutly, “there’ll be nothing lost by my trying,
anyhow.”

The venture ran abroad somehow, for all the uninviting weather, and by
the time I reached number six there were heads poking out of windows
to canvas my repulse. I knocked at the door, and waited. After a quite
reasonable interval a shuffling footstep sounded within, bolts were
withdrawn, and the door opened a few inches, and grated on an iron
tether.

“Who’s there?” said a querulous thin voice.

“I want to see Mother Carey,” I answered.

“She’s not in; she sees no one; she isn’t fit to be seen; go away!”
said the voice, and the door came to sharply; but I had my foot ready.

“She’ll see Richard Gaskett, I’m sure,” I whispered through the
crevice.

“Richard!”

An old, old snuffy beak, shining eyes, and a withered mouth agape
showed in the crack; and there they dwelt for a full minute.

“What do you want of me?” she muttered at last.

“I want to ask you some things,” I said. “It might pay you to answer
them.”

She lingered still a little; then I heard the chain grate stealthily
in its socket, a lean talon shot out, and the next moment I was clawed
into the passage, and the door slammed to behind me. A faint shout of
laughter pursued me into the fastness.

It was close twilight within, filthy, noxious, indescribable. The
narrow hall was bare of everything but stench and decay; the room into
which the old horror motioned me was similarly furnished, but with
first causes more in evidence. When, very cautiously, she had unbarred
the window-shutters and let in a grudging thread of light, I was made
conscious of the fact. There were a table here and a tattered chair or
two, the stuffing of the latter rank from the contact of unclean
generations. There were also piles of refuse, in the corners, under
the rusty grate, dropping from a disembowelled cupboard, burst with
its own noisome surfeit. The walls, hung with old daguerreotypes, old
tinted lithographs, old records of a faded past--all in mouldering
frames, and all, it appeared, illustrative of the one-time graces of a
single simpering personality--were the cleanest places to be seen.
Bugs were the _élite_ of Number six Old Paradise Street.

I felt utterly stupefied--bowled over by the shock of my surroundings.
For the moment I could only gasp and suffer, until a violent fit of
sneezing came to my relief. The old woman, standing before me, softly
pawed at my waistcoat during the paroxysm, peering up into my face.
Water and she were long strangers; a mildewed cap she wore, tied under
her chin, seemed to have grown on her like a fungus on a tree stump;
her dress was of the complexion and savour of tobacco rag. She was a
_mignonne_ small-boned creature, and might even once--the Lord forgive
me--have been pretty. Even now, old thread of fustiness as she was,
there was an indescribable trick of jauntiness in her conduct of her
creaking old body; and the frisky shuffle of her feet, in their
mouldering slippers, seemed sometimes suggestive of a sort of St
Vitus’s ballet dance.

She was taken with a rending fit of coughing while she held me. It
seemed to rattle in her like the plaster inside crumbling walls where
the rats are busy.

“So you’re Richard Gaskett, O the devil,” she said, when she could
gasp out a word at length. “And you’ve come to look up your old
grandma, eh?”

I had not regarded it in that light, and I was fain to tell her so. I
had come to visit Mother Carey. She started on the word, and a sudden
terror flew to her eyes.

“Who’s your mammy?” she cried shrilly, stepping back. “Tell me--quick,
now.”

“Lady Skene is my mother,” I said.

“Ah!”

Her self-confidence returned. It had struck her, “all of a heap,” how
she might have been beguiled into admitting some villain with a design
on her hoardings. She approached me again, curiously.

“Eh!” she wondered. “So this is my Georgie’s child, is it, the deuce?
And how does your mammy treat you, my pretty?”

“Lady Skene has got another son now,” I said. “Didn’t you know it?”

“I hear nothing, and I know nothing in these days, dovey the devil,”
she answered. “So long as I’m given my little provision as her mother,
Georgie’s welcome to make out her own life as she pleases for me. We
usen’t to get on very well together, not always, her and me. She’d
come to me in her troubles, she would, like her father’s own gal; but
most times we lived apart.”

“She came to you when she was in trouble about me, I suppose?” I said.

She conned me a little, unanswering. The wintry pupils of her eyes
seemed to sharpen like a cat’s.

“Not she--a married woman,” she protested cunningly.

“She was not married before she married Lord Skene,” I said. “I was
born to her out of wedlock, and he was not allowed to know it.”

Again she was silent, panting a little; and suddenly she was seized
with a second paroxysm of coughing.

“O dear! O dear!” she gasped, when she could speak. “O, the deuce and
all! O, my lungs are like emery paper, and the joints of my bones gone
scroopy. O, get me a chair, ducky, get me a chair! I’m all wore out
with pain, I am, and I sha’n’t trouble anyone much longer. There, I
shall be better in a minute--I can feel it passing. O the deuce and
the devil!”

I helped her to seat herself, and stood over her while she recovered.
When she did at length, she went on ejaculating, “O, the deuce and the
devil!” in spasmodic whispers, until her speech found breath for
further irrelevancies:

“Welcome to live as she likes for me O, the deuce and all!--in her
fine castle, my pretty--so long as I’m left undisturbed in my little
’ouse--in my little O the devil ducky!”

I waited for the stream to run out, and then spoke again.

“Lord Skene was not allowed to know it, I say.”

She answered me, without looking up.

“I was no party to that, my dovey the deuce. I swear I wasn’t O, the
devil! It was all Pugsley’s doing, the deuce and the devil take him!”

“Was it he, too,” I said, “who christened me out of a pint pot? You
see I’ve found out something, old mother.”

She rocked to and fro--in a sort of obscene secret laughter, I could
have fancied. It was as much as I could do to keep my wits steadily to
the point at issue. In all the sure success of my pursuit, I had never
foreseen any end to it like this, or even approaching it.

“Just like him,” she muttered. “He always called me that, a deuced
providence.”

“Who called you?” I demanded sternly. “Who are you talking about?”

She wiped, or rather smeared her eyes with her sleeve. The old life in
her, I believed, was foundering between craft and senility; but the
ancient habit still predominated. Once more she spoke, and again away
from the point.

“A proud creatur’ was my gal--Georgie was always proud above her
station. She held herself aloof from the common sort, she did. Not
that such beauties oughtn’t to command the best. But she made her
mistake--there, I’ll own to it. It was all from her turning religious
and trying to reform people, the deuce take her. And she’d have been
left to suffer the consequences to this day if it hadn’t a’ been for
me--a good mother though I say it, the devil and the deuce.”

“Old mother,” I said quietly, seeing that for some reason she hailed
the term, “who was it helped her to that mistake? Tell me his name,
and I’ll give you money.”

She paused suddenly in her sibilations. Her old face leered up at me
with infinite acrimony.

“How much?” she snapped. “But, there--I dursen’t--it’s no bid.”

Something, some chord of ancient memory in me, tightened and quivered.

“My God!” I cried. “I remember now. It was you that had the care of me
when I was a baby!”

“Ah!” she piped. “It was me, was it, Richard? And to think you should
have growed to this, and all the understanding in you!”

“Wasn’t it you, I say?”

“You may say it with truth, dovey,” she answered. “She wanted me to
adopt you altogether, did my daughter; but I just struck when I found
I wasn’t to be included in her ladyship’s promotion. But I made her
pay for it, I did--more than if I’d kept you; and then she and Pugsley
had to put their deuced heads together, and account for you to his
lordship in their own way.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

“You know it?” She lowered her frowzy noddle, mumbling to herself;
then looked up fulsomely.

“Tell old Mother Carey, my pretty,” she coaxed, “just exactly how much
you _do_ know.”

“That you were on the stage----” I began.

“Ah!” she leered across at the photographs on the wall; her horrible
old feet drummed on the floor. “The stage, to be sure! My daughter
could never come anigh me as a dancer--no, nor in looks, for that
matter. There’s nothing criminal in being on the stage, ducky dear;
and Georgie herself was born in wedlock.”

“That Lady Skene was taken from the boards by her husband,” I went on;
but she interrupted me:

“There you’re wrong. It was Pugsley rescued her, as he called it, when
she’d returned to them after your little affair, and who trimmed her
up and made her meat for his lordship.”

“That you bought me my name of a publican--his name--for a pint of
beer,” I continued.

She admitted that frankly, with a giggle.

“You had to have one, you know, deary. And to give you your mother’s
might have let out things. And hasn’t this fine lordship, now, ever
shown any curiosity about who was your father?”

“No,” I said. “The curiosity is all mine. Who was he?”

“_I_ don’t know,” she proclaimed blankly, and at once.

“You do,” I said sternly.

“No, I don’t,” she answered, suddenly truculent. “Why should I, now?
The gal came to her mother in her trouble--that was all it mattered to
me. She wouldn’t confess to the author of her shame, not she. She was
always one of the silent sort. Ask the old deuce of a doctor, now--old
Patterson, drat him--if he could ever get a word out of her.”

“I believe you are lying. I’ll pay you, I say.”

She skipped to her feet, with a little blasphemous screech.

“The deuce and the devil! O you” (sanguine) “spark! I don’t want your
money. I believe you’re after mine. O I’ll rouse the neighbourhood if
you don’t get out of this! A pretty gentleman, on my sinful word, to
think to come and bleed his poor old grandmother to pay for his
pop-lollies and opera-boxes! O burst my lungs if I don’t have the
police on you! O the deuce get out!”

She was whipping herself to a frenzy, real or diplomatic. My efforts
to quiet her were only so much oil on her old smouldering fire. She
began to scream pipingly, and to drive me outward with vicious feeble
blows. In the end, baffled and disappointed, I had to make an
ignominious exit. The door slammed and the chain grated behind me.

The Street was awaiting my reappearance with interest. It greeted my
expulsion with a howl of laughter, and pursued my retreat with a
dropping fire of chaff. As I went on my way, I had leisure to reflect
that I had extracted from Mother Carey everything that was of the
least importance either to herself or me--just so much and no more. I
had established the fact of her unsavoury existence, and that was the
bare fruit of my enterprise.

But I had still one forlorn hope to follow; one last nearly blank
little card to play. And, as Luck would have it, that card was to
prove the fateful one. What a trumpery pip, to be sure, looks an
ace--a one-shotted gun. Yet the fortress capitulates to it, the knaves
shiver before it, whole rows of arrogant royalties go down to its
bang.

Something that Mother Carey had let out (inadvertently, even
fatuously, I could not but think) stuck in my mind. Impelled by a
faint hope of promise in it, I made my way by the Albert Embankment
and the South Lambeth Road to Stockwell, whence, from the Swan Tavern,
I took a tram for Clapham. My purpose was to inquire about a certain
problematic Dr Patterson, and it was my good fortune (_pace_ Luck) to
learn not only that that respected practitioner was an existent
actuality, but that he was still, after all these years, active in
promoting the birth rate of his native suburb. I was even lucky enough
to find him at home, in a very comfortable semi-detached house, of an
old-time complexion, which faced the common on its south side. He had
moved into this many years before, from a much smaller dwelling in
Park Road down by the “Plough,” his practice having risen high in the
interval on a modest foundation. So my informant--one of those
garrulous terrors who _will_ volunteer more than they are asked to
answer--confided to me.

I found the doctor a very complacent brisk little man, having
spectacles, black side-whiskers supported by an ample collar, and a
head as shiny and almost as bald as a gas globe.

“Now, sir, what can I do for you?” he said, having hurried into the
room and made his bow.

I apologised, with some embarrassment, for my venturing to claim even
a fraction of his precious time to a matter which, to put it
brusquely, was unconnected with professional emoluments. Naturally
enough, perhaps, he requested me thereupon to state my business with a
reasonable brevity.

“It touches, sir,” I said, “upon the birth of a child some twenty or
more years ago; at which birth, I believe, you assisted.”

“Wait,” he said. “A police case, is it?”

“Not,” I answered, venturing something, “if that can be avoided.”

“Well,” he said, “of whose child do you speak?”

“The mother was a young woman of the name of Carey. She lived in White
Square.”

He lifted, and readjusted his spectacles; then, canvassing me over
them, knitted his fingers lightly before him, and twiddled his thumbs.

“My memory, sir, is, I may say, retentive. The case recurs to me. What
about it?”

“It is desired to find the father of that child.”

He shook his head, smiling.

“My dear sir, I am no clairvoyant. What is my position in these
matters? I come, I see, I deliver. The mother is my sole concern.”

“You don’t know who he was?”

“Not from Adam.”

My face fell, obviously enough, I suppose.

“By the way,” he remarked casually, “you know, of course, that the
child died very shortly after it was born?”

What was he saying in that matter-of-fact voice? what unimpassioned
thunderbolt launching from the blue of his little spectacled eyes? A
quick sharp vertigo seemed to seize my brain. I stared stupidly at
him.

“Died!” I muttered. “O, you must be mistaken!”

“Wait,” he said. “I keep, and have always kept, a minute record of my
cases. I can verify it in an instant.”

He went to a shelf, selected from it one of several thin manuscript
volumes, and rapidly skipped over its leaves.

“Here it is,” he said. “February 7th, 1860: Carey (Georgina), White
Square: obstetric: child, male; died two days later. Certified cause,
atelectasis pulmonum.”

He shut the book with a snap, returned it to its shelf, and faced
round on me, his hands under his coat tails.

“Anything more I can do for you?”

“But,” I stammered, “if--if the child died, it must have been buried?”

“Doubtless,” he answered; “but scarcely by me. Still, it was buried, I
suppose.”

“You don’t know?”

“O, my dear sir! Think for a moment. White Square! and its
reputation--but perhaps you are ignorant there. There are ways and
places--for disposing economically of these superfluous defunct. I
don’t assert anything; but I daresay you have read of them. The child
died, that is all I can certainly state.”

I came to myself, and held out my hand gratefully.

“I am infinitely obliged to you, sir,” I said. “You have enlightened
me on a very important point; and--and I am infinitely obliged to
you.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Would you mind leaving your name and address?”

I hesitated a moment--and gave them.

“H’m! dear me!” he said. “There’s a person of that very name a patient
of mine. Well, good-morning to you.”

Out in the street, I moved on like one in a dream.

“Dead!” I thought--“dead!”

I stopped suddenly, looking stupidly about me.

“Where am I?--Who am I?--Dead!”




 CHAPTER XV.
 THE LETTER IN THE BOOK

I wanted above all things to be alone; to re-order my disordered
thoughts; to marshal into some sort of coherence the fantastic figures
which ran riot in my brain. I felt like some stunned animal turning to
creep away and bury itself in shadow and solitude. The clack of the
train in my head was like the worry of a screw shaft to a sea-sick
passenger. I had to adapt all my reflections to its mechanic monotony.
I could not detach my thoughts from those regular beats. They even
assumed to my mind presently a definite measurement. A thought was
exactly three inches long, and the wheels tapped it out, tapped it out
to one endlessly repeated pattern.

I was horribly, ungraciously apprehensive of running across Johnny
Dando in Footover. The vision of his round beneficent face would rise
like an obtrusive moon over the troubled waters of my soul. To gain
time for self-communion before he learned of my return was my most
feverish desire. I was even, truth to tell, wishing the poor dear boy
out of my way altogether. There was no longer room in my philosophy
for even this gentle _farceur_.

But he did not cross my path, and I succeeded in reaching my cold
hermitage unobserved. There was no fire in it this doleful evening--no
sign of any feminine grace or thought for me. I had to make out my own
comforts--lay my grate, provide my own meal. Well, that was nothing
new; nor was it any new discovery that a passing indulgence often
makes a spoilt content. But I confess I was peevish at having only
myself to help myself again.

However, I persisted, and, after feeding ravenously on meats I had
brought with me, for I was fairly famished, I took a book, haphazard
and for form’s sake, from the shelf, lit my pipe, and sat down before
the glow to excogitate the moral and practical effect I was called
upon to give to an amazing revelation.

As to that, it was patent at once that it had thrown all the machinery
of my life out of gear. The questions of love, duty, resentment,
retribution must all be unpieced and readjusted, to suit a new point
of view. I had no longer, it appeared, true relations with the old. My
position was become one of independence; my attitude one of hard
triumphant aloofness. Only the mystery of my being was deepened, not
resolved. If my mother’s baby had died, I could not be my mother’s
son. That, paradoxically, was the postulate. Then, if not hers, whose
son was I, and for what inexplicable reason had she undertaken the
risk and responsibility of acknowledging me for her own? That there
had been foul play somewhere--trickery, fraud, monstrous
imposition--was very plain, I thought. My mission, if it had proved
abortive in one direction, had been deadly prolific in another. How to
wrench truth from the maze of lies!

The wildest theories flashed into my mind, only to be flouted. Was it
possible that Lady Skene could have done this donna Quixotic thing for
a friend--have imposed on her husband as her own, in some fit of
Evangelical Samaritanism, the fruit of a poor sister’s frailty? Out of
the question. She was utterly truthful, by temperament and religion.
If, on a single occasion, she had let a misunderstanding pass by
default, she had had not only the sanction but the encouragement of
her Church to justify her. Then Pugsley, at least, believed I was her
son, and, as certainly, in all things she believed what Pugsley
believed. Granting which, one must grant her innocence of any
partnership in a fraud which had apparently imposed upon her, the
principal, as it had imposed upon him the unwitting agent.

Yet, had it imposed? or was she, after all, a practised queen of
guile--a Lamia, with the serpent in her blood? I thought of her
villainous antecedents; I thought of the old obscene harpy down in
Lambeth; and my heart would take cold at the thought, insisting that
she knew the truth, that she must know it, and that therein was
confessed the real secret of her antipathy to me.

Then, so much admitted, or assumed, was it not a consequent assumption
that his secret knowledge of the fact that I was not Lady Skene’s
child constituted Dalston’s hold over her? That would be to infer that
he, at least, was cognisant of my true parentage. But would it be that
she was? or, even more inexplicably, that he was practising upon her
ignorance of the truth? But how _could_ she be ignorant--how _could_
she? The hypothesis appeared incredible, monstrous.

One only clear fact seemed to detach itself from the inextricable
tangle of things--that I was not my supposed mother’s son.

Now--so perverse is human nature--I was no sooner self-assured of my
moral quittance from the bonds which had held me so long and so
wistfully to an imaginary grievance, than my soul rose in mutiny
against my own emancipation. Was she not actually, then, my mother
after all--this cold, beautiful spirit, whose countenance I had so
longed to gain, whose aversion, so little concealed, had been the
cruel pain of my life? It would appear so, indeed; it would appear
that I had been wasting my heart on the shadow of a love--the
blasphemy of a worship which God Himself had suddenly exposed for a
sham. I was stripped in a moment even of the cold comfort of that
false religion. I had no longer the right of natural appeal from an
inhuman sentence.

And I had only myself to thank for my awakening. Wilfully, with my
eyes open, I had gone about this business of my own damnation.

There was such an intolerable sting in the thought, that, in its last
full realisation, I jumped to my feet, restless to pace away the
agitation it caused me. As I did so, the book which I had taken from
the shelf dropped roughly from my knees to the floor, and a folded
paper fell from it.

I stooped mechanically to pick up the latter, as mechanically opened
it out, and, two-thirds preoccupied, ran my eyes down the sheet.
Instantly, with a little shock of amazement, they were caught and
riveted to a name written thereon.

A sigh, as of one just awakened, came from me, What was to follow? I
thought I could tell already. There was a signature at the foot of the
paper, and I believed I knew whose it would be--the signature of
Charlie Skene, his lordship’s dead son; and so it proved. It gave me
an odd thrill to look at it--the boyish scrawl in its faded ink; and
attesting--what? You shall hear. Walking on tiptoe, as if in some
instinctive emotion towards secrecy, I carried my “find” to the lamp
and examined it.

It was the half, the second half, of a sheet of foreign notepaper, and
had been used evidently by some reader (probably the correspondent to
whom it had been addressed) for a marker in the volume I had dropped.
Heedless trifling with a thing so pregnant with destiny! Yet Luck, no
doubt, had arranged it so. It ran as follows, starting on a broken
sentence:--

 “... right under the fall, and as secret as you could wish. You can
 see through, like as if you were behind a window and the rain coming
 down in sheets outside, and there’s no more sound to be heard than
 with that. It’s just shut away from there, the noise I mean, and all
 you can hear is a drone like a hive, and all you can see is the trees
 and the hills pulled crooked, like we saw ourselves in that
 looking-glass in the confectionier’s at Swanage don’t you remember how
 we laughed George? There is a fellow here Antonio Geoletti that acts
 as our guide and cetera and that would give his ears I expect to know
 of it for the sake of tips. But I’ve a fancy to keep it to myself such
 fun, and not tell anyone of it unless perhaps you-know-who, and
 perhaps if he’s good my tutor _mister_ Cecil Mansel Delane oh
 lawk!--but wait a minute. Geoletti’s a great rascal but I like
 him--always a little attracted to rogues you know George, and he shall
 hear of it too before we go. But now I’ve got something to tell you
 only don’t blab to the Governor. George, my boy, I’ve found out that
 Delane isn’t my tutor’s name at all, but Dalston is--Mark Dalston.
 There was a young fellow Bruno Travers passed through here, and
 recognised him for a master he’d been under at some Grammar School or
 other Clapham I think it was, and he called him to his face and Delane
 had to own up. There was only us three together, and my tutor admitted
 that his name was Dalston right enough, and that he’d only taken up
 the other for its seeming more marketable to a man with his ambitions,
 sounded good familyish and all that, and he asked us not to give him
 away and we promised. But Travers didn’t believe a word of his reason,
 and told me so in private. He said he’d go nap that it was to escape
 the consequences of an intrigue with some girl in Clapham, this Mark
 Dalston being a pretty rapid lot, and known for it to some of the
 young gentlemen that he coached. I don’t know, but I’ve had my
 suspicions, especially in his making those eyes at you-know-who for
 her looks and the rest. But mum’s the word. I shall want all my nerve
 when the time comes for an explanation and it can’t be long now, oh
 lawky lawky!--Your affectionate friend,

                                                Charles Skene.”

My hand, with the letter in it, dropped to my side. Luck! Was this
still Luck, or a fierce and merciless fatality? It had answered clear
on my cry for light long uttered--an echo returned from a vast
distance. “_To escape the consequences of an intrigue with some
girl._” Oh! an excellent shot, Mr Travers--an intrigue with Lady
Skene, _née_ Carey, that was to say. It was Dalston himself all the
while, and I had been looking over his head for the principal. There
could be no doubt about it. Here was the explanation of the beast’s
hold on that wretched lady--a grip doubly dastard, since, it would
seem, he had repudiated his responsibility for her shame only so long
as he saw the opposite to any profit in admitting it. Could there be
in hell a hound more abject?

And to what, but a day earlier, had my inquiries been tending--to
proof of what relationship with this infamous creature? That fable,
thank God, was discounted before even realised by me. And yet for what
alternative? There was none that I could see. If he was not trading
upon her belief that I was his child, their child, what subtler
knowledge helped him to her bleeding? Could it be one that turned upon
the question of my apparent resurrection from the grave? Was I,
perhaps, a changeling? It seemed incredible. To whose possible
interest could it have been to substitute a living child for a dead
one? Not to his assuredly--a piece of good fortune it would have
appeared to him in those days, that fruit of his villainy perished and
removed. To his victim’s, then? to her mother’s? There was more
plausibility there. Yet I could not conceive Lady Skene a party to any
such fraud; and yet again his discovery of the imposition, had it been
committed, would not have weakened his hold on her--rather
substantiated it. _Had_ she done this thing, or her mother for her, in
order to levy false tax on the father of her dead child?

It was a horrible thought. All night I sat out by the fire, hating it,
and dismissing, and returning to it. The coincidence of this Dalston’s
double connection with the family hardly occurred to me. And yet it
was a coincidence, as strange as any that the annals of villainy can
record. But then Coincidence is the father of Luck.

This strange, strange letter! this old young voice from the clouds,
dropping upon me all in an unexpected moment like a ghostly message
from Thibet. It must have its meaning in the sequences of Fate--must
have been meant to have. That the fellow should have been young
Skene’s tutor--his monitor, great God! a vulgar intrigant, with a
past, hardly past indeed, and caught, in despite of it, making eyes at
“you-know-who”! You-know-who? How odd and plaintive sounded the arch
allusion down all that flight of years, like a strange voice laughing
very faint in distant attics. Poor little you-know-who! What had been
thy pretty name and station, and to whose confidence was this cryptic
reference to thee entrusted?

I bent on the thought, and picked up the fallen book from the floor.
It was one of those with which Lord Skene had furnished me from the
library of his deceased young neighbour--a volume of “Armadale” by
Wilkie Collins. I remember it well, a story containing a mystery
something analogous with that which was vexing my life. Turning to the
title-page, I found inscribed on it a name, George Thesiger--the
George, without doubt, of the letter. And he, too, was dead--no hope
of enlightenment there--had closed the book perhaps for the last time
on a mystery more real and tragic than any contained in its pages.
They must have been close friends, those two. I put the book gently
away, and fell into frowning thought again. Not all I could learn or
discover had brought me one step nearer the truth of my own identity.
I might trace out others; myself I could not trace. My name, like
Peter Schlemihl’s body, threw no shadow.

I suppose, in the end, I must have fallen asleep where I sat, for I
was suddenly conscious of the sound of voices outside the lodge. I
rubbed my eyes--it was broad daylight in the room, and shiveringly
cold. I staggered to my feet, a stale spectre of nightmare, and walked
unsteadily to the window. There was a thin fleece of snow fallen on
the grass, and sharply defined on it stood the figures of Johnny and
Miss Christmas.

Now I don’t know what influence was at work in me; but quite suddenly
and strangely, seeing the girl, my eyes flushed hot and wet. I set my
teeth, and gave myself a good curse for my folly; but there it was,
and I could not but be conscious of a fierce pleasure in it. I suppose
I had been a bit overwrought--spectre-ridden; and this vision touched
me like balm. I felt like one who wakes from a dream of damnation to
hear the birds singing. She was so young and happy and fresh; so
detached from the sordid realism of my story; so remote from me at
last. I had never thought her worth my consideration until she was
risen above it; and now I was feeling like a child, who, having
wandered in the track of some absorbing interest, wakes to the sudden
realisation that he is lost. It was just the primal need bubbling in
me. My mother was taken from me, true; but perhaps the more for that
did I wail for a skirt to cling to.

The two seemed to be in intimate talk, and Johnny’s strained squeak of
a laugh reached me irresistibly. A misty sun jewelled the snow, and
there were flowers sparkling, and fountains showering, and the rich
throats of birds choiring among the trees--but all only in seeming;
for love full-hearted has but to look down, and there is a garden
sprung about her feet.

Suddenly it struck me, Had this little diffidence been so wrought
through with passion as to have dared, on short acquaintance, the most
audacious throw a man can stake his all on? If it were so, it would
seem that fortune had favoured the bold, for the couple appeared to be
already on terms as happy as familiar. And why not? Johnny was no
nameless, penniless bastard; but a lord of acres, with a stake in the
land and a right to sue to honour. He was my friend, moreover, and not
to be grudged by me any such triumph. I trusted, I saw no reason to
doubt, that they would prove an excellent match; and, in the midst of
that very Christian reflection, was planning how to get rid of the
little man with all possible despatch.

Why?

_Il y a quelque chose qui couve_, says a French idiom.

Now all in a moment I realised that I was in a measure spying--a trick
grown obnoxious to me. I turned from the window, and went resolutely
out into the open. They saw me at once, and Johnny hurried up with his
greeting, and a rather shameful face, I thought.

“I was coming to see you, and met Miss Christmas in the grounds,” he
said. “We supposed you were still away, old fellow, as there was no
sign of your moving in there.”

“Why should there be at this hour?”

“This hour? Don’t you know it’s near midday?”

“No, by the Lord--is it! What a sleep I’ve had.”

I turned to Miss Christmas.

“Did you want me for anything?” I asked.

“No,” she said, in one hard little icicle of a word. She turned to
Johnny, and the sunlight broke on her face.

“I must go back now,” she said, “but I daresay we shall meet again.”

I went to her as she turned, and spoke low in her ear--two words, “I’m
sorry.” She appeared to start; but she gathered her skirts up, and
went off through the woods, without an acknowledgment of any sort. I
took Johnny’s arm persuasively, as we walked back to the lodge
together.

“Am I to congratulate you, old man?”

He flushed to fire.

“Don’t bait me, Dick. I--I don’t think I can bear it. If a year’s
devotion would win me just the permission to kiss her little hand.”

“No more than that?”

“No more. What right have _I_ to dream of such a thing!”

He was so obviously moved that I had not the heart to banter him, if I
had the inclination. I don’t know about that. I felt of a sudden some
sympathy with his diffidence, and all on my own account. What right
had he, certainly? Material fortune was not to stand for everything in
this world. I was in no mind to let it in my misanthropy; in no mood,
with my new sense of independence, to allow myself to be relegated to
the ranks of the of-no-accounts. I could still be a dog in the manger,
it seemed. And yet my heart was soft with a superior affection for
this old chum of mine.

“Johnny,” I said, as I laid and lit the fire, “are you still in the
mind to help me?”

“Am I _not_!” he answered. “Only tell me how.”

I turned round, inspired, with the match in my hand.

“Watch old Pugsley.”

He gave a chirp.

“The parson?”

“Yes, Pugsley.”

He beamed on me delighted.

“Of course,” he said; “why didn’t I ever think of that? If I could
only catch those two talking together now, I might get at something
valuable.”

“Which two?” I asked.

It appeared that he meant Dalston and Pugsley. Somehow he had got it
into his head that they were in league to keep me out of the Skene
succession, by pretending that I was not the lawful son of my mother.
So much for my power of trenchant summarising. It did not really
matter a bit, so long as I could put him harmlessly out of the way. My
shot for the parson was quite a happy one. Pugsley would never
apprehend that he was being watched; and if he did suspect it, his
conceit would put it down to the fascination of his apostolic person.

“Very well,” I said. “Pugsley’s your quarry. Don’t wander much from
those preserves. Besides, you know, it will employ you about the
neighbourhood, and you’d like that.”

“Of course I should.”

“But there mustn’t be any suspicion of our colluding. You must keep
away from _me_, and only communicate by letter.”

He jumped to his feet in excitement.

“I’ve got it. We’ll have a code. I’ll telegraph to you, Dick.”

“All right. Hit out your code.”

I left him presently busy over it, full of a shrewd importance. There
was a purpose I had in my mind, some information I was hot to obtain,
and my eagerness emboldened me to seek it at headquarters.

Lord Skene received me very genially in his study. He was dressed in a
suit of new tweeds, and looked as fresh and dapper as a boy on his
honeymoon.

“Well, Gaskett,” he said, “what is it?”

I held out to him, title-page open, the book in which I had found the
letter the night before.

“Yes?” he said, with a sort of curious dryness. “George Thesiger.”

“He’s dead, sir?”

“Yes, he’s dead.”

“May I ask, sir--pray forgive me--was he a great friend of----”

I glanced up at the portrait--the bright young face hanging on the
wall opposite him.

“Of Charlie’s?” he said, but with a certain restraint. “O yes! Charlie
and he were immense friends.”

I was silent a moment, struggling with my difficulty. He appeared to
watch me, even with a painful interest.

“What’s on your mind, Richard?” he said at last.

The kind tone, the unwonted familiarity, loosened my speech. After
all, was I not striking for the honour, the happiness of this good
soul, to whom I owed all that of genial tolerance which had accepted
and endured me?

“Can you tell me, sir,” I burst out with, in broken sentences--“will
you tell me--I know I have no right to ask--the--the circumstances
of--I really have my reasons, sir--I would not venture
otherwise--the--the pain--and the impertinence----”

He put his hand across his eyes, and answered me quietly without
looking up.

“What is it you wish to know?”

“Only this, sir,” I said. “The man--his tutor--Delane----”

“Yes?”

“Did you ever see him?”

“No. I was on circuit at the time. He was engaged by my sister, Lady
Thorold, in answer to an advertisement.”

“And Lady Thorold is dead too?”

“Yes.”

Seeing I did not answer, he added voluntarily after a moment:

“Delane was the last to--to see and speak with my boy. They had parted
on the hillside, and Charlie went on alone--a reckless fellow: always
a reckless fellow. The man himself I never saw or spoke to. His
depositions were sent me by Lady Thorold, who represented me out
there. I was too ill to go myself. When I did, Delane had disappeared
beyond tracing--not that I could have any object in wishing to see
him, beyond a morbid sickness to dwell upon things best accepted and
forgotten. They had been on the best of terms, as I understood, and
Lady Thorold was struck with his genuine grief over the catastrophe.
What makes you curious about him, Gaskett?”

What, indeed? This man in sympathy with grief and stricken hearts!
this abject cur a disinterested mourner! What made me curious? How
could I answer? It had been hardly in expectation of learning anything
to Delane’s discredit. Scoundrels, to the simplest understanding, do
not prevail by making a boast of their characteristic qualities. Yet I
had been curious; and how to explain myself without self-committal was
the difficulty. I sorrowed for this unsuspecting faith; I sorrowed for
the wretched woman, whose sin, long past and long repented, was
threatening to engulf in ruin all that it had sinned to gain. And yet,
for some incalculable reason, I felt myself destined to be the
minister of that Nemesis, whether to launch or withhold, to baffle or
direct, I could not tell. But a sense of unrealised, indefinite power
drove me on. I dwelt a little on my answer before I spoke.

