Manwanted immediately to assist in practical refutation of calumny. Apply Judex: Raxe’s Private Hotel, Aldwych.
Manwanted immediately to assist in practical refutation of calumny. Apply Judex: Raxe’s Private Hotel, Aldwych.
The above advertisement met Gilead’s eyes a day or two after his adventure with the beautiful lepidopterist. He fastened upon it at once.
“I shall follow this up,” he said to the secretary. “What can a ‘practical refutation’ mean?”
Nestle shook his head, with a smile.
“I really can’t guess, sir,” he said. “Unless it refers to theargumentum baculinum.”
Gilead mused a little.
“It says ‘immediately’,” he reflected. “I must go at once, then, or I shall be forestalled.”
He rose, and looked about him.
“Miss Halifax enters to-day, you understand,” he said, “upon her duties as my personal typewriter and amanuensis. You will see that she is made comfortable here in my absence.”
Perhaps the ghost of a smile twitched the soft-speaking secretary’s mouth, as he answered that his chief’s commands should be scrupulously obeyed.
Gilead took a cab to Raxe’s Hotel, and enquired at once for “Judex.” He seemed conscious of a twinkle in the right eye of the hall-porter who took his name, and of that of the boy who went off with it, as if some telegraphic levity had passed between them. But in a little the boy came back, with a perfectly sober face, and informed him that Mr Judex would see him. He was shown upstairs into a private sitting-room, where by a table sat a little old man, shrewd and withered, but of a very spruce appearance. His eyes were piercing black, his lips kept a perpetual chewing motion, like a crab’s, a few threads of white hair clung to the barren slopes of his scalp. But he was very neatly dressed in grey twill frock-coat and trousers, with a shepherd’s plaid bow at his neck.
A LITTLE OLD MAN...“A LITTLE OLD MAN, SHREWD AND WITHERED.”
“A LITTLE OLD MAN, SHREWD AND WITHERED.”
“Mr Judex?” said Gilead.
“My name, sir,” said the stranger. “You thought it a pseudonym, no doubt. Now, usher!”
The exclamation was addressed to the boy, who vanished.
“I called in answer to your advertisement,” said Gilead, not unprepared for surprises.
“Be seated,” said the stranger. The bright eyes bent upon him. “You are young, and a gentleman, I take note, Mr Balm,” he said. “A hard-up one—eh?”
“No, not hard-up.”
“What then?”
“A seeker after the truth,” said Gilead. “I pursue it day by day through the columns of theDaily Post. Money is no object to me.”
The little old man bent forward, and eagerly scanned his visitor.
“If that is so,” he said, “fortune could not have sent me a better coadjutor. You are dispassionate, disinterested, whole-hearted?”
“Entirely,” said Gilead.
The old man rubbed his palms gleefully together.
“It is a providence,” he said. “It is to demonstrate a truth, a momentous truth, that I advertised for an agent.”
“May I ask,” said Gilead, “what truth.”
“Hush-sh-sh!” said Mr Judex, putting a finger to his lips with exaggerated gravity. “It lies to prove in the wine-cellar of number forty-one, Belgrave Crescent—a very deep and dark cellar.”
Gilead’s eyes opened a little; but he sat calm and collected. He thought he perceived that he had to do here with an eccentric, not to say a daft old gentleman. But, if the quest was to bear fruit, he must betray nothing of his feelings. The other stretched out, and put a soft impressive hand upon his arm.
“Have you a clean conscience?” he said.
“I believe I may claim one,” answered the young man, smiling.
“No sense of guilt anywhere within?”
“Nothing to trouble me.”
“Exactly. You are not afraid of being alone with your thoughts?”
“O! no.”
“Even in the dark?”
“Even in the dark.”
“If you were conscience-stricken, on the other hand, you might dread your own company unspeakably?”
“It is very likely, I think.”
“Especially in the dark?”
“I daresay.”
“So much so as to be urged to any means to escape it, perhaps?”
“Indeed,” said Gilead, “I could not answer for myself under the circumstances.”
Mr Judex threw himself back in his chair with galvanic quickness and a beaming face.
“Nothing could be happier,” he said delightedly. “It lies in your power to exonerate me from a very gross and cruel accusation.”
“So far as my conscious probity is concerned,” said Gilead, “I am at your service.”
The old man bent forward again, and patted him three times on the knee.
“Meet me,” he said, “at nine o’clock—this evening—outside number forty-one—Belgrave Crescent.”
For one moment Gilead hesitated. The oddity of the request, the lateness of the hour named, the suggestion of something sinister and uncanny connected with that abysmal crypt so darkly alluded to, impressed him with a sense of some unseemliness in prospect which it would be wiser in him to leave unexplored. What could possibly bear upon the refutation of a calumny in those obscure depths? An aspersed bin (he reflected, with concern, that he had no palate for “bouquets”)? A deceased butler? An immured traducer, like him in the terrific Mr Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado!”? Nothing, he hoped, to do with buried corpses or concealed “swag.” But in the end the spirit of the Romantic Quest decided him.
“I will be punctual to the appointment,” he said, and rose from his chair.
