“Oh, mamma, is this really London?” she asked, as, with her teeth chattering, she looked out of the window when they came to Oxford Circus.
“Yes, child; of course you know it is. This is where two of the principal streets cross each other,” answered Mrs. Pennant, rather pettishly, for she was tired with the early and unaccustomed journey.
“What a pity we have come up on such a bad day! It makes everything look so black and gloomy.”
“If we had come up any other day it would have been the same. London is always foggy at this time of year.”
“Always like this?” cried Deborah, in amazement. “Why, how can people live in it?”
“They not only live in it, they like it.”
“Well, then, now I can understand all one reads about the corrupting influences of a great city. For if people can grow to like this atmosphere better than the pure air, it is not astonishing that they can learn to like evil ways better than good ones.”
Mrs. Pennant did not answer; she was too cross. They drove on in silence, Deborah filled with ever-increasing amazement and disgust. When at length the cab drew up at an old-fashioned and dingy house in St. Martin’s-lane, on the right hand side as you go down towards the church, she, however, could not suppress a low cry of horror.
“Oh, mamma,” she cried, “surely poor Rees doesn’t live here?”
“Don’t be silly, Deborah, crying out like some gawky country cousin. Of course, London is not like Carstow.”
They got out, and going up four much-worn stone steps, rang the bell, and were admitted by an old woman, who said that she didn’t know whether Mr. Pennant had come home yet, but she would see. She turned and walked to the end of the hall, which was narrow, dingy, and dark. Knocking at a door on the right, she opened it without waiting for an answer and announced:
“Some ladies to see you, sir.”
“Show them in,” said a voice which neither recognised.
Mrs. Pennant and Deborah traversed the passage slowly, both prepared for some great change in Rees. Therefore, at the first moment of meeting, they were both inclined to think the alteration in him less great than it really was. The room was small and very dark, for the little daylight that filtered through the fog was obscured by the backs of the neighboring houses. The furniture was of the dingy kind peculiar to the back rooms of London lodging-houses, and the fire which burned in the small grate gave forth plenty of smoke, but little flame and less heat.
On a desk in front of the window were pens, ink, some sheets of blue foolscap, and a legal looking document, one pen lying as if it had recently been used. Rees was sitting by the fire, with a newspaper in his hand. He got up to meet them, but it was with more nervous excitement than pleasure that he kissed his mother and shook hands with Deborah. Both saw at once that he was much thinner than he used to be, and that the old boyish, light-hearted expression had left his face. But it was not until the flush which had come into his cheeks at their entrance had died away that they knew what a wreck of the Rees they had known and loved was before them. His cheeks were sallow and sunken, his eyes looked larger and blacker than ever, there were new lines and furrows forming about his mouth and eyes, and, greater change than all, the look which had been frank had become cynical and bold. Even these two simple ladies could see that many people—women especially—would have considered Rees handsomer now than in the old time, but yet both knew that the alteration in him was for the worse.
Mrs. Pennant affected to think that her son was overworked. Deborah, who assigned a very different cause to the change in him, wondered whether the reticent old lady was sincere. Rees explained that he had lost his situation at the lawyer’s through no fault of his own, and that he was now keeping himself by law-copying at home. And he glanced at the desk. Although he hurried this out in a mumbling tone, Mrs. Pennant made no indiscreet comments, but contented herself with caressing his curly head and murmuring, “Poor boy, poor boy!”
After an hour spent in the dingy little room, Rees asking many questions about the family and about Carstow, and leaving no opportunity for questions in return, Mrs. Pennant asked if he would come out and take them somewhere to lunch.
“You know,” she explained gently, “we have had no breakfast.”
“Indeed, mother, I wish I were in a place where I could have had a nice luncheon prepared for you. But I have only this little den and a couple of cupboards—for they’re nothing more—on the second floor. And I’m too busy to go out. But I’ll pack you up comfortably in a cab and send you to a place where I’ve been very well served in better times, and you might get your shopping done or whatever calls you may have to make; and by the time you come back here I’ll have my work done. By-the-bye, Deborah,” he went on, turning as if by an afterthought to the girl who had risen to go, “you might stay and help me to get this through, if you will. I can get on twice as fast if you’ll dictate.”
