I held his hand tight. It was so pleasant to know I could love him now with a clear conscience, even if I had to give myself up to the police to-morrow. And indeed, being a woman, I didn’t really much care whether they took me or not, if only I could love Jack, and know Jack loved me.
“You must tell me everything—this minute—Jack,” I said, clinging to him like a child. “I can’t bear this suspense. Begin telling me at once. You’ll do me more harm than good if you keep me waiting any longer.”
Jack took instinctively a medical view of the situation.
“So I think, my child,” he said, looking lovingly at me. “Your nerves are on the rack, and will be the better for unstringing. Oh, Una, it’s such a comfort that you know at last who I am! It’s such a comfort that I’m able to talk to you to-day just as we two used to talk four years ago in Devonshire!”
“Did I love you then, Jack?” I whispered, nestling still closer to him, in spite of my horror. Or rather, my very horror made me feel more acutely than ever the need for protection. I was no longer alone in the world. I had a man to support me.
“You told me so, darling,” he answered, smoothing my hair with his hand. “Have you forgotten all about it? Doesn’t even that come back? Can’t you remember it now, when I’ve told you who I am and how it all happened?”
I shook my head.
“All cloudy still,” I replied, vaguely. “Some dim sense of familiarity, perhaps,—as when people say they have a feeling of having lived all this over somewhere else before,—but nothing more certain, nothing more definite.”
“Then I must begin at the beginning,” Jack answered, bracing himself for his hard task, “and reconstruct your whole life for you, as far as I know it, from your very childhood. I’m particularly anxious you should not merely be TOLD what took place, but should remember the past. There are gaps in my own knowledge I want you to eke out. There are places I want you to help me myself over. And besides, it’ll be more satisfactory to yourself to remember than to be told it.”
I leaned back, almost exhausted. Incredible as it may seem to you, in spite of that awful photograph, I couldn’t really believe even so I had killed my father. And yet I knew very well now that Jack, at least, hadn’t done it. That was almost enough. But not quite. My head swam round in terror. I waited and longed for Jack to explain the whole thing to me.
“You remember,” he said, watching me close, “that when you lived as a very little girl in Australia you had a papa who seems different to you still from the papa in your later childish memories?”
“I remember it very well,” I replied. “It came back to me on the Sarmatian. I think of him always now as the papa in the loose white linen coat. The more I dwell on him, the more does he come out to me as a different man from the other one—the father...I shot at The Grange, at Woodbury. The father that lives with me in that ineffaceable Picture.”
“He WAS a different man,” Jack answered, with a sudden burst, as if he knew all my story. “Una, I may as well relieve your mind all at once on that formidable point. You shot that man”—he pointed to the white-bearded person in the photograph,—“but it was not parricide: it was not even murder. It was under grave provocation...in more than self-defence...and he was NOT your father.”
“Not my father!” I cried, clasping my hands and leaning forward in my profound suspense. “But I killed him all the same! Oh, Jack, how terrible!”
“You must quiet yourself, my child,” he said, still soothing me automatically. “I want your aid in this matter. You must listen to me calmly, and bring your mind to bear on all I say to you.”
Then he began with a regular history of my early life, which came back to me as fast as he spoke, scene by scene and year by year, in long and familiar succession. I remembered everything, sometimes only when he suggested it; but sometimes also, before he said the words, my memory outran his tongue, and I put in a recollection or two with my own tongue as they recurred to me under the stimulus of this new birth of my dead nature. I recalled my early days in the far bush in Australia; my journey home to England on the big steamer with mamma; the way we travelled about for years from place to place on the Continent. I remembered how I had been strictly enjoined, too, never to speak of baby; and how my father used to watch my mother just as closely as he watched me, always afraid, as it appeared to me, she should make some verbal slip or let out some great secret in an unguarded moment. He seemed relieved, I recollected now, when my poor mother died: he grew less strict with me then, but as far as I could judge, though he was careful of my health, he never really loved me.
Then Jack reminded me further of other scenes that came much later in my forgotten life. He reminded me of my trip to Torquay, where I first met him: and all at once the whole history of my old visits to the Moores came back like a flood to me. The memory seemed to inundate and overwhelm my brain. They were the happiest time of all life, those delightful visits, when I met Jack and fell in love with him, and half confided my love to my Cousin Minnie. Strange to say, though at Torquay itself I’d forgotten it all, in that little Canadian house, with Jack by my side to recall it, it rushed back like a wave upon me. I’d fallen in love with Jack without my father’s knowledge or consent; and I knew very well my father would never allow me to marry him. He had ideas of his own, my father, about the sort of person I ought to marry: and I half suspected in my heart of hearts he meant if possible always to keep me at home single to take care of him and look after him. I didn’t know, as yet, he had sufficient reasons of his own for desiring me to remain for ever unmarried.
I remembered, too, that I never really loved my father. His nature was hard, cold, reserved, unsympathetic. I only feared and obeyed him. At times, my own strong character came out, I remembered, and I defied him to his face, defied him openly. Then there were scenes in the house, dreadful scenes, too hateful to dwell upon: and the servants came up to my room at the end and comforted me.
So, step by step, Jack reminded me of everything in my own past life, up to the very night of the murder, from which my Second State dated. I’d come back from Torquay a week or two before, very full indeed of Jack, and determined at all costs, sooner or later, to marry him. But though I had kept all quiet, papa had suspected my liking on the day of the Berry Pomeroy athletics, and had forbidden me to see Jack, or to write to him, or to have anything further to say to him. He was determined, he told me, whoever I married, I shouldn’t at least marry a beggarly doctor. All that I remembered; and also how, in spite of the prohibition, I wrote letters to Jack, but could receive none in return—lest my father should see them.
