Chapter Twenty Three.Captain Oliphant pays one of his Debts.Mr Ratman’s natural modesty prompted a precipitate retreat from the embarrassing vicinity of the gentleman whom he had last seen with a horsewhip in his hand; but prudence and the presence of the stranger, and the lack of any other place to go to, prevailed upon him to remain.The stranger, apparently unaware of the presence of a third party, continued his conversation where it had been interrupted.“Yes,” said he, “I reckon I should know something of my own family, although it’s a generation since I set foot in these parts.”“Yes; all right,” said Ratman uncomfortably. “I’ll go and order dinner.”But the entrance of the landlord prevented this manoeuvre.“The gig from Maxfield is in the village, Mr Armstrong,” said he, addressing the tutor. “I’ve sent word to Robbins to call for you in half an hour. Maybe, if Mr Ratman is going up, you could give him a lift.”“Mr Ratman is not going up,” said Mr Armstrong.The stranger here took notice of the tutor.“Friend of my friend, eh?” said he. “Pleased to know you, sir. Resident in these parts, I presume? What?”“Quite so,” said Mr Armstrong, putting up his glass, and honouring the speaker with a minute survey.“As I was saying to our young friend here, there’s been changes in this locality since I was here about the time of Noah. You named Maxfield just now, sir. Likely you know Squire Ingleton, my relative, at the manor-house there?”The tutor’s glass dropped abruptly.“Your relative? What relation were you to the old Squire?”“WasI—is he dead, then?”“More than a year ago.”“Sir,” said the stranger, with some excitement, “that man was my sister’s husband. I guess I’ve come here a trifle late. Dead? He didn’t look to have it in him. What say?”It said a good deal for Mr Ratman’s nerve that in the tutor’s presence he took upon himself to reply boldly—“My father died rather suddenly a year since. So you are my uncle?”The American mayor stared at the speaker in bewilderment, which was not lessened by an abrupt laugh from the gentleman at the fireplace.“I guess I’ll take a seat and work this out,” said he. “I’m your uncle, am I? I never should have known it, if you hadn’t been so obliging as to tell me, young man. Which branch of the family tree do you hang on to?”“Your sister had a son, Roger Ingleton. That’s my name.”“Is that so? And you’re the present Squire of Maxfield? Well, well. When did you come to life again?”“There was a false report of my death,” said Ratman, glancing a little nervously at the tutor, who was diligently removing the mud from his riding-boots.“Wal, it’s singular. I never expected to see a nephew of mine again. Why, how long is it, now, since I went over? Thirty-seven years if it’s a day.”“I can’t remember that,” said Ratman tentatively.“Seeing you weren’t born, you’d find it hard,” said Mr Headland. “But, say, by all accounts you were a troublesome boy.”“I was not all I might have been,” replied Mr Ratman, beginning to wish this cross-examination was over.“Put it that way, certainly. You ran away, and left your mother, my sister, with a broken heart, I’ve heard say.”“My father and I quarrelled, and I left home—yes.”Here the tutor quitted the fire and came to where the two men sat.“Excuse my interrupting you, sir,” said he to the stranger, “but your conversation interests me. The fact is, the Squire married a second time, and left a son, whose guardian I happen to be. By the old man’s will my ward is the heir. You will allow I have a right to feel interested in this gentleman, who only discovered six months ago that he was the lost elder brother.”The good American sat back in his chair and looked from Ratman to Armstrong, and from Armstrong back to Ratman, in a state of painful bewilderment.“Now,” said the tutor, “my ward feels a little curiosity about his elder brother—only natural, is it not?—and I, as his legal guardian, naturally share that curiosity.”“Why, certainly,” said the Mayor, beginning to be interested.Mr Ratman began to lose countenance, and fidgeted uncomfortably with the forks and spoons.“I have heard a little of this gentleman’s romantic career,” continued the tutor, with his half-drawl. “He has been good enough to tell us, in fact, that when he left home—by the way, when was that, Ratman?”“When I know your right to ask me questions,” growled Ratman, “I’ll see about answering them.”“Seems to me,” said the Mayor, assuming judicial functions for the time being, “unless you’ve disgraced yourself, you can’t hurt much by saying. You say you’re the Squire’s son; this gentleman—I didn’t catch your name, sir?—Armstrong?—Mr Armstrong says he’s not as sure as you are. Seems to me, if you tell one thing, you may as well tell another. It’s all one story, and if it’s true, it’s a good one.”Mr Ratman did not like the turn affairs were taking. If he refused to reply to the questions put to him, he was aware that he was damaging his own claim. If he answered, how was he to know if the risk was not even greater? And yet, what more was Armstrong likely to know about the lost son than he himself? He might as well go through with it. So he replied, sullenly—“I left home a year before my mother died. He can get the date of that from the tombstone, if he wants it.”“Thanks; I’ll look at it,” said the tutor with aggravating cheerfulness. “You went up to London, didn’t you?”“I’ve told you so, and that I lived there with a man called Fastnet.”“And then you went abroad, I think you said?”“Yes; to India.”“Just so; that’s where you died, is it not? You stayed in London long enough to go to the dogs, I understood you to say?”“That didn’t take long. I spent all my money in six months, and then enlisted,” said Ratman, feeling fairly launched by this time.“Quite so. And you died, I believe, in India?”“I was supposed to have died in a skirmish; and they sent news home that I had. I never corrected it.”“Whereabouts was the skirmish, if it’s a fair question?”“On the frontier. I forget the name.”“That’s unfortunate. By the way, to go back to London, do you recollect where Mr Fastnet lived? I should like to call on him.”“You won’t find him; he died before I went abroad—drank himself to death.”“I’m sorry to hear that. And you enlisted under your present name of Ratman, of course?”“My present name is Ingleton. If I called myself Ratman, that was because I didn’t want my father to hear of me. I never told any one my real name.”“Seems to me,” said the Mayor, “it’s odd how your medical adviser on the field of battle found out where to write home to say you were dead.”“It is still more odd, sir,” said the tutor, fixing the claimant with his glass, “that this Mr Fastnet (who, you will be glad to hear, has also come to life again, was still in good health when my ward saw him a few weeks ago) retains a vivid recollection of the runaway son having entertained him for a year at his own lodgings; at the end of which time the prodigal, so far from enlisting, took to the stage, and spent another year, at least, with a company of strolling players.“We have your unfortunate’s nephew’s story,” proceeded the tutor, “carefully traced up to a certain point, and if either you or Mr Ratman are interested in the matter, we can produce our witnesses. Your memory is a treacherous one, Robert Ratman. It is no use asking you, I fear, what became of you after a certain riot in Boulogne when you, as the Ghost in ‘Hamlet,’ and your fellow-tragedians were mobbed for not paying the rent of your hall?”Mr Ratman, who during this cross-examination had passed through all the stages from blustering rage to abject discomfiture, sank back on his chair and turned a livid face to his questioner. He had sense enough to see that the game was up; and not being an actor himself, he was at a loss to conceal his defeat. The tutor’s cold, keen gaze took the heart out of him.“Lying dog!” snarled he, “I’ve had enough of your questions. You think yourself clever, but I’ll be even with you yet. I’ll ruin the lot of you—you and your fellow-scoundrel and his brats, who don’t know yet what it is to have a felon for a father. You’ll be sorry for this.”So saying, he took up his bag, and with the best swagger he could assume slunk from the room.“See—stay here, young man,” said the Mayor excitedly; “there’s something else.”But he was gone. The outer door slammed to and his footsteps died gradually away down the street.Mr Armstrong and the stranger exchanged glances in silence. Then the Mayor turned to Mr Armstrong with a stern face.“Seems to me, sir,” said he, “that if that young man’s the knave, you’re uncommon like the fool. You’ll excuse me mentioning it after the service you have just rendered to the cause of veracity, but it’s a solemn fact.”“I have heard the same opinion expressed by other authorities, and I have no doubt it is true. You mean to tell me I should have extorted from him a written recantation of his claim?”“That’s so; you guess right. Consequence is, I’m bound to stay now as a witness to see this quarrel through. Here have I come on a pleasure-trip to see my relatives, and it seems I’ve got to combine business and pleasure after all.”“You forget I’ve no hold over this man. He does not claim the property, although he guesses that my ward will hand it over to him if he proves his identity. I can only show him to be a liar.”“You seem pretty sure of that.”“I am myself; and I hope, for everybody’s sake, that your nephew, if he should turn up, will be a better credit to the name than this land-shark.”“Well, sir, I don’t thank you for dragging me into the business; but, since I am here, I stay to see it out.”“I am relieved to hear you say so.”“Tell me now,” said the Mayor, “what the story is; and what does our young friend mean by his farewell threats?”Thereupon Mr Armstrong gave his new ally a faithful account of the family difficulty: of Captain Oliphant’s embarrassing relations to the claimant, of Miss Rosalind’s dilemma, of Roger’s quixotic determination to find his lost brother, and of his own—the tutor’s—conviction of the hopelessness of the quest.The visitor by no means shared the last conclusion.“I rather calculate that lost young man ain’t as dead as you think,” said he. “By all accounts he wasn’t born to be drowned, and he’s not hung yet. You bet, the young brother will come up with him before time’s called.”“Well, by the last accounts he seems to have a vague clue as to his whereabouts fifteen years ago,” said the tutor; “we shall hear what he makes of it. To-morrow you must come up to Maxfield and see my co-trustee.”The presence of this unexpected friend of the family, in the capacity of impartial umpire, struck the tutor as particularly opportune at this juncture. He had been a witness to Ratman’s virtual admission to his imposture, and his natural interest in the discovery of his own nephew was not likely to warp his determination to see fair play for Roger.Captain Oliphant, when he heard next morning of the new arrival, by no means shared his co-trustee’s satisfaction. The news, indeed, agitated him to a remarkable degree, and he astonished the tutor by his ill-concealed reluctance to meet him.“It is important that you should see him,” remarked the tutor. “As the uncle of the lost elder brother he is entitled, I think, to our confidence. I can imagine no reason why you should be afraid to see him.”“Afraid! Who says I am afraid to see him?”“I can think of no other explanation of your reluctance—”“Please, sir, Mr Headland to see you,” announced Raffles.Captain Oliphant changed colour as he turned to greet the visitor.“You’ll pardon the early call,” said the latter, “but they gave me such a shocking supper at the inn, that I resolved to try my luck up here for breakfast. Captain Oliphant, I presume?—friend of my friend Armstrong. Pleased to know you, sir. Pity you weren’t with us last night to see the decline and fall of your ingenious friend, R. Ratman. Your colleague, sir, put that young man to bed in a way that would have made you enjoy yourself. Seems to me, captain, you are well rid of him.”“I fail to understand all this,” said the captain. “If you refer to Mr Ratman’s claims to be the lost Roger Ingleton—”“My nephew,” interposed the American.“All I can say is, that I am not at all satisfied the claim is not a just one.”“Well, sir,” said Mr Headland, “if that’s your opinion, it’s more than that young man thinks himself by this time. But never mind that.”“I do mind it, sir; and I should like to know what right any one has to decide the matter for me? I would suggest that, though we are pleased to see you, you should allow us to attend to our own business.”“I not only allow you, sir, but I expect it of you. And that reminds me of a question that has been puzzling me ever since I heard of the Squire’s death. I wrote him a letter in the fall of last year.”The captain was seized with a sudden impulse to stir the fire, and as he stood thus with his back turned, Mr Armstrong could not help wondering what there was in the operation so violently to agitate the operator’s frame.“Yes, sir, a letter dated November 9th, which must have been delivered, as I have made inquiries, and find it was not returned. It contained money, and as it was never acknowledged, I had fears it was lost.”“Any letters for the Squire have been opened by his executors. I recollect none from abroad—do you, Captain Oliphant?” said the tutor.The Captain, still with his back turned, said— “No; it never came into my hands.”“Mrs Ingleton would hardly be likely to have opened it. It would be only a short time before her death.”“It’s singular,” said the Mayor. “My clerk posted it. He should have registered it, but omitted.”“How was it directed?” asked the captain, turning at last, and pale after his exertions.“Roger Ingleton, senior, Maxfield, England.”“Hum! Did your clerk know it contained money?”