“And suppose the police call during your absence?” said Austin Turold, glancing sharply at his son.
“Then you had better tell the truth. I am tired of it all.”
“I might ask, with Pilate, What is truth?—in your case.”
“You know it already, father, whether you believe me or not.”
Austin Turold looked strangely at him—a look in which anger was mingled with something deeper and more searching, as though he sought to reach some secret in the depth of his soul. Impatiently he crossed the room to the fireplace, and stood with his back to the fire, facing his son.
“I do not see that there’s any more risk than there was before,” said Charles gloomily.
“I say there is,” returned his father sharply. “What! Do you suppose you can go off to London like this, leaving me here alone, at such a moment? Do you not see that your unexplained absence, in itself, is likely to bring suspicion upon you, indeed, upon both of us?”
“I cannot help that,” returned the young man desperately. “I must go and find Sisily.”
“You are not likely to find her. You do not even know that she has gone to London.”
“Yes. I have found out that much. She took a ticket by the midday train on the day after—it happened.”
“And why do you wish to find her?”
“Because she is deeply wronged—she is innocent.”
“You should be able to speak with authority on that point,” said Austin, with a cold glance, which the other did not meet. “You are acting very foolishly, rushing off to London on this quixotic mission. You won’t find her. Besides, no woman is worth what you are risking in this wild-goose chase. You are jeopardizing your future by an act of the maddest folly.”
“There is nothing in life for me but the shadow of things—now,” returned the young man in low tones. “I want nothing except to find Sisily and prove her innocence. I’m going to look for her, whatever you say.”
Austin Turold made an impatient gesture.
“Very well,” he said. “If Providence has made you a fool you must fulfil Providence’s decree. Only, I warn you, I think you are going the right way to bring trouble on yourself. That lawyer who was here to-day—what’s his name, Brimstone, Brimsdown?—has his suspicions, unless I’m very much mistaken.”
Charles turned pale. “What makes you think that?” he asked.
“By the way he watched both of us.”
“That accounts for his attitude when I saw him afterwards,” said Charles in a startled voice.
“Afterwards—where?”
“I went after him to tell him that Sisily was innocent.”
“And what else did you tell him?”
“Nothing but that—nothing that counted, at least.”
“Really, Charles, your lack of intelligence is a distinct reflection on me as a parent. Fancy a son of mine trying to make a lawyer’s bowels yearn with compassion! I’m positively ashamed of you. Why are you so elementary? The situation must have contained some elements of humour, though. I should like to have witnessed it. Did you call down Heaven’s vengeance on the murderer in approved fashion? How did the man of parchments take it?”
“You have no heart,” said his son, flushing darkly under this sarcasm. He walked towards the door as he spoke. “I am going,” he said. “There is an excursion train through to Paddington to-night, and I shall catch it.”
“You are determined on it, then?”
“I should be in an unendurable position if I didn’t,” replied the young man, and without another word he left the room.
Austin looked after him a little wistfully, as though remembering that the other was, after all, his son. He remained motionless for a moment, then crossed over to the window and looked out. As he stood so his eye was caught by two figures beneath. One was his son, walking down the garden path. The other was Mrs. Brierly, returning to the house. She walked past Charles with downcast eyes, but Austin from the window saw her turn and cast a frightened fluttering glance at the young man’s retreating figure. She had seen him, then, but did not want to recognize him. As she hurried up the garden path Austin caught a glimpse of her face, and observed that it was white and drawn.
“What’s the matter with my estimable landlady?” he murmured as he withdrew from the window.
His quick intelligence, playing round this incident and seeking to pierce its meaning, grew alarmed. There seemed to be a menace in it. Did she know or guess something of the hidden events of that night, or had she played the spy since? He turned pale as he considered these possibilities. Women had an unerring instinct for a secret once their curiosity was aroused. But he had been careful, very careful. What did she suspect?
He thought over this problem until night fell, and retired to bed with it still unanswered.
But the solution flashed into his mind at breakfast next morning, suddenly, like light in a dark place. He was amazed that he had not seen it before. “If it is that …” he whispered. But he knew it was that; knew also, that it meant the worst. He got up from the table, then forced himself to sit down again and eat. An untouched breakfast tray might quicken the suspicions in the mind of that most treacherous woman downstairs, might hasten her hand. But why had she delayed so long?
He passed the morning between his chair and the window, watching, and listening for footsteps. He saw Mrs. Brierly leave the house early, and wondered if she would return with the police. Another reflection came to his mind. Charles had some inkling, and had fled in time. Perhaps that was just as well, if he got out of England. For himself there was no such retreat, nor did he wish it. He would have to face things out, if they had to be faced, and he did not yet despair of saving the situation, so far as it affected himself. What did that diabolical female know, really? He had a momentary vision of her stealing about the house, prying, watching, listening. He sank into a motionless brooding reverie.
The day passed its meridian, but he still sat there in solitude with his anxious thoughts. As the afternoon declined his hopes rose. Could it be that he was mistaken, that his fears were imaginary? Perhaps, after all—
At that sharp ring of the doorbell downstairs he walked noiselessly to the window, and shrank back with the startled look of a man who has had his first glimpse of the bared teeth of the law. He stood still, listening intently. He heard the door opened, a sharp question, then the sound of ascending footsteps. When the knock came at his own door he was in complete command of himself as he went to open it. He was well aware of the ordeal before him, but he did not show it. There was nothing but ironical self-possession in the glance which took in the figures of Detective Barrant and Inspector Dawfield, revealed on the threshold of the opening door.
Barrant lost no time in coming to the point. “I want to see your son,” he said, entering and glancing quickly round the apartment.
“I am afraid that is impossible.”
“Why?”
“He is not here.”
“Where is he?”
“I think he has gone to London.”
Barrant was plainly taken aback at this unexpected piece of news. “When did he go?” he demanded.
“Yesterday evening.”
Barrant cast a look at Dawfield, which said plainly: “He’s had word of this and bolted.” His glance returned to Austin. “Can you tell me where he is staying in London?”