And still, the central mystery of the murder was no nearer solution. I held my breath in terror. Had I really any sort of justification in killing him?
Dimly and instinctively, as Jack went on, a faint sense of resentment and righteous indignation against the man with the white beard rose up vaguely in my mind by slow degrees. I knew I had been angry with him, I knew I had defied him, but how or why as yet I knew not.
Then Jack suddenly paused, and began in a different voice a new part of his tale. It was nothing I remembered or could possibly remember, he said; but it was necessary to the comprehension of what came after, and would help me to recall it. About a week after I left Torquay, it seemed, Jack was in his consulting-room at Babbicombe one day, having just returned from a very long bicycle ride—for he was a first-rate cyclist,—when the servant announced a new patient; and a very worn-out old man came in to visit him.
The man had a ragged grey beard and scanty white hair; he was clad in poor clothes, and had tramped on foot all the way from London to Babbicombe, where Jack used to practice. But Jack saw at once under this rough exterior he had the voice and address of a cultivated gentleman, though he was so broken down by want and long suffering and exposure and illness that he looked like a beggar just let loose from the workhouse.
I held my breath as Jack showed me the poor old man’s photograph. It was a portrait taken after death—for Jack attended him to the end through a fatal illness;—and it showed a face thin and worn, and much lined by unspeakable hardships. But I burst out crying at once the very moment I looked at it. For a second or two, I couldn’t say why: I suppose it was instinct. Blood is thicker than water, they tell us; and I have the intuition of kindred very strong in me, I believe. But at any rate, I cried silently, with big hot tears, while I looked at that dead face of silent suffering, as I never had cried over the photograph of the respectable-looking man who lay dead on the floor of the library, and whom I was always taught to consider my father. Then it came back to me, why... I gazed at it and grew faint. I clutched Jack’s arm for support. I knew what it meant now. The poor worn old man who lay dead on the bed with that look of mute agony on his features—was my first papa: the papa in the loose white linen coat: the one I remembered with childlike love and trustfulness in my earliest babyish Australian recollections!
I couldn’t mistake the face. It was burnt into my brain now. This was he, though much older and sadder, and more scarred and lined by age and weather. It was my very first papa. My own papa. I cried silently still. I couldn’t bear to look at it. Then the real truth broke upon me once more. This, and this alone, was in very deed my one real father!
I seized the faded photograph and pressed it to my lips.
“Oh, I know him!” I cried wildly. “It’s my father! My father!”
Some minutes passed before Jack could go on with his story. This rush of emotions was too much for me for a while. I could hardly hear him or attend to him, so deeply did it stir me.
At last I calmed down, still holding that pathetic photograph on the table before me.
“Tell me all about him,” I murmured, sobbing. “For, Jack, I remember now, he was so good and kind, and I loved him—I loved him.”
Jack went on with his story, trying to soothe me and reassure me. The old man introduced himself by very cautious degrees as a person in want, not so much of money, though of that to be sure he had none, as of kindness and sympathy in a very great sorrow. He was a shipwrecked mariner, in a sense: shipwrecked on the sea of Life and on the open Pacific as well. But once he had been a clergyman, and a man of education, position, reputation, fortune.
Gradually as he went on Jack began to grasp at the truth of this curious tale. The worn and battered stranger had but lately landed in London from a sailing vessel which had brought him over from a remote Pacific islet: not a tropical islet of the kind with whose palms and parrots we are all so familiar, but a cold and snowy rock, away off far south, among the frosts and icebergs, near the Antarctic continent. There for twenty long years that unhappy man had lived by himself a solitary life.
I started at the sound.
“For twenty years!” I exclaimed. “Oh, Jack, you must be wrong; for how could that be? I was only eighteen when all this happened. How could my real father have been twenty years away from me, when I was only eighteen, and I remember him so perfectly?”
Jack looked at me and shook his head.
“You’ve much to learn yet, Una,” he answered. “The story’s a long one. You were NOT eighteen but twenty-two at the time. You’ve been deliberately misled as to your own age all along. You developed late, and were always short for your real years, not tall and precocious as we all of us imagined. But you were four years older than Mr. Callingham pretended. You’re twenty-six now, not twenty-two as you think. Wait, and in time you’ll hear all about it.”
He went on with his story. I listened, spell-bound. The unhappy man explained to Jack how he had been wrecked on the voyage, and escaped on a raft with one other passenger: how they had drifted far south, before waves and current, till they were cast at last on this wretched island: how they remained there for a month or two, picking up a precarious living on roots and berries and eggs of sea-birds: and how at last, one day, he had come back from hunting limpets and sea-urchins on the shore of a lonely bay—to find, to his amazement, his companion gone, and himself left alone on that desolate island. His fellow-castaway, he knew then, had deceived and deserted him!
There was no room, indeed, to doubt the treachery of the wretched being who had so basely treated him. As he looked, a ship under full sail stood away to northward. In vain the unhappy man made wild signals from the shore with his tattered garments. No notice was taken of them. His companion must deliberately have suppressed the other’s existence, and pretended to be alone by himself on the island.
“And his name?” Jack asked of the poor old man, horrified.
The stranger answered without a moment’s pause:
“His name, if you want it—was Vivian Callingham.”
