“He was a Mr. Strauss, sir, yes, but not the other name you say. At least, she always called him Harry.”
“Henry is sometimes the English for Johann, you see,” muttered David, with a random guess thatSarah was none the wiser. “Henry, too, was the name of the child, wasn’t it? How about the child? Don’t you know where it is?”
“I only know that she used to go every Tuesday and Thursday by the seventeen minutes past two train from Baker-St., and be back by six o’clock, so it couldn’t have been very far. ’Pon my word, sometimes she’d go half crazy over that child. There was a little box of clothes that she’s many a time made me waste half a day over, showing me the things, as if I’d never seen them afore, everything that was possible embroidered with violets, and she’d always be making—”
“Fond of violets, was she?” broke in David, ready enough to catch at the phrase.
“Oh, it was all violets with her,—violets in her hair, at her neck, at her waist, and all about the place. She had a sister called Violet, and I came to know the sister as well as I knew herself in a manner of speaking, she was always telling me about her. For often she had nobody to talk to, and then she’d make me sit down to hear about her mother and this Miss Vi and the child, and what she meant to do when her marriage could be made public, and that. She was a good, affectionate lady, was Miss Gwen, sir. You couldn’t help loving her, and it was a mortal hard thing what happened.”
It was just then that the mistress of the tavern looked in with an unsympathetic face; so David roseand slipped a gold coin into the hand of the staring Sarah. The talk had already lasted a long while, and the inn-door had to be opened to let him out.
He walked the two miles back to the station, and there learned that the last up-train for the night had just left. Even on the suburban lines there is a limit to late hours.
This carelessness on his own part caused him to growl. It was now a question either of knocking up some tavern, or of tramping to London—about twenty-one miles. However, twenty-one miles made no continent to him, and, after posting himself by questions as to the route, he set out.
Throwing his overcoat over his left arm, he put his elbows to his ribs, lifted his face skyward, and went away at a long, slow, swinging trot. One mile winded him. He stopped and walked for five minutes, then away he went again at a steady jog-trot; and now, with this second wind, he could have run in one heat to Bow Bells without any feeling but one of joy and power. He had seen Indians run all day long with pauses. He had learned the art from them, and London had scarce had time as yet to enervate him. Up hill and down dale he went steadily away, like a machine. It was dark at first, dismal in some places, the sky black, crowded with stars, like diamond-seed far sown; but suddenly, while he was trotting through the main street of Uxbridge, all this was changed, the whole look and mood of things underwent transformation,as the full moon floated like a balloon of light into the sky. It was then about one-thirty in the morning. Thenceforth his way was almost as clearly lit as by day.
Through dead villages he passed, through dead Ealing to Shepherd’s Bush; there were cats, and there were policemen, and one running man, little else. Here or there a constable was half-drawn into giving chase, but wisely forbore—he never would have caught David Harcourt. But at Shepherd’s Bush David came to the foot of a long hill, which he shirked, and drew up. From that point he walked to Notting Hill, past Kensington Gardens, toward Oxford Circus. It was near threeA.M.
Walking on the south side of Oxford-St. eastward, he stopped to look at some books behind a grille. The moonshine was so luminous, the sky so clear, that he could see well enough to read their titles. This was the only quiet hour of London. There was not a sound, save the echo of a policeman’s tread some way off down Regent-St. Not even a night cab rattled in the distance. And then, on the other side of the street, his quick ears caught the passing of swift-gliding feet—a woman’s.
When David glanced round, already she was gone well past him, making westward, most silently, with a steady haste. She gave him the impression of having been overtaken by, of being shy at, the moonlight. His heart leaped in a spasm of recognition, almost offear. And he followed, he could not help it; as water flows downward, as the needle follows the magnet, he followed, with the stealthy pace of the stalker, as silently as if he was tracking a deer, and as keenly.
His breathing, meantime, was as if suspended, his heart seemed to stand still. That form and motion, his instincts would have recognized them in midnight glimmer of dull lamps, and now they were before him in light. Still he could not believe his wits. He doubted whether he was not moonstruck, chasing a phantom made of the clair-obscure stuff of those dead hours of the night when dreams are rife in the world, and ghosts leer through the haunted chambers of the brain. Thatsheshould be walking the streets of London at three in the morning, alone, hastening secretly homeward like some poor outcast foreconscious of the light of dawn!—this savored somewhat of limbo and lunacy. For what good reason could she be thus abroad? A swarm of doubts, half-doubts, queer bodings, jostled in David’s heart. She might, indeed, have come out to summon a doctor, to obtain a drug in an emergency. But something in her air and pace, something clandestine, desperate, illicit, seemed to belie this hope. She turned north when she had gone so far west as Orchard-St., little thinking, apparently, that she was being shadowed, and thence sped on west and north alternately through smaller streets, a region in which the desolation of the sleeping city seemed even more confirmed. And David followed,with this thought in his mind, that, though he had not seen her face, he had a certain means of determining her identity—for, if the flying figure before him went to 60A, Porchester Gardens, the address which he had of Violet Mordaunt, then this must be Violet.
Not that in the later part of his chase he had the slightest doubt. The long black cloak, like those that nurses wear, inflated behind her, the kind of toque above it, the carriage of her head, the slope of her shoulders, all these were hers: and she sped direct, notwithstanding turns and twists, to Porchester Gardens. David, from behind the corner of a street, could see her go up the house-steps, bend over something in her hand, open the door, and slip on what must have been rubber overshoes. This secrecy revolted him, and again he almost doubted that it was she. But when she had gone in, he hastened from his street-corner to the door to read the house-number, and it was 60A.
