Sir Reginald Ardenhad fallen into a doze, as he sat by the fire with hisRevue des Deux Mondes, slipping between his finger and thumb, on his knees. He was recalled by Crozier's voice, and looking up, he saw, standing near the door, as if in some slight hesitation, a figure not seen for two years before.
For a moment Sir Reginald doubted his only half-awakened senses. Was that handsome oval face, with large, soft eyes, with such brilliant lips, and the dark-brown moustache, so fine, and silken, that had never known a razor, an unsubstantial portrait hung in the dim air, or his living son? There were perplexity and surprise in the old man's stare.
“I should have been here before, Sir, but your letter did not reach me until an hour ago,” said Richard Arden.
“By heaven! Dick? And so you came! I believe I was asleep. Give me your hand. I hope, Dick, we may yet end this miserable quarrel happily. Father and son can have no real interests apart.”
Sir Reginald Arden extended his thin hand, and smiled invitingly but rather darkly on his son. Graceful and easy this young man was, and yet embarrassed, as he placed his hand within his father's.
“You will take something, Dick, won't you?”
“Nothing, Sir, thanks.”
Sir Reginald was stealthily reading his face. At last he began circuitously—
“I've a little bit of news to tell you about Alice. How long shall I allow you to guess what it is?”
“I'm the worst guesser in the world—pray don't wait for me, Sir.”
“Well, I have in my desk there—would you mind putting it on the table here?—a letter from Wynderbroke. You know him?”
“Yes, a little.”
“Well, Wynderbroke writes—the letter arrived only an hour ago—to ask my leave to marry your sister, if she will consent; and he says all he will do, which is very handsome—very generous indeed. Wait a moment. Yes, here it is. Read that.”
Richard Arden did read the letter, with open eyes and breathless interest. The old man's eyes were upon him as he did so.
“Well, Richard, what do you think?”
“There can be but one opinion about it. Nothing can be more handsome. Everything suitable. I only hope that Alice will not be foolish.”
“She sha'n't be that, I'll take care,” said the old man, locking down his desk again upon the letter.
“It might possibly be as well, Sir, to prepare her a little at first. I may possibly be of some little use, and so may Lady May. I only mean that it might hardly be expedient to make it from the first a matter of authority, because she has romantic ideas, and she is spirited.”
“I'll sleep upon it. I sha'n't see her again till to-morrow evening. She does not care about anyone in particular, I suppose?”
“Not that I know of,” said Richard.
“You'll find it will all be right—itwill—all right. Itshallbe right,” said Sir Reginald. And then there was a silence. He was meditating the other business he had in hand, and again circuitously he proceeded.
“What's going on at the opera? Who is your great danseuse at present?” inquired the baronet, with a glimmer of a leer. “I haven't seen a ballet for more than six years. And why? I needn't tellyou. You know the miserable life I lead. Egad! there are fellows placed everywhere to watch me. There would be an execution in this house this night, if the miserable tables and chairs were not my brother David's property. Upon my life, Craven, my attorney, had to serve two notices on the sheriff in one term, to caution him not to sell your uncle's furniture for my debts. I shouldn't have had a joint-stool to sit down on, if it hadn't been for that. And I had to get out of the railway-carriage, by heaven! for fear of arrest, and come home—if home I can call this ruin—by posting all the way, except a few miles. I did not dare to tell Craven I was coming back. Iwrote from Twyford, where I—I—took a fancy to sleep last night, to no human being but yourself. My comfort is that they and all the world believe that I'm still in France. It is a pleasant state of things!”
“I am grieved, Sir, to think you suffer so much.”
“I know it. I knew it. I know you are, Dick,” said the old man eagerly. “And my life is a perfect hell. I can nowhere in England find rest for the sole of my foot. I am suffering perpetually the most miserable mortifications, and the tortures of the damned. I know you are sorry. It can't be pleasant to you to see your father the miserable outcast, and fugitive, and victim he so often is. And I'll say distinctly—I'll say at once—for it was with this one purpose I sent for you—that no son with a particle of human feeling, with a grain of conscience, or an atom of principle, could endure to see it, when he knew that by a stroke of his pen he could undo it all, and restore a miserable parent to life and liberty! Now, Richard, you have my mind. I have concealed nothing, and I'm sure, Dick, I know, Iknowyou won't see your father perish by inches, rather than sign the warrant for his liberation. For God's sake, Dick, my boy speak out! Have you the heart to reject your miserable father's petition? Do you wish me to kneel to you? I love you, Dick, although you don't admit it. I'll kneel to you, Dick—I'll kneel to you. I'll go on my knees to you.”
His hands were clasped; he made a movement. His great prominent eyes were fixed on Richard Arden's face, which he was reading with a great deal of eagerness, it is true, but also with a dark and narrow shrewdness.
“Good heaven, Sir, don't stir, I implore! If you do, I must leave the room,” said Richard, embarrassed to a degree that amounted to agitation. “And I must tell you, Sir—it is very painful, but, I could not help it, necessity drove me to it—if I were ever so desirous, it is out of my power now. I have dealt with my reversion. I have executed a deed.”
“You have been with the Jews!” cried the old man, jumping to his feet. “You have been dealing, by way ofpost obit, with my estate!”
Richard Arden looked down. Sir Reginald was as nearly white as his yellow tint would allow; his large eyes were gleaming fire—he looked as if he would have snatched the poker, and brained his son.
“But what could I do, Sir? I had no other resource. I was forbidden your house; I had no money.”
“You lie, Sir!” yelled the old man, with a sudden flash, and a hammer of his thin trembling fist on the table. “You had a hundred and fifty pounds a year of your mother's.”
“But that, Sir, could not possibly support any one. I wascompelled to act as I did. You really, Sir, left me no choice.”