He returned to the Bureau to find Miss Halifax already installed in his private office. She struck him as looking a supremely attractive amanuensis, and he congratulated himself on the good fortune which had attended his first personal venture. If she should prove as sympathetic to his aims as she was grateful to his vision, he would come to hold, he told himself, having the perfect feminine on one side of him and the perfect male on the other, the most admirable balance between reason and emotion. In fact he informed her so, quite frankly and quietly, and she blushed as she made a very pretty and modest acknowledgment of his kindness, and of her determination to win his good opinion.
“Mr Winsom Wyllie is first down among my mental notes,” he told her. “I shall not forget him.”
He went, indeed, that very afternoon to Somerset House in order to ascertain if the Will had as yet been proved, but was unsuccessful in his search. “Never mind,” he thought. “Such a rapacious scoundrel will not be long in realizing his ill-gotten gains, and in a very short time, I fancy, we shall be possessed of a clue.”
He was as little inclined to effusive confidences as to senseless reticence; but for some reason he told Miss Halifax about his forthcoming venture. To his surprise she received his story with some signs of emotion.
“I don’t think it sounds nice,” she said. “I wish you would let one of the others go instead.”
He looked at her kindly.
“What do you doubt?” he answered; “my proficiency, or my discretion, or my savoir-faire?”
“None of these,” she said—“or your courage or generosity. Forgive me and my presumption in offering advice so soon.”
“I should have thought,” said he, smiling, “that the success of my first essay would have inclined you to a greater confidence in my judgment.”
She seemed to hang her head a little, biting her full lower lip.
“I have no right whatever to speak,” she murmured. “Only please, please be on your guard.”
“Trust me,” he said. “But timidity, you must remember, Miss Halifax, never won to a vision of the Grail.”
She raised her head, and looked at him a moment with shining eyes; then returned to her work.
The evening closed in dark and sinister, bringing with it black rushes of wind and sudden avalanches of rain. Gilead despatched a simple but recherché dinner at a choice restaurant, and, at twenty minutes to nine, betook himself on foot to the rendezvous. It was part of his principle to avoid every show of ostentation in his adventures. He wished to decide them on their own exclusive merits, and any confession of his resources would have tended to confuse the issues. Exactly at the hour appointed, he stood, battling with his umbrella, outside number forty-one Belgrave Crescent.
The street, in this stately district, was almost entirely deserted at this mid-prandial hour. The dark garden which contained one side of it stood not more lifeless in suggestion than the black house-fronts opposite. Here and there a gas-lamp winked in the driven tumult; here and there a thread of light under a blind gleamed like a gold stitch in the curtain of night. Far up a solitary motor-car throbbed against the kerb; the thunder of remote traffic spoke like a distant surge; other token of human contiguity there was none.
In such a universal eclipse of things there was little to differentiate one respectable building from another; wherefore the watcher was unable to draw any exclusively portentous suggestion from the gloom and silence of the house he faced. It appeared like any other of its neighbours in the essentials of brown brick and closed shutters, and the rain that plashed off its sills into the deep area was burdened with no exceptional sound of omen or melancholy. The brass knocker was hospitably bright, the antique extinguishers on the rail-posts of the steps were even suggestive of home, and an asylum gained at last from obscure wanderings in the streets. Gilead moved closer to examine one of them.
“Faithful Achates!” said a small voice at his elbow. He started and turned about.
He had come up and upon him without a sound, a little weird blown figure, hopping under an umbrella like some odd-winged night-fowl. His eyes gleamed like drops of ink; he pinched Gilead’s arm in a shrewd ecstasy, while that young man, momentarily paralysed, stood speechless. In truth the apparition had taken him from an unexpected quarter; he had looked to Mr Judex, for some reason, to emerge from the house itself.
As they dwelt thus an instant, a clap of wind took the little figure, and seemed to blow it clean up the steps.
“Quick!” he whispered from that eyrie, closing his umbrella. “I am pressed for time in all things these days—quick!”
A little reluctantly Gilead joined him.
“Pressed for time,” repeated the other, bending and fumbling; “and my movements must be swift and secret. This is excellently fine of you. Your reward shall consist in the vindication of a calumniated soul. Quick! We will make straight for the cellar.”
He was busy with a labelled latchkey as he spoke, fitting it into the lock.
“Procured from the house agents,” he murmured. “My own key and my own house; but they weren’t to know that.”
The door fell open with the word, revealing a cavern of chill blackness. Involuntarily Gilead shrunk a little. The other noticed and protested.
“There is nothing to apprehend—neither goblins nor conspirators,” he said. “You were quite confident as to the dark, you know.”
With a blush of shame, Gilead entered; and instantly the little man shut the door softly upon them both, and producing an electric lamp from his breast-pocket, switched on a spark, whose tiny brilliancy hung in the gloom like a fen-candle, obscurely peopling its thickness. But it was enough to reveal a desert of bare walls, carpetless floors and lightless ceilings. Gilead, after one look around, addressed his companion firmly:—
“This is your house, you say?”
“Unquestionably.”
“It is empty—unoccupied.”
“But it is my house, all the same.”