She was gone now. It was too late to challenge and upbraid her. He already regretted that he had not dared. He was bitter at it. Something said within him: “Both sisters!” Some envenomed fang of anger, spite, and jealousy plagued him, a feeling that he was wholly out of it, and had no part nor lot in her life and acts; and then, also, like oil on the waters, came pity. He must home to his haunted flat, where the scent of the violets which he had boughtgreeted him on his entrance. It was near four o’clock. After looking gloomily for some time at the head in chalks, he read three letters which he had found in the letter-box. One of them was from Miss L’Estrange, and in it she said:
“I have asked my girl, Jenny, about the marriage and birth certificates which fell out of the picture, and there’s something funny about her.” (A woman never means humor when she uses that word funny.) “She wants to make out that she knows nothing about what became of them, but I believe she does. Perhaps she has found out Strauss and sold them to him, or perhaps she only means to do so, and you may get them from her if you be quick and bid high. Anyway, I have done my best for you, and now it is in your own hands. You can come here whenever you like.”
But David was now suddenly not so devoted to the affairs of Violet and Gwendoline Mordaunt as he had been. What he had seen within the past hour made him bitter. He went foraging in the kitchen for something to eat, then threw himself into bed in a vexed mood, as some gray of morning mingled with the night.
As for Henry Van Hupfeldt, he, too, at that morning hour lay awake in his bed. If ever man knew panic, it was he all that night. He had gone home from his interview with Violet, cringing in his carriage even from the glance of the passers in the streets, stricken to the heart by that unsigned note of David’s to Violet: “A pretty certain thing that your sister was a duly wedded wife” ... “the proofs of it will be forthcoming.” Some one knew!
But who? And how? Van Hupfeldt locked himself away from his valet—he lived in chambers near Hanover Square—and for hours sat without a movement, staring the stare of the hopeless and the lost. The fact that he had as good as won from Violet the pledging of herself to him—that fact which at another time would have filled him with elation, was now almost forgotten in the darkness of his calamity, as a star is swallowed up by clouds. The thing was known! That known which had been between the chamber of his heart and God alone! A bird of the air had whispered it, another soul shared in its horror. The faintest hiss of a wish to commit murder camefrom between his teeth. He had meant well, and ill had come; but because he had meant not badly and had struggled hard with fate, let no man dare to meddle! He could be flint against the steel of a man.
His eyes, long bereft of sleep, closed of themselves at last, and he threw himself upon his bed. But the pang which pierces the sleep of the condemned criminal soon woke him. He opened his eyes with a clearer mind, and set to thinking. The unsigned note to Violet was in a man’s hand. Some nights before in the cemetery he had found a man near the grave with her, and the man had seemed to be talking with her, a young, sunburned man. Who he was he had no idea; he had no reason to think this was the man who had sent the note. There was left only Miss L’Estrange. She might have sent it, getting a man to write for her—suspicion of itself fixed upon her. Always he had harbored this fear, that some paper, something to serve as a clue, had been left in the flat, which would lie hidden for a time, and then come forth into the noonday to undo him utterly. Gwendoline, he knew, had wished to screen him; but the chances were against him. He had never dared to go into the flat alone, to take the flat in his own name, and search it inside out. The place was haunted by a light step, and a sigh was in the air which no other ear could hear, but which his ear would hear without fail. Within those walls his eyes one night had seen a sight!
He had not dared to take the place; but he had put Miss L’Estrange into it, and she had failed him; so, suspecting at last that she did not search according to the bargain, he had threatened to stop supplies, in order merely to spur her to search, for his heart had always foreboded that there was something to find.
Gwen, he knew, had kept a diary. Where was that? His photographs, where were they? His last letter to her? The certificates? Had they all been duly destroyed by her? Had she forgotten nothing? But when he had attempted to spur L’Estrange, the woman had flown into a fury, and he had allowed himself to lose his temper. How bitter now was his remorse at this folly! He ought to have kept some one in perpetuity in the flat, till all fear of anything lying hidden in it was past. He suspected now that L’Estrange might have found some document, and had kept it from him through his not being well in her favor during the last weeks of her residence. He groaned aloud at this childishness of his. It was his business to have kept in touch with her, to have made her rich. But it was not too late.
So, on the following evening, he presented himself at the stage-door of the theater where Miss Ermyn L’Estrange was then displaying her charms, in his hand anécrincontaining arivièreof diamonds. He said not one word about his motive for coming to her after so long, but put out an every-day hand, as if no dispute had been between them.
“Well, this is a surprise!” said she. “What’s the game now?”
“No game,” said he, assuming the necessary jauntiness. “Should old acquaintance be forgot?” They drove together to the Café Royal.
“It was just as I tell you,” she explained in the cab, driving later to Chelsea. “I never saw one morsel of any paper until that last day, when the two certificates dropped out of the picture, and them I wouldn’t give you because of the tiff. I’m awfully sorry now that I didn’t,” she glanced down at therivièreon her palm; “but there, it’s done, and can’t be undone—nature of the beast, I s’pose.”
“And you really think Jenny has them? Are you sure, now? Are you sure?” asked Van Hupfeldt, earnestly.