“And yours?” Jack continued, as soon as he could recover from his first shock of horror.
“And mine,” the poor castaway replied, “is Richard Wharton.”
As Jack told me those words, another strange thrill ran through me.
“Richard Wharton was the name of mamma’s first husband. Then I’m not a Callingham at all!” I cried, unable to take it all in at first in its full complexity. “I’m really a Wharton!”
Jack nodded his head in assent.
“Yes, you’re really a Wharton,” he said. “You’re the baby that died, as we all were told. Your true Christian name’s Mary. But, Una, you were always Una to all of us in England; and though the real Una Callingham died when you were a little girl of three or four years old, you’ll be Una always now to Elsie and me. We can’t think of you as other than we’ve always called you.”
Then he went on to explain to me how the stranger had landed in London, alone and friendless, twenty years later, from a passing Australian merchant vessel which had picked him up on the island. All those years he had waited, and fed himself on eggs of penguins. He landed by himself, the crew having given him a suit of old clothes, and subscribed to find him in immediate necessaries. He began to inquire cautiously in London about his wife and family. At first, he could learn little or nothing; for nobody remembered him, and he feared to ask too openly, a sort of Enoch Arden terror restraining him from proclaiming his personality till he knew exactly what had happened in his long absence. But bit by bit, he found out at last that his wife had married again, and was now long dead: and that the man she had married was Vivian Callingham, his own treacherous companion on the Crozet Islands. As soon as he learned that, the full depth of the man’s guilt burst upon him like a thunderbolt. Richard Wharton understood now why Vivian Callingham had left him alone on those desert rocks, and sailed away in the ship without telling the captain of his fellow-castaway’s plight. He saw the whole vile plot the man had concocted at once, and the steps he had taken to carry it into execution.
Vivian Callingham, whom I falsely thought my father, had gone back to Australia with pretended news of Richard Wharton’s death. He had sought my widowed mother in her own home up country, and told her a lying tale of his devotion to her husband in his dying moments on that remote ocean speck in the far Southern Pacific. By this story he ingratiated himself. He knew she was rich: he knew she was worth marrying: and to marry her, he had left my own real father, Richard Wharton, to starve and languish for twenty years among rocks and sea-fowl on a lonely island!
My blood ran cold at such a tale of deadly treachery. I remembered now to have heard some small part of it before. But much of it, as Jack told it to me, was quite new and unexpected. No wonder I had turned in horror that night from the man I long believed to be my own father, when I learned by what vile and cruelly treacherous means he had succeeded in imposing his supposed relationship upon me! But still, all this brought me no nearer the real question of questions—why did I shoot him?
As Jack went on unfolding that strange tale of fraud and heartless wrong, my interest every moment grew more and more absorbing. But I can’t recall it now exactly as Jack told me it. I can only give you the substance of that terrible story.
When Richard Wharton first learned of his wife’s second marriage during his own lifetime to that wicked wretch who had ousted and supplanted him, he believed also, on the strength of Vivian Callingham’s pretences, that his own daughter had died in her babyhood in Australia. He fancied, therefore, that no person of his kin remained alive at all, and that he might proceed to denounce and punish Vivian Callingham. With that object in view, he tramped down all the way from London to Torquay, to make himself known to his wife’s relations, the Moores, and to their cousin, Courtenay Ivor of Babbicombe—my Jack, as I called him. For various reasons of his own, he called first on Jack, and proceeded to detail to him this terrible family story.
At first hearing, Jack could hardly believe such a tale was true—of his Una’s father, as he still thought Vivian Callingham. But a strange chance happened to reveal a still further complication. It came out in this way. I had given Jack a recent photograph of myself in fancy dress, which hung up over his mantelpiece. As the weather-worn visitor’s eye fell on the picture, he started and grew pale.
“Why, that’s her!” he cried with a sudden gasp. “That’s my daughter—Mary Wharton!”
Well, naturally enough Jack thought, to begin with, this was a mere mistake on his strange visitor’s part.
“That’s her half-sister,” he said, “Una Callingham—your wife’s child by her second marriage. She may be like her, no doubt, as half-sisters often are. But Mary Wharton, I know, died some eighteen years ago or so, when Una was quite a baby, I believe. I’ve heard all about it, because, don’t you see, I’m engaged to Una.”
The poor wreck of a clergyman, however, shook his head with profound conviction. He knew better than that.
“Oh no,” he said decisively: “that’s my child, Mary Wharton. Even after all these years, I couldn’t possibly be mistaken. Blood is thicker than water: I’d know her among ten thousand. She’d be just that age now, too. I see the creature’s vile plot. His daughter died young, and he’s palmed off my Mary as his own child, to keep her money in his hands. But never mind the money. Thank Heaven, she’s alive! That’s her! That’s my Mary!”
The plot seemed too diabolical and too improbable for anybody to believe. Jack could hardly think it possible when his new friend told him. But the stranger persisted so—it’s hard for me even to think of him as quite really my father—that Jack at last brought out two or three earlier photographs I’d given him some time before; and his visitor recognised them at once, in all their stages, as his own daughter. This roused Jack’s curiosity. He determined to hunt the matter up with his unknown connection. And he hunted it up thenceforward with deliberate care, till he proved every word of it.