“Now, now, now, now, now! you're not to run away with the thing, you're not to run away with it; you sha'n't run away with it, Sir. You could have made a submission, you know you could. I was open to be reconciled at any time—always too ready. You had only to do as you ought to have done, and I'd have received you with open arms; you know I would—Iwould—you had only to unite our interests in the estates, and I'd have done everything to make you happy, and you know it. But you have taken the step—you have done it, and it is irrevocable. You have done it, and you've ruined me; and I pray to God you have ruined yourself!”
With every sinew quivering, the old man was pulling the bell-rope violently with his left hand. Over his shoulder, on his son, he glanced almost maniacally. “Turn him out!” he screamed to Crozier, stamping; “put him out by the collar. Shut the door upon him, and lock it; and if he ever dares to call here again, slam it in his face. I have done with him forever!”
Richard Arden had already left the room, and this closing passage was lost on him. But he heard the old man's voice as he walked along the corridor, and it was still in his ears as he passed the hall-door; and, running down the steps, he jumped into his cab. Crozier held the cab-door open, and wished Mr. Richard a kind good-night. He stood on the steps to see the last of the cab as it drove down the shadowy avenue and was lost in gloom. He sighed heavily. What a broken family it was! He was an old servant, born on their northern estate—loyal, and somewhat rustic—and, certainly, had the baronet been less in want of money, not exactly the servant he would have chosen.
“The old gentleman cannot last long,” he said, as he followed the sound of the retreating wheels with his gaze, “and then Master Richard will take his turn, and what one began the other will finish. It is all up with the Ardens. Sir Reginald ruined, Master Harry murdered, and Master David turned tradesman! There's a curse on the old house.”
He heard the baronet's tread faintly, pacing the floor in agitation, as he passed his door; and when he reached the housekeeper's room, that old lady, Mrs. Tansey, was alone and all of a tremble, standing at the door. Before her dim staring eyes had risen an oft-remembered scene: the ivy-covered gatehouse at Mortlake Hall; the cold moon glittering down through the leafless branches; the grey horse on its side across the gig-shaft, and the two villains—one rifling and the other murdering poor Henry Arden, the baronet's gay and reckless brother.
“Lord, Mr. Crozier! what's crossed Sir Reginald?” she said huskily, grasping the servant's wrist with her lean hand. “Master Dick, I do suppose. I thought he was to come no more. They quarrel always. I'm like to faint, Mr. Crozier.”
“Sit ye down, Mrs. Tansey, Ma'am; you should take just a thimbleful of something. What has frightenedyou?”
“There's a scritch in Sir Reginald's voice—mercy on us!—when he raises it so; it is the very cry of poor Master Harry—his last cry, when the knife pierced him. I'll never forget it!”
The old woman clasped her fingers over her eyes, and shook her head slowly.
“Well, that's over and ended this many a day, and past cure. We need not fret ourselves no more about it—'tis thirty years since.”
“Two-and-twenty the day o' the Longden steeple-chase. I've a right to remember it.” She closed her eyes again. “Why can't they keep apart?” she resumed. “If father and son can't look one another in the face without quarrelling, better they should turn their backs on one another for life. Why need they come under one roof? The world's wide enough.”
“So it is—and no good meeting and argufying; for Mr. Dick will never open the estate,” remarked Mr. Crozier.
“And more shame for him!” said Mrs. Tansey. “He's breaking his father's heart. It troubles him more,” she added in a changed tone, “I'm thinking, than ever poor Master Harry's death did. There's none living of his kith or kin cares about it now but Master David. He'll never let it rest while he lives.”
“Hemaylet it rest, for he'll never make no hand of it,” said Crozier. “Would you object, Ma'am, to my making a glass of something hot?—you're gone very pale.”
Mrs. Tansey assented, and the conversation grew more comfortable. And so the night closed over the passions and the melancholy of Mortlake Hall.
A coupleof days passed; and now I must ask you to suppose yourself placed, at night, in the centre of a vast heath, undulating here and there like a sea arrested in a ground-swell, lost in a horizon of monotonous darkness all round. Here and there rises a scrubby hillock of furze, black and rough as the head of a monster. The eye aches as it strains to discover objects or measure distances over the blurred and black expanse. Here stand two trees pretty close together—one in thick foliage, a black elm, with a funereal and plume-like stillness, and blotting out many stars with its gigantic canopy; the other, about fifty paces off, a withered and half barkless fir, with one white branch left, stretching forth like the arm of a gibbet. Nearly under this is a flat rock, with one end slanting downwards, and half buried in the ferns and the grass that grow about that spot. One other fir stands a little way off, smaller than these two trees, which in daylight are conspicuous far away as landmarks on a trackless waste. Overhead the stars are blinking, but the desolate landscape lies beneath in shapeless obscurity, like drifts of black mist melting together into one wide vague sea of darkness that forms the horizon. Over this comes, in fitful moanings, a melancholy wind. The eye stretches vainly to define the objects that fancy sometimes suggests, and the ear is strained to discriminate the sounds, real or unreal, that seem to mingle in the uncertain distance.
If you can conjure up all this, and the superstitious freaks that in such a situation imagination will play in even the hardest and coarsest natures, you have a pretty distinct idea of the feelings and surroundings of a tall man who lay that night his length under the blighted tree I have mentioned, stretchedon its roots, with his chin supported on his hands, and looking vaguely into the darkness. He had been smoking, but his pipe was out now, and he had no occupation but that of forming pictures on the dark back-ground, and listening to the moan and rush of the distant wind, and imagining sometimes a voice shouting, sometimes the drumming of a horse's hoofs approaching over the plain. There was a chill in the air that made this man now and then shiver a little, and get up and take a turn back and forward, and stamp sharply as he did so, to keep the blood stirring in his legs and feet. Then down he would lay again, with his elbows on the ground, and his hands propping his chin. Perhaps he brought his head near the ground, thinking that thus he could hear distant sounds more sharply. He was growing impatient, and well he might.