“I have not the least idea,” returned Austin negligently.
“Does he not live with you?”
“As a rule—yes.”
“What is your London address?”
Austin took a card from his case and laid it on the table. Barrant picked it up, glanced at it, and said: “Is your son likely to be there?”
“He may be, but he said nothing to me about going there. He has his own liberty of action, like every other young man of his age. May I ask the reason of these questions, Detective Barrant?”
Barrant did not choose to reply. He drew Inspector Dawfield to the doorway and conferred with him in an undertone. Austin saw Barrant slip the card into his colleague’s hand, and Dawfield then hastened away. The inference was plain. Dawfield had been sent off to intercept the flight or start the pursuit. Austin found himself profoundly hoping that his son was by that time out of England.
He had not much leisure to think of that, for Barrant turned towards him again with an annoyance that he did not attempt to dissemble. “Why has your son gone to London—perhaps you can tell me that much?” he exclaimed.
“I gathered from him that it is his intention to look for his cousin Sisily.”
“For what purpose?”
“Because he strongly believes in her innocence.”
“It is strange that he should have rushed off like this.”
“Without waiting for your visit, do you mean? Really, Detective Barrant, may I constrain you to give me some explanation of all this? I want to help you all I can, but your actions savour too much of a peremptory jack-in-the-box, even in these bureaucratic days. What is the object of this visit? Why did you want to see my son?”
“I wished to interview him.”
“About what, may I ask?”
Barrant did not immediately reply, but Austin, scanning him furtively, sought to reach his thoughts by the varying shades of expression on his face. It was the state of mind of a man who was at once chagrined, amazed, suspicious, and wondering. The older man could picture Barrant thinking to himself: “This man before me—how far is he involved in this?” And, watching him mutely, Austin steeled himself for a sudden outburst: “You picked up the key. You declared it was suicide. What does that mean—now?”
But he under-estimated Barrant’s intelligence. Barrant had no intention of doing anything so crude. The situation was sufficiently awkward as it stood without putting the father on his guard. Austin might guess that he was under suspicion as well as his son, but that did not matter so much. Barrant instinctively realized that flight was impossible for Austin Turold, though he might seek to warn his son not to go near their London home because the police were after him. But that was a warning which would be useless, for the police were ahead of him there. Barrant reflected that he gained nothing by not divulging the object of his visit when the inference of it was so transparently palpable. The disclosure might even serve a useful purpose by lessening Austin’s apprehensions in his own case. With this consideration in view he brought it out frankly—
“I wished to question your son about his movements on the night of the murder.”
“Is my son suspected—now?”
Barrant winced under the delicate inflection of irony which conveyed in that brief reply the inference of another blunder in his own changing suspicions. That sneer roused the official in him, and it was in a curt tone of command that he said—
“What time did your son get home on the day of the murder?”
“I am unable to say.”
“He did not return with you after the funeral?”
“No, he did not.”
“Where did he go?”
“These are strange questions, Detective Barrant. I really cannot tell you that either, because I do not know.”
He put up his glasses to look at Barrant with an assumption of resentment, but the detective’s return glance was hard and searching. “Was your son in to dinner that night?” he asked.
“We have midday dinner, in this house.”
“Well, supper. Was he in to supper?”
Austin reflected rapidly. He dared not refuse to answer the question, and any attempt to mislead the questioner would only make things worse when the two women in the house knew the truth.
“Yes. He was in to supper.”
“And went out afterwards?”
This was put more as a simple statement of fact than a question. Again, Austin’s subtle intelligence could see no better course than truth.
“He did. My son frequently goes out walking of an evening after supper.”
“What time did he return—on this evening?”
“I do not know.”
“Do you mean that?” Barrant’s tone was incredulous.
“I do.” The impulse which had dictated his previous answer sprang from the thought that the foolish females downstairs could not contradict it, and he adhered calmly to the course now he was committed to it.
“What time did Thalassa come for you from Flint House with the news that your brother was dead?”
“I do not know the exact time. He called at the police station first.”
“Had not your son returned by then?”
“I am unable to inform you. He frequently goes straight to his room when he returns from an evening walk.”
“Then you do not know whether he was in or out when you left the house?”
“I assumed he was in, as it was after his usual time for returning.”
“You did not go to his room, to see?”
“No. I did not wish to disturb him.”
Barrant looked as though there was only one possible construction to be placed on these replies, but he still did not utter the question which Austin feared and dreaded most. In a harsh peremptory voice he said—“Show me your son’s room.”
In those words he stood revealed as one with all the resources of the law at his back, able to issue commands which other people must obey. The rights of liberty and freedom were in his hands. It needed not that to show Austin Turold how near he stood to the edge of the precipice. The strain of the interview had told on him. This was the first actual buffet of the beast’s paw. He led the way to his son’s room and watched Barrant go through his intimate belongings with the feeling that intelligence was a flimsy shield against the brutal force of authority. The law in search of prey cared nothing for such civilized refinements as intellect or self-respect. As well try to stop a tiger with a sonnet.
The search revealed nothing, and Barrant went away without another word. A moment later Austin heard him questioning the frightened women on the floor beneath. Listening intently, he made out a fragment of the conversation, sufficient to remove all doubts of the origin of the detective’s present visit. Austin’s mind flew to the episode he had seen from his window on the previous afternoon. Why in the name of heaven had this Brierly woman been such a fool? Why had she not come to him with her story, and asked for money to shut her mouth? Why was she sobbing and snivelling downstairs now, when it was too late?
Austin Turold was wrong in supposing that his son had left Cornwall to fly from England. Charles had stated his intention truly enough when he said he was going to London to look for Sisily, but he did not disclose to his father the real reason that led him there.
His visit to London was the pursuit of a definite plan. He was animated by the hope that he knew where Sisily was likely to have sought shelter. Ever since her disappearance this idea had lurked in his imagination and occupied his secret thoughts.