“That’s my honest belief,” she answered. “I think I remember tossing them to Jenny, and as Jenny knew that I had gone into the flat specially to search for papers for you, she must have said to herself: ‘These papers may be just what have been wanted, and they’ll be worth their weight in gold to me, if I can find Mr. Strauss.’ No doubt she’s been looking for you ever since, or waiting for you to turn up. When I said to her yesterday: ‘What about those two papers that dropped out of the picture at Eddystone Mansions?’ she turned funny, and couldn’t catch her breath. ‘Which two papers, miss?’ she says. ‘Oh, you go on,’ I said to her; ‘you know verywell. Those that dropped out of the picture that fell down.’—‘Yes,’ said she, ‘now I remember. I wonder what could have become of them? Didn’t you throw them into the fireplace, Miss L’Estrange?’—‘No, I didn’t, Jenny,’ I said to her, ‘and a woman should lie to a man, not to another woman; for it takes a liar to catch a liar.’—‘But what lie am I telling, Miss L’Estrange?’ says she. ‘I am not sure,’ I said, ‘but I know that you ought to tie your nose with string whenever you’re telling a lie, for your nostrils keep opening and shutting, same as they’re doing now.’—‘I didn’t know that, I’m sure,’ says she. ‘That’s queer, too, if my nostrils are opening and shutting.’—‘It’s only the truth,’ I said to her; ‘your mouth is accustomed to uttering falsehood, and it doesn’t mind, but when your nostrils smell the lie coming out, they get excited, my girl.’—‘Fancy!’ says she. ‘That’s funny!’—‘So where’s the use keeping it up, Jenny?’ I said to her. ‘You do make me wild, for I know that you’re lying, and you know that I know, and yet you keep it up, as if I was a man, and didn’t know you. If you’ve got the papers, say so; you are perfectly welcome to them, for I don’t want to take them from you,’ I said. ‘Well, you seem to know more than I do myself, miss,’ she says. ‘Oh, you get out!’ I said to her, and I pushed her by the shoulders out of the room. That’s all that passed between us.”
“For what reason did you ask her about these papersyesterday in particular?” demanded Van Hupfeldt, thickly, a pain gripping at his heart.
“I’ll tell you. The new tenant of the flat came to me—”
“Ah! the flat is let again?”
“What, didn’t you know? He’s only just moved in—a young man named David Harcourt.”
“And he came to you? What about?”
“Asking about papers—”
“Papers? What interest can he have in them? And you told him about the certificates?”
“Yes.”
“Gott in Himmel!”
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“You told him about the certificates? Then it was he who wrote the note!”
“Which note? Don’t take on like that—in a cab!”
“You told him! Then it was he—it was he! How does he look, this young man? What kind of young man?” Van Hupfeldt wanted to choke the woman as she sat there beside him.
“Come, cheer up, pull yourself together; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. I’m sure I didn’t know that I was injuring you by telling him, and even if I had known, I should still have told him—there’s nothing like being frank, is there? You and I weren’t pals—”
“But what is he like, this young man?”
“Not a bad sort, something like a Jameson raider, a merry, upstanding fellow—”
“It was he who was at the grave with her!” whispered Van Hupfeldt to himself, while his eyes seemed to see a ghost. “And you told him all, all! It was he, no other. What name did you give him as that of the husband on the marriage-lines? Did he ask that, too? Did you tell him?” With a kind of crazy secrecy he asked it at her ear, panting for the answer.
“I didn’t remember the husband’s name,” she answered. “I told him it wasn’t Strauss, but van or von Something. And don’t lean against me in that way. People will think you are full.”
“Van? You told him that? And what did he say then?”
“He asked if it wasn’t van Something, I forget what, Van Hup—something. I have an awful bad memory for names, and, look here, don’t come worrying me with your troubles, for I’ve got my own to look after.”
Van Hupfeldt’s finger-nails were pressed into the flesh of his palms. This new occupier of the flat, then, even knew his name, even suspected the identity of Strauss with Van Hupfeldt. How could he know it, except from Violet? To the pains of panic in Van Hupfeldt was added a stab of jealousy. That Violet knew this young man he no longer doubted, nor doubted that the meeting at the grave was by appointment. Perhaps Violet, eager to find suspected papers of her sister’s, had even put this man into the flat, just as he, Van Hupfeldt, had once put Miss L’Estrange there. At all events, here was a man in the flathaving some interest or other in Violet and in Gwendoline’s papers, with the name Van Hupfeldt on his lips, and a suspicion that Van Hupfeldt was Strauss, the evil genius of Gwendoline!
“But there must be no meddling in my life!” Van Hupfeldt whispered to himself, with an evil eye that meant no good to David.
When the cab drew up before Miss L’Estrange’s dwelling, she said: “You can’t come up, you know; it is much too late. And there isn’t any need. I will let Jenny go to you as early as you like in the morning if you give me your address, or you can come yourself to-morrow—”
“Ah, don’t be hard on me,” he pleaded. “I mustn’t lose a night. Send her down to me, if I can’t go up.”
“Go on, the poor girl’s asleep,” she answered. “Where’s the use in carrying on like a loony? Can’t you take it coolly?”
In the end he had to go without seeing Jenny, having left his card on the understanding that she should be with him not later than ten in the morning, and that Miss L’Estrange should keep his address an inviolable secret.
The moment he was gone from her, Ermyn L’Estrange darted up the stairs, as if to catch something, and, on entering her flat, tripped into her bed-room, turned on the light, threw off her cloak, and put on the necklace before her mirror. It was a fine affair, and no mistake, all lights and colors playingbo-peep in the stones. She made a curtsy to her image, inspected herself on every side, stepping this way and that, daintily, like a peacock, keenly enjoying the gift, till the novelty of possessing it was gone stale. But at no time did she feel any gratitude to the giver, or think of him at all in connection with it—just the fact of having it occupied her mind, it didn’t matter whence.
And the mere knowledge that it was so valuable proved it to be a bribe, pointed to a weakness in the giver. Some gifts to women, especially splendid ones, produce not only no gratitude, but a certain hardness of heart, contempt, and touch of enmity. Perhaps there is a feeling of “I ought to be grateful,” but being too happy to be grateful, they are bored with a sense of fault, and for this they punish the giver with the opposite of gratitude.
At all events, by the time Miss L’Estrange had taken off the string of gems, a memory had grown up within her of David Harcourt, and with it came a mild feeling of partizanship and liking for David as against Strauss. It was a wayward machine, that she-heart under the bodice of Miss Ermyn L’Estrange—wayward without motive, subtle without thought, treacherous for treachery’s sake. As a matter of fact, before waking Jenny, it came into her head to “give a friendly tip” to David on the ground that he was “not a bad sort,” and she actually went out of her way to send him a post-card, telling him that shehad expected him to call on Jenny that day, and that, if he meant business, he must see her not later than half-past nine the next morning, or he would be too late.