“Which means, did he purloin it? Well, sir, we shall see. An English bank-note can be traced. That’s one advantage you have over us on the other side.”Mr Armstrong during this short colloquy experienced a curious depression of spirits. He was thinking, not of the bank-notes, or the American mayor, or even of Captain Oliphant, but of Rosalind and Jill and Tom; and the thought of them just at this moment made him feel very melancholy.As for the captain, if his thoughts for a moment turned in the same direction, they came back instantly, with a strong revulsion of hate against the man who stood in his way at every turn; who seemed to read him through, to unmask him silently whenever he sought to take refuge in a lie, to pin him ruthlessly down to the consequences of his own delinquencies. But for Armstrong he might have been a free man—free of his debts, free of his frauds, clear in his children’s eyes, able to hold up his head to all the world. As it was, everything seemed to conspire with his enemy to pinion him and hold him fast, a prey to the Nemesis that was on its way! What would he not give to have this stumbling-block out of the path, and feel himself free to breathe and hope once more?In such a mood he spent the morning; and about midday, shaking off his visitor, wandered out into the park for fresh air and space to think. As he paced, there returned to him memories of old half-forgotten days, of faces that once looked into his trustfully, voices that once made his heart glad, children that once ran to welcome him; visions of vanished hopes, ambitions, ideals. Where were they all now? Who believed in him to-day? Who would believe in him a week hence? What voices rejoiced him now? Into whose life did he carry strength and cheer? The park stretched bleak and desolate before him; the earth lay sullen under his feet, the very trees drooped around him, and the great restless ocean beyond moaned at his coming. It was nothing to him that the smell of spring was in the air; that the lark was carolling high overhead; that the declining sun was darting his rays through the trees.Near at hand rose a sound of laughter. He durst not turn that way, lest he should meet his own children.Far away, through a break in the trees, he could catch a glimpse of the old church at Yeld with the Vicarage beside it, where dwelt the one being he dreaded most—his own daughter. From behind wafted a sound of music through an open window, where sat the man who had found him out and could ruin him by a word.Which way was he to turn? Which way shall a man turn who would escape from himself?For two long hours he wandered on caring not which way he took, and feeling himself step by step closer beset by his dismal forebodings. Presently he found himself beyond the park boundaries on the open downs which stretched to the edge of the cliff. The touch of the salt sea-breeze on his fevered brow startled him and made him shiver. The last gleam of daylight was fading in the west, and when presently it flickered out and left him in the dark, he felt that the last ray of his own hope had vanished too. And yet, strange as it may seem, this man had never been quite as honest with himself as he was now. The game was fairly up. He had long since given up deluding himself that he was better than he seemed. Now the time was come when it hardly seemed worth while to delude other people. It was no use. Nor, to such a pass had he come, did it seem much use to be a coward. The dog whose last hope has gone will gather himself together for a final fling at his persecutors; the poltroon driven back against the wall, unable to retreat farther, will sometimes turn and make a stand such as he never deemed himself capable of before. And so Captain Oliphant, because he could do nothing else, plucked up a little courage and groped about in the dark for some new fragments of his lost manhood.He would go back and face the worst. If he was to be ruined, he would pull the mask off himself, and not leave it to Armstrong or any one else to do it. Whatever befell, nothing could well be more wretched than the plight in which he now stood. He had no amends to make, but he could at least simplify the labours of those whose business it was to expose and punish him. With which poor spark of resolution he turned dismally to go back to Maxfield.As he did so he became aware of footsteps close at hand on the cliff-path. Whoever the passenger might be—at such an hour and place it was not likely to be any one but a coastguard or a fisherman—Captain Oliphant was in no mood for company. He therefore stepped off the path and sat down on a seat on the edge of the cliff till the intruder had passed.It was not so dark but that the latter perceived the movement, and halting suddenly, said—“Who’s that?”The voice was that of Mr Ratman. What brought him here at this moment, to extinguish, perhaps, the little gleam of courage that flickered in the breast of his wretched dupe?For a moment the captain was tempted to run like a thief from a policeman; but his very desperation came to his rescue.“What do you want here, Ratman?”“Hullo, it’s Oliphant! Here’s a piece of luck. You’re the very man I wanted to see. I’ve changed my mind since I said good-bye yesterday, my boy, and mean to remain here on the spot and see the end of this business. I was on my way to see you. Come along.”“You’d better say what you want to say here. You won’t find any admirers of yours up at the house.”“Ah! then you’ve heard of last night’s business? What on earth brings this Yankee idiot here at this time to spoil everything? Now, Teddy, the long and short of this business is, that you must stir yourself. You’ve shuffled long enough. First of all you were going to marry the widow; you boggled that. Then you were going to succeed to the property; you’ve boggled that. Then you were to clear the tutor out of the way; you’ve boggled that. Then you were to raise the wind and pay me off, and you’ve boggled that. I’ve given you long enough rope, goodness knows. I mean to haul in now.”Captain Oliphant rose from his seat with a dismal laugh. “I’m tired of hearing you say that, Ratman. I wish you’d do it and be done with it.”Ratman peered through the gloom at the speaker in surprise. “Hullo!” said he, “that’s a new tune for you. Now look here; I suppose you’ve not forgotten our talk yesterday?”“Well?”“You’ve two things to do; you’ve to recognise me as Roger Ingleton when the time comes. There’ll be proofs and witnesses. They must satisfy you, mind. Make no mistake of that. Then I must have Rosalind. I love her. On the day I’m your son-in-law you shall have back every bill I hold against you. Now, is it a bargain? It’s a cheap one for you, I can tell you.”The blood rose to Captain Oliphant’s brow. A few hours ago he would have faltered and evaded, half whined, half promised; now sheer desperation made him reckless.He laughed bitterly.“Recognise you—you shark! Never! And if you ever dare to speak of my daughter, I’ll shake you like a cur. There now, do as you like; you’ve got my answer.”Ratman dropped his jaw in utter amazement. For a minute the words would not come. Then, with a face so livid that Oliphant could see its whiteness through the night, he hissed—“You mean it? You defy me?—me, with these papers in my hand, and the whole story of your villainy in my keeping? You—”As he held up the bills a wild impulse prompted the wretched captain to make a grab at them.There was a short struggle. Oliphant, with his back to the cliff, kept his hold for a moment; then a fierce blow sent him reeling backwards to the edge, with the torn half of the documents in his hand. There was a gasp, a half cry, and next moment only one man stood in the place, peering with ashen face into the black darkness below.
Mr Ratman’s natural modesty prompted a precipitate retreat from the embarrassing vicinity of the gentleman whom he had last seen with a horsewhip in his hand; but prudence and the presence of the stranger, and the lack of any other place to go to, prevailed upon him to remain.
The stranger, apparently unaware of the presence of a third party, continued his conversation where it had been interrupted.
“Yes,” said he, “I reckon I should know something of my own family, although it’s a generation since I set foot in these parts.”
“Yes; all right,” said Ratman uncomfortably. “I’ll go and order dinner.”
But the entrance of the landlord prevented this manoeuvre.
“The gig from Maxfield is in the village, Mr Armstrong,” said he, addressing the tutor. “I’ve sent word to Robbins to call for you in half an hour. Maybe, if Mr Ratman is going up, you could give him a lift.”
“Mr Ratman is not going up,” said Mr Armstrong.
The stranger here took notice of the tutor.
“Friend of my friend, eh?” said he. “Pleased to know you, sir. Resident in these parts, I presume? What?”
“Quite so,” said Mr Armstrong, putting up his glass, and honouring the speaker with a minute survey.
“As I was saying to our young friend here, there’s been changes in this locality since I was here about the time of Noah. You named Maxfield just now, sir. Likely you know Squire Ingleton, my relative, at the manor-house there?”
The tutor’s glass dropped abruptly.
“Your relative? What relation were you to the old Squire?”
“WasI—is he dead, then?”
“More than a year ago.”
“Sir,” said the stranger, with some excitement, “that man was my sister’s husband. I guess I’ve come here a trifle late. Dead? He didn’t look to have it in him. What say?”
It said a good deal for Mr Ratman’s nerve that in the tutor’s presence he took upon himself to reply boldly—
“My father died rather suddenly a year since. So you are my uncle?”
The American mayor stared at the speaker in bewilderment, which was not lessened by an abrupt laugh from the gentleman at the fireplace.
“I guess I’ll take a seat and work this out,” said he. “I’m your uncle, am I? I never should have known it, if you hadn’t been so obliging as to tell me, young man. Which branch of the family tree do you hang on to?”
“Your sister had a son, Roger Ingleton. That’s my name.”
“Is that so? And you’re the present Squire of Maxfield? Well, well. When did you come to life again?”
“There was a false report of my death,” said Ratman, glancing a little nervously at the tutor, who was diligently removing the mud from his riding-boots.
“Wal, it’s singular. I never expected to see a nephew of mine again. Why, how long is it, now, since I went over? Thirty-seven years if it’s a day.”
“I can’t remember that,” said Ratman tentatively.
“Seeing you weren’t born, you’d find it hard,” said Mr Headland. “But, say, by all accounts you were a troublesome boy.”
“I was not all I might have been,” replied Mr Ratman, beginning to wish this cross-examination was over.
“Put it that way, certainly. You ran away, and left your mother, my sister, with a broken heart, I’ve heard say.”
“My father and I quarrelled, and I left home—yes.”
Here the tutor quitted the fire and came to where the two men sat.
“Excuse my interrupting you, sir,” said he to the stranger, “but your conversation interests me. The fact is, the Squire married a second time, and left a son, whose guardian I happen to be. By the old man’s will my ward is the heir. You will allow I have a right to feel interested in this gentleman, who only discovered six months ago that he was the lost elder brother.”
The good American sat back in his chair and looked from Ratman to Armstrong, and from Armstrong back to Ratman, in a state of painful bewilderment.
“Now,” said the tutor, “my ward feels a little curiosity about his elder brother—only natural, is it not?—and I, as his legal guardian, naturally share that curiosity.”
“Why, certainly,” said the Mayor, beginning to be interested.
Mr Ratman began to lose countenance, and fidgeted uncomfortably with the forks and spoons.
“I have heard a little of this gentleman’s romantic career,” continued the tutor, with his half-drawl. “He has been good enough to tell us, in fact, that when he left home—by the way, when was that, Ratman?”
“When I know your right to ask me questions,” growled Ratman, “I’ll see about answering them.”
“Seems to me,” said the Mayor, assuming judicial functions for the time being, “unless you’ve disgraced yourself, you can’t hurt much by saying. You say you’re the Squire’s son; this gentleman—I didn’t catch your name, sir?—Armstrong?—Mr Armstrong says he’s not as sure as you are. Seems to me, if you tell one thing, you may as well tell another. It’s all one story, and if it’s true, it’s a good one.”
Mr Ratman did not like the turn affairs were taking. If he refused to reply to the questions put to him, he was aware that he was damaging his own claim. If he answered, how was he to know if the risk was not even greater? And yet, what more was Armstrong likely to know about the lost son than he himself? He might as well go through with it. So he replied, sullenly—
“I left home a year before my mother died. He can get the date of that from the tombstone, if he wants it.”
“Thanks; I’ll look at it,” said the tutor with aggravating cheerfulness. “You went up to London, didn’t you?”
“I’ve told you so, and that I lived there with a man called Fastnet.”
“And then you went abroad, I think you said?”
“Yes; to India.”
“Just so; that’s where you died, is it not? You stayed in London long enough to go to the dogs, I understood you to say?”
“That didn’t take long. I spent all my money in six months, and then enlisted,” said Ratman, feeling fairly launched by this time.
“Quite so. And you died, I believe, in India?”
“I was supposed to have died in a skirmish; and they sent news home that I had. I never corrected it.”
“Whereabouts was the skirmish, if it’s a fair question?”
“On the frontier. I forget the name.”
“That’s unfortunate. By the way, to go back to London, do you recollect where Mr Fastnet lived? I should like to call on him.”
“You won’t find him; he died before I went abroad—drank himself to death.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. And you enlisted under your present name of Ratman, of course?”
“My present name is Ingleton. If I called myself Ratman, that was because I didn’t want my father to hear of me. I never told any one my real name.”
“Seems to me,” said the Mayor, “it’s odd how your medical adviser on the field of battle found out where to write home to say you were dead.”
“It is still more odd, sir,” said the tutor, fixing the claimant with his glass, “that this Mr Fastnet (who, you will be glad to hear, has also come to life again, was still in good health when my ward saw him a few weeks ago) retains a vivid recollection of the runaway son having entertained him for a year at his own lodgings; at the end of which time the prodigal, so far from enlisting, took to the stage, and spent another year, at least, with a company of strolling players.