The moon now began to break through the mist in fierce red over the far horizon. A streak of crimson, that glowed without illuminating anything, showed through the distant cloud close along the level of the heath. Even this was a cheer, like a red ember or two in a pitch-dark room. Very far away he thought now he heard the tread of a horse. One can hear miles away over that level expanse of death-like silence. He pricked his ears, he raised himself on his hands, and listened with open mouth. He lost the sound, but on leaning his head again to the ground, that vast sounding-board carried its vibration once more to his ear. It was the canter of a horse upon the heath. He was doubtful whether it was approaching, for the sound subsided sometimes; but afterwards it was renewed, and gradually he became certain that it was coming nearer. And now, like a huge, red-hot dome of copper, the moon rose above the level strips of cloud that lay upon the horizon of the heath, and objects began to reveal themselves. The stunted fir, that had looked to the fancy of the solitary watcher like a ghostly policeman, with arm and truncheon raised, just starting in pursuit, now showed some lesser branches, and was more satisfactorily a tree; distances became measurable, though not yet accurately, by the eye; and ridges and hillocks caught faintly the dusky light, and threw blurred but deep shadows backward.
The tread of the horse approaching had become a gallop as the light improved, and horse and horseman were soon visible. Paul Davies stood erect, and took up a position a few steps in advance of the blighted tree at whose foot he had been stretched. The figure, seen against the dusky glare of the moon, would have answered well enough for one of those highwaymen who in old times made the heath famous. His low-crowned felt hat, his short coat with a cape to it, and the leather casings, which looked like jack-boots, gave this horseman,seen in dark outline against the glow, a character not unpicturesque. With a sudden strain of the bridle, the gaunt rider pulled up before the man who awaited him.
“What are you doing there?” said the horseman roughly.
“Counting the stars,” answered he.
Thus the signs and countersigns were exchanged, and the stranger said—
“You're alone, Paul Davies, I take it.”
“No company but ourselves, mate,” answered Davies.
“You're up to half a dozen dodges, Paul, and knows how to lime a twig; that's your little game, you know. This here tree is clean enough, but that 'ere has a hatful o' leaves on it.”
“I didn't put them there,” said Paul, a little sulkily.
“Well, no. I do suppose a sight o' you wouldn't exactly put a tree in leaf, or a rose-bush in blossom; nor even make wegitables grow. More like to blast 'em, like that rum un over your head.”
“What's up?” asked the ex-detective.
“Jest this—there's leaves enough for a bird to roost there, so this won't do. Now, then, move on you with me.”
As the gaunt rider thus spoke, his long red beard was blowing this way and that in the breeze; and he turned his horse, and walked him towards that lonely tree in which, as he lay gazing on its black outline, Paul had fancied the shape of a phantom policeman.
“I don't care a cuss,” said Davies. “I'm half sorry I came a leg to meet yer.”
“Growlin', eh?” said the horseman.
“I wish you was as cold as me, and you'd growl a bit, maybe, yourself,” said Paul. “I'm jolly cold.”
“Cold, are ye?”
“Cold as a lock-up.”
“Why didn't ye fetch a line o' the old author with you?” asked the rider—meaning brandy.
“I had a pipe or two.”
“Who'd a-guessed we was to have a night like this in summer-time?”
“I do believe it freezes all the year round in this queer place.”
“Would ye like a drop of the South-Sea mountain (gin)?” said the stranger, producing a flask from his pocket, which Paul Davies took with a great deal of good-will, much to the donor's content, for he wished to find that gentleman in good-humour in the conversation that was to follow.
“Drink what's there, mate. D'ye like it?”
“It ain't to be by no means sneezed at,” said Paul Davies.
The horseman looked back over his shoulder. Paul Daviesremarked that his shoulders were round enough to amount almost to a deformity. He and his companion were now a long way from the tree whose foliage he feared might afford cover to some eavesdropper.
“This tree will answer. I suppose you like a post to clap your back to while we are palaverin',” said the rider. “Make a finish of it, Mr. Davies,” he continued, as that person presented the half-emptied flask to his hand. “I'm as hot as steam, myself, and I'd rather have a smoke by-and-by.”
He touched the bridle here, and the horse stood still, and the rider patted his reeking neck, as he stooped with a shake of his ears and a snort, and began to sniff the scant herbage at his feet.
“I don't mind if I have another pull,” said Paul, replenishing the goblet that fitted over the bottom of the flask.
“Fill it again, and no heel-taps,” said his companion.
Mr. Davies sat down, with his mug in his hand, on the ground, and his back against the tree. Had there been a donkey near, to personate the immortal Dapple, you might have fancied, in that uncertain gloom, the Knight and Squire of La Mancha overtaken by darkness, and making one of their adventurous bivouacs under the boughs of the tree.
“What you saw in the papers three days ago did give you a twist, I take it?” observed the gentleman on horseback, with a grin that made the red bristles on his upper lip curl upwards and twist like worms.
“I can't tumble to a right guess what you means,” said Mr. Davies.
“Come, Paul, that won't never do. You read every line of that there inquest on the French cove at the Saloon, and you have by rote every word Mr. Longcluse said. It must be a queer turning of the tables, for a clever chap like you to have to look slippy, for fear other dogs should lag you.”
“'Tain't me that 'ill be looking slippy, as you and me well knows; and it's jest because you knows it well you're here. I suppose it ain't for love ofmequite?” sneered Paul Davies.