What a web, this, which was being spun round the young adventurer from Wyoming!
David had not gone to interview Jenny the day before in obedience to Miss L’Estrange’s first note, because of the sullen humor to which he relapsed after his experiences at three in the morning in the streets of London. He resented the visiting of the glimpses of the moon by a young lady who donned rubber overshoes before re-entering her house, and he said to himself: “The day’s work, and skip the Violets.”
Then, the next morning, came Miss L’Estrange’s second letter—“he must see Jenny not later than half-past nine” or he would be “too late.” Again this failed to rouse him. With those lazy, lithe movements of the body which characterized him, he strolled for some time about the flat after his early breakfast, uncertain what to do. He saw, indeed, that some one else must be after the certificates—Strauss—Van Hupfeldt—if Strauss and Van Hupfeldt were one; but still he halted between two opinions, thinking: “Where do I come in, anyway?”
Then again the face which he had seen at the grave rose before him with silent pleadings, a face touchingto a man’s heart, with dry rose-leaf lips which she had a way of wetting quickly, and in her cheeks a die-away touch of the peach, purplish like white violets. And how did he know, the jealous youth, by what hundred reasons her nightly wandering might be accounted for? Why did he nourish that sort of resentment against a girl who was a perfect stranger? Perhaps there was really some jealousy in it! At which thought he laughed aloud, and suddenly darted into action, snatched a hat, and went flying. But then it was already past nine.
When he reached Miss L’Estrange’s flat, for some time no one answered his ring, and then the door opened but a little way to let out a voice which said: “What is it? I am not dressed. She’s gone. I told you you’d be too late.”
“Is she gone?” said David, blankly, eager enough now to see her.
“Look here, why should I be bothered with the lot of you at this ungodly hour of the morning?” cried the fickle L’Estrange. “Ican’t help your troubles! Can’t you see when anybody is in bed?”
“But why did you let her go before I came?” asked David.
“You are cool! Am I your mother?”
“I wish you were for this once.”
“Nice mother and son we little two would make, wouldn’t we?”
“That’s not the point. I’m afraid you are gettingcold. You ought to have contrived to keep the girl till I came, though it is my own fault. But can’t anything be done now? Where is she gone to?”
“To Strauss, of course.”
“With the certificates?”
“I suppose so. I know nothing about it, and care less. I did try to keep her back a bit for your sake, but she was pretty keen to be gone to him when once she had his address, the underhanded little wretch!”
“But stop—how long is it since she has gone?”
“Not three minutes. It’s just possible that you might catch her up, if you look alive.”
“How can that be? I shouldn’t know her. I have never seen her. We may have passed each other in the street.”
“Listen. She is a small, slim girl with nearly white hair and little Chinese eyes. She has on a blue serge skirt with my old astrakhan bolero and a sailor hat. Now you can’t miss her.”
“But which way? Where does Strauss live?”
“I promised not to tell, and I’m always as good as my word,” cried the reliable Miss Ermyn L’Estrange, “but between you and me, it’s not a thousand miles from Piccadilly Circus; and that is where Jenny will get down off her bus; so if you take a cab—”
“Excellent. Good-by! See you again!” said David.
David was gone, in a heat of action. He took no cab, however, but took to his heels, so that he might be able to spy at the occupants within and on the topof each bus on the line of route, by running a little faster than the vehicles. At this hour London was already out of doors, going shopping, going to office and works. It was a bright morning, like the beginning of spring. People turned their heads to look at the man who ran faster than the horses, and pried into the buses. Victoria, Whitehall, Charing Cross, he passed—still he could see no one quite like Jenny. He began to lose hope, finding, moreover, that running in London was not like running in Wyoming, or even like his run from Bucks. Here the air seemed to lack body and wine. It did not repay the lungs’ effort, nor give back all that was expended, so that in going up the steep of Lower Regent-St. he began to breathe short. Nevertheless, to reward him, there, not far from the Circus, he saw sitting patient in a bus-corner the sailor hat, the bolero, the Chinese eyes, and reddish white hair of Jenny.
The moment she stepped out, two men sprang forward to address her—David and Van Hupfeldt’s valet. Van Hupfeldt lived near the lower portion of Hanover Square, the way to which being rather shut in and odd to one who does not know it, his restlessness had become unbearable when Jenny was a little late, so he had described her to his valet, a whipper-snapper named Neil—for Van Hupfeldt had several times seen Jenny with Miss L’Estrange—and had sent Neil to Piccadilly Circus, where he knew that Jenny would alight, in order to conduct her to hisrooms. However, as Neil moved quickly forward, David was before him, and the valet thought to himself: “Hello, this seems to be a case of two’s company and three’s none.”
David was saying to Jenny: “You are Miss L’Estrange’s servant?”
“I am,” answered Jenny.
“She sent me after you. I must speak with you urgently. Come with me.”
Now, in Jenny’s head were visions of nothing less than wealth—wealth which she was eager to handle that hour. She said, therefore, to David: “I don’t know who you are. I can’t go anywhere—”
They stood together on the pavement, with Neil, all unknown to David, behind them listening.
“There’s no saying ‘No,’” insisted David. “You’re going to see Mr. Strauss, aren’t you? Well, I am here instead of Mr. Strauss in this matter.”
But this ambiguous remark failed of its effect, for Neil, whose master had told him that in this affair he was not Van Hupfeldt but Strauss, intervened with the pert words: “Begging your pardon, but I am Strauss.”
However, this short way of explaining that he was there on behalf of Strauss was promptly misunderstood by Jenny, who looked with disdain at the valet, saying: “You are not Mr. Strauss!”