“We have your unfortunate’s nephew’s story,” proceeded the tutor, “carefully traced up to a certain point, and if either you or Mr Ratman are interested in the matter, we can produce our witnesses. Your memory is a treacherous one, Robert Ratman. It is no use asking you, I fear, what became of you after a certain riot in Boulogne when you, as the Ghost in ‘Hamlet,’ and your fellow-tragedians were mobbed for not paying the rent of your hall?”
Mr Ratman, who during this cross-examination had passed through all the stages from blustering rage to abject discomfiture, sank back on his chair and turned a livid face to his questioner. He had sense enough to see that the game was up; and not being an actor himself, he was at a loss to conceal his defeat. The tutor’s cold, keen gaze took the heart out of him.
“Lying dog!” snarled he, “I’ve had enough of your questions. You think yourself clever, but I’ll be even with you yet. I’ll ruin the lot of you—you and your fellow-scoundrel and his brats, who don’t know yet what it is to have a felon for a father. You’ll be sorry for this.”
So saying, he took up his bag, and with the best swagger he could assume slunk from the room.
“See—stay here, young man,” said the Mayor excitedly; “there’s something else.”
But he was gone. The outer door slammed to and his footsteps died gradually away down the street.
Mr Armstrong and the stranger exchanged glances in silence. Then the Mayor turned to Mr Armstrong with a stern face.
“Seems to me, sir,” said he, “that if that young man’s the knave, you’re uncommon like the fool. You’ll excuse me mentioning it after the service you have just rendered to the cause of veracity, but it’s a solemn fact.”
“I have heard the same opinion expressed by other authorities, and I have no doubt it is true. You mean to tell me I should have extorted from him a written recantation of his claim?”
“That’s so; you guess right. Consequence is, I’m bound to stay now as a witness to see this quarrel through. Here have I come on a pleasure-trip to see my relatives, and it seems I’ve got to combine business and pleasure after all.”
“You forget I’ve no hold over this man. He does not claim the property, although he guesses that my ward will hand it over to him if he proves his identity. I can only show him to be a liar.”
“You seem pretty sure of that.”
“I am myself; and I hope, for everybody’s sake, that your nephew, if he should turn up, will be a better credit to the name than this land-shark.”
“Well, sir, I don’t thank you for dragging me into the business; but, since I am here, I stay to see it out.”
“I am relieved to hear you say so.”
“Tell me now,” said the Mayor, “what the story is; and what does our young friend mean by his farewell threats?”
Thereupon Mr Armstrong gave his new ally a faithful account of the family difficulty: of Captain Oliphant’s embarrassing relations to the claimant, of Miss Rosalind’s dilemma, of Roger’s quixotic determination to find his lost brother, and of his own—the tutor’s—conviction of the hopelessness of the quest.
The visitor by no means shared the last conclusion.
“I rather calculate that lost young man ain’t as dead as you think,” said he. “By all accounts he wasn’t born to be drowned, and he’s not hung yet. You bet, the young brother will come up with him before time’s called.”
“Well, by the last accounts he seems to have a vague clue as to his whereabouts fifteen years ago,” said the tutor; “we shall hear what he makes of it. To-morrow you must come up to Maxfield and see my co-trustee.”
The presence of this unexpected friend of the family, in the capacity of impartial umpire, struck the tutor as particularly opportune at this juncture. He had been a witness to Ratman’s virtual admission to his imposture, and his natural interest in the discovery of his own nephew was not likely to warp his determination to see fair play for Roger.
Captain Oliphant, when he heard next morning of the new arrival, by no means shared his co-trustee’s satisfaction. The news, indeed, agitated him to a remarkable degree, and he astonished the tutor by his ill-concealed reluctance to meet him.
“It is important that you should see him,” remarked the tutor. “As the uncle of the lost elder brother he is entitled, I think, to our confidence. I can imagine no reason why you should be afraid to see him.”
“Afraid! Who says I am afraid to see him?”
“I can think of no other explanation of your reluctance—”
“Please, sir, Mr Headland to see you,” announced Raffles.
Captain Oliphant changed colour as he turned to greet the visitor.
“You’ll pardon the early call,” said the latter, “but they gave me such a shocking supper at the inn, that I resolved to try my luck up here for breakfast. Captain Oliphant, I presume?—friend of my friend Armstrong. Pleased to know you, sir. Pity you weren’t with us last night to see the decline and fall of your ingenious friend, R. Ratman. Your colleague, sir, put that young man to bed in a way that would have made you enjoy yourself. Seems to me, captain, you are well rid of him.”
“I fail to understand all this,” said the captain. “If you refer to Mr Ratman’s claims to be the lost Roger Ingleton—”
“My nephew,” interposed the American.
“All I can say is, that I am not at all satisfied the claim is not a just one.”
“Well, sir,” said Mr Headland, “if that’s your opinion, it’s more than that young man thinks himself by this time. But never mind that.”
“I do mind it, sir; and I should like to know what right any one has to decide the matter for me? I would suggest that, though we are pleased to see you, you should allow us to attend to our own business.”
“I not only allow you, sir, but I expect it of you. And that reminds me of a question that has been puzzling me ever since I heard of the Squire’s death. I wrote him a letter in the fall of last year.”
The captain was seized with a sudden impulse to stir the fire, and as he stood thus with his back turned, Mr Armstrong could not help wondering what there was in the operation so violently to agitate the operator’s frame.
“Yes, sir, a letter dated November 9th, which must have been delivered, as I have made inquiries, and find it was not returned. It contained money, and as it was never acknowledged, I had fears it was lost.”
“Any letters for the Squire have been opened by his executors. I recollect none from abroad—do you, Captain Oliphant?” said the tutor.
The Captain, still with his back turned, said— “No; it never came into my hands.”
“Mrs Ingleton would hardly be likely to have opened it. It would be only a short time before her death.”
“It’s singular,” said the Mayor. “My clerk posted it. He should have registered it, but omitted.”
“How was it directed?” asked the captain, turning at last, and pale after his exertions.
“Roger Ingleton, senior, Maxfield, England.”
“Hum! Did your clerk know it contained money?”
“Which means, did he purloin it? Well, sir, we shall see. An English bank-note can be traced. That’s one advantage you have over us on the other side.”
Mr Armstrong during this short colloquy experienced a curious depression of spirits. He was thinking, not of the bank-notes, or the American mayor, or even of Captain Oliphant, but of Rosalind and Jill and Tom; and the thought of them just at this moment made him feel very melancholy.
As for the captain, if his thoughts for a moment turned in the same direction, they came back instantly, with a strong revulsion of hate against the man who stood in his way at every turn; who seemed to read him through, to unmask him silently whenever he sought to take refuge in a lie, to pin him ruthlessly down to the consequences of his own delinquencies. But for Armstrong he might have been a free man—free of his debts, free of his frauds, clear in his children’s eyes, able to hold up his head to all the world. As it was, everything seemed to conspire with his enemy to pinion him and hold him fast, a prey to the Nemesis that was on its way! What would he not give to have this stumbling-block out of the path, and feel himself free to breathe and hope once more?
In such a mood he spent the morning; and about midday, shaking off his visitor, wandered out into the park for fresh air and space to think. As he paced, there returned to him memories of old half-forgotten days, of faces that once looked into his trustfully, voices that once made his heart glad, children that once ran to welcome him; visions of vanished hopes, ambitions, ideals. Where were they all now? Who believed in him to-day? Who would believe in him a week hence? What voices rejoiced him now? Into whose life did he carry strength and cheer? The park stretched bleak and desolate before him; the earth lay sullen under his feet, the very trees drooped around him, and the great restless ocean beyond moaned at his coming. It was nothing to him that the smell of spring was in the air; that the lark was carolling high overhead; that the declining sun was darting his rays through the trees.
Near at hand rose a sound of laughter. He durst not turn that way, lest he should meet his own children.
Far away, through a break in the trees, he could catch a glimpse of the old church at Yeld with the Vicarage beside it, where dwelt the one being he dreaded most—his own daughter. From behind wafted a sound of music through an open window, where sat the man who had found him out and could ruin him by a word.
Which way was he to turn? Which way shall a man turn who would escape from himself?
For two long hours he wandered on caring not which way he took, and feeling himself step by step closer beset by his dismal forebodings. Presently he found himself beyond the park boundaries on the open downs which stretched to the edge of the cliff. The touch of the salt sea-breeze on his fevered brow startled him and made him shiver. The last gleam of daylight was fading in the west, and when presently it flickered out and left him in the dark, he felt that the last ray of his own hope had vanished too. And yet, strange as it may seem, this man had never been quite as honest with himself as he was now. The game was fairly up. He had long since given up deluding himself that he was better than he seemed. Now the time was come when it hardly seemed worth while to delude other people. It was no use. Nor, to such a pass had he come, did it seem much use to be a coward. The dog whose last hope has gone will gather himself together for a final fling at his persecutors; the poltroon driven back against the wall, unable to retreat farther, will sometimes turn and make a stand such as he never deemed himself capable of before. And so Captain Oliphant, because he could do nothing else, plucked up a little courage and groped about in the dark for some new fragments of his lost manhood.
He would go back and face the worst. If he was to be ruined, he would pull the mask off himself, and not leave it to Armstrong or any one else to do it. Whatever befell, nothing could well be more wretched than the plight in which he now stood. He had no amends to make, but he could at least simplify the labours of those whose business it was to expose and punish him. With which poor spark of resolution he turned dismally to go back to Maxfield.
As he did so he became aware of footsteps close at hand on the cliff-path. Whoever the passenger might be—at such an hour and place it was not likely to be any one but a coastguard or a fisherman—Captain Oliphant was in no mood for company. He therefore stepped off the path and sat down on a seat on the edge of the cliff till the intruder had passed.
It was not so dark but that the latter perceived the movement, and halting suddenly, said—
“Who’s that?”
The voice was that of Mr Ratman. What brought him here at this moment, to extinguish, perhaps, the little gleam of courage that flickered in the breast of his wretched dupe?
For a moment the captain was tempted to run like a thief from a policeman; but his very desperation came to his rescue.
“What do you want here, Ratman?”
“Hullo, it’s Oliphant! Here’s a piece of luck. You’re the very man I wanted to see. I’ve changed my mind since I said good-bye yesterday, my boy, and mean to remain here on the spot and see the end of this business. I was on my way to see you. Come along.”
“You’d better say what you want to say here. You won’t find any admirers of yours up at the house.”
“Ah! then you’ve heard of last night’s business? What on earth brings this Yankee idiot here at this time to spoil everything? Now, Teddy, the long and short of this business is, that you must stir yourself. You’ve shuffled long enough. First of all you were going to marry the widow; you boggled that. Then you were going to succeed to the property; you’ve boggled that. Then you were to clear the tutor out of the way; you’ve boggled that. Then you were to raise the wind and pay me off, and you’ve boggled that. I’ve given you long enough rope, goodness knows. I mean to haul in now.”
Captain Oliphant rose from his seat with a dismal laugh. “I’m tired of hearing you say that, Ratman. I wish you’d do it and be done with it.”
Ratman peered through the gloom at the speaker in surprise. “Hullo!” said he, “that’s a new tune for you. Now look here; I suppose you’ve not forgotten our talk yesterday?”
“Well?”
“You’ve two things to do; you’ve to recognise me as Roger Ingleton when the time comes. There’ll be proofs and witnesses. They must satisfy you, mind. Make no mistake of that. Then I must have Rosalind. I love her. On the day I’m your son-in-law you shall have back every bill I hold against you. Now, is it a bargain? It’s a cheap one for you, I can tell you.”
The blood rose to Captain Oliphant’s brow. A few hours ago he would have faltered and evaded, half whined, half promised; now sheer desperation made him reckless.
He laughed bitterly.
“Recognise you—you shark! Never! And if you ever dare to speak of my daughter, I’ll shake you like a cur. There now, do as you like; you’ve got my answer.”
Ratman dropped his jaw in utter amazement. For a minute the words would not come. Then, with a face so livid that Oliphant could see its whiteness through the night, he hissed—
“You mean it? You defy me?—me, with these papers in my hand, and the whole story of your villainy in my keeping? You—”
As he held up the bills a wild impulse prompted the wretched captain to make a grab at them.
There was a short struggle. Oliphant, with his back to the cliff, kept his hold for a moment; then a fierce blow sent him reeling backwards to the edge, with the torn half of the documents in his hand. There was a gasp, a half cry, and next moment only one man stood in the place, peering with ashen face into the black darkness below.