“I _am_ curious, sir. I will tell you the truth. I found a letter--or
part of a letter--in this book last night. It was written by your
son--apparently to Mr Thesiger himself--and there were some references
in it to Mr Delane. They set me speculating, that’s all. I will beg
you, sir, not to ask me to show you the letter--not just at present
anyhow. I don’t fancy, from what I can gather, that the man was
altogether what you supposed him to be. But I would rather pursue my
inquiries independently; I would rather bring down my quarry before
boasting of my skill.”

He was obviously startled and perturbed. He shifted some papers on his
table, and his lips were not quite steady as he looked up at me.

“Quarry and skill!” said he. “This sounds all very formidable,
Gaskett. I will not ask to see the letter, since you wish it, but----”

“I believe, sir,” I said impulsively, “that the man was a villain.”

He buried his face in his hands a minute.

“What do you want me to do?” he said suddenly. “When do you propose
enlightening me?”

“When I have my case, sir.” He smiled faintly. “I ask you in the
meantime to accept me for your counsel, and to believe that it is your
interests alone which I have at heart.”

A longish silence ensued. Then he sighed.

“It is all very mysterious; but--have it as you will. You--you won’t,
I trust, keep me longer than necessary in this state of suspense?”

Though he essayed to dismiss the matter lightly, I knew that I had
greatly disturbed him. The dogs of doubt, of suspicion, of some
formless apprehension, were awake in him. It grieved me to the soul so
to leave him; but I felt that for the moment I had no choice. I must
at least face his unhappy wife, offer her the chance of defence,
explanation, before I decided upon my course.

I found Johnny triumphant in the completion of his code. It was,
numerically, simplicity itself; but the ingenuity of its parts was
devastating. Thus, for example, Dalston was Dalston junction, was
points, was a pointer, was a dog. Therefore _Dog_ represented Dalston.

Pugsley was a pug, was a pug-nose, was tip-tilted. Therefore _Tip_
represented Pugsley.

Miss Christmas, of course, was Noel, was no-hell, which naturally was
heaven, and _Heaven_ was Miss Christmas.

Lord Skene was a skein, was woolly, was a sheep, was a baa. Therefore
_Baa_ stood for Lord Skene.

His lady, by the same reasoning, was an ewe, and you being not-I, was
knotty, which the point at issue was. Therefore _Point_ represented
Lady Skene.

I myself was Gaskett, was (what I hadn’t known; but Johnny was a
learned and travelled little person) a piece of canvas used in furling
sails, was a fastening, was a _Button_--and there I stop. I hadn’t the
faintest conception of the use to which he proposed converting all
these symbols; but he was very convinced of their necessity, and so I
let the question go by default, and accepted a key.

He left me during the afternoon, to return, provisionally, to his inn
in Footover, and I regret to say that I was never relieved over
anything so much as over his departure. It was agreed that, until
further notice from me, we were to hold no communication with one
another unless in the code, and on that understanding we shook hands
affectionately at the gate, and parted, strangers, beyond it.

Dear fervent little man. I wish I could have repaid your devotion as
it deserved.




 CHAPTER XVI.
 A STRANGE ENCOUNTER

As I turned to go in by the gate, a figure, coming hastily up the
road from Market Grazing, made a gesture as if to detain me. I paused
in surprise; and in another minute the woman, for a woman it was, had
hurried to where I stood, and stopped. She was panting heavily, and
she put a hand on her breast as if forcibly to control its spasms. She
was very thin, and dowdy in appearance, and had on a thick grey veil,
pulled down over her face. But, for all the close secrecy of that
screen, I knew her at once. It was Mrs Dalston.

I suppose I ought to have felt some discomposure in her presence,
seeing the nature of my thoughts about her husband. I was conscious of
nothing, however, but an increased sense of the aversion with which
she had at the first inspired me. There was something antipathetic to
my nature in this barren reticence, in this material and intellectual
threadbareness, one might call it, especially as contrasted with the
showy qualities of her partner. I could not dissociate in the two the
essential squalor, whether of soul or person, which goes with crime.
It was part of the eternal tragedy of her colourlessness, it was a
heart-rending consequence of her malleability, that she was thus
moulded to repel where she most sought for sympathy. But how could I
know that?

Now, to be conscious of these feelings in myself, and of the certainty
that her hidden eyes, holding me at a disadvantage, were probing and
interpreting them, filled me with a sort of helpless anger. I might
even have been sharp, plain with her under the irritation, had she not
suddenly taken the initiative. With a swift movement, she put a hand
upon my arm, looking the while, quick and nervous, about her; and then
she entreated me in a hoarse, small voice:

“Leave him alone; don’t watch him; what are you thinking of? He’ll not
let his plans miscarry for such as you. I warn you. You’d better take
my warning.”

I was so shocked, so dumfoundered, that for a moment I could answer
her not a word. Here, it seemed, was the moral of all my self-pluming
astuteness. But the lesson gripped me on the instant.

“You speak of Mr Dalston?” I said.

“Yes,” she answered. “He’s gone to London, or I shouldn’t have dared
to venture this.” Even so, it seemed, the terrific spectre of him
stalked her fancy, for the motion of her head never ceased to suggest
a fearful watchfulness. “He knows that you are observing him--plotting
against him, perhaps. There is never anything hidden from him long.
You’ll be a fool if you don’t desist.”

“Why should he fear observation?” I muttered some commonplace about
conscience.

“Why?” she said. “How can I tell? I know he’s here to carry out some
scheme of force or fraud. I know he’s got some claim on Lady Skene.
It’s all nothing to me. Where he goes, I go; and what he wills, that
thing comes to happen. Do you wish to die yet--horribly, secretly, and
no one guess how or where?”

“I neither wish nor intend to.”

“Intend? That sounds brave. You’ll need some bravery.”

“Is he capable of it--going to those lengths? Why do you tell me all
this?”

“For yourself--not for him.”

“How have I earned your consideration?”

She seemed to look at me intently. Her hands sought my arms; but I
backed instinctively from their touch. She stopped at once, and I was
sorry. But not even this new aspect of her could conquer my
repugnance.

“I have borne children,” she broke out strangely, “and they died--one
after another they died, because I willed they should. I could be
stronger than him in some things. And he begged and prayed me; but I
would not; I willed them dead, and they died--each as it came. They
were the atonement for that life. It’s spirit seems to rise and beckon
to me from the past. O, my God! and you ask me how you’ve earned my
favour. Who was your mother, who were your parents?”

Her voice rose wildly. She held out her arms to me with a passionate
gesture. And now I understood. The poor driven creature was
insane--struck mad, perhaps, in some sudden consciousness of the true
nature of her bondage to a devil. I must humour, not abuse her.

“You say you tell me all this for myself,” I said, standing quiet and
unresponsive. “What, if for myself, I neither fear nor apprehend; can
boast a will as strong, perhaps, as his; am resolved to go forward and
expose him for the thing he is? I take the privilege of your
confidence. I do not flatter.”

She appeared to listen again intently. When she answered, there seemed
a note as of some under-triumph thrilling through her voice:

“You will go on? You will not be dissuaded?”

“I will not--no.”

She caught her hands together; her breath came quick; she took an
eager step towards me, and spoke in broken sentences:

“I thought--I hoped, even, it might be so. Listen, then, I’ll help you
to your end. So like, my God! it seems a Providence. Dead! Yes, but
how? he was going to tell me when Mark came in.”

“Hush, madam! hush! Who was dead?”

“My baby--my darling. He might have been like you now--your age--his
father’s son. It was twenty years ago. I had a nurse--Ellen Trimmer
was her name--she was killed in a street accident; but before she died
she made a confession to the man she had been going to marry, and he
came on with it to me. I had heard just so much, and then Mark spoke.
He had been hidden behind the curtains of my bed all the time; and he
spoke quite softly to the man, and the man declared that he had
asserted nothing, and believed nothing, and had only been a fool for
attaching any value to the ravings of a delirious girl. And he
promised for all his life was worth to say and think no more about it,
and Mark saw to it that he would keep his promise. What had he been
going to say--what? I never had the heart or will to ask. But you--you
can still find out if you like, and if he is still living.”

Was she, herself, raving? Sometimes, as I listened to that disjointed
outpouring, I was convinced of it; sometimes I seemed to gather from
its incoherence the shadow of a truth, a purpose, the cry of a
long-fettered despair struggling for articulation.

“Hush!” she said suddenly. “He may be back at any time--here, now,
watching us and laughing in his sleeve. He is so terrible--so swift
and secret. The souls he desires for his own must go to him.
Look--here is the man’s address. I have never parted with it. Find
him, if you can, and prove the stronger will. If I could repay him
after all these years--remember, and repay him!”

She thrust a paper into my hand, and was gone. I stood stupidly,
staring at her retreating figure. Repay him? repay whom and for what?
Surely, if there _were_ a purpose in her ravings, it must turn on
something ghastly and incredible. It was her husband, I could not
doubt, whom she thus held her awful debtor. But for what deed, what
crime, that could so move her at this last to take a stranger for her
factor? There was something very fearful in the vision of this
apostate from the faith of matrimony. Was it possible that there were
others in the world, who, through twenty years of seeming apathy,
could so be nursing horrible things in their bosoms--vipers--fattening
for an opportunity?

I glanced down at the paper. It contained a name, and an address
somewhere in Kennington--nothing more. The rest was for me to do. A
baby! and dead!--Dalston, and Mother Carey, and a dead baby! There was
a coincidence here, at least. What an unconsecrated plot in a
graveyard was my mind become! And how the deadly branches twined and
shut it in!

Well, I would go and see this man, if he existed. Somewhere and
somehow light must be let into the tangle.




 CHAPTER XVII.
 NURSE ELLEN’S “YOUNG MAN”

After twenty years; and he was still in his old place of business.
That was characteristic of the man. I found Mr Churton in his
workshop, planing a board which seemed destined for a coffin. He had a
paper cap on his head; his indeterminate eyes were pale blue; his
whiskers were of the colour of the sawdust which powdered the bench at
which he wrought. From time to time, as I talked to him, his wife, a
great strenuous woman of an imposing person and virulence, put in her
head at the door, sniffed, each time in crescendo, and departed. There
was an air of dogged helplessness about the man himself.

“The question,” I said, “is of Ellen Trimmer. You walked out with her
once, you know.”

He took up a lath of wood, squinted along its edge, and put it down.

“Did I, sir?” he said. “Dear me; how one forgets.”

“You haven’t forgotten, of course. I can quite understand you. Mrs
Churton wouldn’t favour such reminiscences.”

“Well, no, she wouldn’t,” he said. “Why should she, now?”

“She might, you know,” I answered, “if your peace of mind were in
question.”

“It never is,” he said.

“Say your safety, then.”

That obviously agitated him a little.

“You see,” I went on, “to keep to yourself a secret which touches on
the question of a crime, is to make yourself an accessory after the
fact.”

That was a shot in the dark; but I saw his hand shake on the plane,
and knew that it had struck.

“There’s such a thing, isn’t there, sir,” he said feebly, “as a
Statute of Limitations?”

“Not in criminal cases.”

He went, rather shakily, to fetch a tool from a rack on the wall. He
was quite a long time coming back with it.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said slowly, and with difficulty, “that I
wouldn’t rather face the risk of hanging than----” he paused.

“Than the risk of offending Mr Dalston,” I put in.

He started violently, and the tool dropped from his hand.

“You see?” I said quietly. “Now put this to yourself. What if Mr
Dalston himself were to be hanged?”

“Not through me,” he cried aghast. “I dursen’t risk the chance. He
would get at and do for me somehow, even if it was from the condemned
cell.”

I rose to my feet.

“You have said too much or too little, Mr Churton. There is nothing
for me now but to consult the police.”

He made a sort of lost motion towards me with his hands. At that
moment his wife burst in, and stood with arms akimbo.

“Get out of this,” she cried in an awful masculine voice. “What are
you worritting him for with your questions? Who are you? What do you
want?”

“It’s very simple,” I said. “I want to know what Ellen Trimmer
confessed to him before she died.”

“Then you’ll just pack and go wanting it,” she vociferated. “What’s
Ellen Trimmer to him, or him to her, or you to any of us? Get out, do
you hear?”

“You’re blocking my way.”

“My dear,” said Mr Churton--“if it’s a question of conscience----”

“Conscience!” she bellowed: “a pretty conscience on my word. Who was
it set you up in life, and give you the chance to marry, and something
respectabler than your Ellen Trimmers, a baggage that could go
dropping you for him, the slut, and no wonder to look at you!”

I fancied that I, for my part, could answer who. But Mr Churton only
hung his head on its long neck, like a feeble tulip beaten down under
a storm.

“Very well” I said, “if you’ll allow me to pass, I’ll go.”

“O, _I’ll_ allow you, my man!” said the virago, with an enormous
mimicry which bore not the faintest resemblance to my voice; and, as I
passed out, flounced at me with her apron as if I were a strayed
chicken.

But I hadn’t walked a hundred yards down the street when I heard the
sound of running footsteps behind me; and, turning round, there was Mr
Churton labouring on my tracks. His breath was pumping in him, his
weak eyes watered, the shavings in his whiskers shook like ringlets.

“I must say it, sir,” he gasped. “I had to break from her and follow
you.” He smacked one ineffective fist into the palm of the other.
“She’ll have to find out who’s master some time, and as well to begin
now as later.”

He looked up piteously into my face.

“I were always a feckless creatur’. I know what I ought to ha’ done
about that man arter I see him; but I couldn’t do it, sir, I couldn’t.
It’s been on my conscience these years, dear God--my little Ellen that
was so happy with me, and that he seduced from her plighted word!” He
rubbed his bare wrist across his eyes.

“Was he the cause of her death?” I asked gravely.

“The cause, sir,” he said, “and not the cause. She told it me all in
the hospital where she lay. She’d sent for me while she could speak. I
was the only one left to her, and she owed it to me, she thought. She
was frightened of him, sir--and why?--why was she frightened of him?”

“Well?”

“_Because he’d just taken her mistress’s baby away to a woman called
Carey, and had it killed._”

There--it was out. I was in possession of the secret which “Mark” had
dared this invertebrate witness to reveal. The poor fellow entreated
me not to turn his confession to his ruin.

“He didn’t kill _her_, you know,” he said, in desperate extenuation.
“She just jumped out of the cab, when she found it was dead, and was
run over. There was a fog at the time.”

The fog, I thought, was lifting.

“Mr Churton,” I said, “so Luck favour us, you shall never see or hear
from me again.”




 CHAPTER XVIII.
 TELEGRAMS

Now, henceforth, I was to move on with a set and deadly purpose.
Murder was in the air, and I was stalking it, a hooded falcon on my
wrist. Though I knew only what the reader knows, I had the feeling
that, were I once to loose the jess, some strange and unexpected
quarry would be brought down from the skies. Mark is a significant
name to the beasts of chase. In the meantime, awaiting the psychologic
moment, I had reason to reflect that there is generally somewhere that
flaw in the boldest criminal calculations which sooner or later will
give the crime away. The wicked astute man thinks astuteness
impossible to virtue--one of those mistakes of generalising which lead
to accidents. He estimates _all_ goodness at credulity, _all_ vice at
subtlety. Yet both Solomon and Sancho Panza were good men. Now, if for
twenty years Mr Churton’s mouth had remained sealed from terror, why
should that terror become suddenly inoperative in the twenty-first
year? It is just the contempt for providing against such unforeseen
contingencies which constitutes the flaws. But it would have been
quite possible to close Mr Churton’s mouth at once and for ever at the
beginning of things. Casual concessions to humanity are the weaknesses
of all but Napoleonic criminals. Mr Dalston, then, it would appear,
was not a Napoleonic criminal. He attached too much value, perhaps, to
the mere terror of his personality.

I found, when I reached home, a very batch of telegrams awaiting me.
They had arrived, it seemed, in pretty quick succession, and had been
brought down from the house. The sight of them first astounded, then
frightened me. I opened one with a shrinking, not to say a slinking,
feeling about my backbone, and instantly collapsed into a chair. My
sickest apprehensions were realised. It was from Johnny, and fatefully
potential of entanglements. With a beating pulse I examined the rest
of the batch, and gave a groan of despair. The wretched boy had got,
it seemed, on the track of some preposterous chimera, and was off
after his quarry with a whoop. It had been enough for him to gather
(quite mistakenly) that Pugsley was an enemy to my (non-existent)
pretensions. Henceforth every act of that dyspeptic cleric was open to
suspicion. For what had I not in one reckless moment made myself
responsible?

Suddenly, in the midst of my desperation, the picture of my friend,
round and jocund, tiptoeing, tomahawk in hand, in the unconscious
tracks of a poor evangelical missionary, rose before me and sent me
off into a fit of helpless laughter. “Well,” I thought, when I had
gasped myself sober, “the thing has started, and I’ve no means now of
stopping it. I can only pray not to be included in its retributions.”

Its retributions, indeed! Not on that day alone, but through many days
to follow, did those unconscionable telegrams come swooping upon me,
in flights and swarms, a plague of devouring locusts, desecrating my
green solitude, keeping me in a perpetual flurry between shame and
hysterics. I thought I should never hear the end of them--of the tap
of their arrival, of the story they unfolded, of the sort of
inebriated phraseology in which they were couched. And when at last
the visitation stopped suddenly, I could hardly credit my release. But
it did come at length; and then, when I could breathe once more in
self-confidence, I set to classifying the whole mad array, and to
endeavouring to make a consistent tale out of it. Whether or not I
have succeeded in my object, let the reader decide from the
following:--

 1. (Handed in at 12.10 P.M. Footover.) Watched house saw Tip emerge
 eleven small black handbag what containing thought suspicious followed
 tracked to station. The Eye.[1]

 2. (Handed in at 12.15 P.M. Footover.) Still at station expect arrival
 Dog Tip at bookstall examining County Blue Book letter S funny. The
 Eye.

 3. (Handed in at 2.2 P.M. Waterloo.) No Dog Tip took ticket Waterloo
 Eye also same compartment Tip opened bag took papers out and read
 manuscript convinced bearing on Button must get a look if possible Tip
 now at buffet cream buns and ginger-beer. The Eye.

 4. (Handed in at 2.15 P.M. Waterloo.) Tip still buffet macaroons
 forgot woman and child in carriage Tip took child asked if saved
 mother said narrow squeak just pulled through measles Tip returned
 child hastily what meant perhaps more imposition always watchful
 Button’s interests best respects Heaven. The Eye.

 5. (Handed in at 6.30 P.M. Waterloo Bridge Road.) Tip put up
 temperance hotel by bridge Eye also expect dine early cold beef and
 water watch lest creep out and drop bag in river no fear wine drugged
 no wine respects Point and Baa but perhaps better not how about duke
 and girl from Buffalo what price maple sugar hooty tooty. The Eye.

 6. (Handed in at 9 A.M. Waterloo Bridge Road.) Troubled night room
 next Tip heard groaning thought wrestle with guilt but found with cold
 beef and water not assimilating at breakfast asked by Tip if saved
 inquired from what explained redeemed answered was pledge of affection
 and didn’t want to be jocosity resented no further advances never
 mind. The Eye.

 7. (Handed in at 1 P.M. South Kensington.) Tip lunching bun shop cream
 crackers and lemonade kept in sight all day thought before starting
 slip up bedroom black bag but no good never parts with suspicion
 increasing what discount on Iagos. The Eye.

 8. (Handed in at 2 P.M. Gloucester Road.) Tip just gone Natural
 History Museum appointment with Dog or what no attraction clergyman
 more to follow in haste. The Eye.

 9. (Handed in at 2.30 P.M. Gloucester Road.) Rushed out for a moment
 Tip engaged fossil department giant tortoise making notes had to leave
 bag at door dynamite scare how to get it Tip eyeing the Eye suspicious
 fancies seen me before shouldn’t wonder but not certain. The Eye.

 10. (Handed in at 3.30 P.M. Brompton Road.) Triumph bag mine Tip
 fetching out pencil from pocket dropped voucher which went for and
 returned to him but mine not his own never knew and thanked me what
 joke went and released bag and bolted not examined yet let Button know
 soon. The Eye.

 11. (Handed in at 5 P.M. Charing Cross.) Afraid made mistake not Tip
 at all been following but strange clergyman must have been Tip’s guest
 name Drysalter papers in bag Locusts of Revelations considered in the
 light of prehistoric remains nothing else can’t fit to Button anyhow
 puzzled. The Eye.

 12. (Handed in at 10.15 A.M. Charing Cross.) Decided better return bag
 stick counter Museum plead absence of mind wire again soon. The Eye.

 13. (Handed in at 12 noon Gloucester Road.) Come at once detained
 pending arrival police Drysalter at counter when arrived mad about
 loss of notes listen no apology explained my voucher carried
 gold-mounted umbrella much more valuable didn’t mend things foamed
 threatens worst this by curator.

I omit, at this point, my comments on the situation. They lacked
nothing in vigour because I was in a measure responsible for it. But I
could not on that or any account abandon my friend to the consequences
of his insane act. However, almost before I had time to look out a
train to London, a final telegram arrived, acquainting me of his, and
my release, thus:--

 Hasten inform free much difficulty tried impress with grafto only
 effect Drysalter said might prove useful Wormwood Scrubbs declared
 saved since reading Revelations considered giant tortoise somewhat
 softened compromised finally with gift of hundred pounds to Society
 for promoting abstemiousness among total abstainers coming back
 to-morrow.

Not if I could prevent it. There and then I sat down to indite him
twenty reasons for his staying for the present where he was. They
might convince, or only wound him. I could not help it. It was out of
the question having him actively interesting himself any more in my
affairs, and at this crisis of them. His answer, in fact, when it
came, showed him a little hurt--poor Johnny. There was a
consciousness, a reproach in it of exile from more than my company.
Well, I couldn’t help that either.




 CHAPTER XIX.
 LADY SKENE KNEELS TO ME

His that is just written passes as an _entr’acte_, the fooling of a
clown before the curtain, the merry jigging of the fiddles. It ends;
and the lights are down once more, the dark curtains heave and lift,
waste glooms and sorrows repossess the stage--and only now, always in
their deep midmost, travels a little bloody star, the soul of a
murdered child.

Winter has gripped the land in earnest, and, screaming upon the heavy
dawns, come winds and ashy flights of snow. They are like tempests of
defiance, hissing down and heaping at my feet to dispute my way. But
I shout them back their blasphemies, and spurn them and drive on. I
have a deadly purpose at my heart, and I am not to be deterred by
bluster. The right shall be vindicated and the guilty soul stripped
naked, whatever befall of frost or storm. On and on, to the relentless
end!

Down in my damp holt that winter the cold became intense--not crisp
and dry as in the open, but mortal chill, penetrating to one’s bones
like the sodden embrace of a vampire. The ice underfoot there had
always a spongy crackle, and the snow in the leafy hollows a cankered
scar about its centre. I had hard ado to keep my resolution thawed at
blazing fires; but I heaped the coal on lavishly, recklessly, drawing
from a plentiful store which had been packed into a shed close by; and
presently my lodge was like a charcoal-burner’s covert in a forest.
Coming down to it at night, I could feel the radiations of its warmth
a rod away. I sometimes wonder now it never leapt into roaring flame
before my eyes.

This balmy southern climate had not known such a visitation in all my
memory of it; nor, in all my memory of it, had I so rejoiced to cross
its moods. If, as it appeared, it had rallied itself greatly to the
cause of villainy, throttling, delaying, stultifying, so much greater,
relatively, was the force of doggedness it evoked in me. A point
gained was a gain triumphant, if won through buffeting winds and
drifts of snow. And the most sinister gain of all was to be won from
its deepest drift.

I had delayed going up to the house until the receipt of Johnny’s
final telegram set my mind and conscience at rest. Then, having
written to the dear boy, I turned at once to face the ordeal which
awaited me.

The atmosphere of the dining-room that night seemed one of curious
quiet and reserve. Lord Skene appeared to ruminate, rather than
discuss the good fare with his usual honest relish; his lady only
trifled with her food; Miss Christmas was not present. We talked
desultorily of things, obviously the remotest from our mind hauntings.
I put it all down to the glamour of the fatality which was obsessing
my own brain. It seemed right, somehow, that I should exhale a spirit
of omen and unrest. But there was a reason for it beyond my knowledge.
Minister of retribution as I considered myself, I could hardly have
had the heart to pursue my purpose at the moment, had I guessed. The
child was ill, and the shadow of his trouble lay upon the household.
All other shadows were become as nothing in it.

Why did they not tell me? Had he, my little brother as they thought
him, _no_ claim upon my sympathy? Was _no_ right mine to share the
burden of their disquiet? As they denied me, so was I justified in my
purpose--doubly, trebly justified. And yet I might have taken him into
my arms, and wept to hold him so, and kissed and kissed some measure
of my own exuberant strength into his little flower of a soul. But
they held me, held me always as a thing apart; and on their heads lie
the issue!

I had been apprehensive that Lord Skene, anxious to probe me further
in the matter we had last discussed, would welcome our being left
alone together; but, rather to my surprise, he made no effort to
detain me when her ladyship withdrew, and appeared to sink at once
absorbed in his own reflections. It gave me the opportunity I
desired--that was enough for me--and I availed myself of it instantly.

She was standing at the foot of the stairs, preparing to ascend, when
I accosted her.

“Lady Skene, may I have a word with you?”

She turned, with such a sudden terrified look as I could hope never to
awaken on her face again.

“With me? Not now? O, Richard!” she whispered.

The name, the significance and agony of its utterance, pierced me to
the heart. But I had put my hand to the plough, and must go forward.

“Yes, now,” I said. “There is nothing can be gained by temporising.”

She seemed to totter a moment; her white jewelled hand caught at the
banisters. But almost with the act she had recovered herself.

“You cannot guess how cruel you are,” she said. “But come if you
will.”

She led the way up the first flight and into her boudoir. I had never
entered this room in all my life before, had never more than assayed
in chance glimpses the wealth and costliness of its appointments. Now,
as she shut us in together among the rich hangings, the velvet-lined
cabinets and tables glistening with china, and old silver, and
infinite _bijouterie_, I felt as if Fate had imposed on me a sacrilege
which no pretext of duty could condone. There were lighted girandoles
on the walls, a carpet soft as turf beneath my feet, a great fire
leaping on the hearth. She drew a low chair to it, and sank down,
resting her chin on her hand and frowning into the glow. I went and
stood before her.

“Lady Skene,” I said, “this is a beautiful room. It seems to embody in
itself all that of comfort, and rich possession, and happy security
for which so many of us are ready to barter away our souls.”

She never moved or raised her eyes.

“Happy!” she muttered.

“Why, are you not?” I said. “Hardly worth while, then, to risk so much
to gain so little. Neither happy nor secure, perhaps?”

She looked up suddenly.

“What have you found out? Have you been spying?”

“Yes, I have been spying.”

She rose to her feet, her hands clinched against her skirts. I had
never seen her look so wretched or so lovely.

“You can own it?”

“Why not?”

“So vile an admission!”

“Who has there ever been to teach me it was vile? I have lived alone,
Lady Skene,--untaught, unacknowledged, conforming to the pattern of my
surroundings. If that moulded me to secrecy, who was to blame? If to
be watchful and observant in the midst of enemies is a crime, I plead
guilty to it with all my heart. There was always this much, this one
unhappy riddle, to exercise my mind--why I, who longed for love so
much, was denied my most natural claim to it; why my mother, of all
the mothers in the world, could never bring herself to be a mother to
the child who worshipped her. Well, my watching has borne fruit. I
have discovered why, at last.”

Her head had drooped, lower, lower. It was terrible so to stand before
that love which had been my dream, and betray to it the fulness of my
renunciation. Yet I had no choice.

“Lady Skene,” I said, “I was in the Baby’s Garden that night you had
your interview with Mr Dalston.”

She was down now, crushed at my feet, her pride, her beauty, her
queenly jewels, all in ruin before me. Was I not satisfied at last?
The fire tinkled; the wind came like a hand on the casement; I could
see by the motion of her fair shoulders how heavily she breathed.

“Lady Skene,” I began again--and suddenly she caught at me like one
going under in deep waters.

“Not that--Richard--say it once--once--let me hear it on your lips.”

“It is too late.”

She moaned and moaned; then seemed to listen.

“Too late?”

My arms were held down in anguish, to entreat this dimming phantom as
it fell from me.

“O! if you had but said it a year, a month, a week ago! Useless now.
Why have you hated me so?”

“Not hated--no.”

“What then? Was it love forbade that word to pass my lips, or shame?
It is not like a woman to make her child the scapegoat of her sin. Or
perhaps it was only that you hated to be reminded through that spoken
word of a falsehood to which its utterance would have seemed a
perpetual rebuke? I was the pledge to you of nothing but the lie on
which you had bartered--yes, I use the term to _you_--on which you had
bartered away your soul?”

She shivered and sighed most miserably.

“Kill me with your scorn,” she muttered. “I have deserved it.”

“Did you not hate me?” I cried, in great emotion. “Do you not hate me
now?”

“I feared you,” she said low. “I always feared you from the first. I
think you have shown me why. You seemed strange--a thing I had no part
in. I never felt like a mother to you--God knows I could not help it.
It seemed hard I should be denied redemption for one so strange to
me.”

I listened with a stricken heart. Had she been so much to blame after
all, since some subtle instinct in her, unconscious of itself, had
fore-read the truth? God knew, indeed, she could not help it.

“And now,” she went on dully, “have you not revenge enough? Look at
me--think of me; my position, my example, my--my motherhood--and all
at his mercy! You have me at your feet at last, Richard. You have
watched to some purpose, as you say.”

“Yes, to some purpose,” I answered, “if only I can save you from the
consequences of that deceit.”

She seemed to listen in wonder; then shook her head, working her hands
together feverishly.

“I don’t know what you mean. These are the wages of sin. Death is the
only thing that can cure my shame and my disgrace. O, where is the
atonement in long years of lip service, if while we speak the
penitence we live the lie! I told you once your touch contaminated
your little brother--_I_ told you _that_! It was a wicked spite, and
God has punished me for it. But _you_ haven’t forgiven me.”

I stooped and seized her hands fiercely into mine. She made no
resistance, only hiding her face from me.

“If I have watched you through these long years,” I said, “what was it
for but to study how to win your love? Did it never strike you how the
little cold soul was shivering outside the window, crying for that
warmth and comfort within? ‘Mother!’ Never to have spoken it--not
once! Never to have the right to speak it now. Yes, it was a wicked,
cruel word. I thought I should never forgive you for it--once I
thought it; and now----”

Her tears ran hot over my hands. I felt a savage exultation in their
flowing. Was she not melting to me at last? I clutched her still the
fiercer.

“Now,” I said, “you are wretched and alone, and what you have refused
to give to me I will give to you--love, and pity, and forgiveness most
of all. You cannot claim them of me now, and now I will give them to
you freely. Because you are in need, I will come to you; because in
name you have had that right to my reverence and protection, I will
honour that ghostly trust. I cannot put you from my heart so easily.
Your shame is still my shame; your cause my cause. Be comforted. If,
being bred to tenderness and recognition, I had not learned to watch,
to spy, you would be without an arm well nerved to help you now. All
things, I suppose, work to their appointed end. This man, at least--I
say it--shall not have his damned way with you. Confide in me for
once. Has he attempted to bleed you a second time?”

She made a very slight negative motion with her head.

“He will do it,” I said; “he will come again and again. Do you
recognise that?”

“Yes.”

“How will you answer him?”

She did not speak, but I felt a little tremor run through the hands I
held.

“Why,” I said, “do you not make a clean breast of it to your husband?
If I know him, he would not judge that imposition hardly.”

“No,” she whispered. “It is not him I fear.”

“Who, then? Not me? Let him know me for what I am, for all I care.”

“Richard!”

“Why, I believe he’d think the better of us both for it.”

“Be as cruel to me as you will.”

“Insult you, you mean. But I know what is in your heart. Confess to
him? How would that avert the greater catastrophe?--the scarlet
letter--the ignominy of the moral exposure? And your persecutor knows
it, no doubt, and builds his plans upon the ruin of your reputation,
not as a wife, but saint.”

“O, my God!”

I must pause a little in the mad tumult of my emotions. To have her
thus at my feet, broken, despairing, looking to me, the neglected and
despised, for help and reassurance!--the madness beat like fire in my
brain.

“Now listen,” I said at last. “This man--this reptile--he mines and
mines, like the blind beast he is. He never thinks of his being
undermined by another--his black burrow seems secure to him----” I
felt her hands plucking at mine; but I held them tight. “He sets his
snare, and never sees the noose awaiting his own neck. O! if I have
spied--do you hear me?--I have spied to more effect than _you_ might
dare to hope, or _he_, perhaps, to fear. Mother!--there, I will speak
it for the first and last time--I have that in my hand to save you,
and send him to the gallows.”