The girl hesitated, but Mrs. Pennant broke in at once:
“Yes, yes; stay, my dear, and help him to get his work done. I will be back in an hour—or two hours. Which shall it be, Rees?”
“I don’t think we can get through in less than two hours, mother.”
“Very well, then. In two hours I will be back.”
The active old lady was already out of the room, Rees following, while Deborah, erect and very grave, waited for his return.
WhenRees re-entered the room, he found Deborah standing at the desk examining the inkstand. It was quite dry.
“Ha! you’ve found me out,” he said, laughing. “Of course, I didn’t really want you to dictate for me. One doesn’t waste the time of a lovely girl like that. Come and sit by the fire and talk to me. We have two hours before the old lady comes back.”
He put his arm round her, drew her to the fire, made her sit in the arm-chair, from which he had risen, and placed himself on the hearth-rug at her feet.
“Now,” he said, “we can talk.”
“Yes,” answered Deborah, who had been unusually grave and silent ever since her arrival.
“I say,” he went on, looking up to examine her face with boldly critical eyes, “you’ve changed a good deal, Deborah, surely.”
“Changed!” said she. “Have I ‘gone of,’ as they say?”
“No, it isn’t that exactly; but you seem to have grown older, more staid, more demure. And—you dress differently, don’t you?”
“I’m not wearing the same things that I wore a year ago, of course. I suppose you mean that I’m countrified beside the London ladies.”
“You’re much handsomer than they are, at any rate. I really think, Deborah, without any joking, that you are the handsomest woman I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, you have something more interesting than that to tell me, I suppose. I want to know all about yourself; I’m not so submissive as mamma, remember, and you can’t put me off as you can her.”
“No, I’m afraid you’re rather inclined to be strong-minded, Deb. No need to ask whether you’re still heart whole and fancy free. No man would ever have the courage to make up to you.”
“They have though; you will be surprised to hear that I’ve had two offers, and that I refused them both because I wasnotheart whole and fancy free.”
Rees looked rather pleased. Grave, almost solemn as her manner was, there was a tell-tale shyness in her glance, a marked maidenly reserve about her actions, which told the already blasé young man that her interest in him was as strong as ever.
“I can guess who the offers were from,” said he. “Godwin and Hervey.”
“No,” she said simply, “I didn’t count them.”
“Indeed, that’s flattering to us poor Pennants, to hear we don’t count.”
Deborah said nothing to this.
“And in all this crowd of admirers, I suppose you never find time for a thought of me? Being a Pennant, I suppose I don’t count either.”
“I think of you a great deal,” said Deborah quietly.
“And what is it you think of me? That you never want to see me again?” he asked, leaning coaxingly against her knee.
“I think,” she said sorrowfully, “we never shall see the old Rees again.”
“Did you care for the old Rees then?” asked the young man very softly, with a tender inflection in his voice which was altogether new to her, as he looked up into her face with pleading, passionate eyes.
The unsophisticated girl betrayed her secret altogether in a moment, as her body began to tremble, her cheeks to flush, and her eyes to fill. Rees at once seized his advantage. Crawling up to her side on his knees, he put his arm round her waist and leaned his head against her shoulder.
“Deb, Deb, you care for me still, don’t you, whether I’m good or bad, whether I’m changed or not? If you knew that I wanted you, you’d come to me, wouldn’t you, whatever they said? And you don’t care for Godwin’s frigid love-making, or for Hervey’s virtuous homilies, but you love your poor Rees through everything, don’t you, don’t you, Deb?”
“Rees, you know that I love you,” whispered the girl passionately.