Chapter Twenty Four.The Billiard-marker at “l’Hôtel Soult.”In thesalonof a small dilapidated hotel in one of the southern suburbs of Paris sat Roger, three weeks after the event recorded in the last chapter. He had the dull place, apparently, to himself. The billiard-room, visible through the folding-doors, was deserted. In the dining-room the waiter dozed undisturbed by a single guest. The landlady in herbureauyawned and hummed, and had not even a bill to make out.She had already made out that of the young English gentleman, and a pretty one it was! A guest such as he was worth a season to the landlady of “L’Hôtel Soult.” Three weeks ago, half dead with cold and weariness, he had come and asked for a bed; and in that bed till yesterday he had remained, feverish, coughing, sometimes gasping for breath. Compared with the attack he had had in London in the winter, this was a mild one; but in this dreary place, with not a friend at hand, with a doctor who could not understand a word he said, with a voluble landlady who, when she visited him, never gave him a chance of getting in a word, and with a few servants who stared at him blankly whenever he attempted to lift his voice, it was the most miserable of all his illnesses.He was as close a prisoner as if he had been in jail. The doctor, who took apartments at his expense in the hotel, would not allow him to move. No one to whom he appealed could be made to understand that he had friends in England with whom he desired to communicate. One letter to Armstrong which he had tried to write the landlady impounded and destroyed as waste-paper, perhaps not quite by accident. This well-to-do young guest was worth nursing. His friends would only come and fetch him away; whereas she, motherly soul! was prepared to take him in and do for him. The pocket of the coat which on the day of his arrival she had carried off to her kitchen to dry contained satisfactory proof that Monsieur was a young gentleman who could pay; and although she was too honest to recoup herself for her services in advance, she had kept the coat hanging up in her room for a week, as a pleasant reminder of the joys of hospitality.Only yesterday the invalid had recovered sufficiently to rout the doctor and stagger down to the telegraph-office; and to-day, propped up with pillows on the uncomfortable stuff-sofa, he was expiating his rashness with a day of miserable coughing.At the sound of his handbell, the landlady, a buxom dame of forty-five autumns, hastened to the couch of her profitable visitor.Roger was too weak to oppose the flood of her congratulations and compliments on his recovery, and allowed her to talk herself breathless before he put in his word.“Madame has not been many years in these parts?” he inquired in his best French.Madame threw up her shoulders and protested she had lived in those parts from a child, when the dull suburb was once a festive little rustic village, and the great city now gobbling it up once loomed mysteriously in the north, with acres and miles of green fields and woods between.“But this hotel,” said Roger, “has not stood here so long?”“Ma foi!” said she, “since I can remember, when I used to visit my good uncle here every Sunday, I remember ‘L’Hôtel Soult.’ Why, when I married my cousin and becameMadame l’hôtesse, it was all fields between us and Paris. Yes, and little enough change about the house. We cannot afford, Monsieur, to build and decorate. By a miracle we escaped the German shells. Ah! a merry time was the year of the war! France suffered, alas! but the ‘L’Hôtel Soult’ prospered. ’Twas the year I was left a widow! I had ten waiters then, Monsieur, and two billiard-markers, acheffrom the best kitchen in Paris, and stables, andchambrières, and—why, Monsieur, the wages of one week were twenty—twenty-five napoleons!”“That was after the war?” asked Roger.“Yes. Before that I had more. But, alas! they left me for the field, and came no more.”“Were all your waiters Frenchmen?” asked Roger.Madame stared curiously at the questioner.“Why do you ask? I have had many kinds. Some English, like Monsieur.”“A year or two after the war,” said Roger, “there was an Englishman, a relation of mine, who was a waiter in an hotel in one of the suburbs south of Paris. I want to hear of him. I have hunted for weeks. I could hear nothing of him. I came here before I gave it up as a hopeless search, and, as you know, I’ve been laid up ever since. You have been kind to me, Madame; something makes me think I was not kept here for nothing. Can you help me to find my friend?”The landlady began to have inward misgivings that she had not behaved to this pleasant-spoken young guest of hers as nicely as she might have done, and she secretly resolved to revise the bill in his favour before presenting it.“Why, Monsieur, I had plenty English in my time. The year after the war I had—let me think—two or three. Your friend—was he the little lame one who waited beautiful at table, but that he cough, cough, till I must send him away?”“No; that’s not the one.”“Then it was the fat one?—John Bull, we call him, who eat more than he served, never used a fork when he had his fingers. Ah, he was a dirty one, was your friend!”“No,” said Roger; “that’s not he. My friend was not much older than I am, and a gentleman.”“A gentleman—and a waiter!” laughed the landlady. “But tell me, what was his name?”“He used to call himself Rogers.”She shook her head.“No one of that name was here. I had English, one or two—Bardsley, and Jackson, and Smith; he was a gentleman, but he was not young. He was fifty years, Mr Smith—a good servant. Also there was Monsieur Callow.”“Callot!” exclaimed Roger, starting at the familiar name. “Was he an Englishman?”“Surely. C-a-l-l-o-w—Callow. Ah! he was a droll one, was Monsieur Callow, and a gentleman too. I never had a billiard-marker like him. He could play any man, and lose by one point; and he could recite and sing; and oh, he eat so little! Every one laughed at him; but he laughed little himself, and thought himself too good for his fellow-waiters.”“What was he like?” asked Roger, flushing with excitement.“A fine young man, with long curly hair, and whiskers and a beard. He was afraid of nothing, tall and strong. Ah me! I have seen him knock a man down at a blow. He was a wild, reckless man, was Monsieur Callow; but a good servant, and oh! a beautiful billiard player. He always knew how to lose a game, and oh! it made my table so popular!”“Had he any friends in Paris?”“Yes; he went often to see his father—so he told me—an actor who gave lessons. I never sawMonsieur le père.”“How long did he stay with you?”“Callow? For five years he served me well. Then there was afracas, a quarrel; I remember it now. An English officer was here, and played with him, and was beaten. ’Twas the only time I ever knew Callow win a game; but he lost his temper this time, and won. Then Milord called him a cheat, and without a word Monsieur Callow knocked him down. The police came, and Monsieur Callow knockedhimdown. Then he put on his hat and walked, and I never saw him more. He always said he would go to sea, and I think he would keep his word. Ah, a telegram! ’Tis long since telegrams came to my hotel.Hélas! not for me; for you, Monsieur.”It was from Armstrong.“Shall be with you, ten to-morrow morning.”The three weeks which had passed at Maxfield had been terrible.The discovery of Captain Oliphant’s body at the foot of the cliff, with the clear traces of a struggle on the brink above, had created a profound sensation at Maxfield and the country round.For a day the air was full of wild conjectures of suicide, incident, foul play; until the last-named theory was finally confirmed by the discovery in the tightly-clenched hand of the dead man of a fragment of a promissory note bearing the signature of Robert Ratman.To the tutor, as he held the paper in his hand, everything became startlingly clear. This was the last act of a tragedy which had been going on for months; and now that the curtain had abruptly fallen, he could not help, in the midst of this horror, owning to a sense of thankfulness, for the sake of others, that the troubled career of his rival and enemy had stopped short at a point beyond which nothing but disgrace and scandal and misery awaited it.From that disgrace it was his business now, by every means in his power, to shield the innocent brother and sisters who still honoured the dead man as their father.Many a grievous task had been thrown upon the tutor in his day, but none cost him more effort than this, of breaking to the children of his enemy the news of their father’s death. But he went through it manfully and ably.Rosalind, on whom the blow fell hardest, because on her spirit the burden of her father’s cares had lain heaviest, rose, with a heroine’s courage, to the occasion, and earned the tutor’s boundless gratitude by making his task easy. She said little; she understood everything. She remembered nothing but the father’s love—his old caresses and confidences and kindnesses. The tears she shed blotted out all the anxieties and misgivings and heart-sinkings of recent weeks. All that remained was crowded with love.Tom, dulled and stunned, took the story in gradually, and got used to it as he went along. He came and slept at night in the tutor’s room, and felt how much worse things might have been had it not been for the stalwart protector who put hope and cheer into him, and filled the blank in his heart with sturdier views of life than the boy had ever harboured there before.As for Jill, for a week all was blackness and darkness to her. She felt deserted—lost. She cried herself to sleep at night, and by day wandered over the house, peeping into her father’s room, and half expecting to see him back. Then her gentle spirit took courage, and she looked up, and her eyes lit with comfort and hope on Mr Armstrong. Everything could not be lost if he was there; and when he sometimes came, and took her little hand in his, and invited her to be his companion in his rides, or sought her out in her lonely walks and made her teach him the haunts of her favourite flowers or read to him from her favourite books, she began to think there was still some joy left on earth.“Dear Mr Armstrong,” she said one day when, by invitation, she came to make afternoon tea for him in his room, “you are so awfully kind to me! If I was only as old as Rosalind, I would marry you.”This rather startling declaration took the tutor considerably aback. He laughed and said—“You are very nice as you are, Jill.”“You think I’m silly, I know,” said she, “but I’m not. Would you hate me if I was older?”“I don’t think I could hate you, not even if you were a hundred.”“I love you ever so much,” said she. “Please don’t believe what Tom said about the Duke. I don’t like him a millionth part as much as you.”“Poor Duke!” said the tutor.“Really and truly. And oh, Mr Armstrong, if you would only wait I would love to marry you some day! How soon shall I be big enough?”This was getting embarrassing. But the tutor was in a tender mood, and had it not in his heart to thwart the little Leap-year maid. “Time flies fast,” said he; “you’ll be grown up before we know where we all are.”She sighed.“I know you’d sooner have Rosalind. But she doesn’t care for you as much as I do. She likes Roger best; but I don’t; I like you fifty thousand times better. Would it be anawfulbother, Mr Armstrong?”“What! to have Jill for my little wife?” said he. “Not a bit. If ever I want one, she’s the first person I mean to ask.”With this declaration Jill had to rest content. It solaced her sorrow vastly; and even though Rosalind, to whom she confided the compact under a pledge of secrecy, scolded and laughed at her alternately, she felt a new prospect open before her, and set herself resolutely to the task of growing up worthy of MrArmstrong’s affection.But amid all these troubles and hopes at Maxfield, two questions were on every one’s lips: “Where was Roger? Where was Robert Ratman?”Roger had written once after reaching Paris, a letter full of hope, which had arrived a few days before Captain Oliphant’s death. He had succeeded at last in tracking the man Pantalzar to a low lodging in the city, and from him had ascertained somewhat of the history of the Callot family. They had lodged with him at Long Street in London, where they had given lessons in acting, elocution, and music; and Pantalzar clearly remembered the lad Rogers as a constant visitor at the house, partly in the capacity of a promising student of the dramatic art, and partly as a hopeless lover of his preceptor’s wayward daughter.After a year, his troubles in the latter capacity were abruptly cut short by the illness and death of the young lady; a blow which staggered the parents and broke up the establishment at Long Street. It failed, however, to drive Rogers from the party, who, with a romantic loyalty, attached himself to the fortunes of the old people, and became like a son to them in their distresses.Eventually the bereaved family migrated to Paris, whence Pantalzar had once heard from the father, who had found employment as stall manager of a third-rate theatre in one of thefauxbourg. Hither Roger tracked him, and after dogged search, often baffled, sometimes apparently hopeless, discovered some one who remembered the reputed son of the old couple, who, as far as this witness could remember, was thought to have hired himself out as billiard-marker in an hotel in one of the southern suburbs of the city.Thus far he had succeeded when he wrote home. What transpired subsequently, and how he dropped for a season out of all knowledge, the reader already knows.The suspense occasioned by his sudden disappearance, as may be imagined, added a new element of wretchedness to the situation at Maxfield. Telegrams, letters, inquiries, alike failed to discover his whereabouts or the secret of his silence. As post after post came and brought neither message nor tidings, the hearts of the watchers grew sick. To the tutor especially, tied as he was to the scene of the tragedy, those three weeks were a period of torture. He urged Dr Brandram to go over to Paris to make inquiries; but the Doctor, after a fortnight of fruitless search, returned empty-handed.Mr Armstrong thereupon resolved at all hazards to quit his post and go himself. He knew something of Paris. He had old associations with the city, and once, as the reader has heard, possessed acquaintances there. If any one could find the boy, he thought he could; and with such trusty substitutes as the Doctor and Mr Headland, who remained at Yeld, to leave behind, he felt that he might, nay rather that he must, venture on the journey.It was on the morning of his departure, as he was waiting for the trap to carry him to the station, that Roger’s telegram was put in his hand:—“Come—have been ill—better now—Hotel Soult—no news.”Twenty-four hours later the tutor was at his pupil’s side, with a heavy weight lifted from his heart, and resolved, come what would, not to quit his post till he had the truant safe back at Maxfield.The news he brought with him served to drive from Roger’s mind all thoughts of continuing his sojourn a day longer than was necessary to recover his strength.“It seems pretty certain,” said he, “that my brother, when he left here, returned to England, and probably went to sea very soon after. There is no object in staying here. Look in that room there, Armstrong. That’s the billiard-room in which he spent most of his time, and that’s the very table on which he let himself be beaten regularly for the good of the house.”The tutor walked across to the folding-doors and surveyed the dingy room with critical interest.“And that must have been little more than twelve years ago,” said he. “Do you still hold to your theory that Ratman is your brother?”“I have no theory. I must find my brother, even if he is a—a murderer,” said the boy with a groan. “But, I say, has nothing been heard of him?”“The police have traced him to London; there the scent ends for the present. He is probably in hiding there, and one may have to wait weeks or months till he gets off his guard and is caught.”About ten days later they started, by slow stages, on the homeward journey. Whether Madame received all she expected for her hospitality is doubtful. Mr Armstrong undertook the duties of cashier, and used his eye-glass considerably in scrutinising the figures. He craved an interview with Madame in her parlour to discuss her arithmetic, and although he appeared eventually to arrive at a satisfactory understanding with the good lady (so much so, that she shed tears at his departure), he did not complain that her charges were extortionate, as French hotels go.The home-coming of the heir of Maxfield created a welcome flutter of excitement among the desolate occupants of the manor-house and their neighbours. But the flutter in their hearts was nothing compared with that in the heart of the heir himself as he walked across the park on the day after his return to call at the Vicarage and invite Rosalind to accompany him in a ride. What passed—whether the flutter was contagious, what brought back the deserted colour to Miss Rosalind’s cheeks, why they rode so slow and left so much of their course to the decision of their steeds,—all this and many other matters for wonder, history recordeth not, as is quite proper. But it does record that when, on their return, Mr Armstrong chanced to come out on to the door-step, where the two stood unmounted, Roger said—“Armstrong, Rosalind has promised to be my wife.”The tutor flushed a little at this not unexpected announcement; then taking his pupil’s arm, he said—“It means great happiness for you both. I am glad—very glad.”But why, if he was so glad, did he slink off to his study forthwith and play a dirge on his piano, and there sit listlessly in his chair for the rest of the morning staring out of the window through his glass, till Jill tripped in and fetched him down to lunch, saying—“Dear Mr Armstrong, try not to be too awfully sorry.Ithink no one is as nice as you.”