“I don't care a rush for Mr. Longcluse, no more nor I care for you; and I see he's goin' where he pleases. He made a speech in yesterday's paper, at the meetin' at the Surrey Gardens. He was canvassin' for Parliament down in Derbyshire a week ago; and he printed a letter to the electors only yesterday. He don't care two pins for you.”
“A good many rows o' pins, I'm thinkin',” sneered Mr. Davies.
“Thinkin' won't make a loaf, Mr. Davies. Many a man has bin too clever, andthoughthimself into the block-house. You're making too fine a game, Mr. Davies; a playin' a bit too muchwith edged tools, and fiddlin' a bit too freely with fire. You'll burn your fingers, and cut 'em too, do ye mind? unless you be advised, and close the game where you stand to win, as I rather think you do now.”
“So do I, mate,” said Paul Davies, who could play at brag as well as his neighbour.
“I'm on another lay, a safer one by a long sight. My maxim is the same as yours, ‘Grab all you can;’ butIdo it safe, d'ye see? You are in a fair way to end your days on the twister.”
“Not if I knows it,” said Paul Davies. “I'm afeared o' no man livin'. Who can say black's the white o' my eye? Do ye take me for a child? What do ye take me for?”
“I take you for the man that robbed and done for the French cove in the Saloon. That's the child I take ye for,” answered the horseman cynically.
“You lie! You don't! You know I han't a pig of his money, and never hurt a hair of his head. You say that to rile me, jest.”
“Why should I care a cuss whether you're riled or no? Do you think I want to get anything out o' yer? I knows everything as well as you do yourself. You take me for a queer gill, I'm thinking; that's not my lay. I wouldn't wait here while you'd walk round my hoss to have every secret you ever know'd.”
“A queer gill, mayhap. I think I know you,” said Mr. Davies, archly.
“You do, do ye? Well, come, who do you take me for?” said the stranger, turning towards him, and sitting erect in the saddle, with his hand on his thigh, to afford him the amplest view of his face and figure.
“Then I take you for Mr. Longcluse,” said Paul Davies, with a wag of his head.
“For Mr. Longcluse!” echoed the horseman, with a boisterous laugh. “Well,there'sa guess to tumble to! The worst guess I ever heer'd made. Did you ever see him? Why, there's not two bones in our two bodies the same length, and not two inches of our two faces alike. There's a guess for a detective! Be my soul, it's well for you it ain't him, for I think he'd a shot ye!”
The rider lifted his hand from his coat-pocket as he said this, but there was no weapon in it. Mistaking his intention, however, Paul Davies skipped behind the tree, and levelled a revolver at him.
“Down with that, you fool!” cried the horseman. “There's nothing here.” And he gave his horse the spur, and made him plunge to a little distance, as he held up his right hand. “But I'm not such a fool as to meet a cove like you without the leadtowels, too, in case you should try that dodge.” And dipping his hand swiftly into his pocket again, he also showed in the air the glimmering barrels of a pistol. “If you must be pullin' out your barkers every minute, and can't talk like a man, where's the good of coming all this way to palaver with a cove. It ain't not tuppence to me. Crack away if you likes it, and see who shoots best; or, if you likes it better, I don't mind if I get down and try who can hit hardest t'other way, and you'll find my fist tastes very strong of the hammer.”
“I thought you were up for mischief,” said Davies, “and I won't be polished off simple, that's all. It's best to keep as we are, and no nearer; we can hear one another well enough where we stand.”
“It's a bargain,” said the stranger, “and I don't care a cuss who you take me for. I'm not Mr. Longcluse; but you're welcome, if it pleases you, to give me his name, and I wish I could have the old bloke's tin as easy. Now here's my little game, and I don't find it a bad one. When two gentlemen—we'll say, for instance, you and Mr. Longcluse—differs in opinion (you says he did a certain thing, and he says he didn't, or goes the whole hog and saysyoudid it, and not him), it's plain, if the matter is to be settled amigable, it's best to have a man as knows what he's about, and can find out the cove as threatens the rich fellow, and deal with him handsome, according to circumstances. My terms is moderate. I takes five shillins in the pound, and not a pig under; and that puts you and I in the same boat, d'ye see? Well, I gets all I can out of him, and no harm can happen me, for I'm but a cove a-carryin' of messages betwixt you, and the more I gets for you the better for me. I settled many a business amigable the last five years that would never have bin settled without me. I'm well knowing to some of the swellest lawyers in town, and whenever they has a dilikite case, like a gentleman threatened with informations or the like, they sends for me, and I arranges it amigable, to the satisfacshing of both parties. It's the only way to settle sich affairs with good profit and no risk. I have spoke to Mr. Longcluse. He was all for having your four bones in the block-house, and yourself on the twister; and he's not a cove to be bilked out of his tin. But he would not like the bother of your cross-charge, either, and I think I could make all square between ye. What do you say?”
“How can I tell that you ever set eyes on Mr. Longcluse?” said Davies, more satisfied as the conference proceeded that he had misdirected his first guess at the identity of the horseman. “How can I tell you're not just a-gettin' all you can out o' me, to make what you can of it on your own account in that market?”
“That's true, you can't tell, mate.”
“And what do I know about you? What's your name?” pursued Paul Davies.
“I forgot my name, I left it at home in the cupboard; and you know nothing about me, that's true, excepting what I told you, and you'll hear no more.”
“I'm too old a bird for that; you're a born genius, only spoilt in the baking. I'm thinking, mate, I may as well paddle my own canoe, and sell my own secret on my own account. What can you do for me that I can't do as well for myself?”