The young man considered. A deserted building, a conceivably demented owner, and the rest of the circumstances! What was he to conclude? He seemed to be on the verge of some disturbing discovery. But it was his duty, to himself and his Bureau, to proceed. Certain diffident tremors in him had of late weakened of their force. He had enjoyed his incredible possessions long enough to evolve that sixth sense of omnipotence which is peculiar to plutocracy. All risks appeared easily negotiable to him, endowed with that Fortunatus’s purse. Luckily for the world, as it happened, the chances that tempted him were all on the side of chivalry and justice.
“Will you come?” said Mr Judex.
He went before, treading softly, and holding his lamp high overhead. Gilead followed as quietly, through the empty hall, to the head of the basement stairs, and down them into a vortex of reeling night. Domestic catacombs, rows of cobwebby bells, disconnected gas-meters, a remote gurgle of drain-water, horrible, secret, suggestive of blood-choked lungs labouring somewhere in the darkness, a clammy smell of distempered walls and icy flags—all these things, glimpsed or divined in passing, were spectrally impressed upon his consciousness as he pursued the tiny jack-o’-lantern dancing before him into foundering glooms. And then suddenly, turning off into a deep alcove, they had brought up before a door, strong and solid, standing slightly ajar, with a great key in its lock. “The wine-cellar!” whispered his guide; and he gingerly swung open the door, and backed to the wall.
“I await your solution of the problem, sir,” he said. “Will you oblige me by pronouncing upon it?” With a curious tingling in his nerves, Gilead entered.
“At the other end, if you will favour me,” said Mr Judex.
Thrilling in the prospect of some unconscionable discovery, Gilead advanced an uncertain step or two. On the instant the light went out, and a heavy slam and snap at his back told him that the door had been shut and locked upon him.
He stood for some moments absolutely still and incredulous; then turned in a labouring way, and saw the intense darkness split low down with a faintest edge of light. He stumbled towards it, and found the door.
“Mr Judex!” he cried—“Mr Judex!”
A tiny chuckling laugh reached him from without.
“How can I resolve the problem without light?” he pleaded, conscious of a sudden moisture breaking out over his face and chest.
Again the small laugh came to him, followed by a voice.
“Darkness is the very essence of the problem, Mr Balm. I wish you to remain there, entirely by yourself, until the morning, when I will return to release you.”
“Mr Judex, why? In God’s name, why, Mr Judex?”
He dwelt in anguish on the answer.
“Shall I tell you?” said the voice, apparently after consideration. “I wish you no harm—I wish you no harm whatever, Mr Balm. On the contrary, in your mastery of fate lies my hope. Did you ever hear of Mr Justice Starkey?”
“Yes.”
“I am he, Mr Balm, and this is my house. You will pardon, I am sure, the deception, excusable and necessary under the circumstances. I desired to demonstrate to the world the wickedness of its conclusions in holding me primarily responsible for the man Maudsley’s suicide. Confinement in the dark cell would, I am convinced, never drive a guiltless conscience to self-destruction. It remains with you, if you have not lied to me, to substantiate that truth.”
Somewhere in his racing thoughts, Gilead found and caught at a memory. It was of a notorious recent case in which a prisoner, sentenced to a term of penal servitude, and too late proved innocent, had strangled himself in the dark cell to which he had been committed for insubordination. There had been considerable press comment on the matter, when aired, and Mr Justice Starkey, who had summed up flagrantly against the accused, in despite of a strong presumption in his favour, had met with some caustic criticism, with the result that he had shortly after retired from the bench and withdrawn into seclusion.
“Into the seclusion of a madhouse,” thought Gilead, appalled; “and he has either escaped or been discharged from it.” Such, indeed, appeared the fair presumption. He leaned against the solid door, gasping for speech.
“I daresay the man,” he began, and stopped. He had been going to say, “was guilty after all;” but, even in that crisis, he would not commit his soul to a conscious untruth.
“Yes?” enquired the voice.
“Was unsophisticated, unselfpossessed in the sense of educated reason,” he finished.
“I admit that the cases are not parallel,” answered the voice. “The advantage is certainly on your side in that respect.”
“I would submit,” said Gilead, “that the test, to be adequate, should be applied to a like unintelligence.”
“I am dogged and spied upon,” said the voice. “The time is too short, and the risk of delay too instant. A bird in the hand—eh? And you make it your interest to pursue the truth. I am sure you will surmount the ordeal triumphantly. Good-night! I shall be here again in the morning.”
The thread of light went out. Gilead threw himself against the door, yelling and battering; but its jambs were solidly sunk in the brick-work, and he barked his knuckles in vain. Pausing in the midst of his frenzy, he heard a far distant boom as of the hall door shutting, and knew that he was left alone, immured deep down in the deserted house.
On the instant he recollected himself, and, with a violent wrench of will, brought all his reason to bear on the situation.
To be buried for a few hours in a dark crypt! What was there in that to appal an educated mind? He tried to laugh; but stopped aghast to hear his own voice in that tremendous silence. It seemed to evoke somewhere a wicked response. That was nonsense, of course. There was nothing inherently sinister in his position or his surroundings. He was merely shut into the commonplace wine-cellar of a commonplace house. Let him consider the prospect and its obvious necessities. The first was to forget himself—in sleep, if possible. That should be obtainable by a calm method of reflection.