“And if I asked you to come up and live near me, you would, wouldn’t you, Deb? If you knew that I was ill, and wanted your care and your consolation? You wouldn’t leave me to the care of that cock-eyed old lady who let you in, would you?”
“Oh, Rees, no! of course we wouldn’t. But if you are ill, why don’t you come home and be nursed? We live comfortably now. I’m housekeeper, and sometimes cook as well. And, oh! we should be so pleased and proud to take you home again!”
Rees listened to this speech rather impatiently.
“My dear child,” he said, “I don’t feel inclined at present to settle down to the old lady’s tea and toast and prayer meetings. One may end in that, but it’s a little too early as yet. The fact is,” he went on hurriedly, as he saw her face change, “that I couldn’t leave town just now, however much I wished it. A man has his living to get, a career to make, you know.”
“And you want us to come up and live in London?”
“Well, I want you, Deborah—you—to get used to the thought of a London life. You see, my dearest child, I live a most harassing life, bound by ties and responsibilities that are a perpetual burden to me. I want some one near me who would be sweet and kind, and capable of self-sacrifice for a man she loved; who would bear with his caprices, keep him straight through his temptations, who would care nothing for the world, but only for him. It’s a great deal to ask, Deborah; and I don’t think there are many women capable of it.”
The girl interrupted him by laughing softly. She was brimming over with happiness.
“Why, Rees, those things are not sacrifices to any woman worth her salt. Your London ladies must be poor creatures if they’ve taught you to think differently. And if I’m a little ‘countrified’ at first, as you seem to think, I promise you that in the pride of being your wife I shall soon grow into a very elegant person indeed.”
“My wife!” said Rees, coming closer to her, and joining his arms round her waist. “Yes, that would be jolly, wouldn’t it? For me to come home and find you waiting for me, making a lovely picture by the fireside. But you know, Deb, I’m very poor. I can’t afford to marry yet. In the meantime I am slowly dying, I really believe, for want of the care that only a woman can give.”
Deborah started and looked down with anxious solicitude into his face.
“Oh, Rees, you don’t mean that. It can’t be true! If it is, of course mamma and I must leave Carstow and come up at once to you.”
“But you can’t break up the old home like that,” objected Rees, quickly. “It would be most unfair both to my mother and to Hervey.”
“Yes, but if there is nothing else to be done to save your life, Rees, I know neither of them would hesitate for a moment.”
Rees leapt up from the floor and began to pace up and down the little room in a state of high excitement.
At that moment there was heard the sound of a latch-key in the front door, and then steps along the passage. The door of the room was thrown open, and a well-dressed elderly man came quickly in. Deborah started up in astonishment.
“Lord St. Austell!” she exclaimed.
With a bow and a harsh laugh the man came nearer.
Rees stamped his foot, and said haughtily:
“Don’t mention that wretch’s name here.”
Deborah looked at the new-comer again. It was Amos Goodhare. Except that he was evidently older, better-dressed, and that he lacked the earl’s geniality of manner, Amos was the very counterpart of Lord St. Austell, down to the libertinism of expression which had always marred the earl’s countenance.
The meeting gave the girl a great shock. Goodhare’s presence poisoned all the pleasure she had felt in Rees’s protestations of affection. With a sudden change to extreme dignity and reticence, she turned to Rees, and told him that she would go and find his mother; she was afraid something had happened to detain her. Then, before he could remember that she did not know where Mrs. Pennant was, Deborah shook hands with him, bowed coldly to Goodhare, and left the house.