It was the fruit of one of their last talks together—a memory they shared in common. How well he remembered the occasion! They had been on the cliffs looking down at the Gurnard’s Head wallowing like a monster with a broken back in the foam of a raging sea. It was the day after the death of Sisily’s mother, and Sisily had clung to him as if he were the only friend she had in the world. She had spoken to him from the depth of an overburdened soul impelled to confide in another, telling him of her mother’s sad life, unintentionally revealing something of the unhappiness of her own. And she told him a strange thing about her mother’s last hours.
On her death-bed the unhappy woman must have had her fears concerning the future of her daughter—belated uneasy premonitions arising after her dying confession to the man supposed to be her husband, perhaps causing her to doubt the wisdom of that revelation. That seemed plain enough to Charles afterwards, though not apparent at the time Sisily had confided in him, for she had died without giving the girl the slightest indication of her life’s secret, as if in some inscrutable hope that the tangle might be made straight.
What she did do was to make a feeble effort to save her daughter from the consequences of her own unhappy act, or at least to help her if those results arose. She had whispered a name, the name of an old friend of her girlhood who would befriend her child if ever she needed help. At her urgent request Sisily had propped her up in bed while she wrote down the address. Having performed this feat with infinite labour, she dropped back on her pillow, clinging fast to the hand of the child she loved and whose future she had blasted at the command of conscience.
Charles recalled how Sisily had taken that pathetic little scrap of paper from her blouse, kissed it with quivering lips, and handed it to him in silence. He had deciphered the pencilled scrawl with difficulty. The name was Catherine Pursill, Charleswood, Surrey. It remained in his mind for a special reason. Sisily was afraid she might lose the paper (perhaps, like her mother, she had some prescience of the future) and he had endeavoured to divert her thoughts by making “memory pictures” of the name and address after the method of a thought reader. He had told her to picture a cat sitting on a window ledge, and that would fix the name in her mind. “Purr”—“Sill”—there it was! As for the place, it was only necessary to imagine him wandering in a wood (he slyly suggested it)—Charleswood, and there they were again!
Sisily had smiled wanly at these “memory pictures” and said she would always be able to remember the address of her mother’s old friend by their means.
They were effectual enough in his own case. The grotesque association of ideas brought the address to his mind when he first thought of seeking Sisily in London. He decided to go to Charleswood as soon as he reached there. The dying woman seemed quite certain her old friend was still in Charleswood, although it was twenty years since she had heard from her. She had told Sisily that Mrs. Pursill’s house was her own, and it had belonged to her parents before her. She had assumed that she was not likely to move. The possibility that Death might have moved her without consulting her convenience did not seem to have occurred to her.
It did to Charles Turold though, on his journey up from Cornwall. But he thrust the chilling thought resolutely from him, clinging to his slight clue because he had nothing else to sustain him, building such hopes upon it that by the time he reached London scarcely a doubt remained. He spent the last hour of his journey picturing his meeting with the runaway girl, holding her, kissing her, sheltering her in his arms from the world. And afterwards? He refused to contemplate what was to happen afterwards, and how he was to shield her from the unsentimental clutch of the law which was also seeking her. He declined also to allow his thoughts to dwell upon his own position, which was invidious and threatening enough in all conscience for a man setting out to be the buckler and shield of a girl in Sisily’s plight. He put these obtrusive contingencies out of his mind. Time enough for those bitter reflections afterwards. The great thing was to find Sisily first, before shaping further action. So he reasoned, with the single purpose of a man mastered by love, and the desperate instinct of a reckless temperament which gambled with life, never looking beyond the next throw.
He retained sufficient caution to refrain from going to his father’s house in Richmond when he reached London. His father’s parting words lingered unpleasantly in his mind to serve as a warning against the folly of that course. The same unusual prudence compelled him to leap out of a taxi-cab as soon as he had leapt into it. For himself he did not care, but he had to be careful for Sisily’s sake. So he clambered on top of a ‘bus with his suit case. The same sobering feeling of responsibility directed his choice of an hotel when he descended from the vehicle into the seething streets. He chose a quiet small place off Charing Cross, and booked a room. After a bath and some lunch he went out to a neighbouring bookstall and bought a railway time-table. The next train to Charleswood left Charing Cross in less than half an hour. He walked across to the station, purchased a ticket, and took his seat. In a few minutes the train started.
Now that he was actually on the way of putting his idea to the test his former doubts assailed him again with renewed force, but he refused to listen to them. He told himself that a dying woman’s idea was not likely to be wrong, and that he would find Sisily at Charleswood. She was sure to be there, because she had nowhere else to go. So he reasoned, or sought to reason, until the train slowed down at the station which held the solution of his hopes and fears.
It was a small wayside station at which he alighted—a mere hamlet set in the slumberous calm of English rural scenery, passed by express trains with a roar of derision by day and contemptuously winking tail-lights at night. On the dark green background of the distant heights an eruption of new red bungalows threatened to spread and destroy the beauty of Charleswood at no remote date. But at present the sylvan charm of the spot was unspoiled. Its meadows and fields seemed to lie happily unconscious of the contagion flaming on the billowy hills.
The porter who emerged from a kind of wooden kennel and clattered up to Charles to collect his ticket, stared hard when the young man asked if Mrs. Pursill lived at Charleswood. He appeared to give the matter deep thought before nodding affirmatively, and accompanied him to the station entrance to point out an old house lying behind a strip of white fence and a clump of dark-green trees half-way up a distant hill (not where the bungalows were cropping up, but in the opposite direction), with the intimation that it was the residence of the lady he was looking for. He then watched Charles down the rambling village street until he was out of sight.
It was a long walk—more than a mile—before Charles reached the white fence and the group of trees which shielded the house behind dark-green foliage. He caught a glimpse of partly shuttered windows peeping through this leafy screen, but it was not until he had passed through the trees that he had a clear view of the house.
The place was dreary and dilapidated, with a partly shuttered front. The green-stained walls and a mask of ivy gave the place a resemblance to a large ivy-grown tomb. Charles’s spirits were depressed as he looked at it. There was something so wan and melancholy in its appearance that his high anticipations rapidly faded. In the face of that reality he could no longer picture a silver-haired gracious old lady welcoming Sisily with tears in her eyes for the sake of her dead mother. The human qualities of warmth and tenderness did not accord with that chilling neglected exterior.