“You don't think that, Paul. You dare not show to Mr. Longcluse, and you know he's in a wax; and who can you send to him? You'll make nothing o' that brag. Where's the good of talking like a blast to a chap like me? Don't you suppose I take all that at its vally? I tell you what, if it ain't settled now, you'll see me no more, for I'll not undertake it.” He pulled up his horse's head, preparatory to starting.
“Well, what's up now?—what's the hurry?” demanded Mr. Davies.
“Why, if this here meetin' won't lead to business, the sooner we two parts and gets home again, the less time wasted,” answered the cavalier, with his hand on the crupper of the saddle, as he turned to speak.
Each seemed to wait for the other to add something.
“Ifyou let me go this time, Mr. Wheeler, you'll not catch me a-walking out here again,” said Mr. Davies sourly. “If there's business to be done, now's the time.”
“Well, I can't make it no plainer—'tis as clear as mud in a wine-glass,” said the mounted man gaily, and again he shook the bridle and hitched himself in the saddle, and the horse stirred uneasily, as he added, “Have you any more to say?”
“Well, supposin' I say ay, how soon will it be settled?” said Paul Davies, beginning to think better of it.
“These things doesn't take long with a rich cove like Mr. Longcluse. It's where they has to scrape it up, by beggin' here and borrowin' there, and sellin' this and spoutin' that—there's a wait always. But a chap with no end o' tin—that has only to wish and have—that's your sort. He swears a bit, and threatens, and stamps, and loses his temper summat, ye see; and if I was the prencipal, like you are in this 'ere case, and the police convenient, or a poker in his fist, he might make a row. But seein' I'm only a messenger like, it don't come to nothin'. He claps his hand in his pocket, and outs with the rino, and there's all; and jest a bit of paper to sign. But I won't stay here no longer. I'm getting a bit cold myself; so it's on or offnow. Go yourself to Longcluse, if you like, and see if you don't catch it. The least you get will be seven-penn'orth, for extortin' money by threatenin' a prosecution, if he don't hang you for the murder of the Saloon cove. How would you like that?”
“It ain't the physic that suits my complaint, guvnor. But I have him there. I have the statement wrote, in sure hands, and other hevidence, as he may suppose, and dated, and signed byrespectablepeople; and I know his dodge. He thinks he cameout first with his charge against me, but he's out there; and if hewillhave it, and I split, he'd best look slippy.”
“And how much do you want? Mind, I'll funk him all I can, though he's a wideawake chap; for it's my game to get every pig I can out of him.”
“I'll take two thousand pounds, and go to Canada or to New York, my passage and expenses being paid, and sign anything in reason he wants; and that's the shortest chalk I'll offer.”
“Don't you wish you may get it?Ido, I know, but I'm thinking you might jest as well look for the naytional debt.”
“What's your name?” again asked Davies, a little abruptly.
“My name fell out o' window and was broke, last Tuesday mornin'. But call me Tom Wheeler, if you can't talk without calling me something.”
“Well, Tom, that's the figure,” said Davies.
“If you want to deal, speak now,” said Wheeler. “If I'm to stand between you, I must have a power to close on the best offer I'm like to get. I won't do nothing in the matter else-ways.”
With this fresh exhortation, the conference on details proceeded; and when at last it closed, with something like a definite understanding, Tom Wheeler said,—“Mind, Paul Davies, I comes from no one, and I goes to no one; and I never seed you in all my days.”
“And where are you going?”
“A bit nearer the moon,” said the mysterious Mr. Wheeler, lifting his hand and pointing towards the red disk, with one of his bearded grins. And wheeling his horse suddenly, away he rode at a canter, right toward the red moon, against which for a few moments the figure of the retreating horse and man showed black and sharp, as if cut out of cardboard.
Paul Davies looked after him with his left eye screwed close, as was his custom, in shrewd rumination. Before the horseman had got very far, the moon passed under the edge of a thick cloud, and the waste was once more enveloped in total darkness. In this absolute obscurity the retreating figure was instantaneously swallowed, so that the shrewd ex-detective, who had learned by rote every article of his dress, and every button on it, and could have sworn to every mark on his horse at York Fair, had no chance of discovering in the ultimate line of his retreat, any clue to his destination. He had simply emerged from darkness, and darkness had swallowed him again.
We must now see how Sir Reginald's little dinner-party, not a score of miles away, went off only two days later. He was fortunate, seeing he had bidden his guests upon very short notice, not one disappointed.
I daresay that Lady May—whose toilet, considering how quiet everything was, had been made elaborately—missed a face that would have brightened all the rooms for her. But the interview between Richard Arden and his father had not, as we know, ended in reconciliation, and Lady May's hopes were disappointed, and her toilet labour in vain.
When Lady May entered the room with Alice, she saw standing on the hearth-rug, at the far end of the handsome room, a tall and very good-looking man of sixty or upwards, chatting with Sir Reginald, one of whose feet was in a slipper, and who was sitting in an easy-chair. A little bit of fire burned in the grate, for the day had been chill and showery. This tall man, with white silken hair, and a countenance kind, frank, and thoughtful, with a little sadness in it, was, she had no doubt, David Arden, whom she had last seen with silken brown locks, and the cheerful aspect of early manhood.
Sir Reginald stood up, with an uncomfortable effort, and, smiling, pointed to his slippers in excuse for his limping gait, as he shuffled forth across the carpet to meet her, with a good-humoured shrug.
“Wasn't it good of her to come?” said Alice.
“She's better than good,” said Sir Reginald, with his thin, yellow smile, extending his hand, and leading her to a chair; “it is visiting the sick and the halt, and doing real good, for it is a pleasure to see her—a pleasure bestowed on a miserable soul who has very few pleasures left;” and with his other thin hand he patted gently the fingers of her fat hand. “Here is my brother David,” continued the baronet. “He says you will hardly know him.”