She tore her hands away at last, and rose, tottering, to her feet.

“Not that!” she cried insanely--“not that! You must not. It cannot be.
Do you not know? Have you never guessed? Must I be the one to tell
you?”

“What?”

“He is your father, Richard.”

With the word, there came a swift step at the door, and Miss Christmas
hurried into the room, pale and disturbed. Her eyes met mine in one
startled glance, and turned to Lady Skene.

“Aunt Georgie,” she said in an agitated voice, “I’m sorry; I thought
you were alone; but--but I think you’d better come at once.”

How could I have known, or guessed? I could not even then. Only I
recognised the urgency of some tragic call, and stepped aside to let
her pass. For one instant her wild haunted eyes were turned on mine.

“O! God forgive me!” she whispered; but I think it was I who ought to
have uttered that broken prayer.




 CHAPTER XX.
 ANTONIO GEOLETTI

So she believed me to be her son and his! The deadlier mystery was
none of her sharing. For that, at least, I could breathe one heartfelt
prayer of thanksgiving. She was innocent of any but that one deceit,
and that one, even, in the relief of my soul, I could have found
trivial to insignificance.

The memory of our interview held me sleepless and agitated through
most of the bitter night. I had denounced bravely, and promised
bravely, and now through what new development of the situation was I
purposing to redeem my promise? My course, I felt, would have been an
easier if a darker one, had she betrayed her guilty partnership in
that secret. Her ignorance there was but a new rock in my path. All
doors seemed to open but to shut in my face; all jack-o’-lantern
lights to lead me on but to plunge me in confusion. What impulse,
interest, frenzy had so driven that mad woman to betray her husband to
me? None, perhaps; but some inexplicable craft calculating to mislead
me. Yet had I not proved the genuineness of her strange confidence?
No, it was impossible not to believe that for some hidden reason he
had earned her revengeful hatred. But for what reason? And how was it
to be associated with the paramount mystery?

I had promised much, and I meant much--desperately, if cunning would
not serve. Yet I doubt my performance might have fallen far short of
my intention, had not circumstance, at this crisis, given into my
hands the very witness I could most need. That mocking altar still
stood to attest my confidence in my tutelary god; yet not of Luck, I
think, was this fortuity, but rather of the relentless processes of
Fate. There was even hardly a coincidence in it, when one came to
examine.

I fell asleep at last, and woke to that sense of wan chill light on
the ceiling which is the reflected ghastliness of snow. I rose
shivering, and looked out of my window. The wood was all a whirling
rush of flakes ground to powder between the teeth of a ravenous wind.
It tore and spat them so, that the trees on their north sides were all
glued with white foam a foot deep; and here and there ominous drifts
were already forming.

It was a strange enough sight to a southerner, inured to winter fogs
and dripping skies; and the uncommonness of it--the shriek and sting
and the mad dance--awoke a responsive frenzy in my blood. _This_ was
the right challenge to my mood--something that I could close and
wrestle with and battle through to an end. I rejoiced, as if my
formless visions of retribution had actually at last assumed a
definite shape and substance.

It was Spartan work, nevertheless, dressing, and washing in a pool of
slushy ice, and fetching wood and coal, and preparing the house
generally against the siege of frost which threatened it. An advance
picket of the enemy already occupied the lower rooms, and had to be
driven out under a hot fire from the grate. I must keep an eye to my
provisioning too, in case I should come to be cut off from my
base--snowed up, and prevented from reaching the house, in short. Of
ordinary fare I had always made a point of storing a plentiful supply,
in order to avoid the worry of a daily commissariat, and of this
supply I found to my relief there was ample remainder. Biscuits; jolly
great potatoes for roasting in their winter jackets, and good to be
eaten, crumbling hot, with salt and pepper and perhaps a little yellow
flake of butter in their middles; rashers from a half-side of bacon,
which hung, like an old rusty coat, in the chimney-corner of my tiny
kitchen; eggs, when I could get them, and at whose endless
manipulations in a chafing dish I had become expert; dates, figs, a
canvas bag of chestnuts, and, for drink, coffee and hot whisky grog
with sugar and lemon peel--these made the staple of my diet, and, with
tobacco, were sufficient to the needs of any proper woodland hermit.
But there were perishable goods in addition not to be despised--bread,
milk, and butter, to wit; and for my daily supply of these I was
accustomed to look to the good offices of my old friend Comely the
steward, who had never yet failed me in his service of them. Well, I
must, if needs must, come to drink my coffee black, and lard my
toasted biscuits with pig’s fat. It would be no such terrible
deprivation after all.

I spent the morning putting my fortress in order, for the wildness of
the weather precluded any thought of outdoor exercise. But, after
lunch, the fury of the storm having abated somewhat, I began to cast
about for some means to discipline the restless spirit of adventure
which was awake in me. The prospect, in my then state of excitement,
of a long afternoon of enforced apathy and inaction in my lonely
quarters was intolerable. I decided that I would take the road to
Market Grazing, and pay a visit to the steward himself, with whom I
would still occasionally foregather of an evening in his little
band-box of a villa in the High Street. For Comely had married of late
years, and had a house of his own and, incidentally, a smiling baggy
little wife, who had sat for so long under Mr Pugsley that she had
come to have no particular shape or opinions of her own.

Yes, Comely, genial and deferential and unsuspicious, would prove an
excellent febrifuge in the fever of mind which consumed me.

But I was destined never to reach him--never to get beyond the fall of
the bank where the little wicket gave upon the road. For there the
wind had heaped the snow in a mighty drift, and in endeavouring to
negotiate it, I slipped and plunged up to my neck.

That was little in itself, had not my feet in sinking encountered some
body, soft, and of a texture indescribably different from what they
had expected. It was elastic, and potentially human. Fighting for my
balance, I groped down, and found a buried man.

He was dead, to all appearance--a dark, small, foreign-looking fellow,
with closed eyes and a face like wax. His crop of hair and short beard
were grey and stark like rime. He was cheaply dressed, but newly, in
a suit of coarse tweed, and woollen gloves were on his hands.

I discovered this all when I had prized and tugged him out of his
deadly burrow, and laid him on his back, and brushed the snow from his
clothes and features. My great strength had served me well; but I
thought to no profitable end. I was not to guess for a moment what
wonderful fatality had guided my steps to this drifted cache, and set
my foot on the key to all the mysteries--and at the fruitful moment,
too. Another hour, half hour, perhaps, and it had been too late.

And in the meantime I thought him gone beyond recovery. Listening and
feeling, I could detect no pulse in him nor any sign of life. His
teeth, white and regular still, for all his grey hairs, showed in a
set grin; his lips were pale violet. I believed him dead.

Still, there was no telling; and here at least was material for my
superfluous vigour, something external and challenging to my hunger
for distraction in action. With a huge effort I lifted the body in my
arms, and made with it for the lodge. The wind cut at me; the snow,
still flying viciously, beat and stung my face. I joyed in the battle,
and won triumphant through it into shelter, and laid my burden down by
the fire. Then I fetched brandy, and forced a spoonful of it through
the biting teeth, and stroked the hairy throat to irritate it to
action, and waited and persisted, and persisted and waited. Sometimes,
as the day sank, I thought I could detect a shadowy movement on the
face; but it was only the illusion of dancing firelight. Sometimes a
sound as of a tiny voice calling from a vast depth would startle me,
until I identified it for the thin whine of wind in the keyhole. The
stiff body never moved, never responded by one thrill to the
persistence of my efforts. And presently I gave it up, and withdrew
into the scullery to wash my hands, and ponder my unenviable position
as the keeper of a mortuary, with no immediate or definite prospect of
release.

It was while I was there, scrubbing, preoccupied and depressed, that
the growth of a sound, unnoticed at first, or attributed to familiar
causes, began to impress itself on my hearing. It was like a low
continuous babbling at the outset; but, even while I listened, it rose
all in a moment into a series of strained and gasping screams.
Petrified for an instant, the next I had rushed back into the
sitting-room. The pseudo-dead man was writhing and rolling on the
hearthrug, and it was by him that those cries of suffering were
emitted. His congested veins were recovering their circulation, and
his torment was unspeakable.

I flung myself on my knees beside him, and caught and chafed his
agonised limbs, and poured more brandy down his throat. And by-and-by
the devil fled, and his cries sank into moans, and his moans to
spasmodic gasps; and when those ceased, I got him by degrees into a
chair, where he sat tottery and dribbling, and conning me speechlessly
from bloodshot eyes dim with wonder and the spent tragedy of pain.

“Rest quiet now,” I said, “and don’t attempt to speak or move. You
needn’t worry your brain either about what brought you here. It’s
quite simple. I stumbled on you by chance, sleeping to your death in a
snowdrift, and I fished you out of it and carried you to my house
here, which happened to be close by. Don’t answer, but if you think
you could stand more brandy, move your head, and I will get you a
glass, stiff and hot.”

He nodded feebly once or twice. I disposed him to his safety, fetched
a kettle, water, and the condiments, and in a little had brewed him a
good stinging jorum.

“Now,” I said, “I am going to pull the sofa there to the fire, put you
on it, and leave you to sleep.”

He smiled weakly as I lifted him in my arms, and whispered for the
first time, very faintly: “Good, good--ver’ strong and good--grazia,
signore!”

The medicine, I will admit, he took down lamblike, in three dutiful
gulps. It had its effect on him almost instantly. He closed his eyes
and sank back in a blissful stupor. Then I covered him warm with a
rug; lit the candles; shut all in snug and dry, and set about making
my preparations for a comfortable hot meal against the time when he
should awake.

A strange glow was in my blood. I must have felt something, I think,
of a mother’s feelings, when her conscious self first realises in the
new life beside her the earnest of pains past and present reward--when
she wakes from storm to see the rainbow glowing in her sky. Does that
sound extravagant? I daresay; but remember the sort of social Crusoe I
had been. This was my man Friday--the living salvage of my hands. I
was jealous already of my proprietorship in him. He owed his life to
me; and I felt a fierce joy in that debt, as in one that elevated me
for the first time to the ranks of life’s creditors. All conventional
disabilities vanished in that uplifting. What did a name matter to one
who had saved a life? I had qualified for the great human brotherhood.

He slept very long and heavily, hardly stirring or seeming to breathe.
When I had finished my preparations, I took a chair near him, and sat
pondering his face. It was of a curious green-white, like the
complexion of a plant starved in a cellar. The lines of emotion on it
looked almost grotesquely exaggerated, as if he had been an actor, who
had been made up to portray some tragic part, and who had forgotten to
wash himself afterwards. The contrast between that anæmic skin and
the grey furrows which channelled it was startling.

Who was he? and what could have brought him, a stranger and a
foreigner, to wander to his destruction on these remote and wintry
roads? I was greedy for his awakening to learn.

It came in the end quite suddenly. I had just made up the fire, and
was returning to my post of observation, when I saw his eyes wide open
and staring at me.

“Bully, old fellow!” I said. “_Come sta_, isn’t it? How do you find
yourself?”

He threw off the rug with a quick movement, and, scrambling to his
feet, precipitated himself on his knees before me, and caught and
kissed my hands.

“O, come! that’ll do,” I said. “It’s all right, you know.”

He poured out a torrent of gratitude, part English, part
Italian--wholly incoherent.

“Now,” I said, “if you don’t stop, I shall put you out in the snow
again.”

He was crying, and gesticulating, and embracing me all in one.

“Ah, the snow!” he cried; “and the pain--merciful God, the pain!--and
then the immenseness in the sleep. And you have save me--yes, signore,
you; like a strong lion you com’ and lift me in your mouse; and I am
yours--for ever and more I am yours according.”

He rose to his feet, and stood away, fingering his breast
dramatically.

“Very well,” I said. “But what am I to do with the gift?”

I foresaw, on the instant, embarrassments. But, as to that, I did him
less than justice. He lifted his head with dignity.

“Call me, and I will com’,” he said; “spik to me, and I will obey. Zat
is for my lov’ and duty to you for the eternity of all times. Now I
sank you and go. I go again on my way wiz a great heart, rich in the
thought of the help which vouchsafe itself to a poor dog wizout one
doubt or inquiration.”

I laughed.

“That’s all nonsense,” I said. “You aren’t in a state to take the road
again; and anyhow I’m not going to commit you to the risk. Here you
stop, you know, till it’s safe for you to move on.”

He came to me at once, and, lifting my hand and kissing it again--but
this time with a formal gravity--stood away, and looked at me with
glistening eyes.

“There was wonse a good man, signore,” he said, “who find a fellow
lying senseless by ze way; and he pour in wine and oil to his wounds;
and he ask nozzing--nozzing what the fellow be, or how he deserve what
he get, so he may just take the chance to help him. But I say I will
not com’ to you, signore, so noble and clementeenious, on the lie
which is not to spik. I say you shall know zis fellow, where he leave
and what he deserve, lest your goodness presently shall curse the
folly of itself. I am from prison--since twent-y year, signore, I have
live in prison, and zis is the first long travel I take from it when
you save me.”

He stopped, and bowing his head and clasping his hands, stood meekly
to receive my denunciation. And I do not deny that I was
startled--dumfoundered even for a moment. But the candour and honesty
of the confession overcame me.

“That’s all one,” I said. “There are many men we have to accept and
hobnob with who have a better title than you, I daresay, to the law’s
attentions. Well, you are a ticket-of-leave man, I suppose?”

He shook his head.

“No. I serve my term.”

I regarded him curiously. Circumstance was bringing me acquainted
which some queer house mates.

“A long one,” I said. “You must have deserved well of the law. Do you
mind telling me your name?”

“Ah! my name, signore,” he said. “Yes--Smit, that it is--yes, Smit is
my name.”

“Now you see,” I answered, “you make a show of speaking the truth to
me, and then you go and tell me that. I don’t believe it, of course.
What were you in for? I suppose you’ll say for shop-lifting, or
turnip-pulling, or sleeping out of doors, or something equally
convincing.”

“I was in for nozzing at all. It was a false charge; it was made by a
devil.”

“Of course. That’s even less than I imagined. And you are on your way
now to bring that devil to book for it, I suppose?”

“Yes, I am on my way, when the snow take me into its cold pillows, and
I die in zat bed but for you.”

The quietness of his manner impressed me in spite of myself.

“Why did you call yourself Smith--come now?” I said.

“I tell you a lie,” he answered at once. “It was just zat he might
miss to hear of me--not guess the truce of the vengeance which arrives
to him at last.”

“He? Who?” I asked apprehensively. This matter was assuming a more
sinister complexion than I quite liked. “I say, my friend, I hope your
looks are belying you. You haven’t got a knife in your pocket, have
you?”

“Signore,” he said earnestly, almost piteously, “I beg zat you not
force of me, your servant, to answer. For myself I will confess the
truce that I lie. My name is Antonio Geoletti.”

What chord of memory was suddenly touched in my brain? For a moment I
could not identify it--and then, all in a flash, it had leapt upon me
out of the dark. Geoletti! the name of the Italian guide mentioned in
Charlie Skene’s letter!

I looked at the man stupidly. Some dim association of ideas was
already quickening, very little and deep, in my brain. It was the seed
of a certain deductive reasoning--the stirring of a green shoot which,
like the Indian juggler’s mango-tree, would push through the soil in a
little and break into sudden leaf, and take my soul with knowledge.

“Geoletti?” I exclaimed at last, in a voice sharp with astonishment.
And then in one leap light came in, and the tree burst into flower.

_It was Mark Dalston whom this avenger was tracking to his doom!_

He bowed sombrely. After a little pause I went nearer to him. Here
was, as I have said, no coincidence; but the stupendousness of the
destiny quite awed and humbled me. What was I worth, without this
directing hand of Fate to guide me?

“Geoletti,” I said, looking at him intensely, but speaking very
quietly, “I think--perhaps--it may be--I can tell you something about
yourself.”

“Si, signore?” he answered as quietly, almost indifferently, for he
can have had no apprehension of what was to come.

“You were a guide, once upon a time, in the Italian Alps, were you
not?”

“Si, signore.” His eyelids flicked up swiftly, and were lowered again.
His lips gasped a little.

“You knew a Mr Cecil Delane there. He offended you somehow. It is to
be revenged on him, under his proper name of Mark Dalston, that you
are now come into this part of the country. Is not this all so?”

I thought he would have fallen. He caught himself steady by the sofa
end, and stood staring and gulping at me.

“Now, wait,” I said. “You wonder how I can know this. The puzzle of
Destiny makes a very simple map when it is put together, Geoletti.
Some time ago I happened to come across part of a letter in a book.
You were mentioned in it; Mr Dalston was mentioned in it, and one or
two others. But leave them out. It was just the association of the two
names, yours and his, then and now, that has made me jump to a
conclusion. Wait while I show you.”

I went and fetched the letter, and held it out under his eyes.

“Can you read?”

“Si--yes, yes.”

“Read, then.”

Eagerly, gluttonously, triumphantly, his eyes travelled down the
sheet, and rested on the name at its foot. He thrust out a rigid
finger, and pointed to it.

“Carlo, si! Buono Dio! Challie Skene--yes.”

“What about Charles Skene?”

“Dalston murder him, signore.”




 CHAPTER XXI.
 SNOW AND FIRE

It was a monstrous tale that he unfolded to me, scarce credible for
the guile, the inhuman persecution, the infernal callousness which it
revealed. And yet I could not but accept it as consistent and
convincing. There are men born, one knows, without the moral
bias--brutes “thrown back” on the primordial instincts for lust and
blood. But that learning and culture could be acquired merely to the
exploiting of such primitive passions was a stupendous enlightening.
There is a horrible tale of Hawthorne’s, which depicts the agony of a
clean and sensitive soul upon discovering accidentally that _all_ the
brother and sister souls of his familiar intercourse are on secret
midnight terms with the powers of darkness. I think I experienced
something of that ghastly disillusionment now. Where was the good of
refining and refining on our natures, if at the end such bestiality
remained possible to them? Better the snake and the lion, hunting
their prey on the plain issues of hunger.

My blood became water as I listened; the knees of my soul grew sick
under me. What had this man not suffered of unspeakable persecution,
if his story were to be believed! And I saw no reason to doubt it. The
perspective it appeared to open out to me of revelations affecting my
own interests was obscured for the moment in the contemplation of his
wilder wrongs. And yet I could not but admit he had deserved badly of
Fate. If his spirit of vengeance was justified, the spirit which had
involved him in it was vile. Yet assuredly, sinner as he was, he had
atoned a hundredfold. His back (he showed it me) was scored with
ineffaceable marks of that discipline. His soul (and he showed me that
too) was still deeper scored. He was delivered, had delivered himself,
a fearful brand of retribution into my hand.

I talked with him till late that night, and far into the following
morning. I had made him up a bed on the sofa, and there had become no
question but that he was to remain with me until this riddle of our
common destiny was resolved. I found in him, or believed I had found,
a minister, a witness, a testifier to things potential but
unspeakable. They will be touched upon in due time. In the meanwhile
he dwelt suspended between a mortal hatred on the one side and a blind
devotion on the other.

“What,” I said once to him, “if I were to tell you, Geoletti, that
this man Dalston is my friend?”

He rose to his feet, and begged me, in great emotion, to unsay my
question; to reassure him; not to drive him mad.

“Very well,” I said; “but you must consider that revenge is nothing if
it involves the avenger in the ruin of his victim. We have enough
evidence and over to put the noose about this fellow’s neck; but the
law doesn’t hang on moral testimony; and until we have the material,
sifted and compact, it behoves us to move with caution. He isn’t one,
I gather, to overlook a false step made by an enemy. And there’s to be
no knifing, mind.”

He assured me earnestly that he would be secret, circumspect, always
entirely at my disposal and commands. And with that I had to rest
content.

After lunch on that second day, restless beyond endurance, I left him
to an hour’s siesta while I went for a walk in the bitter weather. I
wanted to think my thoughts alone, to decide upon a plan of campaign,
to clear my mind for battle. It was snowing again, and the wind was
wilder than ever--a furious stimulant to action. I went down first of
all into the road, and saw it swept as clean as a curling rink, though
the drifts on the wood side were piled six feet deep against the bank.
But, bethinking myself that Dalston, or even his uncanny lady, might
chance to come that way, I altered my mind, and, turning again into
the Caddle, went off northward towards Hags Lane.

It was stiff enough work while the trees protected me; but once out in
the open, lungs, muscle, and resolution had to make a common cause of
it. There was no thinking of anything here but just how to set one
foot before the other and hold on. The wind was like a chaff cutter,
whirling off ends of snow that stung one’s skin like straw points; the
fields went up and down in tossed billows of white, with the ground
frozen deep green in the troughs of them; leaden sky and spinning
flakes and the dim tracery of trees were all wrought together in one’s
view, as if life had got into that inextricable tangle which must mean
the end of things. A wild enough day for a constitutional, one might
have thought; and yet, it seemed, I was not the only, nor the weakest
vessel, which had been driven to venture abroad in it. For, beating at
length into the comparative harbourage of Hags Lane, I saw, come there
before me in pursuit of shelter, the figure of a solitary young lady.

She stood under a white-streaked hawthorn which, protruding from the
bank, afforded her a certain cover. In her hand was a broken umbrella,
which dangled like a shot rook with its pinions flopping. Her face
looked very white and her eyes preternaturally large.

I went up to her. “Miss Christmas,” I said, “are you out of your
senses?”

I could have thought that some soft sound, even like a suppressed sob,
came from her lips. If I was not mistaken, she hastened to convince me
at least that the fact of my arrival had nothing to do with it. Her
answer was as cold as the falling snow.

“I don’t think so. I am quite capable of taking care of myself, thank
you.”

“You are not, if you can venture out alone on such a day as this. I
must take you home at once.”

She curled her lip magnificently.

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you. I wish you would go to
another tree. There is plenty of room in this lane for both of us.”

“If I go, I shall go altogether.”

She turned her shoulder on me.

“I don’t want to be rude,” she said.

Now, whatever the meaning of her presence here, her escapade was the
maddest thing conceivable. I was quite at a loss how to account for it
or persuade her from it, when suddenly the devil put a suspicion, half
tormenting, half mocking, into my head, and I spoke recklessly, on the
spur of it.

“Mr Dando has gone away,” I said, “if it was any hope of running
across him that brought you here.”

She started--turned swiftly--and I saw that look on her face which I
had seen once before.

“Ira,” I cried, “don’t say it!”

She threw away the dislocated umbrella, burst into tears, and ran out
into the snow. But she had not gone ten paces, when she stumbled and
sank to her knees. In an instant I was beside her. I did not know what
had happened to me. Is this sort of thing after all a stroke--or
perhaps a sudden possession? Something like a fiery pulse was
hammering in my brain. I felt furious, savage, half
suffocated--reckless with a lust of pain, to inflict it and invite it.
We were Pan and Syrinx in the blasting weather. I was crazy to make a
reed of her sweet red mouth, and breathe my soul of passion into it.
This frenzy may have been long germinating in me. Its delivery came in
a roar of flame--why at this moment more than at another I cannot say.
Perhaps it was the sudden sense of my isolation, alone with her in
that cold soft world--her helplessness--the appeal of her young
troubled face--my own much troubled soul. I had no claim on her, nor
hope nor right of claim that could be held to exonerate me. Who was I
to cull such a flower to my bastardy? And yet I could not control this
sudden insane feeling, nor deny myself the mad indulgence of it. Come
what would, I would take for my own so much of her as my lips would
carry. I lifted her in my arms, while she struggled weakly to repulse
me.

“No use,” I said fiercely. “I am strong, and a brute perhaps, and I am
going to use my strength to rob your lips. They have insulted me often
enough to deserve that toll. Scream if you like. It can hurt no one
but yourself. Why did you think I made that remark about Johnny Dando?
I myself hardly knew at the moment; but now I know. I was
jealous--wickedly, horribly jealous. I had no right to be, I own--no
right to think at all of you. But I do, Ira--I can’t help it; no more
can you. I think of you, I am thinking of you now, in a way that would
make you blush if you knew. Be quiet; it is useless your struggling. I
want just that much of you--your mouth, and I intend to have it. Then
I will let you go, and you can punish me as you like. Only this one
thing you will never be able to say again--that your lips are virgin
lips to the man who shall come to court and win you. You had better
say nothing about it to him. That will be always the secret between
you and me, Ira; and I will promise for my part to hold it inviolate.”

Something in the word, perhaps, drove me beyond myself. I bent my face
down towards hers.

She had lain all this time like a wounded fawn in my arms, her eyes
closed, her lips a little parted, the breath fluttering in her tender
side. Now suddenly, to my wonderment, she looked up at me with a
wistful smile.

“Richard,” she said, “you do not want me to die, do you? I thought I
was going to; and then you came, and I could have cried with delight.
I was so cold, and I had lost myself, and my heart seemed to fly out
to your warmth and strength; and I thought, He is going to help me,
though I have been so foolish; and suddenly I felt quite safe and
happy.”

The madness died down in me, like a flame on which fragrant spices
have been thrown. I seemed to myself to gasp for breath. She had seen
me coming to her in her peril, and had felt safe.

“No, Ira,” I said, in a low choking voice, “I do not want you to die.”

“Then why do you threaten me with this killing shame?”

“I must have some of you. I never knew my own mad need until this
moment.”

“Are you in love with me, Richard?”

“Yes. Now you mention it, I suppose that’s it.”

“And do you want to shame the thing you love?”

“No, Ira, if you would only love me too a little. Will you?”

She gave a thread of a smile.

“How can I help it, if it is to save myself?”

I gathered her furiously to my breast, and rose to my feet, holding
her so. My arms were crushed about her; I set my teeth, snarling, to
the demons of the storm. Let death and hate try to come to conclusions
with me for this my possession. Not a breath should enter to despoil
her, if I knew her really for my own. I looked with wonder once more
into her face. The very veins in it were things to love like flowers;
the snowflakes crisped upon her hair; her eyes were closed again, and
happily, it seemed to me.

“My God!” I said. “It can’t be true--it can’t. Answer me, Ira. Are you
not offended?”

“I don’t think so, Richard.”

“Oh, my love! You said your heart flew out to me.”

“You mustn’t be too exacting,” she whispered.

“Why don’t you open your eyes, Ira? I am mad to read them.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

I held her closer still.

“Ira, I shall never kiss you now, until you give me leave with your
own lips.”

She did not answer. Suddenly I saw a smile flicker on her mouth, and
her long lids opened--just a crevice.

“Richard!” she panted, “they never gave you leave.”

“Yes, they did, they did. O! the world has gone by us, Ira, and we are
left alone together in the old first heaven of things.”

We sat together presently, very unwisely, in the snow under the old
hawthorn--at least I sat on the snow and Ira on me. But we were both
content.

“My poor umbrella,” she said. “It was blown to pieces in my hand.”

“What made you do such an insane thing--come out at all?”

“Are you sorry I did?”

“Sorry! Supposing I had not taken a walk? Supposing the cold had
killed you?”

“Would you have minded _very_ much, Richard?”

This fond stichomythia! these amorous anglings for assurance and
reassurance of love’s blisses! They are not for the wise to
understand. I had not understood them myself an hour ago. Let me hide
their memory away in that old old tabernacle of nature, where only the
foolish and the selfsame smitten shall steal in to contemplate and
adore.

Ira accounted to me for her rashness. The sight of Lady Skene’s
restless anguish--for the child, though better from that dread attack
of two nights ago, was still in a parlous state--had in the end proved
too much for her, and she had hurried out to forget herself in
exercise and fresh air. Then, wandering on blindly in the snow, she
had suddenly awakened to the knowledge that she was lost, and very
cold, and that the wind and rushing flakes seemed all at once to have
become things of animate wickedness, shutting her round and in, and
barring every exit with spears of ice.

“You must have been thinking very deeply, Ira, to have come so far
without noticing. I wonder what about?”

“Yes, Richard. When--when we think a good deal of something, I suppose
something is a good deal in our thoughts, isn’t it?”

“How aggravating of you! I was already pluming myself on a nice
compliment. Well, _you_ have been in _my_ thoughts enough, I can tell
you.”

“Have I? That is why I have felt cold for such a time, I suppose.”

“It sha’n’t be my fault if you feel cold ever again. Do you know what
fools we are to sit here? I’m in a fine glow, myself; but how about
you?”

“O! your arms are about me.”

“You ought to feel them like stove pipes, if they come anywhere near
expressing their own ardour.”

“Please be a little less violent in your language, Richard. Do you
know you are rather a savage creature altogether.”

“You shall tame me. I have had my excuses, Ira--I really have.”

“I know, my dear lord. How shouldn’t I know indeed!”

She put up a penitent mouth. Her sweetness and submission quite
overcame me.

“Richard,” she whispered, with her face very close to mine, “do you
know that, when you--when you cried out to stop me just now, it was
the first time in all your life you had called me Ira?”

“Was it? I don’t know why I called you so then. It came out
involuntarily.”

“Yes; so I supposed; and it was that that made me burst out crying and
run away.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You must be a woman first.”

“Like you, you chit, I suppose you mean. But something occurs to me
that I want to ask you. Do you remember that kiss I gave you long
ago?”

“Perhaps I do--if I flog my memory very hard.”

“Ira, did you hate me for it?”

“N-o-o--I think not.”

“What then?”

“You can imagine nothing but extremes. Isn’t there something--I only
put it to you, you know--between hate, and--love?”

“No; nothing whatever.”

“O! then I suppose I didn’t hate you for it.”

“You dear! What would you have thought of Johnny Dando if he had dared
such a thing?”

“Mr Dando? I should have been furious--outrageously furious; and then
spoilt all the effect by laughing myself into hysterics, I expect. But
it’s too absurd to think of for a moment. He’s much too good-mannered,
for one thing.”

“O, Ira!”

“Does that hurt you, Richard? You have insulted me often enough to
deserve that toll, dear. Don’t you remember your own words? But,
there! It’s very helpful, sometimes, to be taken by storm.”

“I have been very cruel to you, you lovely soft thing.”

Her young arms stole sweetly about my neck.

“How nice to hear your flattery, Richard. You might beat me ten times
a day, if you would always end by saying such things to me. And you
have the air of believing them. _Am_ I pretty--to you, I mean?”

“As if you didn’t know it.”

“That is to say you think me spoilt.”

“Well, young lady, a cherry’s only the sweeter for having a little
bruise in it. But you’ve come on finely in these years. To think what
a detestable little prig you used to be!”

“Now you want to make me cry.”

“Cry away. There aren’t many women to whom tears are becoming, but I
expect you are one of the few.”

“What a Sultan you are; but not very wise to flatter me there. Think
what it would mean to have a crying wife!”

A wife! The words struck a sudden chill into me. My arms, strained
passionately about the child, relaxed a little.

“Ira,” I groaned, “I swear that until this moment I have never
realised my madness.”

She did not answer; but her eyes canvassed me with a sudden piteous
wonder.

“That I should dream of such a monstrous thing--dream that any claim
of mine to you would be listened to for a moment!”

She gave a heart-won happy sigh, and her face was summer again.

“Have _I_ not listened to you, Richard--with all my ears and heart?”

“Yes; but your guardian? The world?”

“What are they to us? I shall soon be my own mistress.”

“Yes, but--O, Ira! I wish I could say I shall soon be my own master.”

“You are master of me, and I am you, Richard. O, dear! are you going
to break my heart after all you’ve said?”

I caught her to me once more in a rapture.

“You dear passionate baby! Do you realise to what, to whom you are
binding yourself?”

“Yes, to my Richard, if you please; and if you abuse him any more, I
shall cry in good earnest.”

How could I answer but in the terms of that lovers’ text-book which
has endured since Eden? A silence fell between us; and then suddenly I
felt myself shivering.

“We are a couple of fools, young woman,” I said, “love-making out here
in the snow. That is not the way to provide against troubles that will
need all our strength to meet them.”

She bestirred herself in quick alarm.

“O dear! what a selfish wretch! You have been keeping me warm all this
time at your own cost. O, come away, Richard--come away at once,
before it is too late.”

She pulled frantically at me. I laughed.

“I expect you will have to carry _me_ now, Ira. I feel as stiff as a
gun barrel.”

“Richard!”

“There, Miss Christmas--nothing but my chaff; but on my word we ought
to be moving. Will you come and sit with me a little in my own lodge?”

“O! you mustn’t ask me, Richard.”

“But, supposing I do, and insist?”

“Then I shall obey, of course.”

“And be very unhappy, of course; and a sweet dutiful devoted child. I
am learning by degrees, Ira. But I must take you that way, though not
to stop, because, with all my ardour, the prospect of that climb back
by the fields doesn’t appeal to me, and the road is swept clean by the
wind, so that we can walk on it easily, and get back by the main
entrance. Come along, child.”

I had to carry her through the lane, nevertheless, and so on mostly
until we reached the woods, where I could trust her to her own pretty
feet. And there we walked in security, like authorised lovers.

“Now,” I said, “I have been forgetting everything but just our two
selves. Is Lady Skene so very unapproachable, Ira?”

She stopped me suddenly, clinging to me, with a pained line come
between her eyes.

“What does it all mean, Richard? There is something more than the
child--I am sure of it; and it fills me with fear and anxiety.”