He approached the door, his sensations painful enough in the mingled tumult of suspense, hope, and fear. There was no bell, only an old-fashioned brass knocker, which, with a kind of surly stiffness, resisted his attempt to use it. He managed to wrench one knock out of it, and left it suspended in the air.
There was a considerable pause before the knock was answered. Then the door was opened by a pretty slim servant girl. There was nothing funereal in her appearance except her black dress, and that was set off by a coquettish white apron. She looked at the young man with questioning bright eyes, as though surprised at his appearance there.
“Does Mrs. Pursill live here?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” she replied with a trace of hesitation.
The barometer of hope went up several degrees in Charles’s breast. “Could I see her?” he eagerly said.
“I’ll ask, sir. What name, please?”
“No name. Mrs. Pursill would not know it. But my business is very important.”
The maid looked at him doubtfully, and left him standing there while she disappeared within. From the depth of the house an agitated feminine murmur reached him through the half-open door. “What’s he like, Ruby?” “Quite the gentleman, miss—young and very good-looking.” A pause, and the first voice rejoined: “Show him into the drawing-room, and ask him to sit down.”
The maid came back with this message, and took Charles into a large sombre room. She gave him a fluttered glance of coquetry as she offered him a chair, as though she would have liked to linger with such an unusual visitor, then went out softly, closing the door behind her.
The room into which he had been ushered was furnished after some faded standard of departed elegance with tapestried chairs, and couches, painted screens, landscapes worked in black lutestring on white silk, and collections of stuffed humming-birds which gazed wanly at the intruder from glassy eyes. A massive dead Christ in Gobelin tapestry covered the whole side of one wall, and from the opposite one the threaded features of Joseph and his brethren stared gloomily down. These subjects accorded ill with several pieces of marble statuary scattered about the room—a reeling Bacchus, a nude Psyche, and an unchaste presentment of Leda drooping her head over an amorous swan. A broken statue of a pastoral shepherd had been laid on a table in the corner and partly covered with a cloth, where it looked very much like a corpse awaiting its turn in a dissecting-room.
Charles had a dreary wait in these surroundings. At first he sat still, but as the time passed he endeavoured to distract his anxious thoughts by walking round the room looking at the extraordinary collections of objects it contained. He was earnestly scrutinizing a lutestring picture depicting “The Origin of the Dimple”—a cupid poking his forefinger into the double chin of a fat languishing female—when the door opened and a woman entered.
She was tall and thin, and had reached that period of life when it costs a woman an effort to look in a mirror because of the menace of approaching age which stares back from the depth of frightened eyes. Her dress, however, suggested that she could not bring herself to believe she was yet out of the hunt, but was still trying to follow it breathlessly on the back of that broken-kneed and sorry steed, late middle-age. There was something ridiculous in the girlish attire intended to convince her fellow creatures that her day was not over; something terrible in the low blouse, short skirt, silk stockings, gauze, lace and fluttering ribbons with which she sought to delude the sneering figure of waiting Time.
Charles’s first startled thought was that he had unwittingly entered one of those neglected shuttered houses of romance, where an eccentric female recluse sits with a waiting wedding breakfast in readiness for a bridegroom who has disappeared thirty years before. But the face of the woman advancing towards him suggested that she was not particular about the identity of the form emerging from the mists of time to rescue her from virginity. She looked as if she would have gladly surrendered that jewel to any freebooter in return for a passage in the ship of matrimony, and gone off flying the proud signal, “All’s well.”
She approached with a smile, and heaven knows what agitation in her breast at the sight of a handsome well-dressed young man in her lonely nest. “You wished to see me?” she asked.
“Mrs. Pursill?” he said interrogatively.
She made a negative sign. “I am Miss Pursill. My mother is an invalid.”
“I am most anxious to see her.”
“My mother keeps to her bedroom.”
“I have come down from London purposely to see her,” he said anxiously. “My business is very important.”
“Could you not tell me?” she murmured.
“I am afraid not.”
She fidgeted and came a little closer, as though she liked the nearness of his handsome presence.
“Very well, you shall see her, but you won’t be able to talk to her. Come with me.”
They went from the room and upstairs. Miss Pursill opened a door on the first floor and beckoned Charles to enter. It was a bedroom, furnished on the same scale of antique magnificence as the drawing-room downstairs. In a deep armchair in front of a fire sat an old woman, tucked up in an eiderdown of blue and white satin. She did not look round as they entered, but remained quite still—an immobile figure with a nodding head.
“That is Mrs. Pursill,” said her daughter.
Charles glanced at the old woman in the chair and turned away. She was past anything except waiting for death, and it was impossible to speak to her or question her. She was in the last stage of senile decay. He masked his disappointment with an effort, conscious that the eyes of the younger woman were fixed on his face.
“If there is anything I can tell you—” she simpered, as she met his glance.
His face betrayed his anxiety.
“I had some reason to think that a young lady of my acquaintance, the daughter of an old friend of your mother’s, might be staying with her.”
“There is no young lady here,” said Miss Pursill with a hard look. “I know nothing about it. What is her name?”
“I have made a mistake, I am afraid.” Charles was instantly on his guard. “I am really very sorry—”
She was not altogether proof against the winning smile with which he tendered an apology, but she looked at him strangely as she accompanied him downstairs to the front door.
Charles went back to London with a dark and angry face. His anger was directed against Fate, which had arranged such a fantastic anticlimax for his cherished hopes. The blow was almost too much for him. He had deceived himself into thinking that he would find Sisily at Charleswood, and he felt that he had really lost her. He was now reduced to searching for her in the great wilderness of London, which seemed a hopeless task.