Meanwhile, the poor broken-down man, worn out with his long tramp and his terrible emotions, fell ill almost at once, in Jack’s own house, and became rapidly so feeble that Jack dared not question him further. The return to civilisation was more fatal than his long solitary banishment. At the end of a week he died, leaving on Jack’s mind a profound conviction that all he had said was true, and that I was really Richard Wharton’s daughter, not Vivian Callingham’s.
“For a week or two I made inquiries, Una,” Jack said to me as we sat there,—“inquiries which I won’t detail to you in full just now, but which gradually showed me the truth of the poor soul’s belief. What you yourself told me just now chimes in exactly with what I discovered elsewhere, by inquiry and by letters from Australia. The baby that died was the real Una Callingham. Shortly after its death, your stepfather and your mother left the colony. All your real father’s money had been bequeathed to his child: and your mother’s also was settled on you. Mr. Callingham saw that if your mother died, and you lived and married, he himself would be deprived of the fortune for which he had so wickedly plotted. So he made up another plot even more extraordinary and more diabolical still than the first. He decided to pretend it was Mary Wharton that died, and to palm you off on the world as his own child, Una Callingham. For if Mary Wharton died, the property at once became absolutely your mother’s, and she could will it away to her husband or anyone else she chose to.”
“But baby was so much younger than I!” I cried, going back on my recollections once more. “How could he ever manage to make the dates come right again?”
“Quite true,” Jack answered; “the baby was younger than you. But your step-father—I’ve no other name by which I can call him—made a clever plan to set that straight. He concealed from the people in Australia which child had been ill, and he entered her death as Mary Wharton. Then, to cover the falsification, he left Melbourne at once, and travelled about for some years on the Continent in out-of-the-way places till all had been forgotten. You went forth upon the world as Una Callingham, with your true personality as Mary Wharton all obscured even in your own memory. Fortunately for your false father’s plot, you were small for your age, and developed slowly: he gave out, on the contrary, that you were big for your years and had outgrown yourself, Australian-wise, both in wisdom and stature.”
“But my mother!” I exclaimed, appalled. “How could she ever consent to such a wicked deception?”
“Mr. Callingham had your mother completely under his thumb,” Jack answered with promptitude. “She couldn’t call her soul her own, your poor mother—so I’ve heard: he cajoled her and terrified her till she didn’t dare to oppose him. Poor shrinking creature, she was afraid of her life to do anything except as he bade her. He must have persuaded her first to acquiesce passively in this hateful plot, and then must have terrified her afterwards into full compliance by threats of exposure.”
“He was a very unhappy man himself,” I put in, casting back. “His money did him no good. I can remember now how gloomy and moody he was often, at The Grange.”
“Quite true,” Jack replied. “He lived in perpetual fear of your real father’s return, or of some other breakdown to his complicated system of successive deceptions. He never had a happy minute in his whole life, I believe. Blind terrors surrounded him. He was afraid of everything, and afraid of everybody. Only his scientific work seemed ever to give him any relief. There, he became a free man. He threw himself into that, heart and soul, on purpose, I fancy, because it absorbed him while he was at it, and prevented him for the time being from thinking of his position.”
“And how did you find it all out?” I asked eagerly, anxious to get on to the end.
“Well, that’s long to tell,” Jack replied. “Too long for one sitting. I won’t trouble you with it now. Discrepancies in facts and dates, and inquiries among servants both in England and in Victoria, first put me upon the track. But I said nothing at the time of my suspicions to anyone. I waited till I could appeal to the man’s own conscience with success, as I hoped. And then, besides, I hardly knew how to act for the best. I wanted to marry you; and therefore, as far as was consistent with justice and honour, I wished to spare your supposed father a complete exposure.”
“But why didn’t you tell the police?” I asked.
“Because I had really nothing definite in any way to go upon. Realise the position to yourself, and you’ll see how difficult it was for me. Mr. Callingham suspected I was paying you attentions. Clearly, under those circumstances, it was to my obvious interest that you should get possession of all his property. Any claims I might make for you would, therefore, be naturally regarded with suspicion. The shipwrecked man had told nobody but myself. I hadn’t even an affidavit, a death-bed statement. All rested upon his word, and upon mine as retailing it. He was dead, and there was nothing but my narrative for what he told me. The story itself was too improbable to be believed by the police on such dubious evidence. I didn’t even care to try. I wanted to make your step-father confess: and I waited for that till I could compel confession.”
“At last my chance came,” Jack went on. “I’d found out almost everything; not, of course, exactly by way of legal proof, but to my own entire satisfaction: and I determined to lay the matter definitely at once before Mr. Callingham. So I took a holiday for a fortnight, to go bicycling in the Midlands I told my patients; and I fixed my head-quarters at Wrode, which, as you probably remember, is twenty miles off from Woodbury.
“It was important for my scheme I should catch Mr. Callingham alone. I had no idea of entrapping him. I wanted to work upon his conscience and induce him to confess. My object was rather to move him to remorse and restitution than to terrify or surprise him.
“So on the day of the accident—call it murder, if you will—I rode over on my machine, unannounced, to The Grange to see him. You knew where I was staying, you recollect—”
At the words, a burst of memory came suddenly over me.
“Oh yes!” I cried. “I remember. It was at the Wilsons’, at Wrode. I wrote over there to tell you we were going to dine alone at six that evening, as papa had got his electric apparatus home from his instrument-maker, and was anxious to try his experiments early. You’d written to me privately—a boy brought the note—that you wanted to have an hour’s talk alone with papa. I thought it was about ME, and I was, oh, ever so nervous!”
For it all came back to me now, as clear as yesterday.