I held her silent a little, turning my face away in a gloom of
irresolution.

“Yes, Ira, there is something more,” I said presently, and very
softly--“something terribly serious and terribly upsetting.”

“I was certain of it,” she whispered. “And you know what it is? I can
never forget her face that evening I found you, together. Am I not to
know, Richard? It is not for my curiosity, indeed.”

“I am sure of it, dear,” I said. “It is your love for her. But I have
a greater claim on your love now, Ira, and I must ask you, for the
sake of that claim, to forbear questioning me at present. The secret
is not my own--at least, not all my own--though it affects my
interests very closely. Sometimes, even, I dare to hope of it a better
claim to you than I possess now. But you mustn’t ask me, dear. There
are ordeals, and interviews, and all sorts of unhappy explanations to
be gone through with before I can trust myself to reveal it to you.
But you mustn’t suppose, in the meantime, that I am Lady Skene’s
enemy. Indeed, if that is true which I expect to be true, my
interference will benefit her--in one way, at least. I am trying to
circumvent a scoundrel, Ira, and chance has put some very wonderful
evidence in my hands. I must not tell you more than that.”

“You are not in any danger--you yourself, Richard?” she asked
fearfully.

“No, you love,” I said--“not more that most people who set themselves
to battle against the forces of villainy. And now I am double-armoured
in your love. It will be such a joy to me, Ira, to put it all out of
mind when I am alone, and let your little image in to talk with me,
and laugh with me, and sleep with me, too, for you can’t help it.”

She gazed into my face a little longer in great doubt and trouble,
until the tears coming into her eyes made her blink, and she turned
away.

“I wish,” she said woefully, “I could be thought strong enough to bear
the burden with you--to help you, Richard.”

“Help me?” I cried--“never so much as by holding yourself and your
dear love apart from all this debasing atmosphere of gloom and
secrecy. I want to think of you out in the sunshine, Ira--something
sweet and unspoiled for my heart to rest on. Now be a sensible dear. I
shall come up to the house to see you to-morrow.”

“You will?” she whispered, brightening through her grief. “Come early,
Richard.”

“Why not?” I cried cheeringly. “Small profits and quick returns, Ira,
as Johnny would say. I sha’n’t let the grass grow under my feet, lest
you change your mind.”

She gave me a lovely tremulous smile in reassurance for that, and we
went on together again. The wind had dropped, almost suddenly, and the
cold white woods were full of a wonderful stillness. As we passed by
the darkling lodge, I thought of the figure hidden away within its
shadows, and a glow of mighty triumph went through my veins, picturing
that confederacy of love and death out of which was to be wrought for
me a new manhood and a name.




 CHAPTER XXII.
 A VISIT FROM MR DALSTON

After Paradise the Deluge. But I held my head high, and laughed at
the lowering heavens. I had enough faith in me to float an ark, with
my heart for dove in it, waiting confidently in expectation of the
green promise. Such deep and full content in myself I had never
dreamed were possible. I was become another being in the prospect of
my close relations with that pure and beautiful child. When I awoke on
the morrow of my joy, it was surely to the same earth I had gone to
sleep on; but whither translated--to what halcyon climate? I could
have believed it had caught in the train of some passing comet during
the night, and been swept into a starrier, balmier region. The frost
had gone; the birds were singing; a sweet and melting tenderness had
usurped the places of terror. No doubt, at the same time, some
clinging villainies had been brought away with it; but their necessary
clearance figured no longer as the paramount interest. They were of
first moment only in their menace to my love’s innocent feet; they
must be cut and weeded away only that the garden of my love’s soul be
made perfect to her.

That was how I felt at last; and let all old dry misogamists and
scornful Benedicks jeer their fill at me. I was of you once myself, O,
sapless brotherhood! until that thing came to happen which made it
impossible for me ever to be of you again. Now, I say, I would rather
hear a lover rant of love than a wise man discourse on wisdom; would
rather, for all the world is worth, be the sinning penitent than the
sinless priest who grudges him absolution. How is Solomon most
remembered? Why, by the love rhapsody which is called his Song--no
better.

It was strange how all the passion and the melancholy of my revengeful
past were dimmed suddenly in the radiance of this new feeling. Day had
risen behind the sullen flaming rick and absorbed it. Still, if
inclination to my task of retribution was much lessened, duty yet
impelled me on to that task. Such tragic and momentous issues hung
upon my conduct of it. Though a mother’s pined-for recognition no
longer drove me forward, there was the question no less of an unhappy
woman’s persecution to make my blood run fury. Besides, I could not
shut my eyes to the fact that all this accumulation of evidence put
me, so long as I remained its sole depository, in the position of an
accessory. Wherefore, everything considered, I was resolved to go this
very day, with my witness, to Lord Skene, and make clean my breast to
him, poor man, of all its “perilous stuff.”

It was a resolve, indeed, not to be regarded lightly; for with what
thunderbolts did it not threaten that old unconscious head! Into the
peaceful chamber of his meditations I was to flounce with fire and
brimstone--murder, blackmail and, worst of all, to some minds, sick
dishonour. For, as to that last, my determination to speak the truth
was one with all the rest. Lady Skene had laid no embargo on me, but
had rather implied, I thought, an acquiescence in my possible advocacy
of her cause. And, indeed, it was out of all my heavy duty the task I
feared the least, since, I believed, it would prove the one the least
disturbing to his lordship; and that for reasons given long ago. The
lesson of that deceit, I suspected, would lack all but a roguish moral
in his eyes.

But, for his boy; his murdered heir! How would he take that ghastly
revelation, and how decide to deal with it?

Yet there was no other course--none that I could see; and I confess,
for myself, that the prospect of shifting the whole burden of my
responsibilities to the shoulders of that shrewd legal understanding
was not, in my then state of exaltation, an unwelcome one. I wanted
freedom in myself for the range of lovelier thoughts. Why should I
retain for ever the sole thankless wardenship of that secret? I was
quite ready to forego my part of principal there, and decline upon the
humbler rank of scout or agent to his lordship.

Yet, when it came to the prick of decision, I lingered and lingered
out the moments. The old man had been good to me. He was happy and
secure in his ignorance. Would he hold the profits of this débâcle
to compensate its losses, and thank me for an interference, which
could bring no gains to him but disillusionment? The substantial
gains, indeed, were more for me than him--and so for Ira. I owed them,
after all, to her. Though I hated my iconoclastic part, it was that
tender debt must hold me inexorably to it.

I had informed Geoletti of my purpose; and he had answered “It is
well, signore. That which you decide is good, is good.” Then he
bestirred himself to do my household work, and, when all else was
finished, retired into the little kitchen to scrub pots and pans.

Lulled by the sound of his soft movements behind the near-closed door,
my thoughts took dreamy wing, and floated out incontinently into the
open. Were my Ira’s speeding to join issue with them above that lovely
hawthorn valley mistermed Hags Lane? What flowers should come to
blossom there in spring? I believed I could write a poem on the
subject, and tinglingly I got out paper and pencil, and sharpened the
latter to a point of tenderest wit, and in a little was absorbed in my
task. Shame, that lover’s rapture should be “held up” over a rhyme!
What was inspiration to these cold laws of prosody? But at last I
appropriated one--“tiara”--the Lord forgive me--and then it was easy,
comparatively, to fit my crown of blossoms to it. Nevertheless it
struck eleven from the little clock on the mantelpiece while I was
still fitting it; and at that same instant I became aware of a
presence in the room.

“A thousand apologies, my dear fellow!” said an unfamiliar voice. “I
wouldn’t have interrupted you for the world in such a romantic task,
if I had known.”

I sat for a minute quite rigid and motionless. It never occurred to me
that here, perhaps, was the best testimony I could have wished to the
effectiveness of my own secret dealings. It seemed only an impossible
piece of insolence that could have brought this man to seek my
company, and at such a moment. But I did not reveal myself. A long
habit of self-repression came to my aid.

“Mr Dalston?” I said at last.

He nodded brightly.

“We have met before. I hope we shall meet again--and on terms of a
better understanding.”

I rose to my feet, at least perfectly cool in seeming.

“Meaning--what?” I asked.

“Nothing cryptic, of course,” said he.

He glanced about the room. His manner was very alert and vivacious.
His teeth and glittering eyes seemed, when he turned his face again,
to take possession of me.

“The tragedy of that first meeting,” he said, “put any pleasant
understanding between us two at the time out of the question, didn’t
it?”

“You use an odd word, Mr Dalston,” I said; “and take an odd way--you
will excuse me--for a stranger.”

“Why, as to that,” he answered, smiling, “I found the door open, and
took what I supposed to be the proper woodland way with hermits. Men
of your principles love secrecy, don’t they? and quiet comings and
goings, and visits unawares? I only borrowed a leaf out of your book,
you see.”

Now, though he was so gay and debonair, I recognised on the instant
some sinister meaning behind his words, and knew that he was aware, in
some measure at least, of the watchful part I had been playing, and
knew, moreover, that he wanted me to know that he knew. I could not
guess his purpose, beyond the fact that it appeared to imply some
menace and a warning; but I could be as cool as he, and his equal, as
I thought, in cunning.

“You referred to an understanding between us,” I said rather
drawlingly. “Well, I can only repeat that it seems to me an odd word
to use.”

“Does it?” he answered; “does it really? Well, say it may be held to
imply, in general terms, a motto--_Vive et vivas_; or, to put it
specifically, If you don’t interfere with me, I won’t interfere with
you.”

“Ah! now you puzzle me entirely--as much, I confess, as the
strangeness of your being down here, alone at eleven o’clock in the
morning, puzzles me.”

“Why, that is easily explained,” he said. “I have just been walking
with Lady Skene in that delightful bower--a little cold just
now--called the Baby’s Garden, and I took this path upon leaving her,
as being the shortest and the most private.”

“O! Why as the most private, may I ask?”

He leaned upon his stick, hat in hand, conning me with a smiling
archness.

“Don’t you know? Don’t you know, indeed, my dear boy? But of course
you do; or why should I be here?”

“That is for you to say.”

“You have inherited frankness, I see. I have always been a model of
frankness myself. I am glad to hear you pay that debt to your
inheritance, Richard.”

I was gathering, at last, something of his drift. He was feeling his
way to my sense of filial duty. I could have struck my fist into his
accursed dandy face. No doubt he had heard from Lady Skene the facts
of that interview between us in her boudoir, and had assumed, as she
had assumed, that the knowledge of my parentage was a revelation to
me. Let him rejoice then, and scheme on that premise, and set the trap
to his own damnation. It was for me now, with all that frenzy of
hatred tingling at my finger-ends, to nurse his delusion for him, and
play the double hypocritical part. I was surprised, even, at the
resources of Machiavellianism I discovered in myself.

“Mr Dalston,” I said, “as you flatter me for candour, I will be as
candid as you could wish. I am aware, as you imply, that you have been
drawing upon Lady Skene for money, and I know the reason.”

“That’s capital,” he said--“that’s very capital and engaging. Well,
now, consider, Richard; love-children are not generally regarded in
the light of very eligible partis, are they? especially when franked
by no financial recommendations. Lord Skene would hardly look upon
such a one as a suitable match for a ward-at-law--and a particularly
charming and well-endowed ward-at-law, I will say. I only put it to
you that the revelation of such a suitor’s legal status would hardly
appeal favourably to a guardian. Now would it? Better, at least, for
him, I think, to make no boast of his moral disability. It is nothing
but a question of terms, after all; but upon such, alas! are our
ridiculous conventions founded.”

How could I listen to him, and not spring at his murderous, lying
throat? His very nameless reference to the subject of my most sacred
hopes was a blasphemy scarce tolerable. But I kept my sense of the
enormous issues that hung upon my self-command, and I dealt him back
his double-dealing to the hilt.

“I am to understand, then, I conclude,” I said, and with a manner, I
do believe, of helpless conviction, “that, if I give you away, I may
expect to be given away myself?”

He laughed.

“You put it with a boyish crudeness; but the method has its
fascinations. Why not, rather, call it a little family understanding,
Richard? We are all in the same boat; we all have our crying needs of
the moment. Yes, call it that; and our family motto--_Vive et vivas_.”

“Well, you must give me a little time,” I said. “This comes as rather
a shock on one, you see?”

“Time!” he cried--“time, if you wish it, to indite fifty immortal
sonnets to your mistress’s eyebrow. I am never in a hurry, my dear
fellow. Let the thought germinate and take root at its leisure. What a
charming retreat, to be sure. And you live here all alone?”

“Yes, all alone.”

“Not even an Abigail to minister the needs?--but of course not, in our
present transcendent altitudes. I wonder if I might pry a bit?”

Should I let him? I thought how during all this interview the door
giving into the kitchen had stood ajar; I recalled how, even before
the fact of his presence in the room had been borne in upon me, all
sound of Geoletti’s movements hard by had suddenly ceased. I pictured
a deadly figure crouching behind the door, saw a mincing step pass on
and in, heard a sudden wild-beast snarl and rush, and then a scream,
my God, freezing one’s blood--and for one instant I was half minded to
bid him on his way, and end thus swiftly at a blow the story of his
villainies.

It was a ghastly temptation--almost paralysing in its suddenness. I
had even stirred involuntarily to make way for him, when the thought
that not vengeance, but retribution, was to be the first exaction,
came to save me. I put my hand across my forehead, and felt it wet.
For a moment I could not command my voice. If my agitation was
obvious, however, he could find his own reasons to account for it. No
doubt he was pluming himself, the blind fool, on his unnerving
conquest of a boy.

“I’d rather, if you don’t mind,” I said at length, “be left to myself
just now. You’ve a bit upset me, as you may guess, and I’m not quite
in the mood to play cicerone.”

“Why, of course,” he rejoined at once and cheerily. “It was
inconsiderate of me. Bye-bye, then, till we meet again, my dear boy.
No, don’t trouble; I can find my own way out,” and he went, smiling,
and waving his hand back to me, and humming a pleasant tune.

The moment he was well gone, I stepped swiftly to the kitchen door,
and stood to obstruct its passage. But the precaution was unnecessary.
No sound or movement came from within.

I stood for a little, triumphing in my own triumphant duplicity. The
dog had thought to force my hand, and had only succeeded in betraying
the pretentious emptiness of his own. He had discovered nothing of
importance, for all his midnight craft; had no suspicion, even, of
that most momentous betrayal of him by his own and nearest, or surely
he would have intimated his knowledge of it to me. I ground my hands
into one another, grinding my teeth. To what had I not been forced to
listen, and, in appearance, to subscribe? A family understanding? No
doubt, granting the hypothesis of my success on the score of it, _my_
blackmailing was to follow as a necessary consequence. It was
defilement merely to have encountered him--aye, and countered him,
too--with his own weapons. I felt as if I could never be entirely
self-respecting again until I had come to terms about him with the
hangman.

With the thought, I turned, and with a guarded caution tiptoed into
the kitchen. My eyes were expectant of the vision of other eyes,
yellow and catlike, crouched near the boards; of a gathered catlike
shape; of a claw of steel protruding from catlike folds. But there was
nothing of the sort awaiting them. Geoletti was nowhere to be seen.

But suddenly, even as I stood in indecision, the oddest sound greeted
my ears. It was like the little sibilant yap of a dog in distressed
dreaming; and it appeared to come from under the dresser.

“Geoletti!” I whispered, amazed.

He came crawling out on all fours, actually like an abject dog, and,
when he reached me, rose up on his knees, fawning with both hands, and
his eyes bright with madness.

“Signore,” he urged hoarsely, “you not go in wiz him--my God! I say,
you not go! Listen to wat I tell you. When two enter togezer, only won
return. His smile on the face zat hide--what? His hand in his pocket
zat hold--what? For you, so you follow him, zere shall be no smile
never again--no face at all to smile wiz. Merciful God, signore! sink
of her what wait you--the beautiful signora, and how on you depend her
happiness. She sall die if evil come to you. Ecco! I know. Her state
is not zat to endure it. Go back, signore! my God, go back!”

He struggled with me, his voice full of an entreating frenzy.

“Geoletti!” I cried, gripping him with force, “what is it? what is the
matter with you? You heard and saw him. Was it not the man?”

He only writhed the harder.

“Signore, I see somsing--I hear somsing! But his eyes--my God! zey see
everysing--his soul go into the deep places--zey look round the door
when his voice spik, though he not move his body.”

Quite suddenly he swayed and fell over. I don’t know whether or not he
was seized with a sort of fit. He lay rigid and staring, and foam
appeared on his lips. But in a minute it was over. He came to himself,
sane once more, but dazed and for the moment quite helpless and
exhausted.

What devilish cantrip had so overthrown his reason? But, from whatever
cause, the moral of his seizure was plain to me. Henceforth, on my
shoulders alone must rest the main burden of the Nemesis.

Hours passed before the man was sufficiently himself again to justify
my use of him for witness. And, in the meanwhile, how was my love
accounting for my tardiness?




 CHAPTER XXIII.
 GEOLETTI TELLS HIS STORY

She came to me, dear love, the moment I had entered the house. Her
sweet eyes, wet and wild, were full of sorrow and unmeant reproach.
They gave one startled glance at the Italian, where he stood behind
me, deferential in the shadows, and then came back in mute appealing
to my face.

“Sit down here, Geoletti,” I said, “until I send for you.”

He obeyed, and I drew the girl into a room hard by, and shut the door,
and held out impassioned arms.

“I could not help it, Ira; indeed, I could not. Things beyond my
controlling have detained me.”

In a moment she had run to me--had abandoned herself to me, and was
sobbing in my arms as if her heart would break.

“Richard, I have wanted you so! Such a dreadful thing!”

“Ira, my darling, what is this?”

“I don’t know what it is. You must go to him--you must go to him at
once. He has been asking for you.”

“He? Who?”

“Lord Skene. O! she has gone away--left us! He has been questioning
me--Uncle Charlie has--and I could tell him nothing. How could I? but
you, Richard?”

“Hush, my dearest darling. Try and compose yourself. Who has gone
away? Tell me in one word, now.”

“Aunt Georgie has.”

“She has gone away? run away, do you mean?”

“She left a letter. He will show it you. There must not be any
scandal, Richard. Some plausible explanation must be given. She went
away before lunch--on foot, and by herself. When I went to look for
her, she was gone, and only the letter was left, and I took it to
uncle, and he read it, and almost broke down before the servants. But
you know what he is. In another moment no one would have thought
anything was the matter--not until I had him alone. O, Richard! what
is it? Everything seems dark and miserable. And you know, and you
won’t tell me.”

“I will tell you if you ask me to; but you will not ask me, dear--not
yet. I see another stroke of scoundrelism in this, perhaps. Why didn’t
I send him to his death! I believe I should have, if I’d known--the
smiling cursed devil!”

“Richard! Who?--you are terrifying me out of my senses.”

“My love, you must not. Look, little girl--little dear, dear girl. I
am holding you--I am Richard, your lover--your lover who puts his
strong arms about you, and tells you it shall all come right. Will you
not trust me?”

“Yes, I will--I will, Richard. Only your violence makes me sick for
you.”

“It makes me sick for myself, to think I cannot control it before my
bird with her beating heart. Be quiet, little soft frightened heart!
Now kiss me, Ira, as I hold you so; and then I will go to him without
a moment’s more delay.”

Yet, for all my resolution, my own heart was beating violently as I
went to seek the old man in his study, where he sat alone. He was at
his desk, his head leaned upon his hand. The lights were lit, but not
enough to flood the room, which lay in partial shadow. It gave me a
pitiful shock, as he turned his face, to see how haggard it was, how
unkempt his hair, so sprucely groomed in general, how all in a base
moment his age had betrayed him. He started upon recognising me, and
gave a heavy sigh, and rose as if to move, but, feeling his weakness,
sank down again, with a forced laugh.

“Egad!” said he--“and I’ve drunk nothing. You must come to the
mountain, Mahomet, as it can’t come to you.”

I took a chair by the desk, and, leaning forward, looked at him
earnestly.

“Lord Skene,” I said low, “Miss Christmas has told me. You meant her
to, I suppose?”

He hesitated an instant; then pushed an open letter towards me; but in
the act withdrew it.

“One moment, my boy,” he said. “There are things that--the essentials
are all you’ll need. Oblige me by reading only what I underline.”

He was busy a little, with a shaking hand; then thrust the letter
towards me once more.

“There,” he said. “You’re her son anyhow. You’ll spare me any
comments, Gaskett, but such as bear strictly upon the question of her
flight and its reasons. I think it likely you’ll know more about those
than I do. There seems a coincidence--damn it, boy, wasn’t there some
damned conscious raven croaking in you the other day, when--there,
read what I’ve underlined.”

He turned his face away impatiently as I took his letter, and read
what he had marked:--

 “_I could have faced the horror of that exposure once--could have
 braved it, even, as your wife, Charles--you will forgive me--I know
 your loving generosity so well. But as the mother of your child I
 cannot face it. ... My falsehood lies like a blight upon his little
 gentle life; his sweet truth finds a stranger in his mother. Perhaps,
 when I am gone, by God’s mercy, he will recover, and live to forget
 me. When just now we were alone together, and I whispered to him that
 I was going, I am sure he stirred and gave a little sigh as if he were
 already conscious of something lifted--some load passing from him. Oh,
 Charles, how cruel, though I have deserved it! I think if you
 knew--all my tears and penitence in the life I am about to seek--that
 sin against the Lamb! ... do not distress yourself about me. I shall
 be secure in the fold. Someday, after my final abjuration of the
 world, I will let you know ... make what terms you can and will with
 my betrayer, for your own sake, for the sake of our darling, dear, not
 for mine. ... This cannot continue--its way is madness. There is no
 possible foreseeing a limit to his exactions, or to my robbing you.
 Now, knowing me fled, he will be anxious, perhaps, to come to terms.
 ... Richard will tell you--my shame is his, but not the right to
 avenge it. Keep him, with all the force of your persuasion, from that
 horrible thought. ... Oh, Charles, forgive me!_”

His eyes had sought me again restlessly, as I read; and now, seeing me
come to an end, he rose quickly and tremulously, and set to pacing up
and down.

“What the devil does it all mean, Gaskett? We must stop her--get her
back somehow before it’s too late and the scandal’s out. Have you any
idea where she can have gone?”

“Give me time to think, sir. It is all very sad.”

“Time, time!” he protested irritably. “It’s just that we want to
foreclose on. While it passes, she--good God! you don’t think she’ll
do herself any hurt, do you?”

“I don’t think so, sir. You have her word. She’s seeking some asylum,
from which she proposes writing to you by-and-by.”

“And you know the reason?”

“Yes. I think I may say I’m sure of it.”

He stared at me, where I had risen by the desk. His usual scrupulous
jauntiness was all slack and unstrung. I noticed with concern that the
bow of his shepherd’s-plaid tie was twisted an inch out of its place.
He looked as if he had been out for many nights on end.

“It’s all deuced odd,” he said at last. “What devil’s abroad in the
house of late? First you and your conundrums, and now this. Perhaps
you’ll be telling me there’s some connection between the two.”

“Yes; I shall tell you that.”

“Ah!”

“There is a very close connection, sir, as regards one person.”

“What person?”

“Mr Dalston.”

The name obviously conveyed no meaning to him. He only pondered me,
dumfoundered, fingering his lips.

“The man is an infernal scoundrel, sir,” I said with emphasis. “I
intimated as much to you once before. What I did not, could not, touch
upon at the time, was the strange coincidence of his double connection
with your family. He was not only your son’s travelling tutor, sir;
but he is also, by his own assertion, and in Lady Skene’s belief, _my_
father.”

For a moment his mind, grasping desperately at the significance of my
words, slipped and went under.

“Dalston!” he muttered amazed. “Delane was Charlie’s tutor.”

“Delane or Dalston, sir--it is all the same. The man had his reasons
for assuming a name not his own. It was to cover over the tracks of a
very discreditable liaison he had had with a young woman, whom he had
known when he was an usher at a school at Clapham.”

“At Clapham!” The word seemed to take him in the face. “Go on,” he
said presently, with a sudden clinching intonation.

“Is it necessary, sir? You will comprehend me, I think.”

“She deceived me about you?”

“Yes.”

“Anything more?”

“This man, who calls himself my father, has come to trade upon his
knowledge of that deceit.”

The old legal terrier was beginning to awake in him--to prick its ears
and show its teeth.

“To trade? I understand. Hush-money, eh?”

“He has had one large sum from her already. I believe, on my honour,
sir, it was his demanding a second this morning that drove her to this
step.”

“Very likely--very probable indeed.”

He resumed his pacing again, plunged into frowning thought. I rejoiced
to see this grasp, this stiffening, this recovery in him of an ancient
forceful shrewdness, Presently he stopped.

“Do you guess where she is gone, Richard?”

“Yes, I guess, sir.”

“Where?”

“To Mr Pugsley’s.”

“O! Now, why?”

“For one thing, he is her spiritual adviser. For another, he was aware
of her deceit from the first, and could even reconcile his condonation
of it with his evangelical conscience. In the view of that, sir, I
understand, the fraud was not only harmless but praiseworthy, in
consideration of its object in reclaiming a brand from the burning.”

“Meaning me.” For the first time a faint smile twitched his lips. “You
seem to have interested yourself successfully in your family history,
Gaskett.”

“Yes, I have, sir; and to more purpose than this, even.”

“Wait a bit. If your surmise is correct, it would be useless to
attempt to persuade her back until this man has been dealt with.”

“I think you would be most unwise to attempt it.”

“I quite agree with you. We must buy him out first.”

“_Buy_ him out, sir? A cur like that? Stone him out, don’t you mean?”

He was smilingly tolerant of me. His manner had become, almost in a
moment, quite confident and reassured. I had guessed already that the
deception, _per se_, would count for little with him; but I was not
prepared for his cool reception of its consequences.

“Tut-tut, my boy!” he said. “If you had had my experience, you would
know that compromise is nine parts of the law.”

“And a rope the tenth, sir, is it not? Well, you may play your nine
parts for me; only I, for what remains, am going to hang Mr Dalston.”

The colour left his face. His new sprightliness was all gone in a
moment. He returned to the desk, and seated himself, somewhat in his
old tired attitude.

“Well, Richard,” he said. “What else?”

Emotion rose in me. I lingered on the blow I had to deal. But it must
out at last.

“I made a point, sir, if you observed, of referring to him as
_calling_ himself my father.”

“I noticed. He is not your father, then--only the vile deputy of
another?”

“No more my father, sir, I do believe, than Lady Skene is my mother. I
was born of quite other parentage.”

He held his eyes shaded with one hand. The shaking fingers of the
other affected to toy with a pen.

“Go on,” he muttered. “Why do you stop?”

Without pause or hesitation, then, I gave him the full history of my
inquisition, from the utterance of the first word which had launched
me on it, to my final interview with his wife. And at the end, “Lord
Skene,” I said, “judge all this as you will. There is still the worst
to come--the corner-stone to such a monument of villainy as I never
dreamed of unveiling when I started. I beg, sir, with all the passion
of entreaty I can command, that you will brace yourself to hear a very
dreadful truth. I told you, on that former occasion, that I had come
by accident upon part of a letter written by your son to Mr Thesiger.
Here it is.”

I laid the faded sheet before him. He read it through once, twice,
three times; and looked up at me with a lost expression.

“Well?” he whispered hoarsely.

“It is your son’s, sir?”

“Yes, it is from Charlie.”

“The reference in it, sir--the ‘You-know-who’?”

“Yes--well?”

“Is to Mrs Dalston, I cannot doubt. _He_ was married to her first.”

“Who? Charlie?”

“Yes; and, because of it--O! sir, for all it means to you, compose
yourself to meet the blow--_because of it, was done to death by the
man who is now Mrs Dalston’s husband, and your own wife’s damned
betrayer._”

His head sank low. I thought, for all my warning, I had risked too
much. But in a moment he lifted it again, and the expression on it,
stern, white, self-repressed, was such, I imagined, as might have
marked its character when, in past days, he would rise, black-capped,
to sentence a prisoner to the last awful penalty.

“On what authority,” he began, in a quick loud voice, which sank even
upon its utterance--“on what authority?”--and the words died out in a
whisper.

“On the authority, sir,” I said, “of a man who was in hiding near by
at the time the crime was committed, and who sought afterwards, on the
strength of his secret, to bleed the murderer’s pocket, as the
murderer has since, on another count, sought to bleed your wife’s. But
he proved himself no match against a desperate villain’s
resourcefulness; and was caught in the net of his own spreading, and
put away for years on a trumped-up charge. You will find his name
there--Geoletti.”

Lord Skene looked up at me, and laughed--a painful, twisted, unnatural
cachinnation.

“I had observed it already, Richard. I sentenced the man myself--good
God!”

He buried his face in his hands, as if overwhelmed. And, indeed, the
coincidence was staggering.

“Is that so, sir?” I said in a strained dry voice. “Well, it only
remains to say that he has served his sentence to the hilt, and has
emerged from it with one only purpose remaining to his ruined
life--revenge on the author of his sufferings.”

I felt the question coming from him, and forestalled it.

“How I know this? The man had tracked his quarry home, and I came upon
him, quite by chance, foundered by the way. But when he told me his
name--great God, sir, I remembered the letter--your son’s letter--and
then only a little questioning was needed to extract the whole
accursed truth.”

“Where is he?”

“He is waiting outside at this moment.”

“Fetch him in.”

I was moving to obey, when he stopped me.

“Put down that light first. I must hear and see and not be seen.
There, would he know me?”

“I believe it is quite out of the question.”

“Go, then.”

I stepped softly into the hall, and beckoning to the Italian, motioned
him into the room and shut the door.

“Geoletti,” I said, “I want you now, clearly and briefly, to relate
the whole history of your connection with Mr Dalston, from the first
committal of the crime with which you charge him, to the moment when,
through his wicked agency, you were sentenced, on a false charge, to a
long term of penal servitude. You can trust me that the statement will
help us all, if you omit nothing and extenuate nothing.”

He bowed his head gravely thereupon, and crushing his hat nervously in
his hands before him, and moistening his dry lips, entered upon his
narrative as follows:--

 ANTONIO GEOLETTI’S STORY[2]

 My name is Antonio Geoletti, and I am a Piedmontese. Twenty years ago
 I was by profession a guide of the Val d’Aosta. There was none equal
 to me in knowledge of that district. From the Glacier di Lys to the
 chain of Mon Iseran I knew it all, every acre. The valleys of Pellina,
 du Butier, d’Entreves, Veni, de la Tuile, Grisanche, Savera, di Cogne,
 Camporcier--they were hackneyed to me one and all. I could trace to
 its source every mountain torrent which poured from the high Alps into
 the upper waters of the Dora Baltea. The cravats of Mon Cervin,
 d’Oren, de Ferret, were no less my familiars than were the passes de
 la Seigne and of the great and little St Bernards, through which I
 would often conduct visitors bound adventurously for Savoy. My
 knowledge of the mountains was unique, wonderful--informed with
 secrets, moreover, hidden from all others. It was the possession of
 one such secret, alas! which betrayed me to my ruin.

 In the Val d’Entreves are the village and baths of Cormayeur. There is
 also the Hospice of St Marguerite to which invalids resort. Thither,
 in the spring of 1860, came two ladies, Miss Lucie Love, a young
 English _héritière_ and orphan, and her only living relative, Madame
 Gondran, who was old and sick, with eyes like the dying hawk, and of a
 self-will and passion quite ungovernable. The young lady was the most
 beautiful in person and complexion; for which reason, it would appear,
 and because of the many gifts of health and wealth which Fortune had
 lavished upon its favourite, her aunt could never expend enough upon
 her her heart of venom and detestation. I think she would have liked
 to debar her for ever from all the profits of her estate of youth. But
 such a flower so sweet, and well-bequeathed, was not long to escape
 the marauding bee. There arrived to Aosta in these days two gentlemen
 making the tour, a young English milord and his Gouverneur, of whom
 the names were respectively Mr Charles Skene and Mr Delane. These two,
 then, exploring among the mountains, came very shortly across Miss
 Lucie; and straightway the die was cast. Milord would hear of nothing
 but that they transfer at once their quarters to Cormayeur; and so
 there they went and remained for six months and more.

 In this interval what now has come to pass? You shall hear, as I
 heard--partly of gossip, partly of acquaintances employed in the
 Hospice, partly of my own ears; for the gentlemen engaged me
 constantly to convey them into the places of interest about the
 neighbourhood.

 This, then, had happened. Milord and Miss Lucie were become
 inseparable lovers, and desirous of the plighted troth. But Madame
 Gondran she would not hear of it. She was all engaged herself to the
 seductiveness of the Gouverneur, and--for the chief reason that the
 young lady feared and disliked him in the exact opposite
 proportion--was determined to sanction him for her nominee to the
 covetable hand of Miss. He, this Mr Delane, was, of a surety, very
 pleasing and attentive with her, and the young man, his pupil, not at
 all; but, like a boy, arrogant and inconsiderate. Milord, no doubt,
 lacked the experience to know that the diplomacy of wooing is to
 propitiate the guardian before the ward. It is well, also, to warm a
 woman’s vanity, if you would see her melt to you.