By the time the train reached Charing Cross he rallied from his fit of despondency. He refused to despair. Sisily was somewhere in London, at that moment walking alone among its countless hordes, perhaps thinking of him. He would find her—he must! Where to commence? She had reached Paddington only a few nights ago, so that was obviously the logical starting-point of any inquiries. To Paddington he went, this time in a taxi-cab.
He had an extraordinary initial piece of luck. Fortune, either regretting her previous treatment or tantalizing him in feminine fashion with the expectation of greater favours to come, threw him at the very outset of his inquiries against the red-headed luggage porter who had spoken with Sisily on her arrival from Penzance. The porter, leaning against the white enamelled walls of a Tube passage, pictured the scene with much loquacity, and a faithful recollection of his own share in the interview. Charles anxiously asked him if the young lady he had encountered was very pretty—pale and dark. The porter, with a judicial air, responded that looks in women was, after all, a matter of taste—what was one man’s meat was another man’s poison, as you might say—but this young lady had dark hair and eyes, and her face hadn’t too much colour in it, so far as he remembered. He apologized for this vagueness of description on the plea that one girl was very like another to a man who saw them in droves every day, as he did. But one or two minute particulars of her dress which he was able to supply convinced Charles that he had seen Sisily. The man added that as far as he knew the young lady went on to Euston Square, though he couldn’t say he’d actually seen her catch the train for there.
It was not until he had pocketed the half-crown Charles gave him that he added a piece of information of some importance.
“You’re not the first who’s been inquiring about this particular young lady,” he said. “There was somebody before you—let me see—Thursday it was. He came strolling along, affable as you please, and seemed to know all about it before he started. ‘That young lady who arrived by the Cornwall train on Tuesday night, porter, and asked you the way to Euston Square—what was she like?’ That took me back a bit, but I told him, just as I’ve told you. He asked me another question or two, and then went into the station-master’s office.”
“What was he like?”
“Not much older than yourself, in a brown suit, tall and thin, with sharpish features and quick smiling eyes.”
Barrant! Charles recognized the description with a sinking heart. He turned away with a sickening sense of the impotence of his own efforts. Scotland Yard was searching for Sisily, and no doubt had warned all the London police to look out for her. She might be arrested any minute. Outside the station he bought an evening paper from a yelling newsboy, and hastily scanned the headlines under the flare of a street lamp. There was nothing about the Cornwall murder. So far they were safe. His own departure from Cornwall had apparently caused no suspicion, and Sisily was still free—somewhere in London.
Where? To find her—that was his task. He rallied sharply from his despondency. He would pit himself against the police. A desperate man, guided by love, could do much—might even outwit the tremendous forces of Scotland Yard. He would not be worthy of Sisily if he lost heart because the odds were against him. Fortune’s wheel might have a lucky turn in store for him.
He beckoned a passing taxi-cab. “Euston Square,” he said as he entered. That was obviously the next point of his search.
But Fortune vouchsafed him no more favours that day. His dive into the crowded depths of Euston Square brought forth no result—no clue which would help in his search. He interviewed many keepers of the “temperance hotels” and boarding-houses which abounded in that quarter, all sorts of women, but all alike in their quick suspicious resentment of his guarded inquiries and in their pretended ignorance of past visitors to their dingy portals. He had little experience of the embittered sordid outlook of a class which earned its own bread by supplying indifferent food and shelter to London’s floating population, but after his fiftieth repulse he had no difficulty in reaching the conclusion that the police were again ahead of him with their inquiries.
Nevertheless he persevered fruitlessly until a late hour before returning to his hotel to pass a sleepless night in a fever of baffled excitement. Not till then did he realize how much he had been upheld by the hope of finding Sisily at Charleswood. He was lost in a maze of conjectures, fears, and impossible plans, though his intelligence told him that no plan of search he could form was likely to be of the slightest use. Only luck could help him there, and it was part of the hopelessness of the situation that he dared not invoke the aid of any of those agencies or organizations which make it their business to find persons who have disappeared in London. His search must be a solitary one.
The morning saw him enter upon it with a feverish energy borrowed from the future and the desperate optimism of a temperament willing to gamble with Fortune against such incalculable odds. At first he attempted to divine the motives likely to actuate a girl ignorant of London in seeking a hiding-place there, and shaped his search accordingly; but he gave that up after a while, and decided to search the streets of the inner suburbs, in the hope of encountering her sooner or later. His method was to purchase a map of each district, and explore it thoroughly from one end to the other. He got his meals anywhere, and slept in the nearest hotel where he happened to find himself late at night. But his meals were often missed and his broken sleep haunted with nightmare visions of the pitfalls and snares spread for inexperienced girls in London.
So Charles passed nearly a week of interminable tramping of London streets, scanning the endless medley of faces in the hope of a chance glimpse of Sisily’s wistful eyes and pale features. But it is one thing to gamble with Fortune, and another to win from her. Sometimes she flattered Charles with a chance resemblance which sent him flying across the traffic at the risk of his life, and once he sprang off a ‘bus after a girl he saw vanishing into an Underground lift, but it was not Sisily. The end of the week saw him returning from uncharted areas of outer London to the more familiar thoroughfares of the city’s life, for in that time his dauntless spirit had realized the colossal folly of any attempt to search London by system. He had no intention of abandoning his quest, but he now felt that it did not matter where his footsteps led him, because it was only by a piece of wonderful luck that he could ever hope to meet Sisily. He did not even know if she was in London. But he believed she was, and some indomitable inward whisper kept assuring him that he would find her sooner or later. So he kept on—and on, seeking the vision of his desires with the insatiable eagerness of a man pursuing the unreachable horizon of a hashish dream.
It was towards the end of this time that it occurred to Charles to wonder if Sisily had made her way to Charleswood since his first visit there. He was resting in a Lambeth public-house after an exhausting day’s wanderings over South London when this thought came to him. He sat up, slapping his thigh with excitement, asking himself why he had not thought of that before. It was a chance—certainly a chance. He decided to run down to Charleswood again on the following afternoon.