He had not moved as yet—had not dared to. The blackness was gross, terrific. Now, all of a sudden, he remembered his matchbox, and with a sigh of relief felt for and found it. Opening it with infinite caution, he fingered a couple of matches, no more. One on the instant slipped from his nervous hold, and fell to the floor. Taking an instinctive step to recover it, his foot trod out a little flare and explosion, gone in a moment, and only a single match remained to him. He clutched it as a drowning man a straw.
Should he nurse that little potential spark—keep the moral of its consolation always between himself and despair? Better, he thought, to resolve at once the mystery of his prison than to torment himself with imagined terrors.
The match was a stout wax one. Giving himself no time for reflection, he struck it, and, guarding the flame jealously, held it aloft.
The cellar he found himself in was fairly deep, but nothing out of the common. Stone bins pigeon-holed all one side of it; the other was the bare wall. Moving pallidly, Gilead examined all its bricked-up length. At the last moment he recollected the door, and thinking to return to it and investigate the lock, found the match burned low in his fingers. Only a second or two of life remained to it; he was standing by the ultimate bin, when he perceived a heap of sacking lying within it. He dragged the mass hurriedly out, and, casting it on the floor, observed a solitary bottle which it had concealed. He had but time to grasp this by the neck, when the match burned his fingers, and, with a gasping exclamation, he dropped it, and was in utter darkness once more. Feeling for the sacking, he let himself down upon it, hugging his find.
And now, in truth, he was committed to the ordeal, with only a bottle for his companion. He was a completely temperate man, and in any case he had no idea what the bottle contained; yet somehow the feel of its sleek sides was a solace to him. Unopened it seemed to cheer and inebriate, as the presence of a jovial comrade might, though fast asleep by one’s side in a haunted house. He patted it fondly, and closed his eyes.
The blackness weighed upon them, instantly and horribly. He opened them with a start, as if he had only emerged just in time from drowning waters. But they took no comfort from that sightless recovery. He strove to concentrate his thoughts on his interests, his ambition, even his gold. It was all useless. Light, he realized, or at least some dilution of darkness, was necessary to sane thought as it was to healthy growth. Without it all things stagnated and fed upon themselves. The coffers of his banks might be bursting with his hoards; they were impotent to buy him one moment of self-forgetfulness. All his omnipotence could not command him a right ray of reason.
“This will not do,” he thought. “It is childish and contemptible.” Lying on his side, he closed his lids again determinedly; and straight with the action, it seemed, there was shut into his mind a torturing demon. “The innocent man,” it kept whispering to him, “failed, for all his innocence, to keep his reason. No self-conscious probity can be proof for long against these supernormal conditions. A hardened conscience could resist them more effectually.”
He reviled the tempter, hated him, found himself suddenly listening to him, with his forehead all clammy and his hands shaking. To be goaded into strangling himself in this black and loathsome pit! The thought was monstrous, incredible—and it clung to him. He sat up in a gasping panic. He forced himself to repeat hundreds of lines and passages from memory. Presently he found that his tongue was running involuntarily into inanities and blasphemies, and he stopped.
“What on earth is the matter with me?” he reflected. For the moment a re-dawn of sanity glowed within him; his pulses slowed. “It is too utterly ridiculous!” he said aloud.
He rose to his feet, and, feeling by the wall, went up and down, up and down, hoping to tire himself in a normal way. But gradually he seemed to become conscious, every time he approached the door, of some evil invisible presence lurking outside. The vast emptiness of the house above occurred to him with a horror even greater than his cell inspired. “They are trooping down,” he thought awfully, “to listen at my door.”
Who the ‘they’ were only his excited imagination might say. Little by little, he contracted his area, until he was standing once more motionless by the heap of sacking.
“Solitary confinement in a dark cell is an unutterable wickedness—an unutterable wickedness,” he kept repeating to himself. Then, in a spasm of horror, he turned, and clawed blindly at the wall, like a trapped animal. He dared not go near the door again, or he would have concentrated all his strength on one frenzied effort to burst it open. But he had come to dread horribly the thought of evoking an uproar in that blind silence. As long as he was quiettheymight keep outside.
Presently, his legs seeming to give under him, he sank down again upon his rough couch. An hour went by in such mental suffering as he had never before experienced or conceived. And then, suddenly, with a ghastly groan, he pulled himself together and sat up.
“I can stand no more,” he whispered, and, reaching for the bottle, knocked its head off against the wall. A gush of liquid came over his hand, a stinging fragrance to his nostrils—brandy!
“Thank God!” he ejaculated fervently, and without hesitation put his mouth to the shattered edge, indifferent to consequences, and gulping once or twice, replaced the bottle on the stones. The potent stuff poured into his veins; its fumes rose to his brain. Like any overtaken sot, he toppled prone, and lapsed into quick insensibility.
A cry in his brain, a pertinacious worry of light in his eyes, awoke him, and he raised his head. There were people in the cellar—his secretary, Miss Halifax, a curious stranger, a police constable holding a dark-lantern. The lady, from whom the pity-stricken exclamation seemed to have come, stood, one hand poised at her lips, a little apart. The secretary bent over him.