 So things went on; until presently a soft gossip began to make itself
 heard, with turnings of the head, and nudgings, and a pointing of the
 finger. There were whispers of a fondness betrayed, and of love
 beginning to reveal in itself the penalty of rashness. One was
 wondering how the truth could still hide itself from the eyes of the
 terrible invalid, when suddenly a startling calamity befell: Milord
 disappeared, and was never heard of again.

 Now I quote what follows from the testimony of the Hospice walls,
 which were alway as full of ears and eyes as a honeycomb. It deals
 with the period before investigation had established the pretty moral
 certitude that Milord had met with some fatal accident on the
 mountains, and when he was still supposed, in the popular view, to
 have slipped away merely from the consequences of an intrigue. The
 young Madame, it appeared, quite incredulous at the outset, was driven
 presently, by her Aunt and the Gouverneur, into the conviction that
 she had been ruined and deserted by a scoundrel. In the first of her
 desperation, indeed, eager to vindicate both herself and her lover,
 she declared that they were husband and wife--that, in short, on a
 certain remembered day, when they had all joined in an expedition to
 Aosta, he and she had eluded the others for a time, and, by
 prearrangement, had been married before some civil functionary, who
 had afterwards certified to the fact in a document, preserved, she
 believed, by Mr Skene.

 Well, if this confession was so unpalatable to the listeners as to add
 a hundredfold to Madame Gondran’s jealousy and hatred, it afforded at
 the same time a text for ample revenge. The match was no match, they
 declared, in English law; Miss Lucie was none the less for it betrayed
 and abandoned. Her seducer, of course, had only caught her into a very
 ancient snare, and, having tangled her in its meshes, had gone off
 laughing. Indeed, it would appear, he had hinted as much to Mr Delane
 before running away, and, by that shameless boast, had caused a
 rupture between himself and his tutor. He was gone, anyhow and
 finally, never to return, and utter ruin and disgrace were all that
 remained to the poor lady out of that short rhapsody of passion;
 unless--unless what? Why, grieved and shame-stricken though he was
 over this downfall of a cherished idol, the Gouverneur, still great
 and magnanimous in his love, would consent to save her reputation, at
 the cost of his own shattered ideals, by marrying her himself at a
 moment’s notice, and afterwards removing her to a place where gossip
 could find no data for detraction.

 They may have lied, or spoken the truth--I know not. But this I know:
 she was wax in their powerful hands--a poor, dazed, heartbroken,
 will-less creature. They took her to Turin, we heard, and there the
 man married her. And there, on the very morrow of the wedding, the old
 witch Gondran was found dead in her bed--struck down, in the moment of
 triumph, by the ecstasy of her spite. She lies in the Cimitero on the
 Chivasso Road. I have seen the blasted flowers on her grave.

 But now all this time I was thinking what to do. And all the time I
 was still thinking and thinking, when the suspicion first arose that
 Milord, instead of having taken himself off, as supposed, had really,
 in some adventurous wandering, come by his death in the mountains,
 since, indeed, he had never been seen to emerge from among them at any
 part. And suddenly there came over from England a lady, his relative,
 to inquire into his disappearance; and Mr Delane was questioned, and
 told all he knew, confessing he had thought Milord had bolted to evade
 the consequences of a scrape best not referred to. Then one day I went
 to learn more of what was doing, and found the inquestation over, and
 Mr Delane gone home to England with his wife. And again that set me to
 thinking more, and again more.

 For now I will tell you: I wanted money for a purpose, and I thought I
 had seen the way to procure it. I was always one that lived strong and
 wastefully, burning the candle of toil or pleasure at both ends with a
 selfsame zest. The silent white tents of the mountains or the roaring
 booths of the fair--they could possess for me an equal madness of
 attraction. For all my activity I had seldom anything but empty
 pockets; and so once it came in upon me how easeful a new sensation it
 would be to marry, and take perhaps an auberge, and rest and ripen on
 the rich vintage of my experience. Only, where to find the capital?
 Yes, that was it--that might always have been the difficulty, had I
 not once become possessed of a secret which it was surely within a
 certain person’s interest to pay me not to reveal. That secret, then,
 was my potential.

 What was it? What was this tremendous secret? It is uttered in a
 breath. I knew, I had known from the first, that Milord had never run
 away, but that he had been murdered, and his body hidden in a
 subterranean chamber, by the man who professed to be his friend and
 admonitor. I will explain.

 High above Cormayeur, among the waste and desolation of the hills,
 there pours itself down a torrent which is called Lapluietonnante--the
 Rain of Thunder. Once and more, this torrent, entering through rocky
 ravines, plunges like a mad and foaming horse, until at length, too
 blind with terror to note where it is going, it leaps from a
 precipice, and crashes in a ruin of watery splinters on the rocks a
 score of yards below. Now, at the very point where the water springs
 from the gorge, there is a certain fissure in the wall of rock, not
 easily observable amongst others, but which, having once discovered
 and entered, one will find leads down by a fantastic passage into a
 chamber or grotto situated right behind the fall and opening on to it.
 Here was a secret of knowledge, I thought, my own exclusive property,
 until Milord came to disabuse my mind. He did not confess his
 discovery to me; but I gathered, from what he let fall, that his
 daring spirit had penetrated to the arcanum which heretofore had been
 my solitary possession. “I could show you, Geoletti,” said he once, “a
 cavern in the water that would be worth a little fortune to you in
 tips, if you knew it. But I’m going to keep it to myself till I go;
 and then perhaps I’ll let out.” I smiled to him, confessing nothing;
 but from that moment I was always on the watch to see if my suspicion
 were correct. There was a second fissure immediately above the other,
 but shallow, and with a projection of rock within it apt for cover;
 and there, when I knew Milord to be abroad in the neighbourhood, I
 would often hide myself, and spy to see him come. And once at last he
 came, and the Gouverneur with him.

 They stopped beside the rock, and talked before they entered. It was
 then the time when scandal came to whisper of a young maid’s
 condition. That subject was on their lips.

 “It’s done, and there’s an end of it,” said Milord in a heat. “I tell
 you I’ve married her, Mr Mark Dalston.”

 “Why do you call me by that name?” asked the Gouverneur. He was very
 quiet and smiling; and he showed his white teeth always.

 “Because it’s your real one, isn’t it?” said Milord. “And because I
 want to convince you that mine isn’t the only secret here that might
 lead to disturbances if revealed. I stand to take the consequences of
 _my_ deeds, Mr Dalston, whatever you may do.”

 “Have you, then,” said the Gouverneur, “written to confess to your
 father?”

 “No, but I’m going to,” answered Milord. “It can’t be delayed much
 longer. Only I’ll do it in my own time and way, and stand no dictating
 from anybody.” Then he seemed to soften a little. “Hang it, Delane!”
 he said. “I’m sorry if you are sweet on the girl yourself. But one
 could never tell from your manner--you’re such a deep chap.”

 “Am I?” said the Gouverneur, and he laughed. “But you have beaten us
 all in depth, Skene. Well, as you remark, the thing’s done, and
 there’s no more to be said about it for the moment. Now show me the
 way into this wonderful cave you’ve discovered.”

 They passed in, one after the other, Milord going first--and he never
 came out again. Only, presently, there jumped from the opening on to
 the grass a man very white but smiling still, who flicked the dust
 from his clothes, and sat down on a rock, looking into the curve of
 the fall as if his eyes were needles to pierce it. And suddenly he
 came to his feet.

 “My God, Lucie!” he said to the water, “how I love you! My God, how I
 love you!” and with that he turned and went away.

 And presently I too went down into the cave.

 He had shot him with a pistol from the back. He lay on his face, and
 his head was like a trampled bush. Near the body, flung from it in its
 fall, was a little tin case such as they make for sandwiches; and in
 it I found, when I could force the nerve to look, the certificate of
 Milord’s marriage with Miss Lucie.

 I put it back; I touched nothing more; like a murderer myself I stole
 away, and left everything as I had found it. From that day to this the
 cave shall have held its secret undiscovered. There still the body
 must be lying as when it fell never to stir again. You know the rest.

I knew it from his own lips: how, a few months after the married
couple had returned to England, an Italian courier, discharged in
Aosta for drunkenness, had persuaded Geoletti to profit by his
knowledge of London, and go there with him; how, from Soho, the
potential blackmailer had taken his bearings, and, by the aid of
compatriots, run his quarry to earth, and forced an interview upon him
and revealed his knowledge and his purpose; how Mr Dalston,
temporising a moment, had referred him, for final settlement, to the
house of a certain doctor in Kennington, to which he had gone by
secret appointment and with what fatal results to himself. The
listener needed only these links in the chain of evidence to complete
the story for him; and, when they had been supplied, a deep and tragic
silence fell upon the room.

Presently, not raising his head, he motioned to the narrator, a
gesture of dismissal.

“Go,” I whispered to Geoletti, “and return to the lodge.”

I stood, when we were alone, a moment in indecision; then crossed the
room softly.

“If the hurt has come from _my_ hand, sir,” I said, “you will know why
I ask you to forgive me for it, will you not?”

He was muttering to himself; he hardly seemed to notice me.

“My God! poor Charlie--my God! poor Charlie”--over and over again.

Suddenly he got stiffly to his feet.

“Hush! Didn’t I hear the boy crying?” he said, listening in a startled
way. “He’s left to me yet--he sha’n’t be disinherited--his mother must
come back to me and end all this. There was never a woman so beautiful
or so foolish in all the world.”

He seemed to recollect himself, and me, and my question; and now he
answered that obliquely, not looking at me, but fingering some papers
on his desk.

“You know your course, Gaskett? It’s obvious enough, I should think.”

The formal address, the reluctance of his manner, woke a strange chill
in me.

“I think so, sir,” I said, withdrawing a little. “It is to visit Lady
Skene’s mother again, and face her with a new and sufficient reason
for confessing the truth.”

He drew in his breath softly, as if to a wince of pain; then turned to
canvass me fully for the first time.

“Well,” he said, “you have hit me pretty hard in my old age, Gaskett;
and you’ll not be surprised that I find your hand a bit stunning. You
must grant me to-night to think it all over; and to-morrow I’ll give
you my answer. Come up at midday. The man’s safe with you, I suppose.
That’s all that it’s essential to ensure for the moment. I shall not
come in to dinner. Good-night!”

The blows to which he had been subjected had tried him, no doubt, to
the very limit of endurance; yet, somehow, this was not the sequel to
them that I had expected. My heart was like a stone in me. I turned
and went out of the room without another word.

And, then--sweet balm in Gilead!

She was waiting for me, flitting like a ghost-moth about the dark old
panels of the room from which she had dismissed me a little while ago.
She put her finger to her lips, and hushed me in, and shut the door.
She had dressed for dinner during the interval of my absence, and was
a lovelier, more fairy-like apparition by twenty degrees. I felt like
taking a dream into my arms--the sweet soft fragrance of her hair, and
lifted face, and young white innocent bosom. A thread of diamonds
dewed her neck--she melted to me like a very dew of girlhood, and
loved and clung to me, and whispered impassioned that I was hers, she
could not spare me to another, and I might claim her when I would and
she would come to me.

Her love, her rapture, her absorbing sympathy, were inexpressibly
touching to me in my moody distress. Let all the world go by, so long
as this dear flower of it sweetened on my heart.

“Ira,” I whispered, fondling her in an ecstasy, “I believe I know
where your aunt has gone.”

“O, Richard!” she answered. “That is heavenly. Am I to know no more?”

“Wait a little, you lovely thing. I may want you all before long. I am
very much alone. Perhaps--Ira, will you meet me to-morrow, under the
old hawthorn?”

“Yes, Richard. Anywhere, and at any time you tell me.”

“Say at three o’clock.”

“Shall I make a note of it, Richard?”

“I’ll do it for you--look, on the inside of your elbow. Now bend your
arm, and keep it hidden from everybody.”




 CHAPTER XXIV.
 I ACCEPT THE BURDEN OF PROOF

Henceforth the chase runs on, swift and relentless; and I give
myself, with a fierce joy, to lead it over rocks and wounding briars,
since it will drive me where by justice I should follow. Hounded and
harassed of all the world, save in the instance of its two dear
loyalest hearts, I turn at bay at length, and fight the bitter quarrel
to an end. Then, though I lose, my persecutors shall bear for ever the
marks of that affray, while I--while I am healing of my wounds in
Avalon. When all is done, mine, I think, shall be the sweeter solace.

All that morning following the interview, I waited, in a conflict of
emotions, for the hour of my appointment with Lord Skene. I would not
doubt its upshot--and yet I doubted. It seemed incredible that I could
have come so far to win so little. Was he so obsessed, so infatuated a
spouse, that all other interests were subordinated in his mind to the
one passion of uxoriousness? I believe indeed that that was the case.
So he only might recover his beautiful partner, all less importunate
pleas for restitution were as the silence of the dead to him. He would
subscribe to any conditions, would do, or leave undone, whatever
appeared to speed him to that amorous conclusion.

And what about the dead? Alas! a yearning for their reincarnation is
always, I fear, the most artificial of sentiments. A re-embodied
spirit would be the last to find a welcome in his old place. His
effect upon the laws of property would be so destructive, would it
not? his claims on our maturer sympathies, such an anachronism and a
bore? Jerusalem, I think, must have been deeply relieved when its
wandering dead lay down again.

Now, I was in the very act of starting for the house, when I saw the
figure of his lordship himself coming briskly over the snow towards
me--and from the direction of the road. I paused, in some
astonishment, to await him. Already, I think, a premonition of the
truth was foreclosing on me. There was an indescribable air of elation
in his face, pink with exercise, and in his sprightly step and the
almost imperceptible cock of his hat. Could this be the collapsed and
stricken soul from whom I had parted not so many hours ago? A sort of
desperate effrontery seized me.

“You have come from Market Grazing, sir?” I said as he reached me.
“Well, that was against my advice.”

The roses in his cheeks deepened, I could have thought, to damask. But
he was full of good humour, and would not be put out of it.

“Pooh!” he said, with a little embarrassed laugh; and, taking my arm,
walked me slowly up the path through the woods. “You have established
a claim to some licence, Gaskett; but you must remember that advice is
not prescription.”

“I am glad, at least, you admit the claim, sir. It would appear a more
gracious admission, perhaps, if you were to address me less formally.”

He turned to look at me with an odd expression of challenge, or, it
might be, propitiation.

“Well, as to that,” he said, “I have something to say. In the
meantime, I am to congratulate you, and myself, on the correctness of
your surmise.”

“She was there--at Pugsley’s?”

“Yes.”

“Well, sir?”

“I have full hopes the matter may be accommodated--hushed up. It comes
to be merely a question of the figure.”

“Good God, sir!”

We stopped simultaneously, falling apart. For a moment a silence fell
between us. The colour had left his face a little; but his mouth was
set in a line of resolution--defiance, even.

“Do you mean to tell me, sir,” I said in a low voice, “that what you
are implying is a money compromise with Mr Dalston?”

“Yes, that is exactly it,” he answered shortly.

I drew and expelled a deep breath. It was to be battle, then--my
rights against a sentiment.

“Lord Skene,” I said clearly, “do you understand what this decision
means to me? Have you drawn any real inference from the facts I have
put before you?”

“Hush, my boy, hush!” he said pacifically. “I have reached a point,
certainly, as you have, beyond which all is speculation and surmise.”

“As yet--yes.”

“Why test it further? It is an incredible enough tale as it stands. I
have listened to many less improbable in my time, and found them one
and all to crumble under the weight of evidence. What chief witness
remains to this? Why one who has never spoken the truth in her life,
but whose reputation, on the other hand, would involve in its exposure
the very soul of truth. I must ask you to bear in mind, Richard, that
this wretched woman is still my wife’s mother.”

“I bear it in mind, sir, as I do also bear in mind, and most firmly
believe, that she helped Mr Dalston, who had made me fatherless, to
make me motherless also.”

He remained silent a little, seeming to struggle for expression.

“Well,” he said at last, “it may be conceded as a plausible theory, at
least. But what if, after all, so dark and fantastic a tale failed of
itself before the test of daylight? You would hardly have bettered
your position in that case, Richard. But let it stand at the point
where it has arrived, and I, for my part, am willing to accept it on
its merits.”

“In which case, sir?”

“In which case I should admit the moral of your more intimate claim on
my regard, both sentimental and practical.”

“You would not, do you not mean, acknowledge me as a grandson, but you
would undertake that I received the provision of one?”

“Yes--distinctly--that is what I mean.”

“You are no niggard, sir, I see, in your bids for silence. Had not I
and Mr Dalston better make a common purse of it, and set up trade
together as murderers and blackmailers?”

He drew back instantly.

“You have your choice of refusing,” he said coldly.

“And I refuse,” I answered, with a most bitter scorn. “I am no Esau,
sir, though Fate has made me a hunter. Throw dust in your own eyes if
you will. For me, I do not stop nor rest until I have probed this
matter to an end. Have no fear for Lady Skene. Believing what I
believe, the humiliation of your family is the thing farthest from my
thoughts. It will not suffer, I think, from the vindication of the
truth.”

He listened to my outburst with an expression which lightened from
gloom to a certain wonder.

“Well,” he said, “well--if you are prepared to take the consequences
of failure.”

“From you?” I cried.

I moved a step nearer to him.

“Lord Skene,” I said, “will you please to look at me? Is there a
likeness or is there not? Have not you yourself been strangely
conscious of it more than once? Did not Sir Maurice Carnac call me by
his name?”

He bit his lip.

“O! I daresay Charlie was no Joseph,” he said.

“O!” I answered, much enlightened; “I beg your pardon. Very blind of
me, to be sure. I may be a bastard none the less, you mean? Well, it
is in the reckoning; but, for all your assumption, sir, you seem to
dread the test more than I do.”

“Well, frankly, I think I do,” he said. “Truth, you see, is often a
confoundedly unwelcome sort of visitor--like a poor relation--very
upsetting to the conveniences. I notice, by the way, her name’s pretty
familiar on your tongue. Do you hold it compatible with your very
strict worship of her to suborn a young lady under the nose of her
guardian?”

If I had startled him, he had retorted effectually. He sniggered a
little, though with an aggravated sound, witnessing my astonishment.
But I at least was in no mood for compromises.

“Miss Christmas has engaged herself to me,” I said shortly.

He gave a soft whistle, raising his eyebrows.

“Indeed?” he said drily. Then he looked at me searchingly. “She is not
of age. It is in my power, of course you know, to refuse my consent.”

There was a significance in his tone that I could not misunderstand.

“Not even for that bribe, sir,” I said. “If needs must be, I’ll win to
both name and wife without your help.”

His cheek went like fire. He turned without a word, and strode off a
few paces; but suddenly wheeled and came back.

“That was infernally insulting,” he exclaimed. “What did you mean to
imply by it?”

“I am very untutored, sir,” I answered in a tone of mock humility;
“and I beg your pardon. I thought you were offering me a wife to keep
me quiet. But, of course, the prospect of honouring her through a
successful vindication of the truth is my chief stimulus to action.
You could have no objection to the match in the event of my
triumphing, I am sure.”

He turned again resolutely.

“Go your damned way,” he said. “Only favour me by being quick about
it. You’ll understand, of course, that so long as you are pursuing it,
pig-headed, my hands are tied.”

From that weak and evil compromise, he meant.

“Trust me, sir,” I said, “not to linger out the agony; and trust me
once again to hold the honour of your family sacred through
everything.”

“A cock-and-bull story,” he muttered fuming, and, without another look
at me, took the path to the house.

I stood a little, watching his retreat. What form of possession was
this which could so cloud, yes and pollute, the very spring of
justice? Had his jurisdiction always been at the mercy of his senses?
It was not the least of the anomaly, perhaps, that he should have been
of that order of judge which visits a certain sort of offence with the
full weight of the law, betraying, possibly, in its sentences on
others, the measure of its own self-condemnation. “There,” he might,
perhaps, have said, in dooming Geoletti, “but for the mercy of God,
goes Charles Skene!” But, maybe, I myself was judging him hardly. He
had a wider experience than I of the criminal genius’s infinite
capacity for deception. No doubt the Italian’s story had really left
him incredulous.

But, whatever the premises, the conclusion was manifest. I must be
satisfied henceforth to play my part independent of him. He would not
interfere, I gathered, but he would not help. So be it. The burden of
the proof should be appropriated to my sole shoulders from that
moment.

The end found me curiously exalted. I felt as if I were breathing a
fuller, more intoxicating air. It was to be Ira and I at last, each
for the other, against all the world. That seemed to simplify the
issues; to make my task a less complicated one. Ira and I, foot to
foot, side to side, to run the race together, and win if we might, or,
if we lost, to sink no less breathless to our reward in the grass by
the roadside. I pictured it thus. I could believe in my dear love
still, thank God!

The mood had not left me when I came down over the snow to the old
hawthorn in Hags Lane, and found her there awaiting me. I took her
worshipfully into my arms, as befitted a fragile figure of such price.

“Ira,” I said, “would you like to have me tell you everything at
last?”

“O, Richard! will you?”

“Wait a minute. Let me feel your bones--these ribs are like a
rabbit’s. I doubt if they could stand such a hammering.”

“Try them, Richard. Have you never read ‘Maud’? Don’t you remember the
shell that a finger-nail could break, but that the cataract shock of
the seas could not? Only an unloving word from you could break me,
Richard.”

“You ineffable dear. I like to hear you quote like that; I like to see
you capable of thinking of anything again but ghosts and shadows. Let
us get the last of them out of the way--shall we? and prepare for the
time when there shall never be a secret left between us.”

“O yes, yes!--if you please, my lord.”

“My lord, you Pythoness? Do you know what a prophetic word you have
used?”

“How can I know anything when you have told me nothing?”

“It is so difficult to begin, Ira; and there are things, such
essential things, which I am wondering how I can put without offence
to my innocent love. I don’t know how I shall do it, unless--unless
you can imagine yourself to be my wife in actual earnest. Do you think
you can?”

“Perhaps, Richard--if I shut my eyes very tight.”

“Yes; shut them--that is the way--and a seal on each. Now they can’t
open till I break the seal. You are quite blind, Ira? and you must
trust yourself to me. I am going to lead you through gloom and wicked
places--dreadful, ghastly places; but you mustn’t mind--nothing shall
hurt you. Now, are you holding me tight?”

“Yes, Richard. Can’t you feel me?”

 * * * * * * * * *

“What do you think, Ira?”

“May I open my eyes?”

“Yes--but wait a minute. There!”

“Shall I be the Honourable Mrs Skene, Richard?”

“So you have jumped to that conclusion? I did not know if you would
see it. What wits women have. Don’t cry so, my pretty bird.”

“How can I help it? Such a horrible, horrible story--and the poor body
lying there still--hardly your own age, Richard. ... This man!--it
makes me ill to think I have spoken to him--touched him in passing,
perhaps. What are you going to do?”

“What does that matter to you, cry-baby?”

“I thought we were married, Richard. Make me shut my eyes again.”

“No, keep them open. You put me in such an ecstasy. What ought I to
do?”

“I don’t think you ought to do anything. It is Uncle Charlie’s
business.”

“Well, he just wants to pay the man to go away and hold his tongue,
and, because I don’t see it in that light, has rather quarrelled with
me.”

“It is infamous. Why should you be expected to incur any risk or
danger? Richard, don’t dare this dreadful man on your own account--O,
don’t, Richard!”

“I will be very careful. Shall I tell you what I had thought of
doing?”

“What?”

“Going straight to Johnny Dando, and getting him to help me.”

“Mr Dando, Richard! How could that funny little creature help you?”

“Funny? Don’t you know that he is enormously rich?”

“What difference does that make? His gilding only seems to show up his
roundness, like one of grandpapa’s pills.”

“Don’t talk of pills, miss, to a scion of the Skene family.”

“I am very sorry.”

“You have the curative principle in you, you little duck of a quack.
Perhaps you have inherited it. I was very bad till I took you. Would
you like a testimonial, dear? But seriously, there is no calculating
what this business may cost me; and my savings don’t amount to much.”

“Richard!”

“Now, I know what you’re going to say. I will steal your heart, Ira; I
will rob your lips, like a greedy boy in an orchard; I will thieve
every bit of you else, but your money I won’t take. Think, if I
touched it, in what a light it would seem to show me! No; Johnny put
his wealth at my disposal once, and then I refused; but things have
altered since. What was a speculation then, seems now a fairly
promising investment. There’s only one objection.”

“What is it, dear?”

“Why, it would mean his helping me to you.”

“Why is that an objection?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“No, indeed I can’t.”

“He loves you too, Ira.”

“Nonsense, Richard.”

“He does, really and truly.”

“Then, if he does, he’ll want to make me happy.”

O, the poignant, lovely inhumanity of women!

“Will he?” I said. “Well, to do him justice, I believe he would. But,
supposing it were the other way about, and I was the rich one, and you
and he were engaged and he wanted my help?”

“Then it would be very unwise of him to ask it, for I should fall in
love with you, of course.”

“And now, I suppose, if he helps me, you’ll fall in love with him?”

“O, Richard! how absurd you are! Can’t you see, dear? And they call
women illogical.”

“Never mind about that, Ira. You’re a very much abused sex, by all who
don’t know you. Well, you think I’m justified in going to Johnny?”

“Yes, indeed. I think now, perhaps, it might be the very best thing
you could do. I’m sure he’d take care of you for my sake. Only----”

“Only what, Ira?”

She put her young arms about my neck, tearfully, entreatingly:

“Must you take this man with you, Richard?”

“Geoletti, do you mean?”

“How is he so much better than the other? To know of that dreadful
thing, and keep it secret just for his own profit!”

“He was educated to another code of morals than ours, Ira. It’s no
good thinking of the gulf between us; but you must see that his
company is indispensable to me.”

“I suppose I must. Will you be gone for long?”

“I can’t say. But I will write to you every day, and twice a day, if
you like.”

“Will you? Will you really? I shall be miserable until you are safe
home again. Richard”--she held me closer--“there is one thing yet
which I haven’t dared to speak about--Mrs Dalston.”

With a woman’s sensitive intuition, she had found, and touched in
sympathy, the real most poignant nerve of this complex tragedy. The
point had not even occurred to Lord Skene.

“I understand what you mean, dearest,” I said softly. “If all surmise
is justified, I am hounding to his doom the husband of my mother.”

“And she would wish it so, you believe?”

“I am bound to believe it.”

“O, Richard! is it not the most tragic thing of all that you should
have wasted all your poor heart of love in pleading to a mother that
was no mother to you, and, when the real one came, that you should
have turned from her like a stranger?”

“It is the most tragic thing, Ira--and the worst that I cannot bring
myself even now to look upon her as anything but Mrs Dalston.”

She sighed. “It is all a dreadful tangle. I wish it were unravelled
and done with.”

“I am going to unravel it, for better or worse. And, if for worse,
Ira?”

She kissed me, of her own sweet will, in a passion of tears.

“I don’t care about a name, Richard. I don’t want to be Lady Skene.
You could never be more to me than you are. If you will only come back
to me, the same as you are now, my heart will have room for not one
other joy.”




 CHAPTER XXV.
 JOHNNY AT HOME

Away with wooer’s gallivanting, and all the soft and sugary stuff of
dreams. A sterner wind than Zephyr speeds me on my way, and lands me,
hard of purpose, in the midst of London, and blows me with a crack up
against Johnny’s door. He is established for the time being, with his
mother, in a luxurious flat in Victoria Street, and the round
red-glass stove in his hall is not more glowing with a warmth of
welcome than is the face with which he greets me.

“I say, Dick,” he says presently, “who spoke of fairies?”

“Not I, Johnny.”

“Didn’t you? I say, how’s Miss Christmas, Dick?”

“She is very well, Johnny; she and I are engaged to be married.”

I would not appeal to his generosity--of that I had been
determined--through any shadow of misunderstanding. He bore the blow
like a Briton, a little huskily, with a little affectation, in the
first of the shock, of bending down to tie his shoe.

“O!” he said, rising apoplectic, and with a quivering lip. “I’m sure I
give you joy, old boy. I could never quite believe, you know, in your
indifference. Who could, with such a prize before him? It’s all in the
right order of things, you know; like--like the _honi soit_, and _quis
separabit_ and the rest of them. I hope Lord Skene approves?”

“Not he.”

“Then he’s no gentleman.”

“He’s no fool, perhaps. Johnny, I’ve come primed with an enormous
budget of news to explode on you.”

“Explode away, then.”

Whether it was the sobering effect of my first astounding stroke, or
the absence of emotional distractions, I don’t know; but he received
my story from beginning to end this time with a grasp and
understanding that were positively pathetic.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, when I had reached a finish. “You must come
with me to-morrow and see Shapter. He’s our family solicitor, and as
sharp as flints. This thing’s got beyond the private and personal
note--don’t you agree with me?”

“I’m afraid I must, Johnny.”

“Now, look here, Dicky; you’re giving me my first chance at what I
have always pined for and never had the luck nor the figure to get--a
personal part in a real, picturesque, mystery-and-murder romance. I’m
not going to be excused out of it, nor forbidden to engineer it as
lavish as I please. It’s the great opportunity of my life, and I shall
take it unkind if you refuse me a free hand to work it. You’re not to
have a share at all in the financing of the venture--you understand
that. If I allowed you one, it would rub all the gilt off my own
make-believe.”

I understood him, and his fine delicacy. This was his way of assuring
me the practical help which I could not but need.

“Put it as you like, Johnny,” I said. “You’re a dear good fellow every
way.”

“Very well,” he answered; “that’s understood. Shapter will
stage-manage the thing, and all we’ve got to do is to dress up and
play our parts like professionals. My eye! I hope there’s a coronet
among the properties. You see, it’s got to the point when, in my
opinion, a reputable independent witness is not only wanted, but
indispensable. You can’t run this any longer on your own
responsibility--you might get into no end of scrapes; and, as to me,
why, I haven’t shown any partic’lar gift for doing the detective, have
I?”

“You betray a tendency, perhaps, Johnny, to jump too hastily to
conclusions.”

“Ah! you may go into fits, if you like. I had my turn of ’em with
Drysalter. My word he _was_ a pepper-castor! I say, Dick----”

“Yes, Johnny?”

“You’re quite sure you and Miss Christmas are engaged?”

“Perfectly certain, Johnny.”

“You ain’t by chance thinking of anybody else, similar sort of name,
are you?”

“No; there’s no mistake about it.”

“Ah!”

He pondered a little, sombrely.

“Did she know you were coming here, to see me?” he asked presently.

“Yes, I told her. Perhaps you would like to know what she remarked
upon it.”

“Shouldn’t I!”

“She said, ‘I’m sure, for my sake, Richard, he’ll take care of you.’”

“_Did_ she say that, Dick--_did_ she?”

“Her very words, old fellow.”

“By George! tell her I’ll never let you out of my sight until it’s to
give you back to her.”

He got up in some emotion, and walked to the window. If in all that
hurrying panorama beneath his eyes, that endless procession of shapes
and shadows all set on overtaking and outstripping one another in the
race for wealth, there was moving onward one only other soul as
disinterestedly intent as he on a brother’s welfare, the old dark
city, I am sure, might yet boast of the seed of promise in its veins.


I dined at the flat that evening. I was not introduced to Johnny’s
mamma until, having entered the banqueting-hall, my attention was
called to an extraordinary old lady seated already at the head of the
table in a wheel-chair in the nature of a portable throne. She was
enormously squat and fat, like a loaf, and her head, I fear, bore no
more testimony to the efficacy of “Grafto” than had the late lamented
analyst’s. The pile on it, nominally golden, but of a hue that never
was on sea or land, was so glaringly, even so loosely adjusted, that,
if she had turned a great bird’s nest upside down on her head, the
deception could not have been more flagrant. It’s size and
precariousness so engrossed my attention, that once, when a blundering
footman knocked it crooked with a plate, and she said placidly, “You
nearly upset my hair, Richard!” I felt as if the rebuke were personal
to myself, and blushed over the involuntary movement I had made to
catch it before it fell into the soup. The man put it straight like a
dish cover, without his mistress, or himself, or anybody else
exhibiting the least disturbance; and then I comprehended upon what
purely undissembling terms the article stood, and felt that one could
no more quarrel with it on the score of mendacity than with a bonnet.

I have never seen a mass of woman so complacent and imperturbable. She
sat basking in speechless comfort, and only emitted, at intervals and
at large, rich oracular remarks about the food. These might be
understood to owe their provocation either to the nice constitution of
some particular dish, or dishes, or to one’s unappreciative attitude
towards such in their passing. Thus, the dictum “The leg of a pheasant
and the wing of a grouse,” pronounced significantly during the game
course, may have been interpretable into a general proposition of
fitness or a personal admonition--there was no telling from the
expression of the speaker, because she was absolutely without any, nor
from the direction of her eyes, which she could only move by moving
her whole body with them, a process much too laborious for the
occasion. I could never get rid, however, of an uncomfortable feeling
that there was something in these utterances aimed aggressively at
myself and my gastronomic perversity, as when, as if in correction of
some spirit of contradictoriness observed in me, she suddenly decreed,
“Fry bread-crumbs in butter, but sippets in dripping,” or appeared,
when I was in the very act of helping myself from a particular dish,
to throw an unfounded aspersion upon my age by asserting with
finality, “Crack no nuts at all, if you can’t crack ’em with your
teeth.”

