The Project Gutenberg eBook of The great Skene mystery, by Bernard Capes

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.

THE
GREAT SKENE MYSTERY

PROLOGUE.
EDITORIAL.
MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

“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?”

“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?”

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

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

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.

“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.

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.

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.”

“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 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.

“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.”

“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?”

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——”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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:

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.

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.

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.”

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 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?”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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

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.”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

“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.

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.”

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

“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?”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

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.”

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.”

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

“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?”

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?”

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?”

“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.”

“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.

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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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——”

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

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?”

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

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

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.

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.

“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.

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

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

“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.

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

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

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!”

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

“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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.

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

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.”

“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.”

“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.

“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?”

“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.”

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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

“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?”

“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?”

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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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 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.”

“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.

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

“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?”

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

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.

“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.

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

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.”

“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.

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?”

“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’!”

“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.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“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.

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

“‘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.

“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.”

“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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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

“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.

“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.

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

“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.”

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?”

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

“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 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.”

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.

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.

“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.

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

“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 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.”

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

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.

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.”

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

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.

“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.”

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?”

“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.”

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.”

“But there mustn’t be any suspicion of our colluding. You must keep away from me, and only communicate by letter.”

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.

I held out to him, title-page open, the book in which I had found the letter the night before.

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.

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——”

“No. I was on circuit at the time. He was engaged by my sister, Lady Thorold, in answer to an advertisement.”

“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——”

“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.”

“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.

“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?”

“Is he capable of it—going to those lengths? Why do you tell me all this?”

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:

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.”

“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.”

“You haven’t forgotten, of course. I can quite understand you. Mrs Churton wouldn’t favour such reminiscences.”

“She might, you know,” I answered, “if your peace of mind were in question.”

“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?”

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.

“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.”

“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?”

“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.

“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.”

“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.

“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?”

“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.”

“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.

She turned, with such a sudden terrified look as I could hope never to awaken on her face again.

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.

She seemed to totter a moment; her white jewelled hand caught at the banisters. But almost with the act she had recovered herself.

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.”

“Why, are you not?” I said. “Hardly worth while, then, to risk so much to gain so little. Neither happy nor secure, perhaps?”

She rose to her feet, her hands clinched against her skirts. I had never seen her look so wretched or so lovely.

“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.

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?”

“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?”

“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?”

“He will do it,” I said; “he will come again and again. Do you recognise that?”

“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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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?”

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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?”

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.”

“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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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?”

“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.

“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.

“Sorry! Supposing I had not taken a walk? Supposing the cold had killed you?”

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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“You can imagine nothing but extremes. Isn’t there something—I only put it to you, you know—between hate, and—love?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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!”

“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.”

“That I should dream of such a monstrous thing—dream that any claim of mine to you would be listened to for a moment!”

“You are master of me, and I am you, Richard. O, dear! are you going to break my heart after all you’ve said?”

“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.”

“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.”

“I expect you will have to carry me now, Ira. I feel as stiff as a gun barrel.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

“We have met before. I hope we shall meet again—and on terms of a better understanding.”

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.”

“Don’t you know? Don’t you know, indeed, my dear boy? But of course you do; or why should I be here?”

“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?”

“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?”

“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.

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!”

“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?”

“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.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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?”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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.”

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.

“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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

“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.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

“Put down that light first. I must hear and see and not be seen. There, would he know me?”

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.

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?”

“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.

“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.

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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“I have full hopes the matter may be accommodated—hushed up. It comes to be merely a question of the figure.”

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?”

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.”

“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.”

“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 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?”

“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?”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“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?”

“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!”

“What difference does that make? His gilding only seems to show up his roundness, like one of grandpapa’s pills.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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——”

“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 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.”

“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 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 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?”

“He’s no fool, perhaps. Johnny, I’ve come primed with an enormous budget of news to explode on you.”

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?”

“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——”

“You ain’t by chance thinking of anybody else, similar sort of name, are you?”

“Yes, I told her. Perhaps you would like to know what she remarked upon it.”

“She said, ‘I’m sure, for my sake, Richard, he’ll take care of you.’”

“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.”

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?”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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:

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.”

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.

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:

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.

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——

“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.

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.

“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?”

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.”

“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.

“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:

“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?”

“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.

“Do I, sir?” answered the detective. “I have to seem a lot of things in the course of my duty.”

“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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

“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.”

Mr Shapter shrugged his shoulders. But he had carte blanche from Johnny to employ whom he pleased; and expense was no consideration.

“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.

“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.

“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!”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Maybe not, Mr Shapter. Maybe it’s a side of my business to be misunderstood, and a side of yours to know it.”

“Should you, sir? With respect, and judging by results, I must take leave to doubt it.”

“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.”

“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.”

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, sir. Mrs Dalston done him. I’ve got her under arrest at this moment.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

“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.

“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’.”

“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.

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.

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.

“Is it not better so? O, my dear! if she should live to realise what she had done!”

“Everything shall be best now—now that I have you again. I have been afraid, Ira.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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:

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?”

“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 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.”

“I hope you don’t mind. He’s waiting in the fly to take me back when we’ve done.”

“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?”

“O! I had forgotten. But what does it matter, Richard, so long as we have one another?”

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.”

“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.

Hush! Who is this come suddenly upon us from the shadows, where Ira, hearing my step, had hidden her?

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“Ira!” I cry once more—and heaven flows upon me under the tangle of her hair.

ENVOI.

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:

“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.”

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.

NOTES.

[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.

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