He did, and found himself disappointed once more. The elegant Miss Pursill had gone to Brighton for change of air, but the pretty maid, who had been left behind to look after the house and the decayed old lady, assured him that there had been nobody to see Mrs. Pursill since his last visit. Miss Pursill went away the very next day after he was down, and there had been no callers or visitors.
She imparted this information at first with a sparkle of coquetry in her eye, then with a glance of compassion as she noticed how much the debonair visitor had changed for the worse since she saw him last. She looked at him solicitously, as though she would have liked to remove with womanly hands the marks of neglect from his apparel. From the door she watched him making his way back to the station. She stood there in the shade of the evening, following him with her eyes until the bend of the road hid him from view.
The train was moving out after the briefest stop at a place so unimportant, and he swung himself into one of the carriages gliding past him. At first he thought the compartment was empty, but as the train emerged from a tunnel immediately beyond the station gates he observed a man with glasses reading a newspaper in the opposite corner seat. That reminded him to buy an evening paper at the next stopping place, a town of some importance, where a number of intending passengers were waiting on the platform. Several pushed past him into the compartment. He did not heed them. He sat in a deep reverie, his paper unfolded in his hand, past scenes flowing through his brain as the train sped on towards London. The carriage and its occupants receded from his vision, and he was back again on the Cornwall cliffs with Sisily. Her face appeared before his eyes just as he had seen it in their last parting.
He came back with an effort to the world of events, and unfolded his newspaper. That was a daily ordeal from which he shrank, yet dared not evade. During the past week he had faced it in all sorts of places: street corners, public squares, obscure restaurants, the burrowed windings of Underground stations, and once in the dark interior of a cinema where he had followed a girl with a vague resemblance to Sisily. As the days went on and he read nothing to alarm him, his tension grew less. It really looked as if Scotland Yard and the newspapers had forgotten all about the Cornwall murder, or had relegated it to the list of undiscoverable mysteries.
He now glanced at the headlines listlessly enough. The editor could offer nothing better on his front page that night than Ireland and the industrial situation. Charles opened the sheet and looked inside. His listlessness vanished as his eye fell upon his own name. In the guise of fat black capitals it headed a half-column article about his uncle’s death. Charles read it through, slowly and deliberately, to the end. He learnt that there had been what the writer called fresh developments in the case. The police were now looking for another suspect—himself. The detective engaged upon the case had suspicions of the murdered man’s nephew for some time past, but had his reasons for reticence—reasons which had now so completely disappeared that Scotland Yard had made public a full description of the young man and the additional information that he was supposed to be in London. Charles found himself reading the description of himself with the detached, slightly wondering air with which a man might be supposed to read his own death notice. He weighed the personal details quite critically. Young and tall. Yes. Good-looking. Was he? Dark blue eyes. Were they? He had never thought about them. Of gentlemanly appearance. That read like the advertisement of a Cheapside tailor—what was a gentlemanly appearance, if he had it? He had always associated it with a cheap lounge suit and a bowler hat. Very well dressed—then followed the description of his clothes. But he couldn’t be well dressed and of gentlemanly appearance at the same time!
These preoccupations floated lightly, almost playfully, on the surface of his mind, but the great fact had sunk to the depths like lead. His father’s fears had been right, and his departure from Cornwall had drawn attention to his actions on that night. He was—what was the phrase?—wanted by the police. So was Sisily. He was searching for Sisily, and the police were searching for both of them.
What had the police discovered about him? His lips framed the reply. Everything. That was to say, all there was to find out. Obviously they had discovered his visit to Flint House on that night, or at least, that he was out in the storm during the time the murder was committed. His commonsense told him the reason for Barrant’s reticence. He had kept quiet in the hope that he would go to his father’s house at Richmond, which no doubt had been closely watched. Now that Barrant had come to the conclusion that the man he was after was too clever to walk into that trap, he had confided his suspicions to the newspapers in order to guard all avenues of escape by putting the public on the watch for him.
A feeling of helplessness crept over Charles as he contemplated the incredible ingenuity of the mesh of events in which he and Sisily were entangled. Any moment might terminate his liberty and see him placed under lock and key. Would it help Sisily if he gave himself up and told all he knew? That was a question he had asked himself before, and dismissed it because he realized that his own story might involve her more deeply still. And the loss of time since then, coupled with his own disappearance, intensified the risk which such a course would entail. There was no hope for her in that direction. Where, then, were they to look for hope?
He was recalled to his surroundings by a hand laid on his arm. He started and looked round. The man next to him, with a glance at the paper in his hand, asked him if he could tell him the winner of the second race at Lingfield. “It ought to be in the stop-press,” he murmured. Charles turned the sheet to the indicated column, and the inquirer glanced at it with a satisfied smile, and the remark that it was only what he had expected, in spite of the weight. “A good horse,” he remarked approvingly. “But perhaps you don’t go in for racing yourself?”
Charles resisted an insane impulse to shout with laughter. Didn’t go in for racing! He was going in for racing with a vengeance—a race against time and the police. What was he to do now?
He glanced round him restlessly. The swaying noisy train and the compartment packed with stolid faces jarred on his overburdened nerves. Why were those women in the next compartment laughing like hyenas? What was there in life to laugh over at any time? It was a thing to impose silence on all by its desolation, its unescapable doom. His eye was caught by an advertisement above the rack opposite him—an advertisement which depicted a smiling grotesque face, and advised him to buy the comic journal it represented in order to dissipate melancholy and gloom.
Fools—fools all!
While he was thus looking around him his eyes encountered a curious glance from the man in the opposite corner seat, who had been in the compartment when he entered the train at Charleswood. The man dropped his gaze at once, but there was something in the quality of the look which put Charles on his guard. Charles did not turn his head again, but, leaning back in his seat, kept the other under view from seemingly closed eyes. He was soon convinced that the man in the corner seat was watching him—shooting furtive glances across the carriage from behind the screen of his newspaper.