Her last remark but one occurred at dessert, when she suddenly
asseverated, without looking at anything, “The late Prince Consort
always ate his orange with a spoon,” a statement which caused me
blushingly to lay down my knife and fork. And finally, having eaten a
stupendous dinner, with the large unimpassioned confidence of one who
had never yet been mistaken in her digestion, with the observation on
her lips that “The late Duke of Wellington used to remark that when
it’s time to turn over it’s time to turn out,” she was wheeled from
the room by the man called Richard, and disappeared from my ken for
ever.

But Johnny (who, by the way, wore a white waistcoat, with real
turquoise buttons), put my inward sniggering all to shame by his
perfectly natural acceptance of this remarkable parent. He was
dutiful, and attentive, and always respectful in his attitude towards
her--unconscious of any reason, indeed, why she should figure as
something slightly abnormal to alien eyes. It had occurred to me,
irresistibly but abominably, how Ira would have regarded such a
mother-in-law. Now, hearing the good fellow expatiating on his mamma’s
generosity and loving-kindness, I was ashamed of myself and joined
warmly in the eulogium.

These two lived in the lap of wealth. The whole flat was alive with
gorgeous, soft-stepping flunkeys, whose plush breeches took the
doorways with beauty. Mrs Dando herself, for all her bulk, had been
caked with diamonds. Yet, I believe, the enormous residuum of that
wealth, when the price of its ostentation was deducted, was devoted
almost exclusively to good works. Which of us, humbler endowed, could
make the same boast relatively? Certainly I had no reason to criticise
a display, whose moral, as it affected me alone, was all of a delicate
helpfulness and generosity.

Johnny and I sat up pretty late together, discussing my affairs; and
when I left my friend, to return to the modest quarters where I had
left Geoletti awaiting me, it was only to breach, by a little interval
of sleep, the business on whose full tide his wealth, and help, and
devotion were to launch me.

At eleven o’clock on the following morning I went to my appointment,
accompanied by the Italian. Mr Shapter’s offices were in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields; and it gave me my first real inkling, perhaps, of the worldly
consequence of my little half-condescended-to old schoolfellow, when I
observed with what deference, and with what disregard of the prior
claims of lesser waiting clients, he was ushered into the great man’s
presence.

I am not going to detail the processes of the interview which
followed. It would be merely to retread well-trodden ground. My story
and Geoletti’s were heard, and balanced, and compared, and the right
inferences drawn from them, with an insight and acumen which gave me a
high opinion of the qualities upon which great legal reputations are
based. The conclusion is the essential thing, and that is related in a
line. It was to be Mother Carey first; and, after her, Aosta and
Lapluietonnante.




 CHAPTER XXVI.
 I REVISIT MOTHER CAREY

The last of the snow was gurgling itself away into the black
drain-traps, and the face of the town was smeared like a sweep’s under
a dreary drizzle, when Mr Shapter, and I, and a certain hard-faced
gentleman, with a habit of rubbing his jaw grittily under reflection,
came down to the grimy little tenement in Old Paradise Street. At the
door, the hard-faced gentleman, motioning us to one side and bending
to the keyhole, gave a call like an itinerant potman’s. The
commendable ruse proving successful, brought, after the briefest
interview, an old remembered step shuffling along the passage. The key
turned and the chain ran gratingly, and, following the unbaring, a
filthy claw, grasping a jug, was protruded through the aperture
revealed. Quick and soft as the swoop of an owl, the hard-faced man’s
fingers closed on the boney wrist, and the jug dropped to the pavement
with a crash. And straightway, like a hooked fish’s, the nose and
flexuous mouth of old Mother Carey came wobbling and gasping to the
light of day. The screech of fear and fury, which she struggled on the
instant to omit, sticking in her throat, the detective took quick
advantage of that momentary paralysis.

“Come along now,” he said. “I’m the law, do you understand? and you’re
wanted on a charge of murder. You’d best let me in, and hear what I’ve
got to say.”

As with the jug on one side of the door, so, on the other, down went
Mother Carey. She tumbled in a heap, rending away from the clutch on
her wrist, and appeared to lie in the hall moaning. Very swiftly and
neatly then, using a tool he had taken from his pocket, the detective,
nearly closing the door first, ran the chain along its socket within,
and made himself master of the filthy stronghold. Once entered, he
beckoned to us, and stooping to the collapsed figure a moment, rose to
his height again.

“All right, gentlemen,” he said. “She’s all right. Shut that door
please--now my good people” (this to the inevitable congregation
gathering outside), “this ain’t an inquest, you know. Come clear away,
clear away.”

He stepped across the whispering bundle on the boards, drew us in, and
closed the door on the little breathless group of faces.

“Now,” he said, “if you’ll please to go and make a light somewheres,
will you, sir, so as we can see ourselves speak? Better take the back
for privacy.”

We went as directed, and found a reasty little kitchen, black with
grease and soot, its walls flaking, its floor vermin-riddled, its long
cold grate one refuse-bin of garbage. There was a tattered curtain
pinned across the window, and this we unfastened to let in the
daylight. It seemed to awaken immemorial odours in its entrance. The
squalor of the place took on a festering sickness.

Hardly had we pulled the rag from its string, when the detective came
bearing in his capture professionalwise. He did not actually carry the
old woman, but he lifted her before him at a sort of helpless run. I
was glad to see at least that she had recovered her nerves of motion,
as I had feared that her downfall might have signified a stroke of
some sort.

He flopped her unceremoniously into a chair, where she sat rocking and
weeping and mumbling, and swaying her head and hands up and down like
a Japanese tortoise. But, for all her apparent collapse, I had a
shrewd idea that her eyes were not failing to take stock of me, and
that her mind was busy over that association of ideas which my return
in company with the law could not have failed to suggest. She kept up
her mechanical moaning, I thought, simply to gain time.

“Now, ma’am,” said the detective suavely. “When you’re quite
recovered.”

Her moans rose the windier at that, but presently with scraps of
articulation threading them.

“O good sir the deuce! ... O my heart and lungs! ... the shock of it
good sir ... wouldn’t hurt a fly the devil take it ... O what a libel
and slander on poor old Mother Carey the deuce!”

“Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “we can’t undertake to breathe this
atmosphere indefinitely. You’d better call a cab, and remove this
woman.”

“Very well, sir.”

The suggestion wrought its desired effect. Mother Carey became all in
a moment distinct to tearfulness.

“O good gentlemen, what is it you want of me? O that I should have
lived to hear my deuced self accused of the devil and all! Is it
anything about this young gentleman? O I’ll tell you the truth I
will!”

“That’ll do, then,” said the detective. “It won’t serve you the worse
perhaps in the long run. You’re pretty deep involved, you know, old
lady; but mayhap there’s another deeper yet. Don’t be saying now you
was never in collusion with Mr Dalston, because I know better. We’re
coming to him in good time; but just for the present the question
stands with you. Do you understand what I mean, a-linking of you and
him together? Of course you do, a woman of your cleverness. Well, look
at this young gentleman. Have you seen him afore?”

She whispered something, huddled into herself.

“What! more than once, perhaps,” said Mr Jannaway. “Right you are, I
do believe. It was him, wasn’t it now, you played the dutiful
grandmother to once upon a time, and ended by palming off on your
daughter as her own very partic’lar offspring? That was a cute move,
upon my word; and it paid you, didn’t it--paid you nigh as well as Mr
Dalston did for putting that other out of the way?”

She uttered a thin screech, and sank upon her quaking ignoble old
knees.

“I didn’t do it, good gentlemen,” she cried--“before God and the deuce
of my poor lungs I didn’t. O I’ve always been expecting something of
this sort to be charged to me, ever since him there came prying in
with his rakings-up and smellings-out of old deuces. I never put
anything out of the way I didn’t. My Georgie’s baby was dead already
when Dalston brought the other. Ask the devil of a doctor if you don’t
believe me.”

“Ah!” The detective shot a significant glance at Mr Shapter. “Dead was
it--the fruits of the little mistake as your daughter had made with Mr
Dalston, eh?”

“It was that drove me to send a message to him,” cried the miserable
old woman. “I told him he needn’t expect on that account to escape the
consequences of his deuced deed, but that I’d prove it against him,
and ruin him with his fine new lady none the less, if he didn’t come
to terms.”

“Exactly. And he answered?”

“He answered, O the devil, by turning up with a live baby as his fine
lady had borne to another, and by proposing to exchange it for the
dead one. She’d never know, he said, and Georgie would never know
neither, as they was both, the two of them, lying light-headed from
their confinements. It was true of my daughter, anyhow; and, when she
came to herself at last, she never thought but to accept the other
one’s baby for her own, though to be sure, as things turned out, she
never could abide it. He told me, for his part, that he’d no mind as
the child of another should come to inherit his lady’s money; and so
we agreed to make the exchange, and he paid me to keep the secret, and
that is the devil and all of the truth, so God burst my lungs if it
isn’t.”

“And bad enough, old lady. It couldn’t be much worse, to my mind,
short of murder.”

“I never killed nothing,” she moaned. “I wouldn’t put my hand to such
a wickedness.”

“You’ll have to put it to a document attesting all this, though,” said
the detective, “if you want to save your bacon.”

“I’ll do it, sir,” she said; “I’ll do it, on the deuce of my honour,
if you’ll only promise not to let him get at me.”

Mr Shapter, standing with me in the background, caught and pressed my
hand congratulatory, and then stepped forward.

“Come, Jannaway,” he said; “paper and ink. We’ll clinch this matter
while we are about it.”

It was what I had half expected, half foreseen; but the assurance of
its actuality found me stunned from speech. I could only look on and
listen in a sort of stupor, while the lawyer wrote, and finished, and
read out what he had written--the evidence--circumstantial, if you
like--to my parentage.

They had to support the old woman between them while she put her
trembling signature to the statement; and, when they released her, she
sank moaning once more to the floor.

“Don’t tell him I done it, good deuced gentlemen; don’t set him on to
me.”

“Now, look here, old lady,” said the detective, “if what we’re aiming
at doing comes to pass, _he_ won’t be in a position to be set on to
anything but a galley bench. All you’ve got to do is to lie quiet and
hold your mouth until you hear from us again; and then possibly, I say
possibly, it may come to happen that you don’t hear from us at all.”

She looked up with a sudden relief of craft in her watery eyes.

“And my little settlement as I draw from his lawyers the deuce bless
you, dears--it won’t be interfered with?--now say it won’t, dovies.”

“Come, Jannaway!” said Mr Shapter sharply.

She gathered herself together hurriedly, and got to her feet with a
scrambling skip, and followed us protesting and entreating all down
the passage. Finally, perceiving her prayers to be entirely
disregarded, she slammed the door upon us with a screaming oath.

Outside, the detective pondered me, grating his chin.

“Well, sir,” he said, “that settles it. There’s no rope for his neck
here. We’ll have to be satisfied with what Italy can give us in its
place.”

“Whatever that may be, it must fall far short of his deserts,” said Mr
Shapter. “A very pretty scoundrel, on my honour. Well, Mr Gaskett--as
I must still call you I suppose” (he took my arm, and we all set off
on our way back to his office)--“so far, I think we may say so,
excellently good. Whether Italy will confirm our claim, or fail of its
evidence, remains to be seen. It would be a pity, apart from our more
personal interest, if it did fail, because any such conclusion must
mean the escape of a scoundrel of a very choice pattern. But we will
hope for the best.”

“Will it be necessary, do you think, to draw further upon Lady Skene’s
parent?”

“I hope not; I think not; family feelings must be respected. At the
same time it must depend very largely upon the attitude which Lord
Skene shall elect to adopt.”

“Well, sir, when is it to be Italy, and for which of us?”

“There must be a delay, I think, of a few days, while Scotland Yard
communicates with Turin. Mr Dando insists upon accompanying us; so
there will be for the venture he, you, I, Jannaway, and your
witness--quite a little regiment--I trust not a forlorn hope. But it
all turns upon the question of that marriage--its proof and
legitimacy. A lot may come to perish in twenty years. That may stand
for a text out of the criminal’s Vade-mecum. I daresay Mr Dalston
nowadays is not troubled much with nightmare.”




 CHAPTER XXVII.
 CORRESPONDENCE

I pause in the chase to jot down a note or two. It is when the
quarry lies close, and the hounds are drawing cover, and a little
breathing space is mine for rest and sentiment. A moment, and we shall
be on again.

On the day of our visit to Mother Carey I wrote to Lord Skene, giving
him the full particulars of that interview, of the circumstances which
had led _to_, and of the conclusions to be drawn _from_ it. How he
might choose to regard those conclusions, whether in his former
sceptical spirit, or in one more accommodating, could only now, I
said, affect the temper of my resolution, not its inexorableness. He
might make my purpose a dutiful or a rebellious one; he could not turn
me from it. The inference to be drawn from that confession, I
insisted, was too plain to be mistaken by any not wilfully blind; and
the friends who had taken up my cause for me were at least
sufficiently convinced of its justice to be determined to spare no
trouble nor expense in the effort to secure me its last essential
confirmation. I put the whole case to him in a frank, unimpassioned,
and perfectly respectful manner; but I expressed through all an
insistence on my right to act independently in my own behalf, should
he still see fit to refuse me his countenance in the venture. And with
that I ended.

His answer, when it came, was courteous, unconvinced, _entêté_. He
was obliged to me, he said, for my information regarding a certain
unscrupulous transaction, inasmuch as it furnished him with an
effective retort upon the insolence of a scoundrel, should that
scoundrel ever have the effrontery to attempt a new move in what was
virtually a lost game to him. For the rest, he had not changed in his
opinion that it would be the best wisdom to let sleeping dogs lie,
and, for me, to reconsider his suggestion of a compromise, lest
“aiming at all, I lost all.” In the meantime, he had to inform me that
Mr Dalston--aware somehow, no doubt, of a threatening turn in
events--had disappeared from the neighbourhood, leaving his lady in
sole possession of the Lone Farm; and, consequently, that Lady Skene,
induced by circumstances and fortified by my revelation, had been
persuaded into reconsidering her resolve to renounce the world, and
was now in actual fact returned to her duties as wife and mother at
Evercreech, which was after all the end of all ends, so far as he was
concerned.

I said to myself, with a bitter laugh, as I put the letter into the
fire, that I could quite believe it. It was the end of all ends to
him--had always been, and would always be. And then I broke the seal
of another letter which represented the end of all ends to me. Perhaps
I was inconsistent in blaming him. Was I less infatuated myself? I
would have disputed fifty successions that seemed to bar me from that
one peaceful possession.


She wanted me, my love--how she wanted me! It was the first letter I
had ever received from her--a little sweet pleasance of her soul,
crossed with shadow and sunshine. Had I ever guessed, she asked, how
love could fly? By so much the greater speed than an express train,
that, though she had herself seen me off from Footover Station, she
had been waiting on the platform at Waterloo for two hours--scheduled
time--when I had reached it. And I had never even noticed her waiting
and holding out her arms among the throng; but had jumped into a
hansom (there she was wrong; it was an omnibus), and had sped away
into the shadows, leaving love forlorn. Should she ever find me again?
Lord Skene, she told me, had come to the sudden resolution to take his
whole family up to town--they were going to start in a day or
two--herself included; and that had given her at first a wild thrill
of joy. But then she had remembered that London was farther than
Evercreech from the Continent, and her spirits had fallen again.
Still, it would be sweet to tread the stones--or thereabouts--which my
feet had lately trodden.

She spoke of Death--how dreadful it was that love, like all lesser
things, must die--that four hands, clinging at once, had no greater
hold on life than two. But there I corrected her very confidently,
when I came to answer. “Is not love the seed love the flower, and love
the flower love the seed? What is death but the snake casting its
skin? The old autumn cloak falls off, and there is spring
underneath--not a new spring, Ira, but the same spring as always; you
and I as we are at this moment; you and I as we shall be for ever. Our
love shall ride on waves of day and night, summer and winter, joy and
sorrow, till it reach the shores which are timeless, the shores which
are unfruitful because all the ripe fruit of love is gathered there
never to reproduce itself again, but to enjoy henceforth all the
raptures of itself without the penalties.”

Those were love’s metaphysics. They might not satisfy philosophers;
but they satisfied Ira, which was infinitely more to the point.
Philosophy may endure the thought of death; it is a sweeter wisdom, I
think, to delight in it.

So sounds the view-halloo, and I am off again, fresh from that little
breathing space. But one thought now troubles me--troubles us all.
What has occurred, if anything has occurred, to send our quarry into
hiding?




 CHAPTER XXVIII.
 ON THE SCENT

Clank and fury and scream; by day and by night; squibbing like a
fallen unspent comet the length of France, and leaving a shining trail
as we go; by flat grey pastures, hardly billowing, and little churches
with unfamiliar belfries, and rows of plumelike poplars, that pass and
come again and flicker and dazzle like tall palings endlessly
repeated; swooping at a perilous poise round the wine-shop ends of
hamlets seemingly strayed and stranded in the fields, or grazing
slow-crawling carts of a strange build, driven by stranger waggoners,
as if the railway track were but a track after all, which we are wont
to lose, and take up, and lose again; rushing, shrieking, upon little
blue-smocked men, or, as often, women, who stand waving absurd flags
at level-crossings, and only missing them, it appears, by the breadth
of a wind-shaving; on again with a yell of baffled fury; ripping,
periodically, if we may judge by the sound, a passage through
match-wood stations, which fly into splinters about us, and
disregarding all warning signals of long white arms flung up--so
through a land, infinitely strange and wonderful to me, we go roaring
southwards to our destiny.

A wild new experience to a woodland hermit--marvellous by day; weird
beyond expression in the rushing dark. What islander, self-contained
in his little sphere, might have guessed the wizard potency of that
slender streak of water called the Channel? One takes it at a gulp,
and, lo! there is a world about one continents removed, it seems, from
the life of one’s knowledge. A seventy times seven leagued boot is the
little steamer into which one puts one’s foot, to reach at a step from
Dover to Calais. It is a longer stride by all the world than from Dan
to Beersheba. The red trousers of the soldiers on the pier strike the
first colour note of dissonance. They have walked with Napoleon in
Egypt. The blood mystery of the Sphinx is in their hue.

And when night at last veils the scene from one’s aching eyes, and the
shrieks, the eternal shrieks, are uttered in darkness, urging one on
to what potential awakening in livid dawns--then is the time for
dreams such as one has never dreamt before. When the throb of the
engine claims one’s pulses to its beat, and its breath paints one with
a sooty rime, and one feels oneself being slowly absorbed into the
system of that crashing, hurtling monster--a small integral part of
its mechanism--what hope seems left at last of any detachment from the
chimera to which one has committed one’s destinies!

Such spaces may be covered in those long night hours. I had never
realised the like before--had never been sped so far, by hundreds of
miles, against my own will of volition. My helplessness affected me
like a personal humiliation. We would catch up tempests, and tunnel a
mad course through them, and leave them battling and booming in our
rear. In ragged spaces of the clouds the moon would shine out, tossing
like a lightship on tumultuous waters, and disappear, and be another
beacon on another shoal when seen again. The shadow of a world rushed
by our windows, phantom fabrics caught in starry glimpses, and always
seeming stranger as we fled. But I slept at last, and was whirled a
passionless straw upon the tide.

Very strange, in truth, was all this long journey to me. Yet it was
taken in fullest possession of the antidote to its worst penalties.
Johnny symbolised that touch of nature which makes the whole world
kin. I had already suspected the fact; now I was convinced of it. The
subtle aroma of his godhead had flown abroad, and our way thenceforth
was to be clouded with the incense of mammon-worship. It was not
enough that his purse had secured us every luxury meet to the
amelioration of our hard lot; obsequious officials, in a democratic
land, clamoured for the privilege of making our primrose path
primrosier and the down of our cushions downier. They were so downy
themselves, that if they had plucked their breasts like swans for our
nesting, we should have been suffocated long before they were denuded.
However, the attention brought its advantages to all but poor Johnny
himself, whose way was made rocks and briars to him.

On and on unceasing tears the mad comet, until striking, after æons
of flight, it seems, a mountain rampart, with a mighty crash and
scatteration of sparks it goes to earth, and is quenched and buried
from the eyes of the world in the Mont Cenis tunnel.

They advise you to keep the windows shut, as you go cork-screwing up
that infernal staircase. You might find it worse if you did not; it is
bad enough when you do. Drifts of asphyxiating smoke, fitfully
lambent, stream by the glass, and writh about and nozzle where they
fancy they have detected an opening. It may not be large enough for
them to enter by, but whiffs of their poisonous breath leak in, and
give you a taste of what you might expect were they to find you
napping. The train itself, in that choking atmosphere, seems to go
weak at the wheels, and to drag itself wearily upward, as if every
revolution must be its last, committing you in prospect to the
alternatives of entombment in the heart of a mountain or a
back-descent at rocket-speed into France. A throb as of thunderous
subterranean waters fills your ears; the wind of your passage clacks
like a monstrous tongue on the stony roof above you; it seems
impossible that any work of man can withstand the hugeness of that
deafening uproar and vibration. But it is all, of course, acoustically
exaggerated to you in your confined pen. You are going up a spiral
chimney, with a sufficient ventilation at the top. The clamour of your
rising emerges there with the smoke and steam, and, like a piston rod,
you expel them before you as you advance. And so, at last, when you
have almost given up hope, a flash--and Elysium.

I think the world can give one no first experience at once so sombre
and so dazzlingly impressive as that of the passage of the Col de
Fréjus, with its entry from low France and emergence into high Italy.
Thirty minutes are but half-an-hour out in the daylight; in the Mont
Cenis tunnel they amount to a good long spell of purgatory. There the
wails of the damned go past in drifts of lurid smoke, most agitating
in their bearing on the fragile pane which alone separates the eternal
from the temporal classes. One finds oneself hoping that the ministers
of justice have fully understood their instructions about one, and
that one will be permitted to reach redemption without the window
being broken. Curiously, too, the system of bought indulgence strikes
one for the first time as having something in it. The cost would be
very small to shorten this tunnel by a spiritual mile or two.

And yet, when it is ended, one would not have had it shorter by a
metre, because every foot taken from it would mean just so much
ecstasy filched from one’s awakening from a nightmare. For, behold!
from travelling in a steaming suffocating drain pipe, one is spat out
suddenly into Paradise in winter.

After that, it seems bathos to compare the prospect with a
transformation scene at a pantomime; yet, I think, perhaps, the latter
analogy is the apter. The instant glide from terrific night into
fairyland; the stupendous brown gullies, dripping icicles from a
sabre’s length to a maypole’s; snow in fields, on slopes, in ravines,
all of a blinding lustre, and stained in its shadows of a celestial
blue; a world of high-lifted iridescence, streaked with gold leaf,
spangled with glass dust, discharging ice-crusted torrents under
archways of glittering rock, climbing peak over peak to the
heaven-painted “cloth” of light, living and violet, which makes its
background--that is how the vision of Italy first broke upon me,
emerging from the portal of the underworld.

But, as to Geoletti, the man was translated like Bottom the weaver.
If, to me, the world had suddenly sprung into a vision of
“cloud-capped towers” and glittering pinnacles chiming unearthly music
from diamond bells, to him it was as the thronging of old familiar
spirits gathered to greet his return. He gazed and gazed, and danced
on his seat, and uttered uncouth ejaculations. He hugged himself in
spasms, and bit his nails, and glared with burning eyes that the
rising waters of his soul could hardly quench. Have you ever seen the
wild spirit of the sea wake in a captive gull when the wind came on to
blow? So wrought the spirit of his mountains on Geoletti. I think
there was not one of us whose soul did not respond in some measure to
the tragic pathos of that revelation. For what trifling messes of
pottage cannot the fool in us be induced to part with his inheritance!

But enough of all this. My theme is Cain, not Esau; murder, not
mountains. The comet, slackening now in its descent, bears us down by
beautiful winding valleys to the plains of Piedmont, and spent and
slow at length, discharges us upon Turin and Signor Valombroso.

That was his magnificent name, no less. He was not only the first of
Piedmontese detectives, but an accomplished linguist to boot, and had
been engaged from London, regardless of expense, to the service of
Milord Johnny di Dando. He took us all under his wing at once,
Inspector Jannaway even condescendingly, and shepherded the flock of
us with a masterful volubility.

He was a tiny slim-waisted man, but his chest was stupendous. He might
have packed all the rest of himself into it, and still have found room
for a superior conceit or two. It stood for Valombroso in Valombroso’s
own opinion. The frill, or comb, which strutted from it, through the
unbuttoned upper half of its owner’s neat frock coat, proclaimed him
cock of the walk in his own exclusive department. In further emphasis
of Valombroso’s supremacy, Valombroso’s silk hat was put at an angle
on his head like an acute accent on Valombroso, and Valombroso’s
moustachios, waxed into stinglike points, were accents also, acute and
grave, on Valombroso’s speech, which was copious and confident. In the
course, indeed, of our acquaintance, Valombroso was to convince us, in
flourishing rhetoric, that in foresight, in acumen, in penetration, as
also in the conquering simplicity of his system, there was no
detective--save one perhaps--in all the world who could approach
Valombroso.

The possible exception was the English amateur, Mr Holmes, no less.
Valombroso had the greatest admiration for this certainly unique man.

“He knows very well,” he said, “that it is not the criminal who want
to mystify, but the public who want to be mystified. So he keep the
clue, which is the obvious one, in his own hand, and send all the
newspapers astray on many false scents. Then the time come when they
are lost, every Jack’s son of them, and he bring them back, very
gradual and gentle, to the path which shall end to the view of Mr
Holmes holding his prisoner in the handcuffs. But there he was from
the first, though they knew it not. He did not want them to know, for
where then would have shown his cleverness? We all scorn the obvious,
do we not? It is so unexciting. There is no reputation to be gained by
seizing on it--not in England. Mr Holmes adapt himself to a demand--he
is very clever. But your police, they make the demand by their
stupidity. ‘Look,’ they say, ‘there is a man stealing a handkerchief
from a lady’s pocket! let us watch him and watch him to make sure that
he does not want only to blow his nose and return it.’ But presently
he steals another handkerchief, and then another, and so they say,
‘Three handkerchiefs are more than the allowance to one nose; he must
be a thief; let us arrest him’; and by that time there are three
ladies who are without the means to blow their noses. So again, if a
murder is committed and the murderer suspect--do they arrest him and
put him by the heels while they bring the charge home? Not at all;
they watch that he commit himself, and they tell the newspapers in the
meantime all of what they are thinking and doing so cleverly, as if
that murderer was the only one out of all the country that not read
the newspapers. But the public applaud, and that is enough. It is not
my way. I do not walk twenty kilometres to get across the street. I
say, ‘Show me my man and I go for him.’ Frankness, frankness
always--that is my method. Plain dealing is the last thing the
criminal expect. It is against his nature. He feels for ever in his
expectation the sudden pinioning from the back. He has no fear that I
shall walk up to his face and take him by the hand. Now, I say, show
me this body in its cave, and I ask no more. I go straight to England
to procure Mr Dalston’s extradition. It is enough for what it is until
I get him here locked safe. Then I will proceed to formulate my case.
It is well to bring down your bird before you put the pot on to boil.”

We were all very much impressed--all of us, that is to say, but
Jannaway. He maintained his insular reserve, and insular prejudice in
favour of insular methods.

“Handkerchers, indeed!” said he, with a withering intonation. “I’d
back any one of our London pickpockets to take and blow his nose in
_his_ handkercher and put it all back into his pocket without his
knowing. He’d never guess but that it was the echo of himself
a-blowing of his own trumpet.”

This lack of the right appreciation rather disillusioned us, I think,
about Jannaway. Assurance is always so much more convincing than
reserve. We sneer at conceit, but we allow it the privileges of its
self-estimation. Valombroso must know himself so much better than we
could possibly know him; and so, as his method was frankness, what
reason had we to doubt his being the greatest detective in the world?
It was simply Jannaway’s jealousy.

From Turin we went north to Aosta, an old walled and turreted town,
situated in a beautiful fertile valley under the mountains, and rich
in Roman remains. I have no time nor will to enlarge on the thousand
wondering sensations which all this novel experience awoke in me. They
were poignant enough, but they do not come into the story. More
germane to that is it to describe something of the feelings with which
I approached this Mecca of my pilgrimage, and thought, with an
agitation hardly to be repressed, how it was here that my father and
mother had come, stealing away from their party, to put a bond upon
their love. How old and far away and strange it all seemed! a pretty
antique pastoral, smelling of pot-pourri, until--ah! one could not
long forget the end of it, sordid and horrible, behind those tumbling
waters.

Yet now, being here, a very strange and sweet realisation of my
relationship to the dead came to me--for the first time, I think, as a
full conviction. Not even, seeing his young eyes laugh down from that
portrait on the wall at Evercreech, had I ever felt him so near to me
and so understanding as when, in this place, I looked up to the hills
and thought of what was lying hidden from me in their quiet folds.
Charlie Skene--the lover and young husband of those days--the boy,
still less than my own present age as he lay up there at this moment,
and yet my father! Was it not all ghastly pitiful! and to think how
that dastard blow had fallen upon three lives in one. O, Mr Mark
Dalston--if they would only hang in Italy!

And so one morning we went up to Cormayeur, and found the Hospice of
St Marguerite hardly altered, by Geoletti’s showing, from the Hospice
of twenty years ago. There was even the same Directrice presiding over
its establishment--a vivid, brown-eyed old dame, with cavernous cheeks
and a vulturine neck. She remembered Geoletti, and the gossip about
his utter evanishment; she remembered the young English milord, and
his no less startling, if more explainable, disappearance; she
remembered very well, better than all the rest, the little demoiselle,
white and pink, and the old aunt, grim and _de mauvaise humeur_, whose
cruelty had betrayed to scandal what should have adorned a pretty tale
of love and matrimony. And were the cold ashes of that scandal to be
raked over for the benefit of a new generation? she protested. Alas!
if the dead were to be consulted for their countenances, better bury
all men in the Abbey La Sagra di S. Michele, where the soil would
convert them in a little into natural mummies--a significant
suggestion, to be sure.

I have given a French tone to these observations, but, as a matter of
fact, they talked a hybrid patois, nearer Savoyard than Italian, up in
these remote tributary valleys of the Aosta. Valombroso had to be our
interpreter to its meaning; but he was always equal to any exigencies
of talk. He loved the sound of his own tongue impartially in all the
dialects of Babel. He could give us a reason, too, for the strange
anachronisms of dress which still prevailed in part among these
mountaineers--cocked hats, to wit, and bright-coloured long-skirted
coats, and breeches and stockings and shoe buckles. They were the scum
of an old upheaval of the ancient order risen to the top, and not yet
entirely skimmed away by the spirit of democracy. As to the coquettish
bibbed caps of the women, they were designed, after the fashion of
other whited sepulchres, to conceal the disfigurement of the goître.

But now all this becomes likened in my memory to the crackling of
thorns under a pot, while I turn to face the real tragic purpose of
our mission.




 CHAPTER XXIX.
 THE BODY IN THE CAVE

Emerging from the pine woods at last, we saw before us a vast barren
slope scattered with an infinite débris of rocks and stones. The hill
went up, shouldering itself hugely against a cold white sky. There
might have been, from our point of view, no higher altitudes beyond;
yet but a short climb was needed to reveal this waste as but a
low-down step to the majesty of the peaks. They rose into view before
us as we advanced, remote and ethereal, springing loftier with our
every step, a whipped froth of pinnacles white as cream.

Presently, bearing to the right, we saw a cleft open in the ridge of
the hill, and Geoletti, pointing to it, stopped us with a quivering
cry:

“Ecco! Lapluietonnante!”

Thenceforth we moved on in a burdened silence. Even Valombroso seemed
subdued under the weight of the responsibility approaching him. We
neared the cleft, and the murmur of descending waters grew upon our
ears. Then in a moment a crease seemed to open in the slope, and we
recognised that we were coming to the brow of a falling gully or
ravine, which divided the hill into two. The murmur increased, as we
advanced, to a roar, tumultuous, astounding; and suddenly, ascending
among rocks, we came out upon a little mossy sward, with the curved
edge of a cataract whirling beyond it, like a section of a huge
half-buried fly-wheel. It poured over a ledge a couple of yards above
us, and, as one could see by peering cautiously, plunged in one
unbroken fall of fifty feet or more into the sharp corner of a wooded
gorge. It came sweeping in the beginning through a great yat or gate
in the rocks above--a sluice regulating the overflow of some vast
cistern of the mountains--and, after rebounding from that first mad
descent, went crashing stair by stair down into the green basements of
the world, where it sped itself away in a flurry of foam.

Huge rocks toppled to the lip of the fall, and piled themselves
landward in a fantastic jumble. They were cracked, and split, and
creviced in a thousand directions, but, among all the fissures, there
was none that, to an ordinary soul, seemed potential of revelations.
Mr Shapter, looking about him with a very white face, put our common
thought into words:

“It must have needed an ingenious as well as an adventurous spirit to
discover the clue to this secret.”