“Of course he isn’t,” said David, quickly. “How dare you, sir, address this lady? Come right away, will you? Come, now. Let’s jump into this cab.”
“Who are you? I don’t even know you!” cried the perplexed Jenny.
“I didn’t say I was Mr. Strauss himself,” began Neil.
“Yes, you did say so,” said Jenny, “and it isn’t the truth, for I know Mr. Strauss very well, and neither of you isn’t going to get over me, so you know!”
“Don’t you see,” suggested David, his wits all at work, “that one of us must be true, and as you are aware that he isfalse—”
“What is all this about?” demanded Jenny. “I have no business with either of you. Just tell me the way to Hanover Square, please, and let me go about my business.”
“That’s just why I’m here, to show you the way,” said Neil. “I dunno why this gentleman takes it upon himself—”
“Best hold your tongue, young man,” growled David. “You must be stupid to think this young girl would go off with you, a man she never saw before, especially after detecting you in a direct untruth—”
“As for that, she don’t know you any more than me, seemingly,” retorted Neil. “Mr. Strauss sent me—”
“How is she to know that? Miss L’Estrange sent me. Didn’t I know your name, Jenny, and your mistress’s name?”
“Well, that’s right enough,” agreed Jenny on reflection.
“Then trust to me.”
“But what is it you want, sir?”
“It is about the papers,” whispered David, confidentially. “It is all to your good to come with me first and hear what I have to say. Miss L’Estrange—”
“Well, all right; but you must be quick,” said Jenny, rushing to a decision.
David hailed a cab, and he and Jenny turned their backs upon the defeated valet, got in, and drove off. However, Neil, who had witnessed Van Hupfeldt’s fever of eagerness to see this girl, followed in another cab. David drove to the Tube Station near Oxford Circus—she would accompany him no farther—and, while he talked with Jenny in a corner there, Neil, lurking among the crowd of shop-gazers across the street, kept watch.
“I propose to you,” David said to Jenny, “to give the certificates to me, and in doing so, I understand that you are a poor girl—”
“That’s just it,” answered Jenny, “and I must know first how much I am to get for them—if it’s true that I have any certificates.”
“Right enough,” said David, “but the main motive which I hold out to you is not what you will receive in hard cash, but that you will do an immense amount of good, if you give the papers to me. They don’t belong to this Mr. Strauss, but they do belong to the mother and sister of a poor wronged lady, a lady whose character they will clear.”
“Ah, no doubt,” agreed Jenny, with the knowing leer of a born Cockney; “still, a girl has got to look after herself, you see, and not mind other people’s troubles.”
“What!” cried David, “would you rather do the wrong thing and earn twenty pounds, or do the right thing and earn five pounds? You can’t be in earnest saying that.”
“It isn’t a question of five pounds, nor yet of twenty,” snapped Jenny, offended at the mere mention of such paltry sums, “it’s a question of hundreds and of thousands.” Her mouth went big for the “thousands.” “Don’t think that I’m going to part with the papers under high figures, if so be I have any papers.”
“Under what?” asked David—“under hundreds, or under thousands?”
“Under thousands.”
“Now hold on a bit. Are you aware that I could have the papers taken from you this minute, papers that don’t belong to you, which you propose to sell to some one other than the rightful owners?”
At this Jenny changed color. There was a policeman within a few yards, and she saw her great and golden dream dissolving.
“It remains to be seen if I have got any papers. That’s the very question, you see!” she said.
“You might be searched, you know, just to clear the point. Yet you needn’t be afraid of that, for I’m disposed to meet you, and you aren’t going to refuseany reasonable offer, with no trouble from the police to follow. So I offer you now—fifty golden sovereigns for the papers, cash down.”
“You leave me alone,” muttered Jenny, sheepishly, turning her shoulder to him.
“Well, I thought we were going to be friends; but I see that I must act harshly,” David said, making a threatening movement to leave her.
“You can have them for one hundred pounds,” the girl murmured in a frail voice with downcast eyes; to which David, not to drive a hard bargain with her, at once answered: “Well, you shall have your one hundred pounds.”
The next moment, however, he was asking himself: “Who’s to pay? Can I afford these royal extravagances in other people’s affairs? Steady! Not too much Violet!”
He walked a little way from the girl, considering it. He could not afford it. There was no earthly reason why he should. But he might go to Violet, to Mrs. Mordaunt, and obtain the one hundred pounds, or their authorization to spend that sum on their behalf. In that case, however, how make sure of Jenny in the meantime? It would hardly do to leave her there in the station, so near to Strauss. She would be drawn to him as by a magnet, and he thought that if he took her with him to the Mordaunts, she would recover her self-assurance and demand from the women more, perhaps, than they could afford. In the end, hedecided to take her to his flat, and leave her there in Mrs. Grover’s charge till he returned from the Mordaunts.
“That’s a bargain, then,” he said to her; “one hundred it is. I take it that you actually have the certificates on you?”
“I may have,” smirked the elusive Jenny.
“That’s all right. ‘Have’ and ‘may have’ are the same things in your case. So now I shall go right away to procure the one hundred pounds, and meantime you’ll come with me to your old flat in Eddystone Mansions—that’s where I live now—No, don’t be scared, there’s some one there besides myself, and the ghost doesn’t walk in the daytime.”
They hailed another cab, and again Neil, leaving his lurking-place, drove after them. He saw David and Jenny go into the mansions, then stood uncertain whether to hurry home and tell the position of affairs to Van Hupfeldt, who, he knew, must by this time be raving, or whether to wait and see if Jenny and David came out again.
He was loitering a little way up the house-stairs, thinking it out, when he heard the lift coming down, and presently he saw David rush out—alone. Jenny, then, was still in the building. Neil ran to the lift-man.
“Gentleman who just come down,” he said, “does he live here?”