In thesalonof a small dilapidated hotel in one of the southern suburbs of Paris sat Roger, three weeks after the event recorded in the last chapter. He had the dull place, apparently, to himself. The billiard-room, visible through the folding-doors, was deserted. In the dining-room the waiter dozed undisturbed by a single guest. The landlady in herbureauyawned and hummed, and had not even a bill to make out.
She had already made out that of the young English gentleman, and a pretty one it was! A guest such as he was worth a season to the landlady of “L’Hôtel Soult.” Three weeks ago, half dead with cold and weariness, he had come and asked for a bed; and in that bed till yesterday he had remained, feverish, coughing, sometimes gasping for breath. Compared with the attack he had had in London in the winter, this was a mild one; but in this dreary place, with not a friend at hand, with a doctor who could not understand a word he said, with a voluble landlady who, when she visited him, never gave him a chance of getting in a word, and with a few servants who stared at him blankly whenever he attempted to lift his voice, it was the most miserable of all his illnesses.
He was as close a prisoner as if he had been in jail. The doctor, who took apartments at his expense in the hotel, would not allow him to move. No one to whom he appealed could be made to understand that he had friends in England with whom he desired to communicate. One letter to Armstrong which he had tried to write the landlady impounded and destroyed as waste-paper, perhaps not quite by accident. This well-to-do young guest was worth nursing. His friends would only come and fetch him away; whereas she, motherly soul! was prepared to take him in and do for him. The pocket of the coat which on the day of his arrival she had carried off to her kitchen to dry contained satisfactory proof that Monsieur was a young gentleman who could pay; and although she was too honest to recoup herself for her services in advance, she had kept the coat hanging up in her room for a week, as a pleasant reminder of the joys of hospitality.
Only yesterday the invalid had recovered sufficiently to rout the doctor and stagger down to the telegraph-office; and to-day, propped up with pillows on the uncomfortable stuff-sofa, he was expiating his rashness with a day of miserable coughing.
At the sound of his handbell, the landlady, a buxom dame of forty-five autumns, hastened to the couch of her profitable visitor.
Roger was too weak to oppose the flood of her congratulations and compliments on his recovery, and allowed her to talk herself breathless before he put in his word.
“Madame has not been many years in these parts?” he inquired in his best French.
Madame threw up her shoulders and protested she had lived in those parts from a child, when the dull suburb was once a festive little rustic village, and the great city now gobbling it up once loomed mysteriously in the north, with acres and miles of green fields and woods between.
“But this hotel,” said Roger, “has not stood here so long?”
“Ma foi!” said she, “since I can remember, when I used to visit my good uncle here every Sunday, I remember ‘L’Hôtel Soult.’ Why, when I married my cousin and becameMadame l’hôtesse, it was all fields between us and Paris. Yes, and little enough change about the house. We cannot afford, Monsieur, to build and decorate. By a miracle we escaped the German shells. Ah! a merry time was the year of the war! France suffered, alas! but the ‘L’Hôtel Soult’ prospered. ’Twas the year I was left a widow! I had ten waiters then, Monsieur, and two billiard-markers, acheffrom the best kitchen in Paris, and stables, andchambrières, and—why, Monsieur, the wages of one week were twenty—twenty-five napoleons!”
“That was after the war?” asked Roger.
“Yes. Before that I had more. But, alas! they left me for the field, and came no more.”
“Were all your waiters Frenchmen?” asked Roger.
Madame stared curiously at the questioner.
“Why do you ask? I have had many kinds. Some English, like Monsieur.”
“A year or two after the war,” said Roger, “there was an Englishman, a relation of mine, who was a waiter in an hotel in one of the suburbs south of Paris. I want to hear of him. I have hunted for weeks. I could hear nothing of him. I came here before I gave it up as a hopeless search, and, as you know, I’ve been laid up ever since. You have been kind to me, Madame; something makes me think I was not kept here for nothing. Can you help me to find my friend?”
The landlady began to have inward misgivings that she had not behaved to this pleasant-spoken young guest of hers as nicely as she might have done, and she secretly resolved to revise the bill in his favour before presenting it.
“Why, Monsieur, I had plenty English in my time. The year after the war I had—let me think—two or three. Your friend—was he the little lame one who waited beautiful at table, but that he cough, cough, till I must send him away?”
“No; that’s not the one.”
“Then it was the fat one?—John Bull, we call him, who eat more than he served, never used a fork when he had his fingers. Ah, he was a dirty one, was your friend!”
“No,” said Roger; “that’s not he. My friend was not much older than I am, and a gentleman.”
“A gentleman—and a waiter!” laughed the landlady. “But tell me, what was his name?”
“He used to call himself Rogers.”
She shook her head.
“No one of that name was here. I had English, one or two—Bardsley, and Jackson, and Smith; he was a gentleman, but he was not young. He was fifty years, Mr Smith—a good servant. Also there was Monsieur Callow.”
“Callot!” exclaimed Roger, starting at the familiar name. “Was he an Englishman?”
“Surely. C-a-l-l-o-w—Callow. Ah! he was a droll one, was Monsieur Callow, and a gentleman too. I never had a billiard-marker like him. He could play any man, and lose by one point; and he could recite and sing; and oh, he eat so little! Every one laughed at him; but he laughed little himself, and thought himself too good for his fellow-waiters.”
“What was he like?” asked Roger, flushing with excitement.
“A fine young man, with long curly hair, and whiskers and a beard. He was afraid of nothing, tall and strong. Ah me! I have seen him knock a man down at a blow. He was a wild, reckless man, was Monsieur Callow; but a good servant, and oh! a beautiful billiard player. He always knew how to lose a game, and oh! it made my table so popular!”
“Had he any friends in Paris?”
“Yes; he went often to see his father—so he told me—an actor who gave lessons. I never sawMonsieur le père.”
“How long did he stay with you?”
“Callow? For five years he served me well. Then there was afracas, a quarrel; I remember it now. An English officer was here, and played with him, and was beaten. ’Twas the only time I ever knew Callow win a game; but he lost his temper this time, and won. Then Milord called him a cheat, and without a word Monsieur Callow knocked him down. The police came, and Monsieur Callow knockedhimdown. Then he put on his hat and walked, and I never saw him more. He always said he would go to sea, and I think he would keep his word. Ah, a telegram! ’Tis long since telegrams came to my hotel.Hélas! not for me; for you, Monsieur.”
It was from Armstrong.
“Shall be with you, ten to-morrow morning.”
The three weeks which had passed at Maxfield had been terrible.
The discovery of Captain Oliphant’s body at the foot of the cliff, with the clear traces of a struggle on the brink above, had created a profound sensation at Maxfield and the country round.
For a day the air was full of wild conjectures of suicide, incident, foul play; until the last-named theory was finally confirmed by the discovery in the tightly-clenched hand of the dead man of a fragment of a promissory note bearing the signature of Robert Ratman.
To the tutor, as he held the paper in his hand, everything became startlingly clear. This was the last act of a tragedy which had been going on for months; and now that the curtain had abruptly fallen, he could not help, in the midst of this horror, owning to a sense of thankfulness, for the sake of others, that the troubled career of his rival and enemy had stopped short at a point beyond which nothing but disgrace and scandal and misery awaited it.
From that disgrace it was his business now, by every means in his power, to shield the innocent brother and sisters who still honoured the dead man as their father.
Many a grievous task had been thrown upon the tutor in his day, but none cost him more effort than this, of breaking to the children of his enemy the news of their father’s death. But he went through it manfully and ably.
Rosalind, on whom the blow fell hardest, because on her spirit the burden of her father’s cares had lain heaviest, rose, with a heroine’s courage, to the occasion, and earned the tutor’s boundless gratitude by making his task easy. She said little; she understood everything. She remembered nothing but the father’s love—his old caresses and confidences and kindnesses. The tears she shed blotted out all the anxieties and misgivings and heart-sinkings of recent weeks. All that remained was crowded with love.
Tom, dulled and stunned, took the story in gradually, and got used to it as he went along. He came and slept at night in the tutor’s room, and felt how much worse things might have been had it not been for the stalwart protector who put hope and cheer into him, and filled the blank in his heart with sturdier views of life than the boy had ever harboured there before.
As for Jill, for a week all was blackness and darkness to her. She felt deserted—lost. She cried herself to sleep at night, and by day wandered over the house, peeping into her father’s room, and half expecting to see him back. Then her gentle spirit took courage, and she looked up, and her eyes lit with comfort and hope on Mr Armstrong. Everything could not be lost if he was there; and when he sometimes came, and took her little hand in his, and invited her to be his companion in his rides, or sought her out in her lonely walks and made her teach him the haunts of her favourite flowers or read to him from her favourite books, she began to think there was still some joy left on earth.
“Dear Mr Armstrong,” she said one day when, by invitation, she came to make afternoon tea for him in his room, “you are so awfully kind to me! If I was only as old as Rosalind, I would marry you.”
This rather startling declaration took the tutor considerably aback. He laughed and said—
“You are very nice as you are, Jill.”
“You think I’m silly, I know,” said she, “but I’m not. Would you hate me if I was older?”
“I don’t think I could hate you, not even if you were a hundred.”
“I love you ever so much,” said she. “Please don’t believe what Tom said about the Duke. I don’t like him a millionth part as much as you.”
“Poor Duke!” said the tutor.
“Really and truly. And oh, Mr Armstrong, if you would only wait I would love to marry you some day! How soon shall I be big enough?”
This was getting embarrassing. But the tutor was in a tender mood, and had it not in his heart to thwart the little Leap-year maid. “Time flies fast,” said he; “you’ll be grown up before we know where we all are.”
She sighed.
“I know you’d sooner have Rosalind. But she doesn’t care for you as much as I do. She likes Roger best; but I don’t; I like you fifty thousand times better. Would it be anawfulbother, Mr Armstrong?”
“What! to have Jill for my little wife?” said he. “Not a bit. If ever I want one, she’s the first person I mean to ask.”