Jack looked at me hard.
“I’m glad you remember that, dear,” he said. “Now, Una, do try to remember all you can as I go along with my story... Well, I rode over alone, never telling anybody at Wrode where I was going, nor giving your step-father any reason of any sort to expect me. I trusted entirely to finding him busy with his new invention. When I reached The Grange, I came up the drive unperceived, and looking in at the library window, saw your father alone there. He was pottering over his chemicals. That gave me the clue. I left my bicycle under the window, tilted up against the wall, and walked in without ringing, going straight to the library. Nobody saw me come: nobody saw me return, except one old lady on the road, who seemed to have forgotten all about it by the time of the inquest.”
(I nodded and gave a start. I knew that must have been Aunt Emma.)
“Except yourself, Una, no human soul on earth ever seemed to suspect me. And that wasn’t odd; for you and your father, and perhaps Minnie Moore, were the only people in the world who ever knew I was in love with you or cared for you in any way.”
“Go on,” I said, breathless. “And you went into the library.”
“I went into the library,” Jack continued, “where I found your father, just returned from enjoying his cigar on the lawn. He was alone in the room—”
“No, no!” I cried eagerly, putting in my share now; for I had a part in the history. “He WASN’T alone, Jack, though you thought him so at the time. I remember all, at last. It comes back to me like a flash. Oh, heavens, how it comes back to me! Jack, Jack, I remember to-day every word, every syllable of it!”
He gazed at me in surprise.
“Then tell me yourself, Una!” he exclaimed. “How did you come to be there? For I knew you were there at last; but till you fired the pistol, I hadn’t the faintest idea you had heard or seen anything. Tell me all about it, quick! There comes in MY mystery.”
In one wild rush of thought the whole picture rose up like a vision before me.
“Why, Jack,” I cried, “there was a screen, a little screen in the alcove! You remember the alcove at the west end of the room. It was so small a screen, you’d hardly have thought it could hide me; but it did—it did—and all, too, by accident. I’d gone in there after dinner, not much thinking where I went, and was seated on the floor by the little alcove window, reading a book by the twilight. It was a book papa told me I wasn’t to read, and I took it trembling from the shelves, and was afraid he’d scold me—for you know how stern he was. And I never was allowed to go alone into the library. But I got interested in my book, and went on reading. So when he came in, I went on sitting there very still, with the book hidden under my skirt, for fear he should scold me. I thought perhaps before long papa’d go out for a second, to get some plates for his photography or something, and then I could slip away and never be noticed. The big window towards the garden was open, you remember, and I meant to jump out of it—as you did afterwards. It wasn’t very high; and though the book was only The Vicar of Wakefield, he’d forbidden me to read it, and I was dreadfully afraid of him.”
“Then you were there all the time?” Jack cried interrogatively. “And you heard our conversation—our whole conversation?”
“I was there all the time, Jack,” I cried, in a fever of exaltation: “and I heard every word of it! It comes back to me now with a vividness like yesterday. I see the room before my eyes. I remember every syllable: I could repeat every sentence of it.”
Jack drew a deep sigh of intense relief.
“Thank God for that!” he exclaimed, with profound gratitude. “Then I’m saved, and you’re saved. We can both understand one another in that case. We know how it all happened!”
“Perfectly,” I answered. “I know all now. As I sat there and cowered, I heard a knock at the door, and before papa could answer, you entered hastily. Papa looked round, I could hear, and saw who it was in a second.
“‘Oh, it’s you!’ he said, coldly. ‘It’s you, Dr. Ivor. And pray, sir, what do you want here this evening?’”
“Go on!” Jack cried, intensely relieved, I could feel. “Let me see how much more you can remember, Una.”
“So you shut the door softly and said:
“‘Yes, it’s I, Mr. Callingham,’” I continued all aglow, and looking into his eyes for confirmation. “‘And I’ve come to tell you a fact that may surprise you. Prepare for strange news. Richard Wharton has returned to England!’
“I knew Richard Wharton was mamma’s first husband, who was dead before I was born, as I’d always been told: and I sat there aghast at the news: it was so sudden, so crushing. I’d heard he’d been wrecked, and I thought he’d come to life again; but as yet I didn’t suspect what was all the real meaning of it.
“But papa drew back, I could hear, in a perfect frenzy of rage, astonishment, and terror.
“‘Richard Wharton!’ he hissed out between his teeth, springing away like one stung. ‘Richard Wharton come back! You liar! You sneak! He’s dead this twenty years! You’re trying to frighten me.’
“I never meant to overhear your conversation. But at that, it was so strange, I drew back and cowered even closer. I was afraid of papa’s voice. I was afraid of his rage. He spoke just like a man who was ready to murder you.
“Then you began to talk with papa about strange things that astonished me—strange things that I only half understood just then, but that by the light of what you’ve told me to-day I quite understand now—the history of my real father.
“‘I’m no liar,’ you answered. ‘Richard Wharton has come back. And by the aid of what he’s disclosed, I know the whole truth. The girl you call your daughter, and whose money you’ve stolen, is not yours at all. She’s Richard Wharton’s daughter Mary!’
“Papa staggered back a pace or two, and came quite close to the screen. I cowered behind it in alarm. I could see he was terrified. For a minute or two you talked with him, and urged him to confess. Bit by bit, as you went on, he recovered his nerve, and began to bluster. He didn’t deny what you said: he saw it was no use: he just sneered and prevaricated.