“She'll hardly believe it. She was very young when she last saw me, and the last ten years have made some changes,” said Uncle David, laughing gently.
At the baronet's allusion to that most difficult subject, the lapse of time, Lady May winced and simpered uneasily; but she expanded gratefully as David Arden disposed of it so adroitly.
“We'll not speak of years of change. I knew you instantly,” said Lady May happily. “And you have been to Vichy, Reginald. What stay do you make here?”
“None, almost; my crippled foot keeps me always on a journey. It seems a paradox, but so it is. I'm ordered to visit Buxton for a week or so, and then I go, for change of air, to Yorkshire.”
As Alice entered, she saw the pretty face, the original of the brilliant portrait which had haunted her on her night journey to Twyford, and she heard a very silvery voice chatting gaily. Mr. Longcluse was leaning on the end of the sofa on which GraceMaubray sat; and Vivian Darnley, it seemed in high spirits, was standing and laughing nearly before her. Alice Arden walked quickly over to welcome her handsome guest. With a misgiving and a strange pain at her heart, she saw how much more beautiful this young lady had grown. Smiling radiantly, with her hand extended, she greeted and kissed her fair kinswoman; and, after a few words, sat down for a little beside her; and asked Mr. Longcluse how he did; and finally spoke to Vivian Darnley, and then returned to her conventional dialogue of welcome and politeness with her cousin—howcousin, she could not easily have explained.
The young ladies seemed so completely taken up with one another that, after a little waiting, the gentlemen fell into a desultory talk, and grew gradually nearer to the window. They were talking now of dogs and horses, and Mr. Longcluse was stealing rapidly into the good graces of the young man.
“When we come up after dinner, you must tell me who these people are,” said Grace Maubray, who did not care very much what she said. “That young man is a Mr. Vivian, ain't he?”
“No—Darnley,” whispered Alice; “Vivian is his Christian name.”
“Very romantic names; and, if he really means half he says, he is a very romantic person.” She laughed.
“What has he been saying?” Alice wondered. But, after all, it was possible to be romantic on almost any subject.
“And the other?”
“He's a Mr. Longcluse,” answered Alice.
“He's rather clever,” said the young lady, with a grave decision that amused Alice.
“Do you think so? Well, so do I; that is, I know he can interest one. He has been almost everywhere, and he tells things rather pleasantly.”
Before they could go any further, Vivian Darnley, turning from the window toward the two young ladies, said—“I've just been saying that we must try to persuade Lady May to get up that party to theDerby.”
“I can place a drag at her disposal,” said Mr. Longcluse.
“And a splendid team—I saw them,” threw in Darnley.
“There's nothing I should like so much,” said Alice. “I've never been to the Derby. What do you say, Grace? Can you manage Uncle David?”
“I'll try,” said the young lady gaily.
“We must all set upon Lady May,” said Alice. “She is so good-natured, she can't resist us.”
“Suppose we begin now?” suggested Darnley.
“Hadn't we better wait till we have her quite to ourselves? Who knows what your papa and your uncle might say?” saidGrace Maubray, turning to Alice. “I vote for saying nothing to them until Lady May has settled, and then they must only submit.”
“I agree with you quite,” said Alice laughing.
“Sage advice!” said Mr. Longcluse, with a smile; “and there's time enough to choose a favourable moment. It comes off exactly ten days from this.”
“Oh, anything might be done in ten days,” said Grace. “I'm sorry it is so far away.”
“Yes, a great deal might be done in ten days; and a great deal might happen in ten days,” said Longcluse, listlessly looking down at the floor—“a great deal might happen.”
He thought he saw Miss Arden's eye turned upon him, curiously and quickly, as he uttered this common-place speech, which was yet a little odd.
“In this busy world, Miss Arden, there is no such thing as quiet, and no one acts without imposing on other people the necessity for action,” said Mr. Longcluse; “and I believe that often the greatest changes in life are the least anticipated by those who seem to bring them about spontaneously.”
At this moment, dinner being announced, the little party transferred itself to the dining-room, and Miss Arden found herself between Mr. Longcluse and Uncle David.
Andnow, all being seated, began the talk and business of dinner.
“I believe,” said Mr. Longcluse, with alaugh,“I am growing metaphysical.”
“Well, shall I confess, Mr. Longcluse, you do sometimes say things that are, I fear, a little too wise for my poor comprehension?”
“I don't express them; it is my fault,” he answered, in a very low tone. “You havemind, Miss Arden, for anything. There is no one it is so delightful to converse with, owing in part to that very faculty—I mean quick apprehension. But I know my own defects. I know how imperfectly I often express myself. By-the-way, you seemed to wish to have that curious little wild Bohemian air I sang the other night, ‘The Wanderer's Bride’—the song about the white lily, you know. I ventured to get a friend, who really is a very good musician, to make a setting of it, which I so very much hope you will like. I brought it with me. You will think me very presumptuous, but I hoped so much you might be tempted to try it.”
When Mr. Longcluse spoke to Alice, it was always in a tone so very deferential, that it was next to impossible that a very young girl should not be flattered by it—considering, especially, that the man was reputed clever, had seen the world, and had met with a certain success, and that by no means of a kind often obtained, or ever quite despised. There was also a directness in his eulogy which was unusual, and which spoken with a different manner would have been embarrassing, if not offensive. But in Mr. Longcluse's manner, when he spoke such phrases, there appeared a real humility, and even sadness, that the boldnessof the sentiment was lost in the sincerity and dejection of the speaker, which seemed to place him on a sudden at the immeasurable distance of a melancholy worship.