With this declaration Jill had to rest content. It solaced her sorrow vastly; and even though Rosalind, to whom she confided the compact under a pledge of secrecy, scolded and laughed at her alternately, she felt a new prospect open before her, and set herself resolutely to the task of growing up worthy of Mr
Armstrong’s affection.
But amid all these troubles and hopes at Maxfield, two questions were on every one’s lips: “Where was Roger? Where was Robert Ratman?”
Roger had written once after reaching Paris, a letter full of hope, which had arrived a few days before Captain Oliphant’s death. He had succeeded at last in tracking the man Pantalzar to a low lodging in the city, and from him had ascertained somewhat of the history of the Callot family. They had lodged with him at Long Street in London, where they had given lessons in acting, elocution, and music; and Pantalzar clearly remembered the lad Rogers as a constant visitor at the house, partly in the capacity of a promising student of the dramatic art, and partly as a hopeless lover of his preceptor’s wayward daughter.
After a year, his troubles in the latter capacity were abruptly cut short by the illness and death of the young lady; a blow which staggered the parents and broke up the establishment at Long Street. It failed, however, to drive Rogers from the party, who, with a romantic loyalty, attached himself to the fortunes of the old people, and became like a son to them in their distresses.
Eventually the bereaved family migrated to Paris, whence Pantalzar had once heard from the father, who had found employment as stall manager of a third-rate theatre in one of thefauxbourg. Hither Roger tracked him, and after dogged search, often baffled, sometimes apparently hopeless, discovered some one who remembered the reputed son of the old couple, who, as far as this witness could remember, was thought to have hired himself out as billiard-marker in an hotel in one of the southern suburbs of the city.
Thus far he had succeeded when he wrote home. What transpired subsequently, and how he dropped for a season out of all knowledge, the reader already knows.
The suspense occasioned by his sudden disappearance, as may be imagined, added a new element of wretchedness to the situation at Maxfield. Telegrams, letters, inquiries, alike failed to discover his whereabouts or the secret of his silence. As post after post came and brought neither message nor tidings, the hearts of the watchers grew sick. To the tutor especially, tied as he was to the scene of the tragedy, those three weeks were a period of torture. He urged Dr Brandram to go over to Paris to make inquiries; but the Doctor, after a fortnight of fruitless search, returned empty-handed.
Mr Armstrong thereupon resolved at all hazards to quit his post and go himself. He knew something of Paris. He had old associations with the city, and once, as the reader has heard, possessed acquaintances there. If any one could find the boy, he thought he could; and with such trusty substitutes as the Doctor and Mr Headland, who remained at Yeld, to leave behind, he felt that he might, nay rather that he must, venture on the journey.
It was on the morning of his departure, as he was waiting for the trap to carry him to the station, that Roger’s telegram was put in his hand:—
“Come—have been ill—better now—Hotel Soult—no news.”
Twenty-four hours later the tutor was at his pupil’s side, with a heavy weight lifted from his heart, and resolved, come what would, not to quit his post till he had the truant safe back at Maxfield.
The news he brought with him served to drive from Roger’s mind all thoughts of continuing his sojourn a day longer than was necessary to recover his strength.
“It seems pretty certain,” said he, “that my brother, when he left here, returned to England, and probably went to sea very soon after. There is no object in staying here. Look in that room there, Armstrong. That’s the billiard-room in which he spent most of his time, and that’s the very table on which he let himself be beaten regularly for the good of the house.”
The tutor walked across to the folding-doors and surveyed the dingy room with critical interest.
“And that must have been little more than twelve years ago,” said he. “Do you still hold to your theory that Ratman is your brother?”
“I have no theory. I must find my brother, even if he is a—a murderer,” said the boy with a groan. “But, I say, has nothing been heard of him?”
“The police have traced him to London; there the scent ends for the present. He is probably in hiding there, and one may have to wait weeks or months till he gets off his guard and is caught.”
About ten days later they started, by slow stages, on the homeward journey. Whether Madame received all she expected for her hospitality is doubtful. Mr Armstrong undertook the duties of cashier, and used his eye-glass considerably in scrutinising the figures. He craved an interview with Madame in her parlour to discuss her arithmetic, and although he appeared eventually to arrive at a satisfactory understanding with the good lady (so much so, that she shed tears at his departure), he did not complain that her charges were extortionate, as French hotels go.
The home-coming of the heir of Maxfield created a welcome flutter of excitement among the desolate occupants of the manor-house and their neighbours. But the flutter in their hearts was nothing compared with that in the heart of the heir himself as he walked across the park on the day after his return to call at the Vicarage and invite Rosalind to accompany him in a ride. What passed—whether the flutter was contagious, what brought back the deserted colour to Miss Rosalind’s cheeks, why they rode so slow and left so much of their course to the decision of their steeds,—all this and many other matters for wonder, history recordeth not, as is quite proper. But it does record that when, on their return, Mr Armstrong chanced to come out on to the door-step, where the two stood unmounted, Roger said—
“Armstrong, Rosalind has promised to be my wife.”
The tutor flushed a little at this not unexpected announcement; then taking his pupil’s arm, he said—
“It means great happiness for you both. I am glad—very glad.”
But why, if he was so glad, did he slink off to his study forthwith and play a dirge on his piano, and there sit listlessly in his chair for the rest of the morning staring out of the window through his glass, till Jill tripped in and fetched him down to lunch, saying—
“Dear Mr Armstrong, try not to be too awfully sorry.Ithink no one is as nice as you.”
Chapter Twenty Five.The Heir of Maxfield comes of Age.It wanted but a month to Roger’s majority, that important day on which the fate of so many persons was to be decided, when a letter was delivered to the heir of Maxfield as he sat at breakfast.The weeks that had passed since Captain Oliphant’s sudden death had been uneventful. To Rosalind and Roger the discovery that they loved one another went far to lighten the sorrow which had befallen both—one in the death of a father, the other in what appeared to be the hopeless loss of a brother.Roger had by no means yet abandoned his search. Twice already had he and Armstrong been up to London to make inquiries, but without avail. The billiard-marker of “L’Hôtel Soult” had vanished as completely as—well, as Mr Ratman.“You know, of course,” said the tutor once, with the rather unsympathetic drawl in which he was wont to allude to the lost Ingleton—“you know, of course, that if the man you want is Ratman, you are having the assistance of the police in your search. A warrant is out against him, and heaven and earth is being moved to capture him.”Roger sighed.“I am looking for no one but my brother,” said he, “Even if he turns out to be this miscreant, I cannot help it.”“Quite so. Only it is right to remember that to find Ratman means to hang him. That at least is the object the police have in view. But you need not disturb yourself on that score. Roger Ingleton, major, if we find him, may be a villain, but he won’t be the murderer of Miss Oliphant’s father.”They returned presently, baffled, to Maxfield. No one at the depots, or recruiting head-quarters, or pension offices could tell them a word of a soldier or a sailor named Callot who might have enlisted or gone to sea about twelve years ago. How could they expect it? Nor did the most careful search among the old Squire’s papers lead to the discovery of any record of the supposed report of the lad’s death.As a matter of fact, if the billiard-marker at “L’Hôtel Soult” was the man, they had already traced him down to a date long subsequent to that of his rumoured death.Together they ransacked the memories of Dr Brandram, the Vicar, old Hodder, and one or two other inhabitants who might be supposed to know something of the matter. Very few there were who had seen the boy at all. He had spent most of his time at school, and during his occasional holidays had usually found all the amusement he needed in the ample confines of the park.No one had seen in black and white an announcement of his death. The Squire had told the Doctor that news of it had arrived from abroad; where and when and under what circumstances he never said. Old Hodder remembered the story of the quarrel between father and son, and identified the portrait as that of the missing lad. But, despite his boasted “threescore years and ten,” the old man was absolutely useless in the present inquiry.And so, thwarted at every turn, not knowing what to hope for, too proud to own himself beaten, Roger abandoned the search, and awaited his majority very much as a debtor awaits his bankruptcy.Mr Armstrong, who chanced to look up at the moment when Raffles delivered the letter, concluded at once from the startled look on the lad’s face that it was a missive of no common importance.It was from Ratman, and bore on its envelope the London post-mark:—“Dear Brother,—For the last time I claim your help. I know quite well that I am being hunted to death by you and those you employ. Without a shred of evidence you are willing to believe me a murderer. I suppose I have no right to complain. It would be convenient to you to have me out of the way, and the best way of getting rid of me is to get up this cry against me. A nice brotherly act, and worthy of an Ingleton! It is no use my telling you that I am innocent—that till I had been two days here I never so much as heard of Oliphant’s death. You would not believe it. Nor, I fancy, is it much use telling you that the scoundrel owed me money, that I was shielding him from the consequences of an old felony for which he might have had penal servitude, and that the little he did pay me was stolen from your property. Of course you wouldn’t believe it. It is only about your brother, who has been a slung stone all his life, who never had a friend, never knew a kind look from any one, that you are ready to believe evil. I am nearly at the end of my tether here. In a day or two you will probably hear that I am arrested, and then you will have your revenge on me for daring to be your flesh and blood; and you will have no difficulty in convincing a judge and jury that I have committed any crime you and your saintly tutor choose to concoct between you. Pleasant to be rich and influential! I could escape if I had money. Fifty pounds would rid you of me almost as effectively as the gallows. But it would cost you something; therefore it is absurd to imagine it possible. When, three days hence, I make my last call at the General Post Office, and hear once more that there is nothing for me, not even a message of brotherly pity (which costs nothing), I shall know my last hope is gone. And you, in the lap of luxury, counting your thousands, and monarch of all you survey, will be able to breathe again. Either you will hear of my arrest, or, if my courage befriends me, you may read in an obscure corner of the paper of a wretch, hounded to death, who escaped his pursuers after all, and preferred to die by his own hand rather than that of his brother. Good-bye till then.“Your brother,—“Roger Ingleton.“P.S.—The Post Office know me, or my messenger, as ‘Richard Redfern.’ No doubt you will show this letter to your tutor, who should have no difficulty in using the information I am obliged to give as to my whereabouts to run me down.”The flush on Roger’s face had died down into pallor by the time he reached the end of this savage yet dismal letter. Till he came to the postscript he had reckoned on demanding Armstrong’s advice as to its contents. Now, somehow, his hands seemed tied. Here was a man, claiming to be his brother, practically placing his life in his hands. Whether the story were true or false, the writer had calculated astutely on the quixotic temper of his correspondent. The appeal, insultingly as it was made, was one which Roger Ingleton, minor, could not resist.“I have had a letter from Ratman,” said he when the two friends were alone together.“I am not surprised,” said the tutor. “He wants money, of course?”“I can’t show you the letter, simply because it contains a vague clue as to his whereabouts, which you would feel bound to follow up.”“I undoubtedly should,” said Mr Armstrong. “Shall not you?”“No. He gives it in confidence, in the hope I shall send him money. I don’t intend to do that, but it would hardly be fair to use this letter against him.”“He is Captain Oliphant’s murderer.”“He denies it, and once more calls himself my brother.”The tutor shrugged his shoulders.“As you please. Burn the letter. It probably does not tell more than the police know already.”Roger dismally obeyed. Had he felt sure that this man was his brother, he would have, at all risk and in spite of all, tried to help him. Even so, to help him with one hand would mean to ruin him with the other. If he found him, it would be to hand him over to the police. If he procured his escape, it would be to oust him irrevocably from his inheritance.There seemed nothing for it but to do nothing and wait.In other quarters the policy of inaction found little favour. Mr Headland called up the same evening at Maxfield and demanded an interview with the tutor.“Wal, young man,” said he, “I calculate those two hundred-pound notes of mine didn’t travel so far astray after all.”“You have traced them, then?”“I’ve been three weeks doing it, but I have so.”“And with what conclusion?”