“He do, in No. 7,” was the answer.
“Girl’s left in his flat, then,” thought Neil, scratching his head, “and the bloke wot owns the flat don’t know I’ve been spying. I’d better hurry back and let the master know how things are looking.”
Whereat the valet, who was clearer in action than in speech, ran out and took cab to Hanover Square, to tell Van Hupfeldt where Jenny was.
David, meantime, also by cab, was off to Porchester Gardens, a certain hurry and fluster now in his usually self-possessed bosom. He looked at his face in the cab-mirror, and adjusted his tie. A young man who acts in that way betrays a symptom of heart-disease. At 60A he sent up his card.
Violet knew from Dibbin the name of David Harcourt, but when she read it she seemed startled, and turned a little pale. “Show him up,” she said, in a flurry.
“You will excuse my calling,” explained David, without shaking hands, “though we have met before—you remember?”
She inclined her head a little, standing, as it were, shrunk from him, some way off.
“But my visit has to do with a small matter which admits of no delay.”
“My mother—” she began.
“Is out, I know,” said he, “but as the affair is urgent, I am here. You know that I am the tenant of No. 7, Eddystone Mansions, and you know also, that, without seeking it, I have some knowledge of your history. I wish to ask whether, without troublingyour mind with a lot of details, you care to authorize me to spend at once, in your interests, a sum of one hundred pounds.”
She scrutinized him with a certain furtiveness, weighing him.
“In my interests?” said she.
“Yours and your mother’s.”
“One hundred pounds?”
“Yes.”
“It seems a strange request.”
“It isn’t a request. If you haven’t confidence in me to the extent of one hundred pounds, I am not deeply concerned.”
“But you come like a storm, and speak like one.”
“On a purely business matter of your own—remember.”
“You were at the pains to come,” she said with a smile. “You cannot both care and not care.”
“I used the word ‘concern,’ you know.”
“Is it a gracious way to approach me?”
“Is it charming to be mistrusted?”
“Did I say that I mistrusted you?”
“With your eyes.”
“Well, I say now with my lips that I do not. Which will you believe?”
“No doubt they can both deceive.”
“Oh, now you are verging on rudeness.”
“There are worse things than rudeness, when one thinks of it.”
“I have no idea to what you refer.”
“That may be because I know more about you than you think.”
At this she started guiltily, visibly, and at that start again she appeared before the eye of David’s memory gliding through the moonlight at three in the morning, a ghost hastening back to the tomb. Yet, in her presence, the resentment which rankled in him softened to pity. A look of appeal came into her dark eyes, and a certain essence of honesty and purity in her being communicated itself to his instincts, putting it out of his power to think any ill of her for the moment.
He said hurriedly: “I fear I have begun badly. All this is neither here nor there.”
She sat down, slung a knee between her clasped fingers in her habitual manner, and said: “Please tell me, what do you mean?” Then she looked up at him again with a troubled light in her eyes.
He walked quickly nearer to her, saying: “Now, don’t let that get into your head as a serious statement. It was a mere manner of speaking, what I said, and of no importance. Moreover, there’s this question of one hundred pounds, and time is a vital consideration.”
“Nevertheless, you were definite enough, and must have had some meaning,” she went on. “Did I not hear you say that you know more about me than I think? Well, then, have the goodness to tell me what.”
“Now I have put my foot in it, I suppose,” saidDavid, “and you will never rest till I find something to tell you. But not now, if you will bear with me. In a few days I shall, perhaps, call on your mother, or see you again at a place which you no doubt visit pretty often at about the same hour, and to which I, too, somehow am strangely drawn. The question now before us is whether I am to spend the one hundred pounds for you.”
“As to that, what can one say? You tell me nothing of your reason, my mother is out, and I am afraid that I have not at the moment one hundred pounds of my own. I am about to be married, and—”
“Married?”
“I am myself rather surprised at it. Yet I fail to see why you should be immoderately surprised.”
“I? Surprised?” said he in a dazed way, still standing with one foot drawn back a step. “I was merely taken aback, because—”
“Well?”
“Because—nothing. I was simply taken aback, that’s all. Or rather because I had not heard of it before.”
“It was only fully decided upon yesterday,” said she, bending down over her knee.
“Oh, only yesterday. And the happy event takes place when? for I am at least interested.”
“Soon. Within two or three weeks. I don’t quite know when.”
“And the happy man?”
“The same whom you saw come to take me from Kensal Green.”
“Mr. Van Hupfeldt?”
“Oh, you know his name. Yes; Mr. Van Hupfeldt.”
David chuckled grimly.
“Why do you laugh?” she asked.
“But whatever is your motive?” he cried sharply.
“You are strange to venture to inquire into my motive,” she said, with downcast eyes. Then her lip trembled, and she added in a low voice: “My motive is known only to the dead.”
“Ah, don’t cry!” he almost shouted at her, with a sudden brand of red anger across his brow. “There’s no need for tears! It shan’t ever happen, this thing!”
“What do you mean?” she asked, glancing tremulously at him.
“What I say. This marriage can’t happen. I’ll see to that. But stop—perhaps I am talking too soon. ‘Let not him boast that putteth his armor on as he that taketh it off.’ Good-day, Miss Mordaunt. I shall not trouble you any more about the one hundred pounds. I will spend it out of my own pocket pocket—”
“Please stay!” she cried after him. “Everything that you say bewilders me! How am I to believe you honest when you say such things?”
“What things? Honest? You may believe me honest or not, just as you will. I told you before that I am not greatly concerned. If I bewilderyou, you angerme.”
“I am sorry for that. But how so?”
“What, is it nothing for a man to hear it doubted whether he is honest or not? And, apart from that, admit that your sister is not very long dead, and that you have been easily drawn into this engagement—”
“But what can all this matter to you?” she asked, with a wrinkled brow. “Why should my private conduct anger you at all? I have not, in fact, as you think, been so easily won into this engagement; yet, if I had, it is amazing that you should lecture me. If it was any one but you, I should be cross.”