“As I listened to his words, I saw he admitted it all. A great horror came over me. Then my life was one long lie! He was never my father. He had concocted a vile plot. He had held me in this slavery so many years to suit his own purposes. He had crushed my mother to death, and robbed me of my birthright. Even before that night, I never loved him. I thought it very wicked of me, but I never could love him. As he spoke to you and grew cynical, I began to loathe and despise him. I can’t tell you how great a comfort it was to me to know—to hear from his own lips I was not that man’s daughter.
“At last, after many recriminations, he looked across at you, and said, half laughing, for he was quite himself again by that time:
“‘This is all very fine, Courtenay Ivor—all very fine in its way; but how are you going to prove it? that’s the real question. Do you think any jury in England will believe, on your unsupported oath, such a cock-and-bull story? Do you think, even if Richard Wharton’s come back, and you’ve got him on your side, I can’t cross-examine all the life out of his body?’
“At that you said gravely—wanting to touch his conscience, I suppose:—
“‘Richard Wharton’s come back, but you can’t cross-examine him. For Richard Wharton died some six or eight weeks since at my cottage at Babbicombe, after revealing to me all this vile plot against himself and his daughter.’
“Then papa drew back with a loud laugh—a hateful laugh like a demon’s. I can’t help calling him papa still, though it pains me even to think of him. That loud laugh rings still in my ears to this day. It was horrible, diabolical, like a wild beast’s in triumph.
“‘You fool!’ he said, with a sneer. ‘And you come here to tell me that! You infernal idiot! You come here to put yourself in my power like this! Courtenay Ivor, I always knew you were an ass, but I didn’t ever know you were quite such a born idiot of a fellow as that. Hold back there, you image!’ With a rapid dart, before you could see what he was doing, he passed a wire round your body and thrust two knobs into your hands. ‘You’re in my power now!’ he exclaimed. ‘You can’t move or stir!’
“I saw at once what he’d done. He’d pinned you to the spot with the handles of his powerful electric apparatus. It was so strong that it would hold one riveted to the spot in pain. You couldn’t let go. You could hardly even speak or cry aloud for help. He had pinned you down irresistibly. I thought he meant to murder you.
“Yet I was too terrified, even so, to scream aloud for the servants. I only crouched there, rooted, and wondered what next would happen.
“He went across to the door and turned the key in it. Then he opened the cabinet and took out some things there. It was growing quite dusk, and I could hardly see them. He returned with them where you stood, struggling in vain to set yourself free. His voice was as hard as adamant now. He spoke slowly and distinctly, in a voice like a fiend’s. Oh, Jack, no wonder that scene took away my reason!”
“And you can remember what he said next, Una?” Jack asked, following me eagerly.
“Yes, I can remember what he said next,” I went on. “He stood over you threateningly. I could see then the thing he held in his right hand was a loaded revolver. In his left was a bottle, a small medical phial.
“‘If you stir, I’ll shoot you,’ he said; ‘I’ll shoot you like a dog! You fool, you’ve sealed your own fate! What an idiot to let me know Richard Wharton’s dead! Now, hear your fate! Nobody saw you come into this house to-night. Nobody shall see you leave. Look here, sir, at this bottle. It’s chloroform: do you understand? Chloroform—chloroform—chloroform! I shall hold it to your nose—so. I shall stifle you quietly—no blood, no fuss, no nasty mess of any sort. And when I’m done,—do you see these flasks?—I can reduce your damned carcase to a pound of ashes with chemicals in half-an-hour! You’ve found out too much. But you’ve mistaken your man! Courtenay Ivor, say your prayers and commend your soul to the devil! You’ve driven me to bay, and I give you no quarter!’”
“Thank God, Una,” Jack cried, “you remember it now even better than I do!”
“Remember it!” I answered, holding my brow with my hands to keep the flood of thought from bursting it to fragments. “Remember it! Why, it comes back to me like waves of fire and burns me. I remember every word, every act, every gesture. I lifted my head slowly, Jack, and looked over the screen at him. In the twilight, I saw him there—the man I called my father—holding the bottle to your face, that wicked bottle of chloroform, with his revolver in one hand, and a calm smile like a fiend’s playing hatefully and cruelly round that grave-looking mouth of his. I never saw any man look so ghastly in my life. I was rooted to the spot with awe and terror. I dared hardly cry out or move. Yet I knew this was murder. He would kill you! He would kill you! He was trying to poison you before my very eyes. Oh, heaven, how I hated him! He was no father of mine. He had never been my father. And he was murdering the man I loved best in the world. For I loved you better than life, Jack! Oh, the strain of it was terrible! I see it all now. I live it all over again. With one wild bound I leapt forward, and, hardly knowing what I did, I pressed the button, turned off the current from the battery, and rushed wildly upon him. I suppose the knob I pressed not only released you, but set the photographic machine at work automatically. But I didn’t know it then. At any rate, I remember now, in the seconds that followed, flash came fast after flash. There was a sudden illumination. The room was lighter than day. It grew alternately bright as noon and then dark as pitch again by contrast. And by the light of the flashes, I saw you, half-dazed with the chloroform, standing helpless there.
“I rushed up and caught the man’s arm. He was never my father! He dropped the bottle and struggled hard for possession of the pistol. First he pointed it at you, then at me, then at you again. He meant to shoot you. I was afraid it would go off. With a terrible effort I twisted his wrist awry, in the mad force of passion, and wrenched the revolver away from him. He jumped at my throat, still silent, but fierce like a tiger at bay. I eluded him, and sprang back. Then I remember no more, except that I stood with the pistol pointed at him. Next, came a flash, a loud roar. And then, in a moment, the Picture. He lay dead on the floor in his blood. And my Second State began. And from that day, for months, I was like a little child again.”
