CHAPTER XXIII.
KATE'S CONFESSION.
"I willgive no such promise," I began furiously. "I will——"
Then I stopped short.
"Forgive me. I have some decent instincts left, I hope—in spite of my being a detective," I added bitterly. "You are, of course, within your rights; and if you so command, I have no option but to obey. But even you cannot command me or compel me to cease from loving you. Am I to have no explanation?"
"You are to have no explanation," she repeated in a dull, dreamy voice, as if her thoughts were elsewhere, and with her eyes fixed on a far-off space of sky which she could see through the window.
"Except, perhaps—you have already said it—it is because you hate me," I prompted bitterly.
Moveless as a listening sleep-walker, she made answer:
"It isnotbecause I hate you."
"Do you, or do you not, hate me?" I pleaded.
And again, dully, indifferently, like one speaking in her sleep, she replied:
"I donothate you."
"But you dislike me," I urged.
With the same troubled, far-off look in her beautiful eyes, she repeated, automatically:
"I donotdislike you."
For a moment, like the defiant fluttering of a banner over a besieged and well-nigh surrendered city, Hope sprang up to raise her red flag upon the ramparts of my heart; but at the sight of the dull indifference in the girl's eyes, banner and banner-bearer sank back.
"Perhaps even," I said in a foolish and feeble spirit of attempted irony, "perhaps even you like me."
"Perhaps even," she echoed, "I like you."
"Kate," I cried, all the blood in my veins running riot, "it is not possible—for God's sake don't play with me—but it is not possible—tell me—it is not possible, it can't be—that—that—you care."
In a moment she was alive again. Hereyes, all her soul in them, left the far-off skies, and leapt to meet mine.
"I care," she said, softly.
The next instant, and before I could stay her, she was gone.
It is fortunate I did not see Miss Clara as I left the house. Had I met that dear creature on my way out, I should, to a dead certainty, not only have kissed her on the spot, but with never a thought for horrified servants or scandalised neighbours, should have put my arm around her capacious waist, and then and there have compelled her to dance a Highland fling with me. That Metcalfe thought I had been drinking (as I had—deep draughts of the most intoxicating of all elixirs, the elixir of love), I am positive. Detecting me in the act of tweaking the nose of the stone bust of a celebrated Nonconformist divine, which stood in a recess at the bottom of the stairs, and of painstakingly (mere absence of mind that!) wiping my boots on the doormat, as if I were about to enter a drawing-room instead of passing out into a muddy street, he inquired solicitously whether I wouldn't like a cab, remarking with a surreptitious glance at the bootswith which I had been performing such unnecessary antics on the doormat:
"Yes, sir; the streetsisvery muddy, but you'll get home nice and dry and comfortable in a keb."
Telling him that I was tired out and half asleep from my long watch overnight, and that to walk home would be the surest way to awaken and freshen me, I slipped a sovereign into his palm, and made my way into the streets, all the blood in my body dancing in my veins, all the joy of first love singing in my brain.
At my rooms I found the expected notice requiring me to attend and to give evidence at the inquest to be held that day at noon upon the bodies of the three men who had been found drowned in the Thames.
That the inquiry was not wanting in painful interest the reader will readily surmise, but except to say that I was subjected to a severe and suspicious examination, I do not propose further to enter upon the details of the inquest here.
I come now to a point in my narrative when the trend of events takes a new turn, and when I shall have to relate happenings of infinitely greater importance than the circumstancesunder which Parker and Smudgy, the negro Black Sam, and the two Grants, met their death. These were but the "curtain-raisers" preceding the drama in which the man known to the readers of this history as "the Dumpling" took so remarkable a part. Up to this point my tale—I had to tell it as it happened—has been little more than a detective story. Now we shall soon come to a story of quite another sort.