“It’s all right, sir,” he said. “He’s caught, thank God!”
Gilead, with assistance, staggered to his feet.
“What—where!” he exclaimed wildly—“Mr Justice Starkey?”
“Ah!” said the secretary; “you know his name, then?”
“He told me plain enough,” said Gilead faintly—“and his purpose; but that was after he’d locked me in. How did you know? how did you find me?”
“It was Miss Halifax, sir,” said the secretary. “You told her about the appointment, you know, and the thing worried her—worried her to that degree that in the evening she must come round to confide her fears to me. I didn’t like the sound of it myself, and, after consultation, we decided to take a cab to Raxe’s hotel and discover what we could about Mr Judex. That was near ten o’clock, and we reached the place to find it in a commotion over the man himself. It appeared that he had escaped from a private asylum at Sutton, and had eluded recapture until his own advertisement gave him away. The attendants had been waiting for his return to the hotel, and had nabbed him just before our arrival. I stated our fears to them, and sure enough, on overhauling him, they found in his possession the key of his own front-door, which he had procured, under his assumed name, from the house-agents. This gentleman representing the asylum, we all came on together, and engaging the services of a constable, entered the house. From a hint let fall by the madman, we gathered that we should find you locked in somewhere down here, and your snoring, sir, led us to the spot.”
Gilead, with a faint blush, glanced down at the tell-tale bottle.
“He said it was his wish to demonstrate,” he murmured, “how the dark cell could hold no terrors for the impeccable conscience, and how, therefore, arguing per contra, the man Maudsleymusthave been guilty of the crime for which he was sentenced.”
The constable put in a word:—
“He went mad on it, sir, did his Lordship. The papers and his own conscience druv him off of his head.”
“Thank you,” said Gilead quietly; “and thank you, too, Nestle.” He crossed, with some sign of emotion, to where Miss Halifax stood by the wall. “You advised me,” he said, “and I have had a fine lesson in self-sufficiency. It is humiliating to have to own that I owe my reason, such as it is, to a chance bottle of brandy which I found in one of the bins. But for that, I am afraid, you would have exhumed a gibbering idiot. I shall think more mercifully of one form of drunkard for the future, and less confidently of myself.” He turned. “If this gentleman,” he added courteously, “will favour me with his address, I shall take pleasure in acquitting myself of my considerable obligations to him. You, Constable, will no doubt find an opportunity of calling at Lamb’s Agency some time during your off-hours, when a closed envelope will be put into your hands.”
He bowed punctiliously to each, offered his arm to Miss Halifax, and, waiting for the Constable to lead, quitted the place of durance.
Gileadhad often encountered in theDaily Post—sandwiched, say, between a heart-moving appeal on behalf of the outcast and houseless, and a last drowning cry for help from a soul almost submerged—a plea for some dog or cat seeking a kind home, and had reflected on the curious variety and varied quality of the petitions which a medium for benevolence was calculated to attract. He hoped that those, thus fondly appealing to charity for their animal beloveds, were in the habit of scrutinizing the lists in which their advertisements appeared, and of justifying their own title to help in one form by vouchsafing it in another. But he believed he had always noticed that an excessive devotion to animals entailed a rather ironic attitude towards the needs of the human family, and it was in no very sympathetic mood, therefore, that he read the first words of the following advertisement, which his secretary one morning pointed out to him:—
“Will anyone give a kind home to Pilot, a dog. O, please do help! This is genuine. No money-lenders need apply. Address Judy, Marshlock Old Rectory, Shipton-on-Thames.”
“Will anyone give a kind home to Pilot, a dog. O, please do help! This is genuine. No money-lenders need apply. Address Judy, Marshlock Old Rectory, Shipton-on-Thames.”
“Why do you show me this, Nestle?” he said, looking up.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the secretary. “Have you read to the end?”
Gilead bent to the paper again, and smiled.
“What a very odd advertisement!” he said. “Is it nonsense or innocence, do you think?”
The secretary shrugged his shoulders slightly.
“Supposing we ask Miss Halifax’s opinion, Mr Balm?”
Gilead said “certainly,” and leaned back in his chair as the secretary carried the paper to the young lady, who was engaged at her desk over correspondence.
“Do you take that for a hoax, Miss Halifax?”
The beautiful amanuensis read and considered.
“No, Mr Balm,” she said. “This was written, I am sure, by some distressed child, whose people take in theDaily Post. If it were a hoax, some covering address would have been given.”
Gilead rose.
“Give me the paper, please,” he said.
She smiled, rather wistfully.
“I knew the very suggestion of a child would win you,” she said.
He looked at her kindly.
“It is your feminine perspicacity that wins me,” he said. “I cannot tell you how it touches me to find us all three in such accord over this business of humanitarianism, and so superior, in its pursuit, to ignoble jealousies and misunderstandings.”
That was a tribute to the secretary, who had never shewn the least resentment over the lady’s inclusion in the inner confidences of his Chief. Nestle stood quiet a moment or two, as Gilead, having spoken, left the room; and then, moving softly, addressed a word to the amanuensis. She waved him away; and he saw at once, to his curious concern, that she was crying.