Jack looked at me as I paused.
“And then?” he went on in a very low voice, half prompting me.
“And then all I can remember,” I said, “is how you got out of the window. But I didn’t know when I saw you, it was you or anyone else. That was my Second State then. The shot seemed to end all. What comes next is quite different. It belongs to the new world. There, my life stopped dead short and began all over again.”
There was a moments silence. Jack was the first to break it.
“And now will you give yourself up to the police, Una?” he asked me quietly.
The question brought me back to the present again with a bound.
“Oh! what ought I to do?” I cried, wringing my hands. “I don’t quite know all yet. Jack, why did you run away that last moment and leave me?”
Jack took my hand very seriously.
“Una, my child,” he said, fixing his eyes on mine, “I hardly know whether I can ever make you understand all that. I must ask you at first at least just simply to believe me. I must ask you to trust me and to accept my account. When you rushed upon me as I stood there, all entangled in that hateful apparatus, and unable to move, I didn’t know where you had been; I didn’t know how you’d come there. But I felt sure you must have heard at least your false father’s last words—that he’d stifle me with the chloroform and burn my body up afterwards to ashes with his chemicals. You seized the pistol before I could quite recover from the effects of the fumes. He lay dead at my feet before I realised what was happening.
“Then, in a moment, as I looked at you, I took it all in, like a flash of lightning. I saw how impossible it would be ever to convince anybody else of the truth of our story. I saw if we both told the truth, no one would ever believe us. There was no time then to reflect, no time to hesitate. I had to make up my mind at once to a plan of action, and to carry it out without a second’s delay. In one burst of inspiration, I saw that to stop would be to seal both our fates. I didn’t mind so much for myself; that was nothing, nothing: but for your sake I felt I must dare and risk everything. Then I turned round and looked at you. I saw at one glance the horror of the moment had rendered you speechless and almost senseless. The right plan came to me at once as if by magic. ‘Una,’ I cried, ‘stand back! Wait till the servants come!’ For I knew the report of the revolver would soon bring them up to the library. Then I waited myself. As they reached the door, and forced it open, I jumped up to the window. Just outside, my bicycle stood propped against the wall. I let them purposely catch just a glimpse of my back—an unfamiliar figure. They saw the pistol on the floor,—Mr. Callingham dead—you, startled and horrified—a man unknown, escaping in hot haste from the window. I risked my own life, so as to save your name and honour. I let them see me escape, so as to exonerate you from suspicion. If they hanged me, what matter? Then I leapt down in a hurry, jumped lightly on my machine, and rode off like the wind down the avenue to the high-road. For a second or two they waited to look at you and your father. That second or two saved us. By the time they’d come out to look, I was away down the grounds, past the turn of the avenue, and well on for the high-road. They’d seen a glimpse of the murderer, escaping by the window. They would never suspect YOU. You were saved, and I was happy.”
“And for the same reason even now,” I said, “you wouldn’t tell the police?”
“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Jack answered, in the same words as Dr. Marten. “Why rake up this whole matter? It’s finished for ever now, and nobody but yourself is ever likely to reopen it. If we both told our tale, we might run a great risk of being seriously misinterpreted. You know it’s true; so do I: but who else would believe us? No man’s bound to criminate himself. You shot him to save my life, at the very moment when you first learned all his cruelty and his vileness. The rest of the world could never be made to understand all that. They’d say to the end, as it looks on the surface, ‘She shot her father to save her lover.’”
“You’re right,” I said slowly. “I shall let this thing rest. But the photographs, Jack—the apparatus—the affair of the inquest?”
“That was all very simple,” Jack answered. “For a day or two, of course, I was in a frantic state of mind for fear you should be suspected, or the revolver should betray you. But though I saw the electric sparks, of course, I knew nothing about the photographs. I wasn’t even aware that the apparatus took negatives automatically. And I was so full of the terrible reports in the newspapers about your sudden loss of health, that I could think of nothing else—least of all my own safety. As good luck would have it, however, the clergyman at Wrode, who knew the Wilsons, happened to speak to me of the murder—all England called it the murder and talked of nothing else for at least a fortnight,—and in the course of conversation he mentioned this apparatus of Mr. Callingham’s construction. ‘What a pity,’ he said, ‘there didn’t happen to be one of them in the library at the time! If it was focussed towards the persons, and had been set on by the victim, it would have photographed the whole scene the murder, the murderer.’
“That hint revealed much to me. As he spoke, I remembered suddenly about those mysterious flashes when you burst all at once on my sight from behind the screen. Till that moment, I thought of them only as some result of your too suddenly turning off the electric current. But then, it came home to me in a second that Mr. Callingham must have set out his apparatus all ready for experimenting—that the electric apparatus was there to put it in working order. The button you turned must not only have stopped the current that nailed me writhing to the spot: it must also have set working the automatic photographic camera!
“That thought, as you may imagine, filled me with speechless alarm: for I remembered then that one of the flashes broke upon us at the exact moment when you fired the pistol. Such a possibility was horrible to contemplate. The photographs by themselves could give no clue to our conversation or to the events that compelled you, almost against your own will, to fire that fatal shot. If they were found by the police, all would be up with both of us. They might hang ME if they liked: except for Elsie’s sake, I didn’t mind much about that: but for your safety, come what might, I felt I must manage to get hold of them or to destroy them.