“Just this, that Captain E. Oliphant fell over that cliff just about the right time, sir. Yes, sir, my notes are lying snug at the English Bank at this present moment, and I know their pedigree. Number 90,356 came there from a bank in Fleet Street. The bank in Fleet Street received it from a hotel. The hotel received it from a gentleman who slept in bedroom Number 36, and that gentleman’s name was Ratman. Number 90,357 came to the bank later from Amsterdam. Amsterdam had it from an English diamond merchant, the diamond merchant had it from a stock jobber, and the stock jobber had it from a sporting club, who had it from a temporary member in December last in payment of a gambling debt, and that temporary member’s name was Ratman. That’s not all, sir. My letter was posted in America, November 9. On November 17 the post-master at Yeld, an intelligent man, sir, received a letter with an American stamp, sir, addressed to Roger Ingleton, senior, at Maxfield. A Yankee stamp was a novelty to your intelligent post-master, and he took a note of date, and sent it up here for delivery. It was delivered here November 17, and your footman remembers giving it to your colleague. Three days after, Mr Ratman visited his friend Captain E. Oliphant here. Two days later he reached the hotel in London with a Yeld label on his trunk. A week after that he passed note Number 90,356 to settle his bill. There, sir; the Americans are born explorers. I flatter myself there’s not much more to know about my two notes.”“Quite so,” said the tutor. “You have done a great deal in three weeks. What reparation can be made you?”“Sir, you are an honest young man. You believe in shielding the memory of a dead enemy. You are right. Continue on that tack and you’ll do yourself credit. As executor of my late kinsman, I will trouble you to place this cheque for £200 to the credit of the estate, and never to say a word about the sum that was lost. Notes get lost every day; at least they do in America.”Mr Armstrong’s gratitude was beyond words. He had set his heart, for the sake of the children of his late colleague, and even for Roger’s sake, on covering with a cloak of oblivion the crime of which chance had made him the detector. This American had it in his power to aid or thwart him, and had chosen the former course; and a great weight was lifted off the tutor’s mind in consequence.On the following day he was calling at the Yeld bank to transact some business (part of which was to pay in Mr Headland’s cheque), when the manager invited him into his parlour. This functionary was a respectable, middle-aged person, who had held his appointment for five or six years, keeping pretty much to himself, and, as is the lot of bank managers, being made a great deal of by clients who chanced to be, or desired to be, under obligations to his bank.“Mr Armstrong,” said he, “you will pardon me, but there’s a little matter—”“Hullo!” thought the tutor, “has the bank stopped payment, or the Maxfield securities been robbed?”“Well, sir?”“It’s a private matter, and I should not mention it if it were not for the talk which is going to and fro about young Mr Ingleton’s lost brother. I understand there’s a claimant for the title, and not a very eligible one.”“On the contrary, most ineligible,” said the tutor. “And it seems likely that he will, under present circumstances, keep far enough away from these parts?”“Naturally. The coroner’s jury have given him a pressing invitation, which he feels compelled to decline.”“Well, about this lost boy. You’ll think me impertinent, but I think I can tell you something about him.”The tutor started, and looked hard at the speaker. “Yes,” said the latter mildly. “As you know, I’ve not been here long. My predecessor, Mr Morris, was a friend of the family. I remember his once mentioning an elder son of the Squire who had been reported dead, and that was all I ever heard of the matter from him or anybody else. But only last week, in a bundle of documents relating to Mr Morris’s own affairs, which, as his executor, it was my duty to examine, I came upon a letter which, though evidently private at the time, seems as if it ought at least to be seen by you and your ward now. It proves that ten years ago the elder son was alive, and being in his handwriting, it may be important evidence if you have to deal with the claim of an impostor.”The tutor expressed considerable discomfort at this new complication, and regarded the document in the banker’s hand as if it were an infernal machine.“It’s private, you say. Would it not be better to regard it as such?”“I think it should be seen. If you prefer I will submit it to Mr Pottinger.”This settled the business. The tutor stretched out his hand for the letter. It was dated from on board the ship “Cyclops,” off Havana, ten years ago, and, by the unsteady character of the handwriting, which rendered some words almost illegible, had evidently been written in a high sea. Mr Armstrong could scarcely help smiling at the banker’s naïve suggestion as to the use of the document as evidence of handwriting.The note was as follows:—“Dear Mr Morris,—I write to you in strictest confidence. My father probably has given me up for dead. I hope so. On no account must he know that I have written to you. My object is to enclose a twenty-five dollar note which I owe him. Once, before we quarrelled, he lent me five pounds. I want to pay it back without any one knowing of it, because I’m determined not to owe anything to anybody, especially to one who has told me I’m not honest. Please put it into his bank account. He probably will never notice it; anyhow, please, whatever you do, don’t tell him or any one alive where it came from, or that you ever heard a word from me or of me. I trust you as a gentleman.“Yours truly,—“Roger Ingleton.”“Well, sir,” said the banker, who had watched the reading curiously, “does it not seem an important letter?”“I think so. It appears to be genuine, too, on the face of it. If you will allow me I should like my ward to see it. It will interest him.”The tutor was not wrong. With this strange missive in his hand all Roger’s yearnings towards his lost brother returned in full force. The object of his search seemed suddenly to stand within measurable reach. Ten years appeared nothing beside the twenty which only a few months back had divided them. If he could but postpone his majority another year! Then came the miserable doubt about Ratman. If, after all, his unlikely, discredited story should prove to have a grain of truth at the bottom of it! But he dismissed the doubt for the hope.“Armstrong, I must go to town to find out about the ‘Cyclops.’ Come with me, there’s a good fellow. In three weeks it will be too late.”The tutor was prepared for this decision.“By all means,” said he. “We will go to-morrow to inquire after a passenger or sailor who was on board a sailing-vessel, nationality unknown, which happened to be off Havana in a heavy sea on October 20, ten years ago.”“I know it’s absurd,” said Roger, “but I can’t help it. I never seemed so near my brother before. I should despise myself if I sat idle here.”So it happened that, just when Maxfield was preparing in a quiet way to celebrate the coming of age of the heir; just as the gloom which had followed on Captain Oliphant’s tragic death was beginning to lift a little and allow Tom and Jill decorously to think of football; just as Rosalind was beginning to make up her mind that she was not destined for ever to teach the elements of art and science to the Vicarage children; just when everything seemed to be settling down for the last scene of the drama, Roger and his tutor vanished once more on their familiar wild-goose chase.Dr Brandram grumbled; the county gentry shook their heads; Mr Pottinger breathed again. No one thought well of the expedition; some went so far as to make a jest of it.Roger cared nothing for what people thought. With Armstrong to back him, with Rosalind to bid him a brave God-speed, with his own stout heart to buoy him up, and with his lost brother only ten years distant, he could afford to start in good cheer, and let the world think what it liked.But the cheer was destined to failure. They heard of one or two vessels called the “Cyclops,” but respecting the crew or passengers, of none of them was it possible to glean a word of news. The vessel in question might have been ship, schooner, or barque; she might have been English, American, Indian, or Australian; she might have foundered, or changed her name, or been broken up for lumber. Lloyds knew her not. West India merchants had never heard of her. Of all their quests, this seemed the most vague and hopeless.Up to the last, Roger stuck doggedly to it. Even if he spent his majority in the London docks he would not turn tail. The tutor backed up loyally, did most of the work, made most of the inquiries, never grumbled or gibed or protested. When Roger looked most like giving in, it was the tutor who put fresh heart into him.“To-morrow,” said Roger on the eve of his birthday, “I will give it up. But there is a day yet.”And sure enough, on the last day, a vague ray of light came in the shape of a telegram from the port-master at Havana, to whom, at the tutor’s suggestion, a message of inquiry had been sent:—“Cyclops known. Writing.”Writing! A letter would take weeks to come, and they had but a day! They hurried to the telegraph-office and sent an urgent message begging particulars by wire whatever the cost. Late that day, indeed it was nearly midnight, the reply came:—“Sailed Ceylon, West Indies. Name Ingleton unknown. Ship now here.”Roger staggered from the office a beaten man. Through the deserted City streets the clocks were booming the hour of midnight and ushering in his majority. His brother! All along he had persuaded himself this quest was to end in victory, that before now he should have met his brother face to face and given him what was his. To-day it was no longer his to give. The race was already over, and the clock had won. His brother was not there.“Take my arm, dear old fellow,” said Mr Armstrong, “and cheer up.”
It wanted but a month to Roger’s majority, that important day on which the fate of so many persons was to be decided, when a letter was delivered to the heir of Maxfield as he sat at breakfast.
The weeks that had passed since Captain Oliphant’s sudden death had been uneventful. To Rosalind and Roger the discovery that they loved one another went far to lighten the sorrow which had befallen both—one in the death of a father, the other in what appeared to be the hopeless loss of a brother.
Roger had by no means yet abandoned his search. Twice already had he and Armstrong been up to London to make inquiries, but without avail. The billiard-marker of “L’Hôtel Soult” had vanished as completely as—well, as Mr Ratman.
“You know, of course,” said the tutor once, with the rather unsympathetic drawl in which he was wont to allude to the lost Ingleton—“you know, of course, that if the man you want is Ratman, you are having the assistance of the police in your search. A warrant is out against him, and heaven and earth is being moved to capture him.”
Roger sighed.
“I am looking for no one but my brother,” said he, “Even if he turns out to be this miscreant, I cannot help it.”
“Quite so. Only it is right to remember that to find Ratman means to hang him. That at least is the object the police have in view. But you need not disturb yourself on that score. Roger Ingleton, major, if we find him, may be a villain, but he won’t be the murderer of Miss Oliphant’s father.”
They returned presently, baffled, to Maxfield. No one at the depots, or recruiting head-quarters, or pension offices could tell them a word of a soldier or a sailor named Callot who might have enlisted or gone to sea about twelve years ago. How could they expect it? Nor did the most careful search among the old Squire’s papers lead to the discovery of any record of the supposed report of the lad’s death.
As a matter of fact, if the billiard-marker at “L’Hôtel Soult” was the man, they had already traced him down to a date long subsequent to that of his rumoured death.
Together they ransacked the memories of Dr Brandram, the Vicar, old Hodder, and one or two other inhabitants who might be supposed to know something of the matter. Very few there were who had seen the boy at all. He had spent most of his time at school, and during his occasional holidays had usually found all the amusement he needed in the ample confines of the park.
No one had seen in black and white an announcement of his death. The Squire had told the Doctor that news of it had arrived from abroad; where and when and under what circumstances he never said. Old Hodder remembered the story of the quarrel between father and son, and identified the portrait as that of the missing lad. But, despite his boasted “threescore years and ten,” the old man was absolutely useless in the present inquiry.
And so, thwarted at every turn, not knowing what to hope for, too proud to own himself beaten, Roger abandoned the search, and awaited his majority very much as a debtor awaits his bankruptcy.
Mr Armstrong, who chanced to look up at the moment when Raffles delivered the letter, concluded at once from the startled look on the lad’s face that it was a missive of no common importance.
It was from Ratman, and bore on its envelope the London post-mark:—
“Dear Brother,—For the last time I claim your help. I know quite well that I am being hunted to death by you and those you employ. Without a shred of evidence you are willing to believe me a murderer. I suppose I have no right to complain. It would be convenient to you to have me out of the way, and the best way of getting rid of me is to get up this cry against me. A nice brotherly act, and worthy of an Ingleton! It is no use my telling you that I am innocent—that till I had been two days here I never so much as heard of Oliphant’s death. You would not believe it. Nor, I fancy, is it much use telling you that the scoundrel owed me money, that I was shielding him from the consequences of an old felony for which he might have had penal servitude, and that the little he did pay me was stolen from your property. Of course you wouldn’t believe it. It is only about your brother, who has been a slung stone all his life, who never had a friend, never knew a kind look from any one, that you are ready to believe evil. I am nearly at the end of my tether here. In a day or two you will probably hear that I am arrested, and then you will have your revenge on me for daring to be your flesh and blood; and you will have no difficulty in convincing a judge and jury that I have committed any crime you and your saintly tutor choose to concoct between you. Pleasant to be rich and influential! I could escape if I had money. Fifty pounds would rid you of me almost as effectively as the gallows. But it would cost you something; therefore it is absurd to imagine it possible. When, three days hence, I make my last call at the General Post Office, and hear once more that there is nothing for me, not even a message of brotherly pity (which costs nothing), I shall know my last hope is gone. And you, in the lap of luxury, counting your thousands, and monarch of all you survey, will be able to breathe again. Either you will hear of my arrest, or, if my courage befriends me, you may read in an obscure corner of the paper of a wretch, hounded to death, who escaped his pursuers after all, and preferred to die by his own hand rather than that of his brother. Good-bye till then.“Your brother,—“Roger Ingleton.“P.S.—The Post Office know me, or my messenger, as ‘Richard Redfern.’ No doubt you will show this letter to your tutor, who should have no difficulty in using the information I am obliged to give as to my whereabouts to run me down.”