Gilead, foreseeing a long day and a queer experience, drove to Paddington Station, whence he took a train presently to a distant up-river junction, from which a short branch line carried him leisurely to Shipton-on-Thames. It was a quiet torrid day in late April, hot as the ideal Midsummer, and, after asking his direction, he started on foot across the fields for the Old Rectory, which, it appeared, was situated at no great distance away on the banks of the river. His path was a pleasant one, remote and peaceful, leading him by sweet-smelling pastures and lanes to a waterside hamlet, where a scrap of church-tower, ruined and ivy-grown, and a fragment of antique graveyard at its foot spoke of some ancient benefice long since discontinued or translated. He was looking about in this sleepy retreat for someone to correct his way for him, when a sound of youthful voices breaking out if a leafy road reached his ears, and he saw two children, a boy and a girl, turn a corner and make in his direction. He advanced to meet them.
“Can you tell me the way to the Old Rectory?” he asked.
The boy went on without answering, but, finding that his little companion had stopped embarrassed, swaggered round and came back.
“Beg your pardon?” he said.
Gilead repeated his question.
“Well, we’re going there,” said the boy. “You can come with us, if you like.”
He was a meaty youth of some twelve summers, with an imbecile self-satisfied face and porky eyes; but his stylish white flannels and little Oxford-blue blazer with the yellow badge on its pocket spoke him quite the riverside dandy.
Gilead fell into pace with the two, and the little girl kept peeping up at him from the other side of her cavalier. She was the dearest charmer of nine, dressed in a sort of sweet Directory frock with heliotrope sprays; and the shepherd’s straw hat on her head had its mauve ribbon poked full of real daisies.
Presently the boy, shouldering his companion a little apart, spoke something in her ear, and she whispered back “O, Georgy!” and flushed as pink as an apple-blossom.
“Please,” she said, being nudged to the soft impeachment, “Georgy says he believes you must have come about Pilot.”
Gilead smiled, oddly enlightened.
“The dog mentioned in the advertisement?” he said. “Did you put it in?”
“No, I did,” said the boy, sniggering. “I say, what a lark! Have you really come about him?”
“Supposing I have,” said Gilead; “what then?”
The boy grinned, but did not answer.
“Is this Judy, by any chance?” asked the young man.
“Yes, it is,” said the boy.
“Your sister?”
“Not much. I say, you know!” exclaimed the youth. “Her name’s Brown. My name’s George Wimble. My father’s Captain Wimble. We live at the Court. I only made it up for her, and got old Gask the stationer to send it on.”
“I see,” said Gilead. “What was that about no moneylenders applying?”
“O! I don’t know,” said the boy. “You aren’t one, are you?”
“No, I’m not one.”
“I made it up out of the advertisements,” said Master Wimble. “They always put in that sort of thing. I did it for her.”
“Father said I might,” ventured the little girl, between apology and self-defence. “At leastways he said I might try and find a good home for him.”
“He didn’t mean that way, you bet,” said the boy, glancing slyly up at the stranger.
“No,” said Judy, her small mouth tightening a little. “When he saw it in the newspaper this morning he was simply furiated. He is a very boracic man.”
The boy stifled an explosion.
“Isn’t she funny?” he whispered.
“O! boracic,” said Gilead; and added, in some vague association of ideas, “Is he a doctor?—O! no; a clergyman, I suppose?”
The boy plucked his sleeve.
“He’s neither the one nor the other,” he confided to his private ear. “He’s a radical.” He spoke the word with a weight of social significance. “He stood for Henley in the last by-election, but our man beat him at the post. He doesn’t live here. He’s only taken the house for the summer. He isn’t a gentleman, you know; he’s a radical; butshe’sall right.”
The magnificence of the distinction quite silenced Gilead. He walked on while the boy strutted on; but suddenly he was moved very sweetly to feel little confiding fingers thrust into his.
“Please,” said the little girl, who had slipped round to his side, “have you really and truly come about Pilot?”
“Really and truly,” said Gilead, looking down with a smile. “Do you want to part with him?”
“No,” said the child, flushing very pink.
“Perhaps someone else does?” suggested Gilead.
“Yes, father.”
“Shall I seehimabout it, then?” She did not answer. “What’s wrong with him—the dog, I mean?” asked the young man.
The boy answered for her, with a contemptuous laugh.
“He bit somebody. Anybody would have,her.”
Gilead kept a discreet silence.
“Here’s the gate of the Rectory, if you want to see Mr Brown,” said the boy, stopping; and then Gilead saw that the little girl was in floods of tears. He bent down, very concerned.
“If hehasto go, Judy,” he whispered, “he shall find a good friend.”
“O! don’t be such a ninny,” said the boy. “What’s a dog anyway? I’m not going to go fishing with you, you know, if you’re going on like this.”
He walked off, whistling. She sniffed once or twice, dried her eyes on her sleeve, and fled after him. Gilead, watching the two a moment, turned through a gate into a leafy drive, which swept round a semi-circle of lawn to the front of a white-latticed creeper-hung house of two storeys, where, ringing the bell, he sent in his card to Mr Brown.