“Were the negatives already in the hands of the police? That was now the great question. I read the reports diligently, with all their descriptions of the room, and noticed that while the table, the alcove, the screen, the box, the electrical apparatus, were all carefully mentioned, not a word was said anywhere about the possession of the negatives. Reasoning further upon the description of the supposed murderer as given by the servants, and placarded broadcast in every town in England, I came to the conclusion that the police couldn’t yet have discovered the existence of these negatives: for some of them must surely have photographed my face, however little in focus; while the printed descriptions mentioned only the man’s back, as the servants saw him escaping from the window. The papers said the room was being kept closed till the inquest, for inspection in due time by the coroner’s jury. I made up my mind at once. When the room was opened for the jurors to view it, I must get in there and carry them off, if they caught me in the attempt.
“It was no use trying before the jury had seen the room. But as soon as that was all over, I judged the strictness of the watch upon the premises would be relaxed, and the windows would probably be opened a little to air the place. So on the morning of the inquest, I told the Wilsons casually I’d met you at Torquay and had therefore a sort of interest in learning the result of the coroner’s deliberation. Then I took my bicycle, and rode across to Woodbury. Leaning up my machine against the garden wall, I walked carelessly in at the gate, and up the walk to the library window, as if the place belonged to me. Oh, how my heart beat as I looked in and wondered! The folding halves were open, and the box stood on the table, still connected with the wires that conducted the electrical current. I stood and hesitated in alarm. Were the negatives still there, or had the police discovered them? If they were gone, all was up with you. The game was lost. No jury on earth, I felt sure, would believe my story.
“I vaulted up to the sill. Thank heaven, I was athletic. Not a soul was about: but I heard a noise of muffled voices in the other rooms behind. Treading cat-like across the floor, I turned the key in the lock. A chalk mark still showed the position of the pistol on the ground exactly as you flung it. The box was on the table, and I saw at a glance, the wires which connected it with the battery had never been disconnected. I was afraid of receiving a shock if I touched them with my hands, and I had no time to waste in discovering electrical attachments. So I pulled out my knife, and you can fancy with what trembling hands I cut that wire on either side and released the box from its dangerous connections. I knew only too well the force of that current. Then I took the thing under my arm, leaped from the window once more, and ran across the shrubbery towards the spot where I’d left my bicycle.
“On the way, the thought struck me that if I carried along the camera, all would be up with me should I happen to be challenged. It was the only one of the sort in existence at the time, and the wires at the side would at once suffice to identify it and to arouse the suspicion even of an English policeman. I paused for a moment behind a thick clump of lilacs and tried to pull out the incriminating negatives. Oh, Una, I did it for your sake; but there, terrified and trembling, in hiding behind the bushes, and in danger of my life, with that still more unspeakable danger for yours haunting me always like a nightmare, can you wonder that for the moment I almost felt myself a murderer? The very breezes in the trees made my heart give a jump, and then stand still within me. I got out the first two or three plates with some trifling difficulty, for I didn’t understand the automatic apparatus then as I understand it now: but the fourth stuck hard for a minute; the fifth broke in two; and the sixth—well, the sixth plate baffled me entirely by getting jammed in the clockwork, and refusing to move, either backward or forward.
“At that moment, I either heard or fancied I heard a loud noise of pursuit, a hue and cry behind me. Zeal for your safety had made me preternaturally nervous. I looked about me hurriedly, thrust the negatives I’d recovered into my breast-pocket as fast as ever I could, flung the apparatus away from me with the sixth plate jammed hard in the groove, and made off at the top of my speed for the wall behind me. For there, at that critical point, it occurred to me suddenly that the sixth and last flash of the machine had come and gone just as I stood poising myself on the ledge of the window-sill; and I thought to myself—rightly as it turned out—this additional evidence would only strengthen the belief in the public mind that Mr. Callingham had been murdered by the man whom the servants saw escaping from the window.
“The rest, my child, you know pretty well already. In a panic on your account, I scrambled over the wall, tearing my hands as I went with that nasty-bottle glass, reached my bicycle outside, and made off, not for the country, but for the inn where they were holding the coroner’s inquest. My left hand I had to hold, tied up in my handkerchief to stop the bleeding, in the pocket of my jacket: but I thought this the best way, all the same, to escape detection. And, indeed, instead of being, as I feared, the only man there in bicycling dress and knickerbockers, I found the occasion had positively attracted all the cyclists of the neighbourhood. Each man went there to show his own innocence of fear or suspicion. A good dozen or two of bicyclists stood gathered already in the body of the room in the same incriminating costume. So I found safety in numbers. Even the servants who had seen me disappear through the window, though their eyes lighted upon me more than once, never for a moment seemed to suspect me. And I know very well why. When I stand up, I’m the straightest and most perpendicular man that ever walked erect. But when I poise to jump, I bend my spine so much that I produce the impression of being almost hump-backed. It was that attitude you recognised in me when I jumped from the window just now.”
“Why, Jack,” I cried clinging to him in a perfect whirlwind of wonder, “one can hardly believe it—that was only an hour ago!”
“That was only an hour ago,” Jack answered, smiling. “But as for you, I suppose you’ve lived half a lifetime again in it. And now you know the whole secret of the Woodbury Mystery. And you won’t want to give yourself up to the police any longer.”