CHAPTER XXI.
THE KINDNESS—AND UNKINDNESS—OF KATE.
WhenI awoke next morning it was with a singular feeling of depression—the reaction, I told myself, from the excitement of the last few days. Life seemed flat and at loose ends. I was in love, with small prospect of bringing my suit to a successful issue. Nor, in the matter of the Dumpling, could I persuade myself that I had any reason for self-congratulation. I had heroically set out to trap and to catch a criminal, instead of which I had been made a prisoner myself.
That I was here in bed, and between the blankets, was due neither to my own skill nor to my own strength, for I had been hopelessly outwitted in the former quality, and ignominiously made to feel my own inferiority in the latter. That I was here at all, instead perhaps of lying strangled in a cellar, was due to the arrival of the police on the previous evening.
Had their appearance not cut short mydiscussion with the Dumpling, the issue of that discussion might have been disastrous to myself. The most difficult part of my task—to convince the Dumpling that I was sufficiently in sympathy with himself and with his projects, safely to be allowed at large—was all to come. In dealing with a madman, one never knows what sudden warp his cunning and his mania will take; and but for the interruption, it might have been my life, instead of the conversation, which was prematurely cut short.
Another reason for my feeling thus stale and "cheap" on this particular morning was that the ardour with which I had taken up the hunting down of the Dumpling had considerably cooled. I am sympathetic by nature, and, mad though he was, this man's passionate denunciation of the wrongs of the poor, and the terrible and, I fear, only too true picture which he had drawn of their sufferings, had strangely moved me. The tragedy of poverty, the fact that a man's spirit could be so broken, that he could be brought to such infamy as to pawn his very manhood, to become, as the Dumpling had said, like bullocks and steers, and to bow his head to the yoke, for thesake of a roof to cover the heads of wife and children; the fact that women could be brought to such a pass as to be compelled to choose between starvation or the streets, had come home to me with new and awful significance. Even as out of the mouth of babes and sucklings God brings forth wisdom, so out of the mouth of a madman and a fanatic had some of the sternest and most terrible facts of life been brought to my realisation.
When such things could be, it seemed to me that to be spending time and strength in playing at being a detective, and in writing what a newspaper once aptly described as "harmless little tales with titles that appal," was almost criminal. I was more than minded to throw the whole thing up, and to occupy myself, instead, in doing what little I could to relieve the suffering of my less fortunate fellow-creatures.
With these thoughts still seething in my brain, I dressed, and after breakfasting, sallied out to make my report to Miss Clara.
She received me with the same cordiality with which we had parted, and on learning that I had news to impart, sent word tothat effect to Kate, who, she said, would be equally interested to hear it.
I told my story, just as I have set it down in the previous chapter, omitting nothing, and giving the Dumpling's words in regard to the poor and their sufferings almost as those words had fallen from his lips.
Upon one of my listeners, at least, the narrative had a most unexpected effect. Kate heard me throughout with very evident sympathy, and was clearly alarmed and disturbed at the risk I had run in my encounter with the Dumpling. Otherwise she was not in any sense moved. But upon the elder woman's face, as I unfolded my story, there suddenly came a look like that of one who has received a crushing blow. For a moment or two I feared she was about to faint; but by an effort she collected herself, and sat out the remainder of the recital quietly and impassively.
When I had made an end of my narrative her only comment was, "Quite exciting, I'm sure!" Then she rose, and walking to the door, beckoned Kate to her. Whispering a few words in the girl's ears—not more than a dozen at most—she passed out.
Kate turned to me.
"Mr. Rissler," she said, "I want you to promise that you will do nothing of the sort again."
"Nothing of what sort, Miss Carleton?" I asked, wondering whether she was speaking for herself, or from instructions she had received from her aunt.
"This detective work?" she replied.
"But why?" I asked. "What difference can it make to you in what way I employ myself?"
"For one thing," she said ruefully, "you'll be killed to a certainty. This dreadful man is clearly too clever for you."
"I fail to see the certainty, either of my being killed or of my being so hopelessly outwitted in cleverness," I replied stiffly; for it was somewhat mortifying to one's pride thus to be pronounced a fool and a failure.
"Besides, even if it be so," I added ungenerously, "my getting killed, or not killed, is my own affair, and cannot greatly concern you, to whom—as you reminded me yesterday—I am a stranger."
"Well, so you were—then. Almost a stranger, that is," she added, diplomatically."But, you see, we know something more of you now. Promise you'll give it up from this time forth—'d'reckly moment,' as I used to say when I was a child, and was too impatient to wait for what I wanted."
On my first meeting with this extraordinary young woman I had been very properly snubbed and put in my place. On my second, I had been coldly informed that I must consider myself a stranger—as if only by effacing my previous behaviour entirely from her memory could my undesirable presence be endured at all. Yet now, on our third meeting, she was pouting her dainty lips at me, and pleading, in the prettiest way possible, that I would reconstruct and re-order my entire life to humour her unaccountable caprice.
Extraordinary, inexplicable, as her conduct was, the novelty of finding myself in therôleof someone who was to be considered and conciliated, instead of a nobody who was to be effaced and ignored, was highly agreeable. Even had I been disposed to accede, off-hand, to her request—which I certainly was not—the situation was too pleasant for me to wish prematurely to end it.
"But why," I asked, "should you wish me to give up my detective work, or trouble yourself about me at all?"
"You are very unkind," she said, suddenly breaking down and, to my indescribable astonishment and dismay, bursting into tears.
Recalling, at this lapse of time, the course of our conversation on that occasion, I do not consider that I was guilty of any unpardonable offence against good taste or good manners; but at the moment, and at sight of her tears, my behaviour struck me as blackguardly beyond belief.
"Oh, please, Miss Carleton, don't cry!" I gasped imploringly. "I was a beast, a blackguard, a bully. Forgive me—won't you forgive me? I wouldn't do or say or even think a thing that would hurt you for worlds—for—for—I—I—love you. I loved you from the moment I saw you in the boat. I shall love you as long as ever I live."
When, for the first time, a man tells a woman, and with evident sincerity, that he loves her, he not unnaturally expects that she would receive his declaration with some consciousness of the fact that what he says is, to him at least, a matter of supremeimportance. Kate, on the contrary, took my avowal with what I considered ill-timed levity. Possibly that avowal told her nothing of which she was not already aware; possibly she did not approve of the suddenness with which I had sprung it upon her, or of the unconventionality of my wooing; possibly she merely wished to gain time before giving me an answer. Be that as it may, she not only proved herself to be a very self-possessed young person, but a calculating little body into the bargain. Having brought me metaphorically to my knees, having reduced me to a condition in which I was not likely to deny her anything, she suddenly released one eye from the eclipsing handkerchief which, a moment before, had hidden both. Regarding me out of the corner of this eye, but with the other still behind the handkerchief—like a horseman who, with one foot in the stirrup, waits the final word which shall decide whether he is to ride away or to stay—she smiled at me through her tears, and with the air of one making a bargain said:
"Then you promise?"
"Promise what?" I asked.
"To give up this detective work."
"Why, no! I can't promise that," I replied.
"I hate you! I hate you!" she cried, and, springing to her feet, flung angrily out of the room.