Was he a detective? Not if Barrant was a usual representative of the tribe. Yet there was something infernally quizzical in the scrutiny which reached him through those gold-rimmed glasses. Stay, though! Did detectives wear glasses? Wasn’t there an eyesight test or something like that for officers of the law? He had never seen a policeman wearing glasses. If he was not a detective, why was he watching him? There was no reward offered for his arrest. Perhaps he belonged to the wretched type of beings who pride themselves on their public spirit—men who wrote letters to the newspapers and interfered in other people’s business. The beast might have guessed his identity and wanted to show his public spirit by handing him over to the police. The newspaper in his hand! Of course. He had read his description there, and identified him.
Charles found himself conjecturing how the man would set about carrying out his task of public watchdog, if that was in his mind. He pictured the possibility of him appealing to the others in the compartment. He might get up and say: “There is a murderer in this compartment. I recognize him from the description in this paper, and I call upon you all as public-spirited citizens to see that he does not escape justice.” The torpid passengers would start up, staring and looking foolish after the fashion of English people when asked to do something unusual. Would they help? There was a stout man opposite with the symptoms of a public spirit lurking in the creases of his fat self-satisfied face. Charles promised himself that he would give them a fight for it. He counted his chances. He was aware from his previous journey to Charleswood that the train he was in now ran through to Charing Cross without another stop. Perhaps the man in the corner seat would wait until they arrived there, and then give him in charge. That was a disconcerting possibility, but he could see no way of guarding against it unless he chose to drop from the train, now travelling at nearly forty miles an hour, taking the risk of being maimed or killed. He considered the advisability of that. It was a chance he might have taken casually enough on his own account, but he had also to think of Sisily. She would be quite friendless if he were killed. Besides, there was also the chance that he might be mistaken in interpreting the man’s intentions by his own fears. At all events he seemed to have no thought of springing up and denouncing him. Charles decided to wait and trust to luck to escape in the crowd at Charing Cross if the man made any move there.
In ten minutes the train was running into Charing Cross station at slowing speed. Charles’s mouth closed tightly, and his face flushed.
The man in the corner seat flattened his newspaper into a pocket, opened the carriage door, and sprang out on to the platform. Charles followed him quickly, and stood still watching him make his way towards the barrier. He saw him press through, give up his ticket, and disappear without so much as a backward glance.
There was something so ridiculous in this anticlimax to his poignant fears that the young man was for the moment actually exasperated. But his face and linen were wet with perspiration. Then a great feeling of relief swept over him like a cooling wave. He followed in the wake of the other passengers and emerged from the station into the street.
It was early enough for the shops to be still open, but the streets were thronged with pleasure-seekers going to restaurants and places of amusement. As he stood there a painted girl touched him on the arm with an enticing smile for such wares as she had to sell, and her solicitation awakened him sharply to the folly of standing in the lighted Strand at that hour in full view of every passing policeman. He walked slowly away, debating where to turn his steps. An outfitter’s shop displaying overcoats gave him a bright idea. He walked inside and selected a long dark coat which reached to his heels, putting it on over the light and fashionable coat he was wearing. The shopman seemed surprised at his choice, but made no comment as he took his money and handed him his change. Charles caught a glimpse of himself as he went out, and was satisfied with his changed appearance. In that shapeless garment he was no longer likely to catch the eye of any unduly curious observer as a “well-dressed” man.
He now walked swiftly. Turning out of Chandos Street from the Strand, he avoided the brightly lit proximity of Leicester Square, and plunged into the crooked dark streets on the other side of Charing Cross Road. He reached New Oxford Street, crossed it, and continued along obscure streets, his head bent forward, in the unconscious habit of a man thinking deeply as he went.
In the first feeling of dismay at the discovery that the police were looking for him he had been overwhelmed by a sense of catastrophe. With the passing of that phase he was able to consider the situation with a cooler brain, and it now seemed to him that his position was not so precarious as he deemed it in the light of that shock. He knew London, and might be able to evade arrest indefinitely if he took precautions and avoided risks. But Sisily was in different case. He recalled her telling him that she had only been in London once, as a child with her father. Her inexperience of London was her greatest danger, because it was likely to attract attention. The only one to whom she could look for help was himself.
His determination to find her was doggedly renewed as he thought of that. He accepted the lengthened odds against him with the desperate dark courage of a spirit which had always regarded life as a gamble against unseen forces holding marked cards. The police were searching for him? Very well. He would pit his wits against theirs, and continue his own search for Sisily with a caution he had hitherto disdained to use.
Courage and caution! Those were the two qualities he must use in adroit combination. The plight of both Sisily and himself was desperate enough now without giving the enemy a chance by recklessness. He was like a man rowing a small boat in the immensity of a dark sea which threatened every moment to engulf him. Sisily was somewhere in that darkness, and she must be rescued. If his own cockleshell went down there could be no succour for her. That was a thought to make him keep afloat—to keep on rowing.
And suppose that he did find her, as he believed he would, sooner or later—given time. What was to happen then?
That thought pursued him in his walk that night, and was his constant companion in the lonely days and nights of his wanderings which followed. He had banished it before, but that course was no longer possible. The impalpable yet terribly real menace of authority overshadowing them both now made it imperative that all the facts should be faced. All the facts—but what were they? It was the question he asked himself again and again as he strove to twist out of the black fantasy of that horrible night some tangible shred of truth which might help them both. His own incredible share in it was forever being re-enacted in his mind, and haunted his dreams. In the night, at early dawn, at odd moments of his eternal quest, the curtain of his mind would rise on that unforgettable scene—the cliffs, the rocks, the darkling outline of Flint House, with a feeble beam of light slanting down from the upstairs window at the back which looked out on the sea. Then the gush of light from the open door, and her shape stealing forth into the darkness, followed by another—Thalassa’s. And then, the final phase—the desolate house, the wind rushing noisily along dark passages, the dead form of Robert Turold in the room upstairs. What did these things mean, and what was to be the end?
His hope was that Sisily could reveal something which would furnish the key to the enigma of that night’s events. From her lips he might learn enough to guide him to the hidden truth, and save them both. Sustained by the feeling that she existed somewhere near him, he continued his search day after day until in the abstracted intensity of his fancy London assumed the appearance of a wilderness of unending streets filled with pallid faces which flitted past his vision like ghosts. But the face he was seeking was never among them.