“I am so much obliged!” said Alice. “I did wish so much to have it when you sang it. It may not do for my voice at all, but I longed to try it. When a song is sung so as to move one, it is sure to be looked out and learned, without any thought wasted on voice, or skill, or natural fitness. It is, I suppose, like the vanity that makes one person dress after another. Still, I do wish to sing that song, and I am so much obliged!”
From the other side her uncle said very softly—“What do you think of my ward, Grace Maubray?”
“Oughtn't I to ask, rather, what you think of her?” she laughed archly.
“Oh! I see,” he answered, with a pleasant and honest smile; “you have the gift of seeing as far as other clever people into a millstone. But, no—though perhaps I ought to thank you for giving me credit for so much romance and good taste—I don't think I shall ever introduce you to an aunt. You must guess again, if you will have a matrimonial explanation; though I don't say there is any such design. And perhaps, if there were, the best way to promote it would be to leave the intended hero and heroine very much to themselves. They are both very good-looking.”
“Who?” asked Alice, although she knew very well whom he meant.
“I mean that pretty creature over there, Grace Maubray, and Vivian Darnley,” said he quietly.
She smiled, looking very much pleased and very arch.
With how Spartan a completeness women can hide the shootings and quiverings of mental pain, and of bodily pain too, when the motive is sufficient! Under this latter they are often clamorous, to be sure; but the demonstration expresses not want of patience, but the feminine yearning for compassion.
“I fancy nothing would please the young rogue Vivian better. I wish I were half so sure of her. You girls are so unaccountable, so fanciful, and—don't be angry—so uncertain.”
“Well, I suppose, as you say, we must only have patience, and leave the matter in the hands of Time, who settles most things pretty well.”
She raised her eyes, and fancied she saw Grace Maubray at the same moment withdraw hers from her face. Lady May was talking from the end of the table with Mr. Longcluse.
“Your neighbour who is talking to Lady May is a Mr. Longcluse?”
“Yes.”
“He is a City notability; but oddly, I never happened to seehim till this evening. Do you think there is something curious in his appearance?”
“Yes, a little, perhaps. Don'tyou?”
“So odd that he makes my blood run cold,” said Uncle David, with a shrug and a little laugh. “Seriously, I mean unpleasantly odd. What is Lady May talking about? Yes—I thought so—that horrid murder at the ‘Saloon Tavern.’ For so good-natured a person, she has the most bloodthirsty tastes I know of; she's always deep in some horror.”
“My brother Dick told me that Mr. Longcluse made a speech there.”
“Yes, so I heard; and I think he said what is true enough. London is growing more and more insecure; and that certainly was a most audacious murder. People make money a little faster, that is true; but what is the good of money, if their lives are not their own? It is quite true that there are streets in London, which I remember as safe as this room, through which no one suspected of having five pounds in his pocket could now walk without a likelihood of being garotted.”
“How dreadful!” said Alice, and Uncle David laughed a little at her horror.
“It is too true, my dear. But, to pass to pleasanter subjects, when do you mean to choose among the young fellows, and present me to a new nephew?” said Uncle David.
“Do you fancy I would tell anyone if I knew?” she answered, laughing. “How is it that you men, who are always accusing us weak women of thinking of nothing else, can never get the subject of matrimony out of your heads? Now, uncle, as you and I may talk confidentially, and at our ease, I'll tell you two things. I like my present spinster life very well—I should like it better, I think, if it were in the country; but town or country, I don't think I should ever like a married life. I don't think I'm fit for command.”
“Command! I thought the prayer-book said something about obeying, on the contrary,” said Uncle David.
“You know what I mean. I'm not fit to rule a household; and I am afraid I am a little idle, and I should not like to have it to do—and so I could never do it well.”
“Nevertheless, when the right man comes, he need but beckon with his finger, and away you go, Miss Alice, and undertake it all.”
“So we are whistled away, like poodles for a walk, and that kind of thing! Well, I suppose, uncle, you are right, though I can't see that I'm quite so docile a creature. But if my poor sex is so willing to be won, I don't know how you are to excuse your solitary state, considering how very little trouble it would have taken to make some poor creature happy.”
“A very fair retort!” laughed Uncle David. And he added, in a changed tone, for a sudden recollection of his own early fortunes crossed him—“But even when the right man does come, it does not always follow, Miss Alice, that he dares make the sign; fate often interposes years, and in them death may come, and so the whole card-castle falls.”
“I've had a long talk,” he resumed, “with Richard; he has made me promises, and I hope he will be a better boy for the future. He has been getting himself into money troubles, and acquiring—I'm afraid I should say cultivating—a taste for play. I know you have heard something of this before; I told you myself. But he has made me promises, and I hope, for your sake, he'll keep them; because, you know, I and your father can't last for ever, and he ought to take care of you; and how can he do that, if he's not fit to take care of himself? But I believe there is no use in thinking too much about what is to come. One has enough to do in the present. I think poor Lady May has been disappointed,” he said, with a very cautious smile, his eye having glanced for a moment on her; “she looks a little forlorn, I think.”
“Does she? And why?”
“Well, they say she would not object to be a little more nearly related to you than she is.”
“You can't mean papa—oryourself!”
“Oh, dear, no!” he answered, laughing. “I mean that she misses Dick a good deal.”
“Oh, dear! uncle, you can't be serious!”
“It might be a very serious affair for her; but I don't know that he could do a wiser thing. The old quarrel is still raging, he tells me, and that he can't appear in this house.”
“It is a great pity,” said she.
“Pity! Not at all. They never could agree; and it is much better for Dick they should not—on the terms Reginald proposes, at least. I see Lady May trying to induce you to make her the sign at which ladies rise, and leave us poor fellows to shift for ourselves.”
“Ungallant old man! I really believe she is.”