“Signore,” said Geoletti proudly, “Milord was not the first.”

The man, exalted to these rocky attics which were his home, was become
another being from the hang-dog creature of my knowledge. His eyes had
brightened, his step become elastic, he walked like one entitled to
the command of the expedition.

“Behold,” he said, “the door!”

In an instant he had sprung upon a ledge--we saw him stoop--and he was
gone. But his voice rallied us from a resonant hollow:

“It is here! Com’!”

I think we all hung fire for an instant--a natural enough qualm. It
was not the adventure in itself, but--merciful God! what, after all
these years, were we expecting to find? One’s imagination, drifted to
the very threshold at last, sickened as in the emanations from a
charnel vault. Twenty years! and lying in what abnormal
atmosphere--subject to what unspeakable transformation! It could have
wrought of him surely nothing “rich and strange” like drowned Alonso?
It----

I felt Valombroso pushing by me, and I held him back instantly, and
took the leap--and almost struck against an upright slab of stone.
Then I saw that behind this veiling slab there was a low-down aperture
in the rock face, narrow and uninviting enough to one of my bulk. But
Geoletti’s hand came through, and, with difficulty, guided me in--and
instantly the thunder of the waters fell to a murmur.

“Stand up, signore,” he said whisperingly. “There is plenty room in
here.”

I straightened myself nervously; but there was indeed no necessity for
precaution. The narrow rent or gully in which we stood was just a
disparted fracture in the mass of rock, extending from crown to base
and from verge to verge. A man, though a Titan in height, might have
walked its length unhurt.

“Animo!” whispered my guide. “You follow me down, sir, and we reach it
ver’ soon.”

I felt him, as I thought, sinking from me, and caught at him like a
frightened child.

“Si, si,” he said. “You shall see the light com’ at once.”

It appeared even with his words--an odd globing radiance, that
throbbed and flickered on the walls of rock, like the glimmer of a
distant torch to one lost in the labyrinths of a catacomb. But with
our every downward step it dilated--broadened--drew nearer and
steadier--and lo! at one stride its source was revealed--a square of
green casement lit as it were by a rising dawn.

I halted, stupefied, as Geoletti halted. It was minutes before I could
realise that we had reached, were actually standing in, the
sleeping-room of death. But gradually understanding came to me, and I
saw.

It was the oddest chamber--a sort of cave or embrasure (it might have
been sixteen feet in width by a dozen in depth), opening upon the
under-sweep of the cataract some two yards beneath its leap, and lit
by the strangest window, it appeared, of green agitated spun glass.
That ran for ever, as it seemed, off an invisible reel, and shook and
fluctuated in its descent. I could hear the swish of its going like
the tear of rain--it “droned like a hive”--my God! “And all you can
see is the trees and the hills pulled crooked, like we saw ourselves
in that looking-glass”--I saw them, warped eccentric demons of things,
reaching and clawing and shrinking, as my father had seen them and
described them to his friend twenty years ago--I saw them, and----

A cry from Geoletti caught me to my senses:

“Zitto! zitto! Ah Dio di compassione! Look, signore! it is there--it
has never stirred. The shroud of the waters has enwrapped it where it
lay.”

I followed the direction of his hand. The cave was humid with a fine
floating spray. Something shapeless, grotesque lay on the floor of it
near to its farther end--a thing which, in a first hurried glance, I
had taken for a mere natural excrescence of the rock.

“What?” I gasped--“Geoletti--great God!”

We approached it, holding to one another, over the slippery floor, and
looked down. A horrible thing; blurred out of mortal recognition;
fungussed with lime, preserved in it, decay arrested and
perpetuated--a horrible thing. It resembled nothing so much as one of
those pitiful casts taken from the ashy moulds in dead Pompeii--grey
as pumice-stone--my father.

A smaller excrescence lay near it--quite a little one. Geoletti
stooped and pulled, and it came away in his hand.

“Signore!--the box!” he whispered.

“Ah!” I cried. “Go, while I watch, and fetch the others. They must
come--they must see this--Valombroso will know what to do. Go, do you
hear? I am not afraid any longer. Do you not understand what he was to
me?”




 CHAPTER XXX.
 HARD PRESSED

It was on a dreary wet morning, laden with the very spirit of
depression, that I led my little party of three across the fields to
the Lone Farm. We had talked, or slept, out the night at the “Black
Dog” in Market Grazing; and now, in grim fulfilment of the purpose
which had brought us so far, were advancing to the assault of the
inner abode of that mystery, whose final ramification had ended for us
under the waterfall in far-away Piedmont. We numbered, besides myself,
Mr Shapter and the two detectives. Johnny and Geoletti had stopped by
the way in London, to provide us with the necessary correspondents in
that prescriptive centre to all such operations.

We had hardly rested in our flight back from the Continent, since the
finding of the inquest held upon those pitiful remains had supplied us
with the _argumentum ad rem_ for procuring the extradition of Mr Mark
Dalston; but, quick as we had travelled, the news of our presumptive
mission had preceded us. For many reasons we should have preferred for
the present to have throttled all journalistic gossip; but where was
the lethal spot to be found in that myriad-necked Hydra? The story, or
a travesty of it, leaked out and ran faster than we could, and was
threatening us already, on our arrival in London, with a most
undesired fame. The absurdest surmises were rife; the most ingenious
inventions drawn upon to provide them. I have no time nor patience to
stop and retail a fraction of the nonsense talked by the newspapers.
The serious thing to us in it all was that it brought into a full
glare of notoriety a case which, in its first processes, it was of the
utmost importance should be kept secret. Signor Valombroso was, of
course, as cutting as a whip upon the paradox involved. “Why do you
not also publish portrait cards of your London detectives, with their
character parts included?” he asked. “It would give the poor criminal
yet one other chance.” He would have proposed a newspaper censorship
as the remedy. But it was certainly aggravating. If it was true that
Mr Dalston, having got wind somehow--perhaps through Mother Carey--of
the trend of my inquiries, and being baffled in his designs on his
victim, had already slipped into hiding, it was hardly probable that
this public exposure and _esclandre_ would bring him out of it. The
puzzling thing was that he should have left so vexatious a witness
behind him at the Lone Farm; but, as to that, it had to be borne in
mind that he was presumably unaware of her treachery to himself. In
any case, hither had been our obvious direction from the moment of our
landing.

I had written to Ira, while still in Italy, a full account of the
discovery, with all its tragic incidents and consequences. Afterwards,
arriving in London, I filled in the sheet with a brief account of our
subsequent doings and present intentions, and posted it to her where
she was staying with the family at Claridge’s Hotel. It was misery to
be so near and apart; but the peremptoriness of my mission admitted of
no delay; while the nature of our relations precluded any present
thought of a meeting under the Skene ægis.

But how desolate seemed the country, void of the consciousness of that
young darling presence in it. I could almost welcome the dripping
skies, the sodden fields, the deathly soak and stillness, as things
attuned to a mood abandoned of love and shivering under a sort of
creeping paralysis of terror. For how could I forget for a moment the
relations in which I stood towards the unhappy woman of whom it was
the very purpose of our visit to make a traitor and informer? She had
borne children to him. I was not the only fruit of her motherhood. I
could not but feel my part somehow an execrable one; and most in its
self-consciousness of a still-existing repugnance towards the object
of our schemes, which was surely unnatural, but which I could not, for
all my striving, overcome. Was not this, indeed, one of the bitterest
features of a bitter tragedy? At the present moment, even, my
thoughts, for all the filial warmth and graciousness they could
command, turned instinctively to Lady Skene.

The foreboding solemnity of my mood seemed to impart itself to my
companions. We plashed and plodded along the field paths with hardly a
word to exchange amongst us. Inspector Jannaway, it is true, had his
own reasons for reserve. Holding the very tangible fact of a warrant
for Mr Dalston’s arrest in his pocket, he seemed bent on leaving it to
his Italian colleague to justify its production. “Let him have his
head, gentlemen. He knows all about it. He’s agoing to prove the
superiority of his system over ours. Very well; I’m not the man to
interfere--not just yet awhile, anyway.” He did not speak these words,
but his attitude unmistakably expressed them. He was a great English
detective on the high horse, aggrieved by insolent comparisons. Let
Valombroso have our confidence; let all fools have their paradise. We
should find ourselves on the wrong side of ours in due time. When we
wanted him--and we should want him--he was here at our service. In the
meantime, he kept his thoughts--and his theories, if he had any--to
himself, and acquiesced passively and pleasantly in all that was
suggested. But he offered no suggestions of his own.

A dive through a dripping copse, a final flounder along a little muddy
lane, brought us into view of the house. It was certainly entitled to
its name--a lonely haunted tenement, flung away into the fields to rot
and perish of its own reputation. The fabric of it dated from the
Tudors, but it had been patched and shored with a number of unseemly
anachronisms, until it looked like a crippled house on crutches. Old
barns, old byres, an old dove-cot, toppled hard by to their fall. The
only modern feature about it was the filth, which discharged in one
place its moister particles into a little green duck pond with no
ducks in it. The house itself was half buried in trees, through which
one caught a glimpse of a considerable garden to the rear, full of
vegetables, but neglected. Tradition pointed to the farm as a refuge,
during the Marian persecutions, of a number of non-juring ministers,
who had nevertheless come to be routed out and despatched to the
flames for their obduracy. It was certainly quarried with vaults, and
priests’ holes, and other such sanctuaries of the desperate.

“H’m!” muttered Mr Shapter, with his hand on the bell. “A very warren
this, I shouldn’t be surprised. What do you think, Jannaway?”

“I think as you think, sir,” answered the detective serenely.

Shapter turned away impatiently. The clang of the bell answering from
those bowels of silence made us all start. And, almost with the
cessation of its deep voice, she stood in the opening of the door
before us.

The same mean sapless figure; the same unmoving face, worn and
unwholesome, and scored with its grey lines of suffering or endurance.
Only the eyes in it lived--the eyes of the “_petite_ demoiselle, so
white and pink.” I could not picture it--I could not. Age has no past
for youth--no memory of joys like its own. I shrank before the fire of
those eyes; but their vision had no direction--not even for me. They
looked beyond us all.

Valombroso swept off his hat, and returned it to his head, being
careful of the tilt.

“Good-morning, madama,” he said. “Is your husband at home? We desire
the honour of a word with him.”

“You have come to arrest him?”

The voice was as lifeless as the face.

“Madama is too precipitate,” answered the detective. “A word is not
necessarily a warrant.”

“I have always been waiting for it to come,” she went on, in the same
cold low tone, and with the same hot vision always challenging
something beyond us that we could not see. “I have always expected and
lived for this moment. Now, is it not in the eternal curse of things
that it has come too late? Too precipitate. O, yes! too precipitate.”

She gave a frozen little laugh--horrible, because the muscles of her
mouth, the breath of her bosom did not seem to stir to it.

“He killed my husband, my dear first love, did he not?” she asked.

Not one of us could find words to answer her.

“O, I know it!” she said. “I have always known it. Voices and visions
used to come to me--they were for ever coming. One was of a little
child I bore; but it went, and I knew then that it was not of the
dead. Only the dead speak to me. The others are like murmurs behind a
wall. I hear them as the dead hear the steps and laughter overhead. He
killed him out of love of me--he struck him through my heart and
killed my heart. The rest was his to take. He could not gain back what
he had killed. His will was strong, but that was beyond it. And he
made a passionate wooer, too. But it wanted more than his warmth to
melt that dead stone of my heart. The children of his passion--they
were born with the chill of it on them, and they too died, one by
one.”

Not once did her voice rise above that lifeless current of sound. She
stood like one speaking in an hypnotic trance, compelled to say the
things she said. Now, in a pause, Valombroso spoke again:

“Will madama explain what she means by its being too late?”

Her eyes came down to him, with the strangest challenge.

“Did you know him, and think to take him so easily? Look where you
will; you will not find him here.”

“We shall avail ourselves very fully of your permission, madam,” said
Mr Shapter civilly. “It obviates for us the unpleasant necessity to
fall back upon our search warrant. Mr Dalston is gone, then, you say.
Will you perhaps acquaint us where?”

“He is gone abroad--a long journey. I have a letter from him. You can
see it if you like.”

She turned and led the way into the house, and we all followed her
into a low dark inky-panelled sitting-room. Melancholy green light
flowed in here through a wide lozenge-paned window at the back. A
round-headed bush was stooped to the glass outside, as if listening
with its ear to it. It was an unchancy creepy place, and shudderingly
cold.

We exchanged some significant glances while the unhappy woman was
searching a bureau for the letter. Crazed--that was their common
implication; and perhaps by reason of her madness spared much. It was
very pitiful.

Presently she found what she sought, and brought it to us. Our heads
crowded together to read it. It was indisputably his, couched in
affectionate terms, and dated from some port in Spain, a week back. It
related the writer’s sudden inducement to seize a business chance
which had offered, talked of a short absence, and gave some directions
for his wife’s abandonment of the farm and withdrawal to a certain
address in London, which was mentioned. Valombroso, finishing with it,
shrugged his shoulders and handed the sheet on to Jannaway, who put it
in his pocket.

“It is very well, then. And now, with your permission, madama, we will
get to work,” said the Italian.

She answered not a word, but stood leaning on the desk, and looking
strangely after us as we trooped out of the room. Mr Shapter, leading
us across the passage, halted in a little dull study which had
presumably been the master’s, and faced the detectives with a
question--“Well?”

Valombroso shrugged his shoulders again; Inspector Jannaway did and
said nothing.

“Come,” said the lawyer impatiently to the former. “Is the letter in
your opinion genuine?”

“In-con-test-abilmente, signore.”

“Then it is no good our searching here?”

“Very like, but we must search nevertheless. He may have gone and come
back. I say only this: Show me once my man, and I go for him.”

Jannaway uttered a curious sound. If his face had not been so
immovable. I should have taken it for a laugh. Mr Shapter glanced at
him sharply.

“You seem amused, Inspector Jannaway,” he said.

“Do I, sir?” answered the detective. “I have to seem a lot of things
in the course of my duty.”

Shapter flounced his shoulders slightly, and turned away.

“The sooner we get to business the sooner we shall satisfy ourselves,”
he said. “Come.”

We left the room together, but outside, by the lawyer’s advice,
separated, and took each his independent direction--as one the living
rooms, one the offices and cellars, and a third the attics. Inspector
Jannaway decided, on his own initiative, for the grounds and ruined
outbuildings.

Our search, as might have been expected, yielded us no human
quarry--not so much as a scullery-maid. Mrs Dalston, it appeared,
existed, for whatever reason, the sole tenant of this remote and
dismal homestead.

But, if the place was void of any sign or shadow of what we sought,
the voices of a hundred unseen demons seemed to people it. They rang
in peals of laughter up the stairs; they answered mockingly to one’s
tap on hollow panels; they rose in reverberant boomings from the
cellars, and echoed away down dark passages to a scampering of tiny
feet. When, by-and-by, we reassembled in the hall, Valombroso’s
instant utterance spoke, I think, the common feeling:

“God of mercy, signore! there is only one way to penetrate the secrets
of this house--and that is to pull it down.”

He wiped his white face with a ball of handkerchief. Inspector
Jannaway’s appeared the only composed countenance amongst us. But even
his answered with a momentary pallor to the shock of a sudden screech
of laughter uttered hard by. It came, or seemed to come, from the room
where we had left Mrs Dalston. Mr Shapter, after a second’s paralysis,
turned the handle of the door resolutely, and we all looked in. She
was standing still where we had left her. A handkerchief was in her
hand. Her bosom was rising and falling in hard pants.

“Great God, madam!” said the lawyer. “Was it you made that noise?”

She gave no answer--she seemed fighting for breath--but presently she
spoke:

“You have not found him, then?”

“Not yet; but we shall come again; we have not finished.”

“It is open to you, now and always,” she said, still with difficulty.
“I am at your service; we are all here at your service.”

_We?_

I shivered in the thought of those viewless colleagues of hers. A
vision of the cheery inn where we had quartered ourselves suddenly
rose before me, before us all, I think, irresistibly attractive. It
would be possible only in some such healthy commonplace to resolve
upon reason and a course of action. Without another word, we turned
and left the house.

We must have walked half-a-mile, I believe, before any one of us
spoke; and then it was Inspector Jannaway, answering a mute appeal of
the lawyer’s eyes.

“Mad, sir,” he said. “As mad as a hatter.”




 CHAPTER XXXI.
 A NOTABLE INTERLUDE

It was evident that things had come to a deadlock between the two
detectives. They could not work together, and they would not work
apart. Mr Shapter was summoned at length to arbitrate between them. He
found Valombroso bristling, and Jannaway conscience-calm. The Italian
opened on him.

“Signore, if I am to have an English colleague, it shall be other than
this serene man. Yes, I will call him that for politeness.”

“What is the matter with him, detective?”

“The matter? Nothing is the matter. He enjoy the most perfect
constitution in my experience. Nothing shall move or trouble him. I
say to him ‘Suppose I think this Dalston somewheres in the
neighbourhood?’ ‘Well, think it,’ he say. Again if I remark, ‘I
believe of this letter that it is genuine,’ ‘You are quite welcome to
your belief,’ he answer. Once more, ‘Suppose I decide it the good
policy,’ I say, ‘to go and watch at the address which our man give for
his wife in London?’ What is his reply? Why ‘Go along and watch
yourself silly, if you like’--just that. But he will not come too; and
so I shall refuse to go without him. He desire anything to put me
wrong, so he may presently take to himself the credit when it arrive.
We are baffled here at present, yes. We shall continue the same while
this sort of thing shall last. But it shall not last. I say now at
once, that, unless you give me the colleague I desire, I throw up the
case. I cannot work at it any longer with a mule.”

“And who is this suggested colleague, Valombroso? Is it Mr Holmes?”

“Who else, signore? Am I not Valombroso?”

Mr Shapter shrugged his shoulders. But he had _carte blanche_ from
Johnny to employ whom he pleased; and expense was no consideration.

“Well, have you any objection, Jannaway?” he asked resignedly.

“None whatever, sir,” answered the inspector. “It won’t be the first
time me and Mr Holmes have met over a case. He’s got the makings of a
respectable detective in him, or used to have; and if he _should_ come
to fail here, like Mr Valombroso, why, there’s still me to fall back
upon for a forlorn hope.”

What _did_ he mean? Had he or had he not something up his sleeve,
which he was retaining merely for the greater discomfiture of his
rival, should that gentleman once come to admit his own defeat?
Nothing could be plausibly guessed but that he felt himself aggrieved
over our moral assumption of the other’s supremacy, and was regarding
with a mischievous enjoyment some _faux pas_ into which our mistaken
faith was leading us. It seemed incredible that a man of his
reputation could have _no_ ideas in the matter. We could so little
believe it, in fact, that, through all this puzzling perversity of his
mood, it never occurred to us for a moment, I think, to dispense with
his services, negative as those were. At the very least, he might
become, as he himself suggested, our ark of refuge.

Valombroso snorted fearfully over the assumption of his failure.

“_You_, to think you shall see to the end of my resource,
Inspec-tar-r-r-r Jannaway!” he said, and ended with a furious ironic
laugh.

Jannaway stood impassive.

“Very well, then,” said Mr Shapter hastily. “I will telegraph to Mr
Holmes. I cannot, of course, answer for his being disengaged at the
moment.”

But fortunately a favourable answer was received. Mr Holmes himself
would follow by the midday train.

I confess I was extremely curious to see this extraordinary man, with
whose eagle countenance, penetrating eyes and slender aristocratic
figure report had made me familiar. Nor, when I had my opportunity,
was it marked by that disillusionment which is often the penalty of
over-expectation. It is true that there was a trifle more grey in the
hair, a trifle more vagueness, or shall I say less brilliancy in the
eye than I had looked for; but it must be remembered that at this
period Mr Holmes was at least approaching that state of premature
superannuation which his adventures, countless and diversified beyond
the common human experience or endurance, had necessarily imposed upon
him. Nevertheless he was still a striking-looking man, very pale in
the face, and with a curious bump on his head, any mute and stealthy
observation of which he was wont characteristically to detect, and to
regard, it seemed, with suspicion or annoyance. He drove from Footover
in a station fly, and of course his friend Dr Watson accompanied him.
The two, it was well known, were inseparable.

Mr Shapter and I were waiting for him, as he alighted; but he took not
the least notice of us for a moment, turning to his companion with the
remark: “I believe you are perfectly right in what you are thinking,
my dear Watson. The breach between the D.’s is eternal; they will
never come together again.”

The doctor, long accustomed, it appeared, to the other’s method of
deductive reasoning, showed no astonishment, but merely replied, “Yes,
you have answered the thought in my mind exactly. No doubt it will
interest these gentlemen to hear the processes by which you reached
that conclusion.”

“Why, my dear Watson,” said Mr Holmes promptly, “do you not remember
that little oath you uttered under your breath when our flyman jogged
us over an offensively large stone? The ejaculation inevitably
suggested a big letter to you--the bigness of the letter a certain
popular operetta--the operetta, a pinafore--a pinafore, overcoats in
general. At that moment you glanced up; the coat our coachman was
wearing had obviously been made for a smaller man, and the seam had
parted at the back never to rejoin. I saw you observe it. The
association of ideas was complete. The D.’s and the breach between
them rushed into your mind at the very instant that we came to the
door of this capital hostelry, and into the presence, if I mistake
not” (he turned with a charming bow and smile), “of our respected
telegraphic correspondents.”

The formal greeting over, we conveyed our visitors into our private
sitting-room, where the two detectives were awaiting us. Mr Holmes
greeted the inspector with a “Ha, Jannaway!” and we promptly got to
business.

The great amateur was severely interested in the tale unfolded to him,
though his companion, I could not but think, appeared somewhat bored
by it. He yawned a good deal, and kept looking at his watch. I was not
mentally as familiar with his figure as with the other’s, and, beyond
the fact of his face being a mutton-chop-whiskered one, had no more
than an idea of his general appearance. Still, I had not seemed to
associate quite so much bulk with it. Doctor Watson, I fear, had grown
rather fat and inert, and, in suggestion, not unlike a prosperous
impresario.

The story related and the letter examined, Mr Holmes sat in profound
silence for a while.

“I take it, then,” he said presently, “that the point of contention is
the present whereabouts of Mr Dalston?”

I was a little surprised, as that _was_ the point; and no other, in
fact, had been raised.

“I believe,” said Mr Holmes after further reflection, “that Mr Dalston
went abroad, and that he wrote that letter _from_ abroad. That is not
necessarily to conclude, however, that he is abroad at this moment.
The farm, by your showing, offers itself a very potential retreat to
one desirous, shall we say, of evading his social obligations. At the
same time it does not appear to be rich in the material necessities of
existence. It is at least conceivable that this man, rendered
desperate by an enforced abstinence, may be caught sneaking from his
well-chosen burrow there at night, in order to satisfy those
insatiable appetites which his position renders him unable to indulge
by day. Your criminal is notoriously a sensuous animal, and one the
least capable of resisting the calls of his nature. Have you, may I
ask, ever thought of putting a watch upon the place at night?”

No, it appeared we had not. Our interlocutor smiled, shaking a long
finger at Jannaway.

“Inspector, inspector!” he murmured--“the old fundamental
insufficiency!”

Valombroso skipped with delight.

“Signore,” he began, “only show _me_ my man, and----”

Mr Holmes interrupted him, rising.

“I will do my best,” he said. “But this is very sad.”

He went out, and we did not see him again until dinner-time, when he
turned up--rather late, to Dr Watson’s obvious annoyance--and
luminous, so to speak, with preoccupation. He smoked a heavy pipe,
filled with tobacco of a peculiarly pungent brand, throughout the
meal, but ate very little--an abstinence which was fully compensated
by his friend, who, not to misjudge him, appeared to think a good deal
of his food, and eyed every dish interestedly as it was put on the
table. The fare, proving exhilarating, moved the doctor, even, to some
ill-timed levity; for when Mr Holmes at dessert slipped, apparently in
a fit of abstraction, the nutcrackers into his pocket, he asked him
banteringly if he hadn’t better send the dishful of nuts after them.
Mr Holmes was very angry, and demanded to know how, after all these
years of their acquaintance, he had learned no better than to question
him openly as to the meaning of any action of his however seemingly
uncalled for.

“For what do you exist, my dear Watson,” he said, with an infinite but
perfectly gentlemanly irony, “but as a screen of vulgar commonplace
between me and the public. You are not here to expose my methods, but
to cover them.”

The doctor was completely, and rightly, set down; though it is only
fair to him to admit that Mr Holmes afterwards confessed to us in
private that the act had been an involuntary one on his part, due, no
doubt, to some association of ideas between the implements, and his
recognition of the fact that he had here a particularly hard nut to
crack.

He left us again after dinner; and, seeing him well out of the room,
the doctor, presumably in a spit of resentment, took the occasion to
tap his own head significantly.

“He has never been,” he murmured, “quite the man he was since that
fall.”

If this admission, or insinuation served to “give us pause,” our
spirits were to be reassured in a few hours by the return of Mr Holmes
in a great state of suppressed excitement.

“Give me a foot-rule,” he said. “I believe my theory was correct and
that I am on his tracks.”

His enthusiasm communicated itself to us all.

“Great heavens, sir!” said Mr Shapter. “Do you mean to say you believe
him to be really in hiding at the farm?”

“I lend myself to no positive assertion, my dear sir,” answered the
other, with a smile. “I state, only, that I have come upon a number of
footmarks about the house that were not there this afternoon. They may
be his; they may not be. A great deal depends upon the postulate. But
nothing can be lost, at least, by following them up; and that is my
sole present intention. I shall be absent, probably, during the
greater part of the night, and even, it may be, well into to-morrow
morning. See that the door is left on the latch.”

You may be sure that none of us--save only Dr Watson, whose snores
shook the partitions--slept much that night. We were all awake with
daylight, and eager for news. It came, presently, with the astounding
information that Mr Holmes, returning to the house in the early hours
of the morning, had ordered incontinently a fly for the station, and
had left in it before any of us were down. We stared at one another in
mute consternation.

But Dr Watson, when he appeared, took the thunderbolt unruffled. This
sudden disappearance was only, in his opinion, part of the plot.
Likely enough the tracks had led his friend to Footover.

In the meantime he laid himself out to enjoy his respite in the
consumption of much excellent fare and tobacco, to which latter
indulgence he never resorted without first fitting on his head an
embroidered black velvet smoking-cap with a large gold tassel pendent
from its crown. His engagements, he said, left him free till Easter,
when he was to take his usual little holiday at Clacton-on-Sea. No
doubt there would be developments in a day or two.

But there were no developments, not that day nor the next, and we were
beginning to foresee a difficulty in ridding ourselves of this
self-complacent incubus, when there arrived a letter to him from Mr
Holmes, which settled the business. He read it, and, in a fit, I
cannot but think, of temporary aberration, threw it across to Mr
Shapter. It ran as follows:--

 “My Dear Watson,--I find this must be counted among my unsuccessful
 cases. I am under the necessity of admitting that the footmarks I have
 been following were my own. I traced them all the way to the “Black
 Dog,” and so up the stairs to my bedroom, where the boots themselves
 lay under a chair. _En passant_, why did you never remind me, my dear
 Watson, that they were a pair of yours which I had borrowed, and put
 off for some of my own when I went out for the second time? It was
 that misled me. Make my apologies to our friends. I enclose the half
 of your third-class return ticket, and am off to Siberia by the night
 mail. An important political prisoner has escaped from Kara Baigarama.
 I believe him to be hidden under an ice-floe in the Arctic Ocean. Tell
 this to nobody.”

Mr Shapter looked across at Dr Watson, who had sunk back in his chair,
with a piece of bloater sticking out of his mouth. He gasped and
swallowed it.

“I believe,” he said, “that that fall into the river gave him water on
the brain.”




 CHAPTER XXXII.
 RUN TO EARTH

“I have to tell you, Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “that your
colleague has deserted you.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“He has driven away this morning to catch the early express.
Disillusioned for ever, he told me, as to our police methods,
disappointed in his one cherished ideal, he has gone to London, to
deliver his report and state his case before the court of final appeal
as represented by our employer, Mr Dando.”

“Very well, sir. Then, p’raps its time as _we_ got to business.”

“I don’t understand you, Jannaway.”

“Maybe not, Mr Shapter. Maybe it’s a side of my business to be
misunderstood, and a side of yours to know it.”

“Well, I should have thought I knew you pretty well by this time.”

“_Should_ you, sir? With respect, and judging by results, I must take
leave to doubt it.”

“Well, Jannaway, well.”

The detective warmed a little, his grievance coming to an irresistible
head.

“Look you here, Mr Shapter,” he said. “If we’re all to be judged by
what we go a-boasting of ourselves, we might as well petition the
Almighty to open Paradise again, and give us that Valombroso for our
head gardener. But He’s not to be took in, like some folks, by the
clanging of an empty brass pot; and mayhap He’d ask for a little more
proof of what was at the inside of all the noise that pretended to
such a bellyful of wisdom. It’s time for a cock to crow when it’s out
of the egg.”

“But really, inspector, mayn’t silence sometimes be a little empty
too?”

“That’s for you to judge, sir.”

“I am your very humble servant, Jannaway.”

“Then, sir, if you’ll come along with me, I’ll show you where the body
of this man Dalston is lying at this moment.”

“Dead?”

The bolt, loosed serenely from that official blue, caught us fairly in
the wind, and sent us staggering. The whispered cry came from us
together. The inspector nodded his head, with his lips set very grim.

“Dead, gentlemen. Look in a well, they say, for truth. It’s worth
bearing in mind.”

“In a well!”

“In a well, sir. Mrs Dalston done him. I’ve got her under arrest at
this moment.”

“Murder?”

The detective with a swift movement gripped my arm.

“Hold on, sir,” he said. “It’ll pass in a bit.”

“I’m all right,” I whispered huskily. “Did she murder him!”

“I didn’t say she did, now did I?” he protested. “She drove him to
kill himself, if you want the truth. We got him up at daybreak, and
he’s lying in the parlour now. _His_ ticket’s cancelled for good and
all. I want you over there at once, Mr Shapter; but the young
gentleman needn’t come unless he likes.”

“I’m ready,” I retorted fiercely. “What do you suppose? Have I run him
so far to shirk the end? Come, hurry; what are you waiting for?”

“Well,” said the detective, “he’s not a pretty sight, that’s all.
There’s few as is what shoots themselves in the head.”

I stared at him; I would ask no more. In a minute we were on our way.

“Since when have you known this, Jannaway?” asked Mr Shapter, pale and
breathless, as we hurried on.

“Only since early this morning for certain, sir,” answered the man.
“But I’d been awake and busy half the night before, while the Italian
gentleman, I suppose, was a-fuming and a-packing of his bag. He’d
better have waited a little longer. I couldn’t have kept the truth
from him another day.”

“How long have you been keeping it from him, from us all, as it is?”

“I mentioned, since this morning, didn’t I, sir? I don’t say as that
covers the whole process of my reasoning up to it. But, as to that,
you’ll hardly blame me, I suppose, for sitting close. Anyway, its the
inferior English method, Mr Shapter, and, being an inferior English
detective myself, I’m stupidly prejudiced in favour of it.”

It was wounded dignity’s last shot. We hardly spoke another word as we
sped across the fields. For myself, I was so overcome with agitation
as to find the mere effort of speech a labour. Yet once I found voice
to ask Jannaway a question appalled: “What will be done with her?”

He shook his head, grating his chin.

“What indeed, sir? It might be proved incitement to suicide. More like
she’ll be found incapable to plead. I’m detaining her as a matter of
form; but the County Asylum’s more in her line than the police
station. Don’t you be afraid for her, sir.”

Afraid? Merciful heavens! if this might be found the solution!--my
mother--never as yet so realised--never, until made a widow for the
second time, and by her own revengeful act, it seemed. Yet, dreadful
as that might prove itself, it restored her somehow in my mind to her
right place in the triple tragedy of my life.

We found a knot of gaping, whispering rustics gathered about the farm
when we reached it. The news had already got abroad, and a potent
shadow was henceforth to add itself to the traditional spectres of the
place. A stolid hot-faced member of the local police opened the door
to us. A fellow-constable was in charge of the prisoner in the study.
Thither we went.

She rose, with a smile, upon seeing us--there was a bright unearthly
light in her eyes--and glided across to me.

“Hush!” she said. “They have found him, Charlie darling; but it does
not matter, he can never hurt you again. How big and strong you have
grown while you slept; and he has fallen to nothing. He would be no
match for you now; and yet, in spite of all, I used to think him a
fine man. He would woo so confidently; and all the time he never
guessed what was in my heart. And in the end I did it so cleverly. He
just went down there into hiding, into the place which he had
discovered and told me of--I let him down myself--and afterwards it
was so simple. I had only to wind up the bucket again and leave him.
He had never foreseen that, for all his cleverness; and I kept my
secret too well. He used to call up to me--the names that had once
seemed to give me to him, and I listened and never answered. And then
he implored and implored, and I never answered; but I looked over the
rim and laughed at him until he knew. I saw his face hang white above
the water--whiter and whiter every day--and then once, when evening
had fallen, came the sound--O, my God!--and I knew that at last he had
shot himself in his despair.”