He had not waited a minute in an untidy tobacco-reeking study, into which he had been informally and rather suspiciously shown, when a gentleman came hurrying in with an air of effusive cordiality which took him completely by surprise.
“Mr Balm?” said the gentleman. “This is kind of you—this is more than kind. To come in person to answer my appeal? I had not expected such distinction, such consideration, and it makes me proud. Pray take a chair, sir, and let us discuss this matter.”
Gilead, immensely perplexed, bowed and seated himself. He saw before him a fluffy fiery little man, wearing spectacles like burning glasses, and clad in a blazing rhubarb tweed, with knickerbockers and bright brown shoes. He was snappy in his movements, jerky in his speech, and, in disposition, he alternated, it seemed, between white heats of enthusiasm and dead ashes of depression.
“Your Agency, sir,” he said, “justifies its title to being the most prompt and princely institution of its kind. I am favoured in a visit from its founder.”
“Its representative,” corrected Gilead.
Mr Brown raised his hands and eyes with an air of polite deprecation.
“True,” he said; “we know your humour and respect it, Mr Balm. I say no more. I am completely dumb.”
“Well,” said Gilead, a little chilly: “as to the purpose of my visit, sir, I was led to suppose that the—the form of appeal somewhat lacked your sanction.”
“Not at all,” said Mr Brown, with a surprised look. “How could you have gathered that impression when I dictated its terms myself?”
“O! I didn’t know,” said the visitor. “I was misenlightened, no doubt—made the victim very possibly of a trifling hoax.” He smiled. “Then the little lady’s name was an intentional mask?”
“I don’t know, sir, what you mean by a mask,” said Mr Brown with some apparent heat. “It was quoted to illustrate a very genuine sentiment. If you had said abait, I might have admitted the impeachment.”
“A bait, then,” said Gilead—“and a sweet one.”
“I am indebted to you for the term, Mr Balm,” said the gentleman, with a certain dry dignity; “but I can hold it hardly applicable to a personality endowed with such supreme gifts of force and intelligence. I would as soon call the Mother of the Gracchisweet, sir, for my part.”
Gilead felt himself at a loss for words. Could it be possible that the little girl so contradicted her appearance as to be an infant phenomenon of an advanced type?
“Well, sir,” he said, utterly at sea—“a bait of whatever nature you please. In any case, I am to understand, its purpose was to find someone who would be willing to take this discarded pet off your hands?”
Mr Brown rose from his chair.
“Sir—Mr Balm!” he exclaimed.
“To secure a kind home for it,” explained Gilead, “whether because it is old, or because it bites, or—”
Mr Brown seized up a heavy paper-weight, poised it an instant furiously, and replaced it on the desk calmly.
“I think, I am sure,” he said, “that there must be some mistake.”
Gilead, risen also, faced him gravely.
“Would you mind telling me,” he said, “to what you are alluding all this time?”
“I am alluding, sir,” said Mr Brown, with sarcastic emphasis, “to the letter I had the honour of addressing to you yesterday, and the substance of which, I flattered myself, you had come to answer in person. My name is Brown.”
“I am unfortunate,” said Gilead. “I have much correspondence and a poor memory, and a name, however distinctive, is apt to slip me. I devoted, I am afraid, but a cursory examination to this morning’s letters. The penalty is mine.”
Mr Brown bowed stiffly.
“Assuredly not, sir, since, it seems, I have appealed to your munificence in vain.”
“The misfortune, sir,” said Gilead, “is, by your favour, easily amended for both of us.”
His courtesy was so charming, that the indignant gentleman was instantly mollified.
“You are very good,” he said. “Your frankness invites a warmer confidence than that I had already ventured in a sacred cause. You are acquainted, no doubt, with the name of Mrs Craddock Flight?”
Gilead bowed.
“Of all the militant sisterhood,” said Mr Brown, “the bright particular star. It was she, if you remember, who chained herself to the wheel of the Prime Minister’s carriage, just as he was about to enter it to drive to the House of Commons, and so forced him to seek his infamous destination on foot. A woman of extraordinary resource and originality.”
“Extraordinary,” said Gilead. “If I recollect, she was nearly killed by the horses becoming restive before she could be released.”
“She would have been glad to die, sir,” said Brown, “in that glorious situation—a second St Catherine broken on the wheel for her faith.” He looked at his visitor searchingly. “Do not distress me, Mr Balm,” he said, “by affirming that the cause is to be denied its share of the vast resources at your disposal. No, no, you must be with us, sir. It was for that purpose that I wrote to you; it was for that purpose that I identified myself in my letter with a name calculated to shed refulgence on any propaganda to which it should elect to give itself—the name of Mrs Craddock Flight. That name, sir, and that cause lack nothing but the devotion of a sympathetic capitalist to ensure their immortality. It was to that stately name that I questioned the right application of so sugary an epithet as ‘sweet’. Finally, sir, that name—if I may dare the confidence—has pledged itself to become, on a single condition, my priceless possession; to adorn with its widowed lustre my no less widowed insignificance. I confess, sir, that I yearn to bask in that reflected glory—to follow in the tail of its comet-like flight to the new world its radiance is destined to discover to the enraptured vision of posterity.”
“You allude—?” said Gilead.