“What, am I in special favor, then?”
“You have an honest face.”
“Then why is my poor honesty constantly doubted.”
“Because you say extraordinary things. It is not, for instance, usual for people to pay one hundred pounds for the benefit of a casual acquaintance as you just volunteered to do. Either you have some trick or motive in view, or you are very wonderfully disinterested.”
“Which do you think?”
“I may think one thing now, and the other after you are gone.”
“Well, it is useless arguing. I should be here all day, if I let myself. We were not made to agree, you see. Some people are like that. I shall just pay the one hundred pounds out of my own pocket—”
“You are not to do that, please.”
“Then, will you?”
“I think not.”
“You have no idea what is in question!”
“Then, give me some idea.”
“And lose more time. However, you may as well hear. It is this: that the tenant in the flat before me, one Miss L’Estrange, found concealed in a picture a certificate of a marriage and one of a birth, and I wish to buy them for you from Miss L’Estrange’s servant, who has them.”
Violet sprang upright with an adoring face, murmuring: “Heaven be thanked!”
“I didn’t tell you before,” said David, “because I haven’t secured the papers yet. I have left the girl in my flat—”
“But where—where do you say she found them?” she asked, with a keener interest than the question quite seemed to call for.
“It was in a picture-frame, between the picture and the boards at the back,” he answered. “The picture dropped, and the certificates fell out.”
“Heaven be praised!” she breathed again. “Was there nothing else that fell out?”
“Nothing else, apparently.”
“That was enough. Why should I want more? Oh, get them for me quickly, will you?” she cried, all animated and pink. “With these in my hand everything will be different. Even your prophecy against my marriage, which you seemed not to desire, will very likely come true.”
“So now I have your authority to spend the one hundred pounds?” he asked, with a smile.
“Of course! Ten times as much!”
“But blessed is she who has not seen, and yet has believed!”
“Forgive me! I do thank and trust you!” She put out her hand. He took it, and bent some time over it.
“Good-by, Miss Mordaunt.”
“Not for long—an hour—two?”
“I am glad to have pleased you. I shall always remember how the brunette type of angels look when they thank Providence.”
“It is not fair to flatter when one is highly happy and deeply thankful, for then one hears everything as music. Tell me of it some other time, when I shall have a sharper answer ready. But stay—one word. It is of these certificates that Mr. Van Hupfeldt, too, must somehow have got wind. Does the girl say that any one else knows of them?”
“A man named Strauss knows of them.”
At that name her eyelids fell as if her modesty had been hurt. “Does not Mr. Van Hupfeldt know of them?” she asked, with face averted.
“I cannot tell you—yet,” he answered, turning a little from her lest she caught the grim smile on his lips. “Why do you think that he may know?”
“Because some days ago he wrote me a note—it is this. It can refer only to these certificates, I suppose.”
She handed to David his own note—“It is now a pretty certain thing that your sister was a duly wedded wife”—and David, looking at it, asked with something of a flush: “Did Mr. Van Hupfeldt say that it was he who sent you this? I see that it has no signature.”
“Yes, it was he,” said Violet.
“Ah!” murmured David, and said no more.
“If it was these certificates which he had in his mind when he wrote that note,” said she, “then he, too, as well as you, must have a chance of securing them from the girl. So you had better be careful that he is not beforehand with you.”
David looked squarely at her. “So long as you obtain them, what does it matter from whom they come?”
“Of course,” she replied, with her eyes on the ground, “I shall owe much gratitude to the person who hands them to me.”
He took a step forward, whispering: “Must I be the winner?”
He received no answer from her; only, a wave of blood, a blush that flooded her being from her toes to the roots of her hair all of a sudden, suffused Violet, while he stood awaiting her reply. He put out his hand with a fine self-control. “Well, I must try,” he cried lightly. She just touched his fingers with hers, and the next moment he was striding from her.
His cab was waiting outside. Calling, “Quick asyou can!” to the driver, he sprang in, and they started briskly away. He was well content inwardly. Something bird-like seemed new-fledged and fluttering a little somewhere inside. He had tasted the sweet poison of honey-dew.
As for doubt, he had none at the moment. Jenny he had left safe with Mrs. Grover; he was sure that she had the certificates with her. But when he reached the middle of Oxford-St., he saw that which made him start—Van Hupfeldt in a landau driving eastward, and, sitting beside the coachman, the valet Neil. What spurred David’s interest was the pace at which the landau’s horses were racing through the traffic, and also the face of the man in the carriage, so gaunt and wild, leaning forward with his two hands clenched on his knees, as if to press the carriage faster forward by the strain of his soul.
At once a host of speculations crowded upon David’s mind. Now, for the first time, it occurred to him that Neil may have shadowed him and the girl to the flat, that Van Hupfeldt might have the daring to be on the way to the flat to win Jenny from him. He felt that he could hardly prevail against Van Hupfeldt with Jenny—Van Hupfeldt being rich—and the two high-steppers in the landau were fast leaving the cab-horse behind. An eagerness to be quickly at his flat rose in David, so without stopping his cab he stood out near the splash-board and cried to his amazed driver: “I say! You come inside, and let me drive.”
“Mustn’t do that, sir. It is more than my place is worth,” began the cabman.
“Two pounds for you, and I pay all fines—quick now!” said David.
The driver hesitated, but pulled up. He climbed down, went into the cab, and David was on the perch, reins in hand. Though some persons were astonished, luckily no policeman saw them. The horse, as if conscious of something from Wyoming behind him, began to run. David bolted northward out of the traffic, and careered through the emptier streets, while the old cab-horse wondered what London was coming to when such things could be, and praised the days of his youth. When David drew up at Eddystone Mansions, there was no sign of the landau. He ran up the stairs three at a time. He would not await the tardy elevator. In moments of stress we return to nature and cast off the artificial. Opening his door with his key, he made straight into the drawing-room where he had left Jenny. Then his heart sank miserably, for she was not there.