She flung her hands to her throat, with a gasping cry--

“It was like him to take that way. He knew that the sound would go on
for ever and ever in that pit and betray me in the end. Don’t you hear
it now, coming from the garden? But you needn’t be afraid to touch me,
my lord; my hands are clean. Gentlemen of the Jury, I did not kill
him. Please let me pass. He has a headache, and it is my duty to
attend to him. He is a very handsome man when he is himself. I should
like to tell him that--it is so little--and I have never said as much
to him before. I think it might help to cure him and stop the sound.
Gentlemen--please!”

At a sign from Jannaway the two constables advanced, and put firm but
not ungentle hands upon the poor creature. She struggled, uttering
shriek upon shriek.

“Best leave her to us, sir,” panted one of the men. “She’ll go quiet
in a little.”

Mr Shapter led me, inexpressibly agitated, from the room, and out into
the open at the back. Here the detective took the lead, and,
conducting us by way of weed-grown paths and tangled vegetation
through a wicket into an old walled fruit garden, turned towards an
angle of the enclosure where, on a little elevation, the yoke of a
great well sprouted from the ground.

My heart shuddered in me as we approached the thing. It was a pretty
massive structure, built for endurance, and calculated to the strain
of a heavy load of water. The bucket, the loop of a strong chain
connecting it with the windlass barrel, stood empty on the grass by
the well rim--a great sheet-iron pail, capable of holding eight or
perhaps half-a-score gallons. But the machinery by which it was
manipulated was the most curious, being a nest of powerful cog-wheels
and blocks, so adjusted under the butt of the windlass that, by
turning a handle, a child, or little stronger, could wheel up the full
bucket with perfect ease and as many pauses by the way as he chose.
What was as striking as anything, perhaps, was the state of
preservation of the whole structure; but, no doubt, the entire water
supply of the farm depending on it had made that a perennial
necessity.

“Will you look down now, gentlemen,” said the detective, “and see if
anything strikes you? Hold steady, sir!”

I balanced myself by the upright post of the windlass, and peered into
the well. Its heavy wooden lid, pierced by a trap in the middle,
through which the bucket could be raised and lowered without
disturbing the rest, had been bodily removed, and stood on its rim
against the wall hard by. The diameter of the shaft was
considerable--a full six feet, I should say--and the depth of the
boring, it might be, two hundred, but I am not certain. I know only
that the eye of water at the bottom looked no larger than a full moon,
and that a surprising interval elapsed between the dropping of a stone
from above and its answering plop from below.

“Well, gentlemen?” said Jannaway, after we had been gazing down some
moments; “nothing strikes you out of the common?”

“Nothing whatever.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed, satisfied. “They was pretty cute in those days.
Now, I’ll tell you, there _is_ something peculiar, and not more’n
thirty or forty feet down; but you’d never guess it from here, would
you? If you doubt me, go and satisfy yourselves. I don’t ask you to,
mind you. I say only as I’ve been the journey myself this morning, and
more than once; and if that’s enough for you, you can take my word on
it.”

I came away instantly from the post.

“I’m going down,” I said.

“No!” exclaimed Mr Shapter violently.

“Yes,” I insisted.

“He’ll do all right, sir,” said the detective, after a moment’s survey
of me. “I should be glad, as a matter of fact, of the corroborative
testimony, and there’s no more danger in it than in a fire escape, if
he keeps his hold and his nerve.”

“I am going down,” I repeated. “What shall I do, Jannaway?”

“Nothing more, sir, than sit on the bucket edge, with your legs
inside, and hold on to the chain. When you come to it, shout, and I’ll
stop.”

I did as he bid me. He went to the windlass handle, and without a
moment’s hesitation began to turn. Instantly the bucket containing me
swung free, and, after a little sluggish oscillation, descended slow
and smooth, dropping into the bowels of the earth. It was a curious
rather awful sensation, going down so into that smooth-walled shaft,
with its deep-sunk eye watching for the breaking of the thread which
was to precipitate me to an unthinkable death. I could not find the
nerve, after one glance, to look down again. But, on the other hand,
the brightness of my descent both surprised and comforted me. I had
peered from above into a pit of gloom, rather appalling and fathomless
to the eye; now, descending into it, under its open circular skylight
all was as clear as day, so that I could see the shadows under the
projecting bricks, and the little hartstongues in the crevices of
mortar a vivid green.

I must have dropped already some thirty or more feet, when I saw a
curious hooded bulge, so slight as to be imperceptible from above,
swell from the curve of the wall; and immediately afterwards the wall
itself appeared to gape beneath it like a yawning mouth. I shouted in
another moment, and the bucket stopped. Right opposite me, gouged out
of the wellside, was a deep niche like an oriel, forming a sort of
grotto or retreat. It was quite roomy, and lined and floored with
brick; and a stone ledge in it formed a seat. At the entrance an iron
stanchion was let into the wall, so that one, setting the bucket
gently swinging, might easily grasp that hold and land himself in the
cave. A man might lie hid there indefinitely, with the aid of a
confederate above, and not a soul guess the secret of his
disappearance. It was as cunning a cover, I am convinced, as
persecution had ever inspired.

Now, as I gazed fascinated, a certain token of some late human
occupation there entered into my vision and set the brain of it
reeling. I screeched out, and clung frantically to the chain. In an
instant I was going upward, and in a little more the wholesome
daylight came about me.

“Swing!” cried the detective, bending at the crank; and he slipped in
a block that held up the machinery.

I obeyed, as well as my shaken nerves would let me; and in a little
they had caught the rim of the bucket, and held it to the side while I
stepped out.

“Why the devil didn’t you tell me of the blood?” I gasped, wiping my
wet forehead as I stood away.

The inspector looked at me queerly.

“Truth is, sir,” he said, “I never thought. We’d had to get him out,
you see; and a nice job it was. What was left of it didn’t seem to
matter.”

Mr Shapter, with his eyes like grey agates, was holding my left hand
in his left, his right placed sympathetically on my shoulder.

“What was it, my boy?” he said.

“A cave, sir,” I answered--“a scoop in the wall where he’d
hidden--water and a cave like that other. And the shot in his head! My
God! who fired it? My God, sir!”

“An awful retribution,” he said. “But come, come--you are overwrought;
and no wonder. Let us go back to the house--or into the open fields,
if you prefer it; and Jannaway shall give us the story of his
discovery, in good matter-of-fact reviving prose.”

 * * * * * * * * *

The detective took from his pocket the letter which he had obtained
from Mrs Dalston, and held it up to the light for our inspection.

“Do you observe the water-mark, gentlemen--Nolans, the big North
Hampshire paper mills? It was that first put me on the scent. Here was
local-made foreign note-paper, asserted to have been received from
Spain. He might, of course, have took some with him; but it wasn’t
likely, was it, seeing as how the letter itself refers to the journey
as unpremeditated, and him away from home, or wished it to be supposed
so, at the time? Inference, that he’d wrote it here for a blind, and
give it to be produced by Mrs D. in case of inquiry, while he himself
dropped into hiding.

“He was clever, and he knew a good deal--not the least of his
knowledge that the game was threatening to be up with him--but the
best of his sort make their slips. He’d made his, and it left me
pretty convinced that he’d be found lying close somewheres about the
neighbourhood, while the hunt ran abroad.

“I didn’t much cotton to the house, myself, for a solution. It was
reasonable to suppose, of course, that, during his tenancy of the
place, he hadn’t overlooked its best facilities for concealment. But,
then, where _he_ could find a way, others could too, and the
reputation of the farm promised a pretty searching inquiry into its
holes and corners. No, I thought, if our gentleman’s to be unearthed
at all, it will be from somewheres characteristic of his genius, and
the least likely to be considered by the ordinary. Probability pointed
to the house for that: therefore I made it my business to look
outside.

“Now, I don’t know if you may recall, gentlemen, a rather queer
thing--and that was the odd laugh the lady give in answer to our
Italian friend’s remark that she’d been too precipitate? She had--she
admitted it indirectly. She’d always been looking, the inference was,
for this solution to the long grudge she’d bore against him, and, when
at last it come, it come too late. Why? By God, gentlemen, the answer
took me in a flash. It was because she herself had already anticipated
the law by killing him.

“Once, in my mind, I couldn’t get it out. Yet, if it was true, it only
made the puzzle deeper. For where could she have hid him, none the
less? and why had she chosen this particular time more than another
for the deed? The plain answer to that second seemed because he must
have put himself suddenly at her mercy, in a way he’d never done
before, and the temptation had proved too strong for her. It was then
for the first time that the well occurred to me. Could she have pushed
him in unexpected when he was gone to draw water?

“I had observed the thing, of course, often enough before. Its size
and depth and the machinery about it was only too conspicuous to draw
my serious notice. But now I went to a closer examination--and, by the
Lord, gentlemen, what do you think I found caught among the cogs? Why,
a finger-stall. That was something, at least, for on the day we first
saw her, Mrs D. was wearing such a thing.

“That decided me. I tested the machinery, and found the bucket drop
like oil. A child could have worked it. I determined to go down into
that well, and find out, if I could, what a little fishing at its
bottom might bring to light. You see, the discovery of the grotto was
an accident. I’d been looking for murder, not suicide, and the truth
met me, like you, sir, half way. Only God or a Jury can give it a
name. That was no earlier than this morning, when I got over a couple
of the locals, and had the cover off and was let down. _He’d_ never
wanted the cover off. The man must have been built of stone and steel.
To sit there those days and nights famished and deserted, waiting for
his release that never came! The most of us, I think, would have
dropped into the water and ended it long before he did. But he always
had his revolver, that’s true. He could afford to stake up to the last
chance. I don’t know how long he himself had known about the grotto;
but he only let his wife into the secret of it a fortnight ago. He’d
seen or heard from the woman Carey, as far as I can gather, and
thought as we should be down upon him at once. He bolted for his
hiding at the first in a panic, arranging with Mrs D. that she was to
come and wind him up at evenfall if nothing happened; and that was the
last the world saw of him. It come on the woman in a moment as how
she’d got him in a trap, and her chance was given her at last. I had
it all out of her, while she kept the reason to speak it, and that
wasn’t long. When she saw _him_ being brought in, she broke out like a
screech-owl; and a mercy for her if she could be turned into one in
actual fact, poor creatur’.”

“Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “I owe you an apology.”

“I’ll cancel the debt, sir,” answered the inspector. “After all, your
saying _you_ couldn’t understand me was a compliment.”




 CHAPTER XXXIII.
 A REST BY THE WAY

My story draws to a close. I linger only yet a little by the way--a
balmy breathing space, a last restful interlude between the
acts--before I rally to the final struggle.

Before the inquest could be held, my unhappy mother’s complaint had so
increased upon her that it became an imperative necessity to remove
her to the asylum from which her poor broken spirit was only to be
released by death. The whole painful business, with the material
difficulties it entailed upon me at a crucial pass, was undertaken for
me by Mr Shapter (acting on my good Johnny’s private instructions)
with the most feeling tact and helpfulness. These are matters to be
touched upon with no less delicacy than was shown in their
accommodation. Never has man been blessed with a finer and more
generous-hearted friend than I.

Yet, conscious of a hundred unmerited graces, a blight as of
abandonment by all the world seemed to fall upon me as I left the room
where the inquest had been held. The inquiry was over; the last
flicker of its excitement was dead for me; the madhouse and the
unhallowed acre had closed upon the scene. The Jury, equal to
Inspector Jannaway’s faith in them, had brought in a verdict of
Justifiable _felo de se_; and, with the snap of that final spark, the
curtain had fallen, committing me to a profound gloom.

That, in its essence, no doubt, was fruit of the inevitable reaction
from long nervous tension. In the exhaustion following any such
prolonged struggle, one is always apt to make a selfish grievance of
one’s state--to resent the self-imposition of one’s burden as a duty
enforced upon one by the callous egotism of one’s fellows. The disease
of ungraciousness soured my vision, and painted the world to me a
bilious yellow. True, my friend had very handsomely provided the
material means to my success; but why, in the justice of things,
should Fate have imposed upon _me_ the necessity of securing that
success at all? A dozen issues were involved in the question, and I
knew it; but my reason was clouded under the sense of personal
desertion, at the crisis, by those who appeared to think that their
moral sympathy with me at a distance was all-sufficing. In fact, and
to end the matter, I had not heard from the two dearest to me for a
week and more, and the shadow of that silence was obscuring my mind,
and peopling it with a hundred spectres of apprehension.

And so, returning to the “Black Dog,” I found a telegram awaiting me:

 _If possible be at lodge in Caddle three-thirty this afternoon.
 Particular business Gas and Gaiters. J. D._

It was like finding a bottle of champagne in a glooming wilderness. At
the first gulp the clouds lifted, a crevice opened in them, and
sunshine poured into my heart. Cryptic as ever, there was no telling
Johnny’s meaning; but, Johnny being Johnny, and all things equal,
helpfulness shone in some sort potential.

I looked at the clock. With barely time to keep the appointment, I
started, with a bounding heart, on my way.

Reaching near to the wicket at last, I was aware of a station fly
loitering along the road ahead, as if in waiting for a discharged
fare. I hesitated an instant, then, passing through the gate, plunged
into the wintry coppices, and went resolutely for the lodge. I had not
once entered this old hermitage of mine since my return. I had felt
it, indeed, morally barred to me while the great question was at
issue. But now I could not resist the sudden recall, since, as I told
myself, I was visiting it an invited guest.

How familiar and yet strange it looked, as I drew near, viewed in the
light of my wider experiences--a dark and lonely little tenement, but
haunted by what wistful ghost at last, a spirit more potent than all
its old-time spectres of melancholy and decay. Whatever might come to
be, it was hallowed for evermore in the memory of that possession. My
heart was very full as I approached it, and entered by the open door,
and stepped softly into what had been my sanctuary.

“Ira,” I whispered, half choking--“if only it could be Ira!”

“O, Richard! it is me.”

Sweet imperfection of sweet lips and slips! What has love to do with
grammar? With a sob I had her in my arms. I could not help it--this
dream, this rapture--and I was overwrought.

The gentle lovely child! How she understood, and quieted my quivering
face with her soft hand, and spoke to me in murmurs of heavenly pity
as if I were her child, her baby, the first-born of her heart. And I
bent to her in an ecstasy of submission, until I felt the manhood in
me rise and strike for conquest.

 * * * * * * * * *

“And it is all over, Richard?”

“All over, Ira; and he is dead; and she is mad for ever, I fear.”

“Is it not better so? O, my dear! if she should live to realise what
she had done!”

“I hope she will die.”

“It is best to hope it.”

“Everything shall be best now--now that I have you again. I have been
afraid, Ira.”

“Afraid of what, Richard?”

“I had not heard from you for so long. I was troubled.”

“Troubled?”

“I imagined things. My mind has been in such a state.”

“What things, bad boy? Poor, poor little fellow! There! he shall be
told the worst at once and get it over. Miss Christmas, sir, has been
offered a husband by her guardian.”

“What husband?”

“O, not you, sir--don’t think it. It is Lord Sycamore. He is very
tall, and very silly, but only fairly well off; and he has no roof to
his mouth, or to his head--I forget which; but anyhow, if it was the
dome of St Paul’s, I shouldn’t want him.”

“I should hope not. And Lord Skene thinks to impose this ass on you?”

“Richard, don’t shout so. Yes; and he is enormously angry over my
refusal.”

“I owe a debt to my grandfather for it. He seems determined to add to
my obligations to him. And Lady Skene, Ira?”

She answered very softly, the dew of love in her eyes:

“She is not angry, Richard. I think, if one knew, she is your friend
now. She is very quiet and unself-assertive--always now since she came
back to us. Once I saw her looking so strangely at me, and I hurried
to her, and knelt and took her hands in mine without a word. ‘Be a
good wife to him,’ she whispered suddenly; ‘he has suffered such wrong
from us all’--and she was crying, Richard, as she got up and left me.
And afterwards, as I passed the nursery door, she was sitting huddled
on the floor by baby’s cot; and I could not see her face because her
hands were held quite still to it, and the firelight was dancing in
her beautiful hair. She has grown so humble, it makes me cry. And,
Richard, I think Uncle Charlie feels the change in her; and it has
made him more masterful--more peremptory. Once Mr Pugsley came, and he
would not let him see her, but got rid of him without ceremony, and
she did not say anything when she heard. It is as if she knows that
she has forfeited her right to a voice in the conduct of her own
affairs.”

“I have no quarrel with her, Ira; and now less than ever. She will
always be my mother in my heart--God forgive me, and her. But with
Lord Skene it is another matter. He knows how I stand with you, and
this persecution of his only shows his determination to resist all
natural claims of mine on his consideration.”

“He scoffs at the whole story, Richard. I think he looks upon it as
the fabrication of a pretender.”

“He chooses to look upon it so, dear. A son, an old man’s Benjamin,
stands in my way. Well, if it were not for the vile insult implied to
my father, I think I could almost honour his infatuation, and be
content to waive my claim for--for that? I was going to say for a
younger brother; but things have altered. Just imagine it, Ira; that
little cradle creature is my uncle.”

That set her off laughing.

“And you are asked to make room for him, dear. Doesn’t it sound like
that horrible vulgar song? You should hear Lord Sycamore drone it
out--it is one of his most admired performances--with the little brays
to give it tone:

  “‘Richard, make room for your uncle--haw!
  There’s a little de-ar--haw!’”

She buried her face against me, and withdrew it for a moment, flushed
and half weeping between laughter and indignation.

“I am ashamed to tell you such nonsense, dear. But it has really been
very painful--you see, I am not of age yet--and so--and so, I have got
something to confess.”

“Confess away. Your lips, you know, can always make their own bid for
absolution.”

“You wicked priest. But it’s nothing very dreadful--at least I hope
you don’t think it so--only that things became so unbearable in the
end that I thought it best to go on a visit. I wonder if you can guess
where?”

“Tell me.”

“Why, to the Dandos. I wrote to your friend--was it very unmaidenly of
me? and the invitation came back directly. O, Richard, what a glorious
little man he is, loving you so, and, I think, attached to me too--but
of course you told me that.”

“Did I? So you went? And what did you think of Mrs Dando?”

“Now, Richard! I won’t answer you as you want. She is immense.”

“Enormous.”

“I didn’t mean that. To hear the way they both spoke up for you.”

“Did she too? But I really had no reason to suppose she would--may her
shadow never grow less. But Johnny, of course.”

“Of course. He is mad about the way you are being treated, and insists
on seeing you through to the end, and establishing your claim before
the world.”

“I am so blessed in my love and friendship, darling, that I live in a
perpetual fools’ paradise about myself and my merits. And so that is
the explanation of this escapade, I suppose.”

“Yes; he brought me.”

“_Who_? Johnny?”

“I hope you don’t mind. He’s waiting in the fly to take me back when
we’ve done.”

“I shall go with you. I’m finished here.”

“O, Richard! Will you--will you?”

“Clasp your hands to me, baby. You look as if you were all made of
tinted sugar, and I’ve a business not to eat you. There. In spite of
everything my heart sings to choke me. How can I ever let you go
again! Yes. I’ll telegraph to Shapter when we get to town. An hour ago
I felt as if the world had done me; now I feel like a giant for
rounding on it. What is your particular power, you weak little thing?
Give me your hand. Don’t you remember how I made it carry that pailful
of water, beast that I was! It would have served me right if you had
dumped it on my toes. Ira, supposing I never made good my claim?”

“What, to me?”

“To you, conceit? No, to the title, I meant, of course.”

“O! I had forgotten. But what does it matter, Richard, so long as we
have one another?”

What did it matter, indeed? I ring down the curtain on that
unanswerable query.




 CHAPTER XXXIV.
 THE GREAT SKENE CASE

You see the heading to this chapter? Your fathers used to see and
greet it for many a long day in their newspapers--especially in the
evening issues, when a little excitement was needed to beguile the
tedious minutes of the journey homeward from the city to Clapham, or
Streatham, or Hampstead. How the boys used to shrill it out, decorated
with its daily official furbelows, and make their halfpenny profits on
that _cause célèbre_! There may be comfortable newsvendors now who
owe their position to the social furore it created. I know that many
lifelong friendships, not to speak of heads, were broken in the
differences of opinion to which it led. You may unearth the full
report of it all, if you will, from the dusty files of ’82. I am not
going to be so silly as to retail it to an indifferent generation.
Even the great Arthur--great in bulk as in impudence--has shrunk
to-day into little more than a buffer for legal precedents. What
modern can gauge the force of the contests which raged about the
Tichborne or Skene standards, or find himself more than politely
interested in the story of the blood spilt and reputations overthrown
on those doughty fields?--lost, both, by their claimants, or
pretenders; yet, I trust, in one case, an honourable defeat, a few
words as to which must now suffice.

Lord Skene persisting obstinately in disputing my claim, and my cause
being warmly espoused by my friends, led to the institution of those
legal proceedings which were to result in that action at law before
the Lords of the Court of Common Pleas, which came to be known as the
Great Skene Mystery, and which in the end found me non-suited and
disinherited. The case lasted many weeks, and entailed the production
of a little army of witnesses. Its expenses shake my memory to this
day; though, thank Heaven, some subsequent successes were to enable me
to come to some sort of a compromise for them with their guarantor--my
blessed and admirable Johnny. Its chief weakness consisted in its
failure to procure any reliable depositions from the witness who
should have been its first--my poor stricken mother. A disastrous blow
to it was the death of Mother Carey on the very evening following her
receipt of an official citation to the Court to give her evidence.
That, resolving itself into a matter of second-hand, brought about my
discomfiture. Whatever was the moral of the case--and their
appreciation of its true bent was conveyed to me spontaneously by a
large number of independent persons, legal and otherwise--so reckless
a dealing with our institutions as would be entailed in the upsetting
of an hereditary title on circumstantial evidence was hardly to be
thought of. My claim was dismissed as, in Scottish parlance, not
proven, and Master Baby was confirmed in his succession to the
lordship of Evercreech.

Not so many weeks ago I strolled into the old Court of Common Pleas at
Westminster, and tried to regather from its mouldering echoes some
whisper of the enormous babble which my solitary voice had once
awakened there. Quiet sunshine came in through the windows; there was
an atmosphere in the place as of one of those little done-with and
locked-away graveyards which one comes on unexpectedly in the green
nooks of London. It was difficult to reincarnate in fancy from that
silent dust the roar and scuffle of a dead generation. Its figures,
and the emotions they had once evoked in me, would not be stirred to
more than a very shadowy demonstration. They were not, in fact, so
much the fallen precipitate of time as of a dead phase of my own
existence. Between them and the present lay the verdict of the Court.
Only on the hither side of that verdict was life a vivid and strenuous
reality to me. Hence, though the case itself, with its judges, and
droning counsels, and motley witnesses, and pomp and circumstance of
legal warfare, was become as the shadow of a fantasia, every detail of
its immediate issues was as clear to me as if it had happened
yesterday. The verdict had severed my past from my present self, as a
surgeon’s knife cuts away a diseased limb. I could recall the very
queer stunned feeling with which I had awakened from the operation
amidst the rising buzz and shuffle of the court, or theatre. The
solemn withdrawal of the judges--figures like old ermine-muffled
dowagers making for their chariots; the yawning and stretching
barristers, laughing as they gathered their papers; the excited gossip
of the audience; the general movement, and rush of draughts, and gusty
wind of cab-hailing voices, loud or indistinct as the doors opened and
shut like an organ-swell--it all came back to me like a last week’s
harlequinade to a child.

Someone takes me by the arm, and leads me out, unresisting, into the
mild May evening. A sense as of something rather comical bubbles in me
like weak laughter. There is a smell of water carts in the roads, and
the unconcerned sparrows are hopping in the intervals of the traffic.

“Never mind, old fellow,” says the dear voice in my ear. “You’re the
one that comes out of it with credit.”

I stop, reeling a little, as if stupidly drunk.

“O, credit, Johnny!” I answer, with an inane giggle. “You’ll have to
give me that with a vengeance.”

“Come, Dicky!” he says, peremptorily for him. “That’s neither sense
nor kindness, old man. Nor it isn’t fair to me, you know. I didn’t
lead you on to this for my own profit. What I lose is what you lose,
and nothing more--faith in men’s justice, that’s all. The rest counts
for nothing; and if you’re the friend I believe, you’ll see it as I
do.”

I may be morally intoxicated. I am not ashamed to own, nevertheless,
that, there in the open street, I take his good hand and kiss it.

“Now, come along home,” he says, flushing; “and hear what she’s got to
say about it all. Your defeat will pay you with her, if I know her,
better than any victory would. I only wish I was you, by golly!”

We reach the flat, and he leaves me to mount the stairs alone. There,
in the gorgeous drawing-room, ablaze with lights, I find her--a little
soft radiant figure, “born to consume the soil” and the bleeding
hearts of its labourers. I look round and about me with a renunciatory
laugh and shrug of my shoulders, and my eyes, bitter and defiant, come
back to her.

“Yes, Miss Christmas,” I say, “this is your proper setting. I have
lost my case.”

The vile brute in me--the vile brute! She does not answer a word; but,
with a quick sob, she wrenches the diamond from her bosom, the pearls
from her hair, and that falls and half veils her face. And the next
moment she is prostrate at my feet.

“Richard! I will be poor--O, I will be poor!”

Hush! Who is this come suddenly upon us from the shadows, where Ira,
hearing my step, had hidden her?

“Will you make my burden, Richard, more than I can bear?”

I turn in amazement. It is Lady Skene.

“I have dared much to come to you--to her,” she says, in a low
agitated voice. “I knew from my husband that you could never win--not
there--not in that Court. But here, Richard? O, it is great to be
generous in triumph, but greater in defeat.”

“Generous! What have I left to give in all the world?”

“Yourself.”

“Ira!” I cry, as if waking from a dream. “What have I been saying?
What wicked nonsense have I been talking? Why, what has all this to do
with you and me? Money and titles? I don’t remember their ever having
had anything to do with the understanding between us. Or had they? I
am stupid, and I can’t remember.”

“Richard!”

I am on my knees to her.

“What tomfoolery, of course. I can’t imagine what I was thinking of.
To quarrel with my own heart because it wouldn’t stop beating!”

I look round. Lady Skene has gone.

“Ira!” I cry once more--and heaven flows upon me under the tangle of
her hair.




 ENVOI.

I have only a note or two to add, inessential but explanatory to the
curious.

Lord Skene never forgave me for that stand made in my own rights, but
persisted to the end in regarding me as an impostor who had got even
something better than his deserts. His ward coming of age soon after
the trial, and persisting no less obstinately in her attachment to a
rascal, he washed his hands of her and committed us both to the devil.
The death of his mother-in-law, I am satisfied to think, caused him
some retributive pangs; for, out of pocket as he was by the action, he
could not afford to ignore her substantial leavings, or fail to suffer
the social penalties entailed thereby through his obligation to admit
his wife’s relationship with the horrible old miser. After Mother
Carey’s demise, bonds, scrip, and securities to a handsome tune were
discovered hidden about her premises, besides a considerable amount of
property in hard, but dirty, cash. I hope his lordship enjoyed
handling it. But I bear him no grudge. Old kindly memories of him
predominate in my mind.

From facts subsequently unearthed by Mr Shapter, it was believed that
Mr Mark Dalston had originally purposed the infanticide, through the
co-operation of his friend, Dr Blague, of the teller of this
narrative, and that it was nothing more that the accidental
interposition of Mother Carey which had suggested to him the
compromise which, though after a long interval, was to bring about his
undoing. If he had been imbued with only a little less confidence in
his own managing villainy, he might have been a respected citizen at
this day, and my story had never been written.

The trial had at least one sequel satisfying to justice. It
led--largely through Johnny’s instrumentality--to an inquiry into the
circumstances of Geoletti’s conviction (an inquiry only less notable
than the one to which it was supernumerary), with the result that the
victim was granted a free pardon, together with some pecuniary
compensation nicely adapted to his deserts at the time of his arrest.
It was sufficient, however, to his expectations; and returning with
the sum to his native land, he was enabled to realise the desire of
his heart in the purchase of an auberge in the Aosta Valley, where in
after days I called upon him, in company with my wife, and found him a
quiet prosperous man, not speaking much, but possessed with an
insatiable craving to make up for past abstinences from tobacco and
wine.

And, finally--of ourselves? Under the seal of love’s confessional lies
locked all that is worth knowing there; but we were married, if the
term is essential to the propriety of an ending. I am not fond of it
myself, I confess. It is the conventional expression for a
conventionally vulgar festivity. But one has to endure it, and get
away from it as quickly as possible, and commit to one’s fancy a
picture of the thing as one would have liked it to be--something out
in the woods, perhaps, with maids dancing, and garlanded heifers, and
a gentle poem of wedlock, as binding as its natural symbol in the oak
and eglantine. It is nothing but a question of terms, when the sweet
and solemn oath is exchanged, after all.

Well, the thing had to be, and my fairy, who should have come dressed
like the green lace-wing, must drag after her a preposterous train of
watered tabby, or moiré antique bombazine, or some such unnameable
stuff at something terrifying the yard. Johnny, the best of men, was
likewise my best man; and, in the enthusiasm of both parts, pursued
us, flying, with a dropping fire of telegrams in cypher, which
punctuated our honeymoon with merriment.

And afterwards? Why, I started life dependent on my wife; and what was
to say against it? A sense of honour? Pooh! Fine honour or kindness to
wreck two lives on a sentiment of vanity! That curse of the golden
balance! Go, fall into love, my friend--really into love, I mean--and
marry you a wife, and learn what mutual confidence means. After the
second day you will be beating your brains to remember which of you it
was brought the money into the concern. But that is not to say you
will be justified in leading an idle life.

_Méchant poulain_, says an old French proverb, _peut devenir bon
cheval_. Nature having given me a certain fanciful inventiveness,
which might appear to be my most negotiable asset, I thought I would
try writing for a living, and even began with some illusions about
Literature (with a capital), and the certainty of high purpose and
high endeavour meeting in time with their due recognition and reward.
But long was not wanted to put me out of that preposterous conceit,
and make me understand the terms upon which “literature” is permitted
to include itself among the high arts, such as the forming of a trust,
or the exploiting of a pill or hair wash. I then stuffed a manuscript
into an old potted beef tin, and forwarded it to an enterprising
publisher, with the intimation that it had been discovered on a
dust-heap, and that my terms were such and such, not as author but as
entrepreneur. The ruse, being appreciated at its worth by a sagacious
spirit, and the venture launched on a flood-tide of puffery, proved an
instant success. The literary value of the book may have been anything
or nothing; it ran into its twenty-fifth edition on a much solider
basis; and I found myself suddenly the possessor of capital. Ira and
Johnny were both immensely indignant with me when they discovered the
truth. That occurred on the very day on which my wife had unearthed
from Keats a quotation which she considered peculiarly applicable to
my destiny and the ideals which ruled it:

  “... to die content on pleasant sward,
  Leaving great verse unto a little clan.”

I laughed as I kissed her.

“Good poets make unpractical fathers,” I said--“and you must not
excite yourself, my loveliness. This money, well invested, is going to
prove the nest-egg of our song-bird. We must line the nest, you know,
if we want the bird to sing. And now, being independent of the public,
I am going to pull its ears.”

“You donkey,” she said, and pulled mine.


So ends the Great Skene Mystery, the symbol of whose “stopping” is to
be found at this day, if one is curious enough to look for it, in the
little lead plug let into a hole in the floor of the old Court at
Westminster, where once was inserted the rod which held the screen
which protected the judges from the draughts. And, if I am Richard
Gaskett still, I have at least earned a popular title to my name.

 [The End]




 NOTES.

 [1]
 #The Eye# Equals Johnny himself--the ego, that is to say. All his own.

 [2]
 For the sake of clearness, the story is given in reporter’s English, as
 afterwards minuted, and not in the hybrid phraseology characteristic of
 the narrator.




 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ frowsy/frowzy,
notepaper/note-paper, etc.) have been preserved.

Text-edition only: “#” is used to indicate bolded text.

Alterations to the text:

Convert footnotes to endnotes.

Punctuation fixes: quotation mark pairing, missing periods, etc.

[Chapter III]

Change “to realise in it a a sense of my own” delete one _a_.

“to _marshall_ these resolutely before my mind’s eye” to _marshal_.

[Chapter IV]

(“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,” she answered,) italicize French
text.

[Chapter V]

“Didn’t she suggest this to to you?” delete one _to_.

[Chapter XI]

“a bottle of gin and one of peppermint _esssence_” to _essence_.

[Chapter XIII]

“that must be _Jonnny_ Dando!” to _Johnny_.

[Chapter XV]

“consequences of an _intreege_ with some girl” to _intrigue_.

[Chapter XX]

“honesty of the confession _evercame_ me” to _overcame_.

 [End of text]






*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 70048 ***