He searched with the wariness of one whose own liberty depended upon his watchfulness. A second glance, an indignant look, a turn of the head, a policeman’s casual eye—any of these things would place him immediately on his guard and turn his footsteps in a different direction. He chose his sleeping places with care at the last minute, and left them at early morning when only a yawning night porter or a sleepy maid servant was astir. He never returned to the same place, nor did he go to the same restaurant twice. Most carefully did he read the newspapers, but nothing appeared in their columns to alarm him; merely an occasional perfunctory paragraph about the Cornwall murder. The favourite adjective in the journalistic etymological garden was culled for the heading, and it was described as an amazing case. Charles felt that the definition was correct enough. Early developments were faithfully promised—by the newspaper. Charles understood very well what was meant by that. It was hoped he would provide the development by falling into the hands of the police. He smiled a little at that, but the unintended warning increased his vigilance.
On the whole he felt tolerably safe in the crowded London streets. It was not as though there was any real hue and cry after him. The lonely Cornwall tragedy had not come into sufficient public notice for that, and now it seemed almost forgotten.
He had his hazards and chances, though in a different way. One was an encounter with a young man of good family whose acquaintance, commenced in France during the war, had continued in London afterwards. The two young men had seen a great deal of each other—dining and going to music-halls together. It was in Leicester Square that Charles saw him getting out of a taxi-cab to enter a hall where a professional billiard match was in progress. He paused midway at the sight of Charles, exclaiming: “Why, Tur—” The second syllable of the name was nipped off in mid-air, and the outstretched arm was dropped, as the patron of billiards took in the cut of his former friend’s coat. He gazed at the ill-fitting garment with a kind of astonished animosity, and then his puzzled look shot upwards to the face surmounting it, no doubt with the feeling that he may have been deceived by a chance resemblance. Charles went past him without a sign of recognition, but he felt that the other was still staring after him.
Another day a street musician regarded him curiously from behind a barrel organ which he was turning with the lifeless celerity of one without interest in the sounds created by the process. His card of appeal—“Wanted in 1914; not wanted now”—helped Charles to recall him as a soldier of his old regiment. They exchanged glances across the card. The man gave no sign that he knew his former officer, but Charles had no doubt that he did. He placed a coin on top of the organ and went swiftly on.
A week of increasing strain slipped by, and another commenced. Then Fortune, with a contemptuous good-humoured spin of her wheel, did for Charles Turold what he could hardly have hoped to achieve in a year’s effort without her aid.
It was late at night, and he was in a despondent mood after one of his recurring disappointments—this time a graceful slender shape which he had earlier in the evening pursued in a flock of home-going shop-girls until she turned and revealed a pert Cockney face which bore no resemblance to Sisily’s. Several hours later he paid another of his visits to Euston Square, which he believed to be the starting-point of Sisily’s own wanderings. He felt closer to her in that locality because of that. From Euston Square he walked on aimlessly, engrossed in impossible plans for finding Sisily by hook or crook, until the illuminated dial of a street clock, pointing to half-past ten, reminded him of the passage of time.
He paused and looked round. He was in an area of darkened suburban streets converging on a distant broader avenue, where occasional taxi-cabs slid past into the blackness of the night with the heartless velocity of years disappearing into the gulf of Time.
He turned his steps in the direction of this thoroughfare in order to find out the locality, but stopped half-way at the sight of a coffee-stall on the opposite side of the street. He was hungry and thirsty, and he had learnt to like the safety of these places in his wanderings. The food might be coarse, but there were no lengthy waits between courses; no curious glances from the other patrons. A couple of half-drunken young men were feeding at this stall, and a girl of the streets was standing near them. In the light of a swinging lamp the scene shone clearly in the surrounding darkness—the brass urn, the thick crockery, the head of the stall-keeper bent intently over a newspaper, the munching jaws of the customers, the girl in the background with splashes of crimson paint like blood on her white drawn face.
Charles was about to cross the street, but at that moment a policeman’s helmet emerged slowly from the surrounding darkness as if irresistibly attracted by the concentric glow of the light. At the sight of him Charles shrank back into the friendly shadow of his own side of the road. The policeman emerged into the fulness of the light, serene in his official immobility. His slow yet seeing vision dwelt on the painted girl with a gaze as penetrating as that of Omnipotence in its profound knowledge of evil. He strolled towards her with a kind of indifferent benignity with which Providence has also been credited. He raised a hand, omnipotent with the authority of the law. “Better get away from here,” Charles heard him warn her, and she disappeared from view in obedience to this command.
So did Charles, but in quite another direction. There was something about these chance manifestations of authority, so lightly exercised, so unhesitatingly obeyed, which never failed to thrill and impress him, as they would have thrilled and impressed any other man in his present position. They seemed to intensify the hopelessness of his own situation. He had a slight feeling of creepiness about the spine as he thought of the narrowness of that escape—though, of course, the policeman might not have identified him. But some day or other it was bound to come—that accidental confrontation which might mean his arrest.
He walked swiftly until he reached the avenue. It was a part of London that he did not know, and appeared quite deserted. He wondered which way he should turn to get back to that area of London where he usually sought a bed.
As he stood there glancing about him irresolutely, his eye caught a glimpse of somebody walking swiftly along—a slight girlish figure dimly visible in the dark vista of the empty street. There was something familiar in the girl’s outline—something which caused his heart to give a great maddening jump. As he looked she turned into one of the converging streets.
He raced up the broad road, indifferent at that moment whether the eyes of all the policemen in London were upon him. When he reached the street which had swallowed her he could see nothing of the form which had excited him. Then, far ahead, he again saw it passing under a distant lamp-post and merge once more into the darkness. He ran quickly in pursuit.
The girl heard him coming and looked back anxiously. This time he saw her face. In a bound he was at her side.
“Sisily, Sisily!” he cried. “Oh, Sisily, I have found you!”