“Dear Brother,—For the last time I claim your help. I know quite well that I am being hunted to death by you and those you employ. Without a shred of evidence you are willing to believe me a murderer. I suppose I have no right to complain. It would be convenient to you to have me out of the way, and the best way of getting rid of me is to get up this cry against me. A nice brotherly act, and worthy of an Ingleton! It is no use my telling you that I am innocent—that till I had been two days here I never so much as heard of Oliphant’s death. You would not believe it. Nor, I fancy, is it much use telling you that the scoundrel owed me money, that I was shielding him from the consequences of an old felony for which he might have had penal servitude, and that the little he did pay me was stolen from your property. Of course you wouldn’t believe it. It is only about your brother, who has been a slung stone all his life, who never had a friend, never knew a kind look from any one, that you are ready to believe evil. I am nearly at the end of my tether here. In a day or two you will probably hear that I am arrested, and then you will have your revenge on me for daring to be your flesh and blood; and you will have no difficulty in convincing a judge and jury that I have committed any crime you and your saintly tutor choose to concoct between you. Pleasant to be rich and influential! I could escape if I had money. Fifty pounds would rid you of me almost as effectively as the gallows. But it would cost you something; therefore it is absurd to imagine it possible. When, three days hence, I make my last call at the General Post Office, and hear once more that there is nothing for me, not even a message of brotherly pity (which costs nothing), I shall know my last hope is gone. And you, in the lap of luxury, counting your thousands, and monarch of all you survey, will be able to breathe again. Either you will hear of my arrest, or, if my courage befriends me, you may read in an obscure corner of the paper of a wretch, hounded to death, who escaped his pursuers after all, and preferred to die by his own hand rather than that of his brother. Good-bye till then.
“Your brother,—
“Roger Ingleton.
“P.S.—The Post Office know me, or my messenger, as ‘Richard Redfern.’ No doubt you will show this letter to your tutor, who should have no difficulty in using the information I am obliged to give as to my whereabouts to run me down.”
The flush on Roger’s face had died down into pallor by the time he reached the end of this savage yet dismal letter. Till he came to the postscript he had reckoned on demanding Armstrong’s advice as to its contents. Now, somehow, his hands seemed tied. Here was a man, claiming to be his brother, practically placing his life in his hands. Whether the story were true or false, the writer had calculated astutely on the quixotic temper of his correspondent. The appeal, insultingly as it was made, was one which Roger Ingleton, minor, could not resist.
“I have had a letter from Ratman,” said he when the two friends were alone together.
“I am not surprised,” said the tutor. “He wants money, of course?”
“I can’t show you the letter, simply because it contains a vague clue as to his whereabouts, which you would feel bound to follow up.”
“I undoubtedly should,” said Mr Armstrong. “Shall not you?”
“No. He gives it in confidence, in the hope I shall send him money. I don’t intend to do that, but it would hardly be fair to use this letter against him.”
“He is Captain Oliphant’s murderer.”
“He denies it, and once more calls himself my brother.”
The tutor shrugged his shoulders.
“As you please. Burn the letter. It probably does not tell more than the police know already.”
Roger dismally obeyed. Had he felt sure that this man was his brother, he would have, at all risk and in spite of all, tried to help him. Even so, to help him with one hand would mean to ruin him with the other. If he found him, it would be to hand him over to the police. If he procured his escape, it would be to oust him irrevocably from his inheritance.
There seemed nothing for it but to do nothing and wait.
In other quarters the policy of inaction found little favour. Mr Headland called up the same evening at Maxfield and demanded an interview with the tutor.
“Wal, young man,” said he, “I calculate those two hundred-pound notes of mine didn’t travel so far astray after all.”
“You have traced them, then?”
“I’ve been three weeks doing it, but I have so.”
“And with what conclusion?”
“Just this, that Captain E. Oliphant fell over that cliff just about the right time, sir. Yes, sir, my notes are lying snug at the English Bank at this present moment, and I know their pedigree. Number 90,356 came there from a bank in Fleet Street. The bank in Fleet Street received it from a hotel. The hotel received it from a gentleman who slept in bedroom Number 36, and that gentleman’s name was Ratman. Number 90,357 came to the bank later from Amsterdam. Amsterdam had it from an English diamond merchant, the diamond merchant had it from a stock jobber, and the stock jobber had it from a sporting club, who had it from a temporary member in December last in payment of a gambling debt, and that temporary member’s name was Ratman. That’s not all, sir. My letter was posted in America, November 9. On November 17 the post-master at Yeld, an intelligent man, sir, received a letter with an American stamp, sir, addressed to Roger Ingleton, senior, at Maxfield. A Yankee stamp was a novelty to your intelligent post-master, and he took a note of date, and sent it up here for delivery. It was delivered here November 17, and your footman remembers giving it to your colleague. Three days after, Mr Ratman visited his friend Captain E. Oliphant here. Two days later he reached the hotel in London with a Yeld label on his trunk. A week after that he passed note Number 90,356 to settle his bill. There, sir; the Americans are born explorers. I flatter myself there’s not much more to know about my two notes.”
“Quite so,” said the tutor. “You have done a great deal in three weeks. What reparation can be made you?”
“Sir, you are an honest young man. You believe in shielding the memory of a dead enemy. You are right. Continue on that tack and you’ll do yourself credit. As executor of my late kinsman, I will trouble you to place this cheque for £200 to the credit of the estate, and never to say a word about the sum that was lost. Notes get lost every day; at least they do in America.”
Mr Armstrong’s gratitude was beyond words. He had set his heart, for the sake of the children of his late colleague, and even for Roger’s sake, on covering with a cloak of oblivion the crime of which chance had made him the detector. This American had it in his power to aid or thwart him, and had chosen the former course; and a great weight was lifted off the tutor’s mind in consequence.
On the following day he was calling at the Yeld bank to transact some business (part of which was to pay in Mr Headland’s cheque), when the manager invited him into his parlour. This functionary was a respectable, middle-aged person, who had held his appointment for five or six years, keeping pretty much to himself, and, as is the lot of bank managers, being made a great deal of by clients who chanced to be, or desired to be, under obligations to his bank.
“Mr Armstrong,” said he, “you will pardon me, but there’s a little matter—”
“Hullo!” thought the tutor, “has the bank stopped payment, or the Maxfield securities been robbed?”
“Well, sir?”
“It’s a private matter, and I should not mention it if it were not for the talk which is going to and fro about young Mr Ingleton’s lost brother. I understand there’s a claimant for the title, and not a very eligible one.”
“On the contrary, most ineligible,” said the tutor. “And it seems likely that he will, under present circumstances, keep far enough away from these parts?”
“Naturally. The coroner’s jury have given him a pressing invitation, which he feels compelled to decline.”
“Well, about this lost boy. You’ll think me impertinent, but I think I can tell you something about him.”
The tutor started, and looked hard at the speaker. “Yes,” said the latter mildly. “As you know, I’ve not been here long. My predecessor, Mr Morris, was a friend of the family. I remember his once mentioning an elder son of the Squire who had been reported dead, and that was all I ever heard of the matter from him or anybody else. But only last week, in a bundle of documents relating to Mr Morris’s own affairs, which, as his executor, it was my duty to examine, I came upon a letter which, though evidently private at the time, seems as if it ought at least to be seen by you and your ward now. It proves that ten years ago the elder son was alive, and being in his handwriting, it may be important evidence if you have to deal with the claim of an impostor.”
The tutor expressed considerable discomfort at this new complication, and regarded the document in the banker’s hand as if it were an infernal machine.
“It’s private, you say. Would it not be better to regard it as such?”
“I think it should be seen. If you prefer I will submit it to Mr Pottinger.”
This settled the business. The tutor stretched out his hand for the letter. It was dated from on board the ship “Cyclops,” off Havana, ten years ago, and, by the unsteady character of the handwriting, which rendered some words almost illegible, had evidently been written in a high sea. Mr Armstrong could scarcely help smiling at the banker’s naïve suggestion as to the use of the document as evidence of handwriting.
The note was as follows:—
“Dear Mr Morris,—I write to you in strictest confidence. My father probably has given me up for dead. I hope so. On no account must he know that I have written to you. My object is to enclose a twenty-five dollar note which I owe him. Once, before we quarrelled, he lent me five pounds. I want to pay it back without any one knowing of it, because I’m determined not to owe anything to anybody, especially to one who has told me I’m not honest. Please put it into his bank account. He probably will never notice it; anyhow, please, whatever you do, don’t tell him or any one alive where it came from, or that you ever heard a word from me or of me. I trust you as a gentleman.“Yours truly,—“Roger Ingleton.”
“Dear Mr Morris,—I write to you in strictest confidence. My father probably has given me up for dead. I hope so. On no account must he know that I have written to you. My object is to enclose a twenty-five dollar note which I owe him. Once, before we quarrelled, he lent me five pounds. I want to pay it back without any one knowing of it, because I’m determined not to owe anything to anybody, especially to one who has told me I’m not honest. Please put it into his bank account. He probably will never notice it; anyhow, please, whatever you do, don’t tell him or any one alive where it came from, or that you ever heard a word from me or of me. I trust you as a gentleman.
“Yours truly,—
“Roger Ingleton.”
“Well, sir,” said the banker, who had watched the reading curiously, “does it not seem an important letter?”
“I think so. It appears to be genuine, too, on the face of it. If you will allow me I should like my ward to see it. It will interest him.”
The tutor was not wrong. With this strange missive in his hand all Roger’s yearnings towards his lost brother returned in full force. The object of his search seemed suddenly to stand within measurable reach. Ten years appeared nothing beside the twenty which only a few months back had divided them. If he could but postpone his majority another year! Then came the miserable doubt about Ratman. If, after all, his unlikely, discredited story should prove to have a grain of truth at the bottom of it! But he dismissed the doubt for the hope.
“Armstrong, I must go to town to find out about the ‘Cyclops.’ Come with me, there’s a good fellow. In three weeks it will be too late.”
The tutor was prepared for this decision.
“By all means,” said he. “We will go to-morrow to inquire after a passenger or sailor who was on board a sailing-vessel, nationality unknown, which happened to be off Havana in a heavy sea on October 20, ten years ago.”
“I know it’s absurd,” said Roger, “but I can’t help it. I never seemed so near my brother before. I should despise myself if I sat idle here.”
So it happened that, just when Maxfield was preparing in a quiet way to celebrate the coming of age of the heir; just as the gloom which had followed on Captain Oliphant’s tragic death was beginning to lift a little and allow Tom and Jill decorously to think of football; just as Rosalind was beginning to make up her mind that she was not destined for ever to teach the elements of art and science to the Vicarage children; just when everything seemed to be settling down for the last scene of the drama, Roger and his tutor vanished once more on their familiar wild-goose chase.
Dr Brandram grumbled; the county gentry shook their heads; Mr Pottinger breathed again. No one thought well of the expedition; some went so far as to make a jest of it.
Roger cared nothing for what people thought. With Armstrong to back him, with Rosalind to bid him a brave God-speed, with his own stout heart to buoy him up, and with his lost brother only ten years distant, he could afford to start in good cheer, and let the world think what it liked.
But the cheer was destined to failure. They heard of one or two vessels called the “Cyclops,” but respecting the crew or passengers, of none of them was it possible to glean a word of news. The vessel in question might have been ship, schooner, or barque; she might have been English, American, Indian, or Australian; she might have foundered, or changed her name, or been broken up for lumber. Lloyds knew her not. West India merchants had never heard of her. Of all their quests, this seemed the most vague and hopeless.
Up to the last, Roger stuck doggedly to it. Even if he spent his majority in the London docks he would not turn tail. The tutor backed up loyally, did most of the work, made most of the inquiries, never grumbled or gibed or protested. When Roger looked most like giving in, it was the tutor who put fresh heart into him.
“To-morrow,” said Roger on the eve of his birthday, “I will give it up. But there is a day yet.”
And sure enough, on the last day, a vague ray of light came in the shape of a telegram from the port-master at Havana, to whom, at the tutor’s suggestion, a message of inquiry had been sent:—
“Cyclops known. Writing.”
“Cyclops known. Writing.”
Writing! A letter would take weeks to come, and they had but a day! They hurried to the telegraph-office and sent an urgent message begging particulars by wire whatever the cost. Late that day, indeed it was nearly midnight, the reply came:—
“Sailed Ceylon, West Indies. Name Ingleton unknown. Ship now here.”
“Sailed Ceylon, West Indies. Name Ingleton unknown. Ship now here.”
Roger staggered from the office a beaten man. Through the deserted City streets the clocks were booming the hour of midnight and ushering in his majority. His brother! All along he had persuaded himself this quest was to end in victory, that before now he should have met his brother face to face and given him what was his. To-day it was no longer his to give. The race was already over, and the clock had won. His brother was not there.
“Take my arm, dear old fellow,” said Mr Armstrong, “and cheer up.”