And in a moment more the ladies were floating from the room, Vivian Darnley standing at the door. Somehow he could not catch Alice's eye as they passed; she was smiling an answer to some gabble of Lady May's. Grace gave him a very kind look with her fine eyes as she went by; and so the young man, who had followed them up the massive stairs with his gaze, closed the door and sat down again, before his claret glass, and his little broken cluster of grapes, and half-dozen distracted bits of candied fruit, and sighed deeply.
“That murder in the City that you were speaking of just nowto Lady May is a serious business for men who walk the streets, as I do sometimes, with money in their pockets,” said David Arden, addressing Mr. Longcluse.
“So it struck me—one feels that instinctively. When I saw that poor little good-natured fellow dead, and thought how easily I might have walked in there myself, with the assassin behind me, it seemed to me simply the turn of a die that the lot had not fallen upon me,” said Longcluse.
“He was robbed, too, wasn't he?” croaked Sir Reginald, who was growing tired; and with his fatigue came evidences of his temper.
“Oh, yes,” said David; “nothing left in his pockets.”
“And Laroque, a watchmaker, a relation of his, said he had cheques about him, and foreign money,” said Longcluse; “but, of course, the cheques were not presented, and foreign money is not easily traced in a big town like London. I made him a present of ten pounds to stake on the game; I could not learn that he did stake it, and I suppose the poor fellow intended applying it in some more prudent way. But my present was in gold, and that, of course, the robber applied without apprehension.”
“Now, you fellows who have a stake in the City, it is a scandal your permitting such a state of things to continue,” said Sir Reginald; “because, though your philanthropy may not be very diffuse, each of you cares most tenderly for one individual at least in the human race—I meanself—and whatever you may think of personal morality, and even life—for you don't seem to me to think a great deal of grinding operatives in the cranks of your mills, or blowing them up by bursting steam-boilers, to say nothing of all the people you poison with adulterated food, or with strychnine in beer, or with arsenic in candles, or pretty green papers for bed-rooms—or smash or burn alive on railways—yet you should, on selfish grounds, set your faces against a system of assassination for pocket-books and purses, the sort of things precisely you have always about you. Don't you see? And it's inconsistent besides, because, as I said, although you care little for life—other people's, I mean—in the abstract, yet you care a great deal for property. I think it's your idol, by Jove! and worshipping money—positivelyworshippingit, as you do, it seems a scandalous inconsistency that you should—of course, I don't mean you two individually,” he said, perhaps recollecting that he might be going a little too fast; “you never, of course, fanciedthat. I mean, of course, the class of men we have all heard of, or seen—but I do say, with that sort of adoration for money and property, I can't understand their allowing their pockets to be profaned and their purses made away with.”
Sir Reginald, having thus delivered himself with considerable asperity, poured some claret into his glass, and pushed the jugs on to his brother, and then, closing his eyes, composed himself either to listen or to sleep.
“City or country, East End or West End, I fancy we are all equally anxious to keep other people's hands out of our pockets,” said David Arden; “and I quite agree with Mr. Longcluse in all he is reported to have said with respect to our police system.”
“But is it so certain that the man was robbed?” said Vivian Darnley.
“Everything he had about him was taken,” said Mr. Longcluse.
“But they pretend to rob men sometimes, when they murder them, only to conceal the real motive,” persisted Vivian Darnley.
“Yes, that's quite true; but then there must besomemotive,” said Mr. Longcluse, with something a little supercilious in his smile: “and it isn't easy to conceive a motive for murdering a poor little good-natured letter of lodgings, a person past the time of life when jealousy could have anything to do with it, and a most inoffensive and civil creature. I confess, if I were obliged to seek a motive other than the obvious one, for the crime, I should be utterly puzzled.”
“When I was travelling in Prussia,” said Vivian Darnley, “I saw two people in different prisons—one a woman, the other a middle-aged man—both for murder. They had been found guilty, and had been kept there only to get a confession from them before execution. They won't put culprits to death there, you know, unless they have first admitted their guilt; and one of these had actually confessed. Well, each had borne an unexceptionable character up to the time when suspicion was accidentally aroused, and then it turned out that they had been poisoning and otherwise making away with people, at the rate of two or three a year, for half their lives. Now, don't you see, these masked assassins, having, as it appeared, absolutely no intelligible motive, either of passion or of interest, to commit these murders, could have had no inducement, as the woman had actually confessed, except a sort of lust of murder. I suppose it is a sort of madness, but these people were not otherwise mad; and it is quite possible that the same sort of thing may be going on in other places. People say that the police would have got a clue to the mystery by means of the foreign coin and the bank-notes, if they had not been destroyed.”
“But there are traces of organisation,” said Mr. Longcluse. “In a crowded place like that, such things could hardly be managed without it, and insanity such as you describe is very rare; and you'll hardly get people to believe in a swell-mob ofmadmen, committing murder in concert simply for the pleasure of homicide. They will all lean to a belief in the coarse but intelligible motive of the highwayman.”
“I saw in the newspapers,” said David Arden, “some evidence of yours, Mr. Longcluse, which seemed rather to indicate a particular man as the murderer.”
“I have my eye upon him,” said Longcluse. “There are suspicious circumstances. The case in a little time may begin to clear; at present the police are only groping.”
“That's satisfactory; and those fellows are paid so handsomely for groping,” said Sir Reginald, opening his eyes suddenly. “I believe that we are the worst-governed and the worst-managed people on earth, and that our merchants and tradespeople are rich simply by flukes—simply by a concurrence of lucky circumstances, with which they have no more to do than Prester John or the Man in the Moon. Take a little claret, Mr. Longcluse, and send it on.”
“No more, thanks.”
And all the guests being of the same mind, they marched up the broad stairs to the ladies.