“I allude,” said Mr Brown, “to a world reconsecrated, through the political enfranchisement of woman, to reason, justice and purity. Everything, you will grant, is wrong as it is. Civilization, as a male imposition, has proved itself a depressing failure. Men, on true premises, labour to false conclusions; women, on false, jump to true. Their unerring moral sensitiveness penetrates all massed and complicated sophistries, and pierces in a flash to the heart of the real. Unbiassed by formulas, untrammelled by dogma, they will blow through our corrupt institutions like a cleansing gale, whirling the dead leaves of discredited systems before them. Woman is not conscientious, so to speak, in the prescriptive sense. She will strip from equity, justice and the moral law the trappings in which they have been too long confounded, and show us nature again, primitive and fearless.”
“Indeed?” said Gilead. “You surprise me.”
“There will be many surprises when the time comes,” said Mr Brown grandiloquently; and, on the very word, suffered a surprising change of countenance. “Why, why,” he cried, flushing scarlet; “my letter—my letter, sir, in which I expatiated at some length on this very subject. You have not seen it, you say? To what, then, am I to attribute the honour of your visit?”
“To an advertisement, sir,” said Gilead quietly, “about a dog.”
The effect of his words was startling. Mr Brown seemed to burst at the head, like an over-charged bottle of ginger-beer, and thence to spout a volume of incoherent expletives. He then, as if impelled by some uncontrollable emotion, went racing up and down the room, until, the pressure slacking, he gradually slowed, and finally came to a stop opposite his visitor, the steam, so to speak, all out of him.
“I see it all,” he said, in a state of the limpest depression. “By an irony of circumstance scarce credible, the sympathies I sought to engage have been forestalled by my own child in a trivial matter.”
“By a young friend of your child, sir, if I am correctly informed,” said Gilead kindly.
“You mean the boy Wimble?” said Mr Brown bitterly. “No doubt, sir, your information—”
“It was at first hand,” put in the visitor, smiling. “I met the young people outside, and got into talk with them. The boy, he himself confessed to me, composed and inserted the advertisement.”
“The grotesque impertinence of it!” cried Mr Brown, boiling over; “the assurance and the inopportuneness!”
“I understand,” said Gilead, “that you authorized the little lady to find, if possible, a home for the animal?”
“Go on, sir, go on!” said Mr Brown resignedly. “Tell me that I authorized her to hold her father up to ridicule before the world.”
“Nay, sir,” said Gilead, “I am quite at sea in the matter.”
“I will acquaint you, Mr Balm,” said the father dismally, “with the facts of the case—especially as they bear in some measure on a confidence I have already reposed in you. Mrs Craddock Flight, sir, made it a condition of our union that the dog should be destroyed.”
“It was the single condition to which you referred, I assume,” said the visitor. “May I venture to ask what suggested it?”
“The dog had bitten her, sir. They will take these unaccountable aversions. It was during a short visit she lately paid us.”
“Pardon me,” said Gilead, “if I enquire if your little girl is not very attached to the animal?”
“There is no denying,” said Mr Brown, “that Judy is devoted to Pilot, and Pilot to Judy. It was on that account that I was moved to sanction the compromise of a new home, in which compromise, I have not the least doubt, Mrs Flight’s superior reason will acquiesce, particularly when she is informed of the character of the applicant.”
Gilead bowed. “May I see the dog?” he asked.
Mr Brown shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands in a manner of patient repudiation.
“With pleasure,” he said, and evidently without the least. “We will go at once.”
He led the visitor out by a back door, across a fair but neglected lawn, through a space of untended kitchen garden, and so down to the river bank, where, by some water steps and a little boat-house, stood a dog-kennel of considerable dimensions. And straight, on the sound of their approach, there issued from this last, with a rattle of iron links, a magnificent Newfoundland.
Gilead exclaimed.
“But he is superb! I am quite astonished! His value, Mr Brown!”
The master was engaged in releasing swivel from collar. The beautiful dog, fawning and delighted, made up to him endearingly.
“Judy, I am sure,” said Judy’s father in a suppressed voice, “would never dream of making a transaction of her pet. Yes, there’s your little mistress, boy.”
The great dog, released, went bounding joyously and sniffing riverwards. There was a punt out there in mid-stream, and a small meaty boy was upright in it, endeavouring to find soft bottom, for fishing purposes, with one of its poles. A little girl in a flowered hat sat in the stern.
“It seems a harsh necessity,” said the father, in a voice which made Gilead approve him for the first time; “but the cause, sir, the cause is paramount.”
Gilead, quite fascinated, called to the dog—approached him. At that instant there came a shrill cry from the father: “Sit down, Judy, sit down! My God!”
There was an answering screech from the river; a splash; the small boy, slipping his hold in a panic, went down among the thwarts, and the punt, leaving its pole sticking in the mud, began to swing downstream. Judy, in anguish of the scene enacting on the banks, thinking to see her pet ravished away before her eyes, had stood up, and, blind with grief, had lost her footing and tumbled overboard. She could not swim; neither of the men could swim; the boy in the punt, nerveless and blubbered, was worse then inept. A dreadful moment of paralysis followed, and then two little arms and a draggled head came above the surface.