“Mrs. Grover!” he called, and when Mrs. Grover hurried from the kitchen, her hands leprous with pastry-dough, David looked at her so thunderously that she drew back.
“Where’s the girl, Mrs. Grover?” he growled.
“She’s gone, sir.”
“I see that. You let her go, Mrs. Grover?”
“Why, sir, a man came here, saying he had a messagefrom you for the girl, and I let him in. They had a talk together, then she said she must be going. I couldn’t stop her.”
David groaned.
The man who had called was Neil, who, on hurrying to tell his master where Jenny was, had been sent back with instructions to try and induce her to leave the flat and come to Hanover Square. Neil had accomplished this to the extent of getting Jenny to leave Eddystone Mansions; but she would not go to Strauss, for David’s threat of the police if she disposed of the papers to any one else than their lawful owner was in her mind, and she now feared to sell the papers to Strauss, as she knew that she would certainly do if she once went to his rooms. Yet she was sorely tempted to sell to the lavish rich man rather than to the bargainer, and so, making a compromise between her fears and her temptation, she had told Neil that she would wait in a certain café, and there discuss the matter with Strauss, if Strauss would come to her. She was waiting there, and Strauss was going to her, led by Neil, when David had seen him in the landau.
At any rate, the girl was gone. David felt as if he had lost all things. He had promised the certificates; and Violet had said: “I shall owe much gratitude to the person who hands them to me.”
Now Van Hupfeldt had, or would have, them. While he had been dallying and bandying words in Porchester Gardens, Van Hupfeldt had been acting,and he groaned to himself in a pain of self-reproach: “Too much Violet, David!”
He strode to and fro in the dining-room with a quick step, pacing with the lightness of a caged bear, his fists clenched, keen to act, yet not knowing what to do. The girl was gone, the certificates gone with her.
One thing, however, he had gained by the adventure, namely, the almost certainty that Van Hupfeldt was Strauss—for he had seen the valet, Neil, who at Piccadilly Circus had declared that he was Strauss’s servant, sitting on the box-seat of the landau in which was the man whom David had heard Violet at the grave call “Mr. Van Hupfeldt.” This seemed a sort of proof that Van Hupfeldt and Strauss were one. The same man who had been so bound up with the one sister, and had somehow brought her to her death, was now about to marry the other! The thought of such a thing struck lightning from David’s eyes.
“Never that!” he vowed in his frenzy. “However it goes, not that!”
And then he was angry afresh with her, thinking: “He can’t be much good, this man—she must be easily won.”
He could not guess that Van Hupfeldt had promised to clear her sister’s name six months after the marriage, and that this was her motive, and not love, for being won. He did not realize that the certificates now lost by him would have freed Violet from VanHupfeldt. He believed that she was entering lightly into marriage with a man of great wealth. Again, in this unreasoning mood, he saw her in her nocturnal wanderings.
But bitterness and regrets could not bring back the certificates, in the gaining of which her honor was almost at stake. If he had known where Van Hupfeldt lived, he would have gone straight there. Nevertheless, Van Hupfeldt was not at home, was hurrying away from home, in fact. Here, then, was another point. Jenny had clearly not gone to Van Hupfeldt’s on leaving the flat, or why should Van Hupfeldt be racing eastward? It seemed that Jenny and Van Hupfeldt were to meet somewhere else, perhaps somewhere not far from the mansions. If David had only kept the landau in sight, he might have tracked Van Hupfeldt to that meeting! He felt now that, if he could come upon them, then, by the mere force and whirlwind of his will, he should have his way. On a sudden he went out again into the streets.
He ran southward at a venture. If there was a conference going on in any house near by, and if the landau was waiting outside, he should recognize it by the horses and by Neil on the box. But, as it turned out, even this recognition was not necessary, for, running down Bloomsbury-St., toward a carriage of which he caught sight standing before a French chocolate-shop at the Oxford-St. corner, he saw a man and a girl come out of the shop. The man lifted hishat and nodded toward the girl with his foot on the carriage-step, and then was driven off westward. Half a minute afterward David had overtaken the girl.
“You wretched creature!” he said, in the fierce heat of his anger and haste: “Hand me those certificates, and be quick about it!”
“I haven’t the faintest idea which certificates you mean,” said Jenny, as bold now as brass, for she had no doubt been strengthened by the interview in the shop, and assured of Van Hupfeldt’s protection.
This was enough for David. He understood from her words that the papers were now in Van Hupfeldt’s hands; whereat a flood of rage surged within him, and, without any definite purpose, he rushed after the carriage. It had not gone far, because of a block of traffic near Tottenham Court Road, and his hot face was soon thrust over the carriage-door. Van Hupfeldt shrank back into the farthest corner with a look of blank dismay.
“Yes, you can have them, Mr. Strauss—” began David, hotly.
“What is it?” muttered Van Hupfeldt, crouching, with his hand on the opposite door-handle. “That is not my name.”
“Whatever your name, or however many names you may own, you can have those papers now; but there may be other things where they came from, and if they’re there, I’m the man in possession, mark you, and I’ll be finding them—”
“Papers! What papers? Find what?” asked Van Hupfeldt, with a scared face that belied his words.
“You cur!” cried David, his heart burning hot within him; “make amends for your crimes while you may. If you don’t, I tell you, I shall have no mercy. Soon I shall have my hands on you—”
“Drive on!” screamed Van Hupfeldt to his coachman, and, the block of traffic having now cleared, the horses trotted on, and left David red-faced with fury, in imminent danger of being run over by the press of vehicles behind.