Once outside in the street she did not know where to go. It was not much past midday, but already the fog was hanging in a thick brown veil over the houses; in a few hours even old Londoners would be unable to find their way from place to place. She turned to the left, and walking a few paces slowly up the street, found herself at the corner of a paved passage, which ran, between two rows of dismal, deserted houses, into Charing Cross-road. The entrance to this passage was flanked by high boardings, which were covered with flaming advertisement posters, among which there flaunted conspicuously the colossal portrait of a lady with a marvellous abundance of curly hair, whose eyes had been carefully picked out by the ubiquitous boy. Deborah gazed up at the houses with fascinated interest. They were old, almost ruinous. The windows, the glass of which had in nearly all cases disappeared, were covered by nailed-up boards. Most of these buildings had been small shops which had gone gradually down in the world, as was proved by the fact that in some cases two had been made out of what was originally one. The doors were nailed up as well as the windows, and pasted over the whole of the ground-floor walls were the dingy remains of more posters, which the damp had reduced to fluttering rags.
There was a look about these hole-and-corner beetle-browed little shops which would have suggested to a more sophisticated observer the unsavory literature of Holywell-street. To Deborah the place was eloquent only of black poverty and wretchedness, such as, in her pleasant country life, she had scarcely dreamed of. She glanced down the gratings into the disused cellars, full of dust and rubbish, then up at the great beam which had been put across from side to side at one end of the passage to keep the tottering buildings from falling in, while they awaited their impending demolition. As she raised her head and watched with a kind of horror the great clouds of mist and smoke that seemed to roll down towards the earth from the brown sky, she heard footsteps on the flags behind her, and turned with a start to see Amos Goodhare.
His mouth expanded with an ugly smile as his eyes met hers. The girl thought that he looked like the incarnate spirit of evil, and that his figure harmonised with the hideous surroundings.
“I am so pleased to see you, Miss Audaer,” he said, courteously enough. His old pedagogic manners seemed to have given place to a burlesque of those of the earl. “But I am surprised, too, for I had heard that you were married.”
“No,” said Deborah, “I am not married.”
“Well, I am jealously inclined to be glad that no unworthy wretch of a man has yet obtained a prize much too good for him. But matrimony seems to be in the air just now, and I didn’t know whether you had yet fallen a victim. Rees and Lady Marion Cenarth are the last pair. But of course you’ve heard that. It’s a secret at present, and I’m the letter-carrier.”
He held out for her inspection a letter, stamped and directed to “M.C.” at a shop in South Audley-street.
Deborah was for the moment so absolutely stunned as to be incapable, not only of showing, but of feeling anything. She looked at the envelope and appeared to be examining the address, which she perceived to be in Rees’s handwriting. She was intelligent enough to understand in a moment the meaning of Rees’s strange love-making and the extent to which the evil influence of the man before her had corrupted the unhappy lad. At the same time there sprang up in her mind a defiant determination that this depraved Goodhare should not triumph in her humiliation.
“I did not know of it,” she said at last, very quietly, “though I rather guessed at something of the sort from his manner. Are they already married then?” she went on; and, having quite recovered her serenity she looked up in his face.
Goodhare was puzzled, disappointed. This she saw and hated him for.
“I’m not sure whether they’re married yet,” he said; “but, at any rate, they’re going to be. They’ve been corresponding all this year.”
“Oh dear, I hope the earl won’t be very angry.”
Goodhare’s face, as usual, grew black at the mention of the earl’s name.
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” he said, shortly. “But I don’t suppose he’ll be pleased.”
“I do hope, though, that he’ll forgive them very soon. But now I must say good-bye to you, Mr. Goodhare, for my mother must be by this time waiting for me at Rees’s lodgings.”
She bowed to him, and turning, walked rapidly back to St. Martin’s-lane, where she found Mrs. Pennant in the act of getting out a cab.
“What is the matter, my dear? You look so dreadfully white,” cried the old lady on seeing her.
The girl ran up and clung to her hand.
“Mamma, mamma, don’t go in again, or if you do, let me go away without you,” she whispered in a hoarse voice. “I cannot bear it.”
Mrs. Pennant was a strangely reticent woman, whose thoughts were difficult to guess. She turned as pale as the girl herself, however, and drawing her into the cab without more inquiries, directed the cabman to drive to Paddington.
The two ladies reached Carstow late that night; but neither during the journey, on their arrival, nor ever afterwards, did they exchange confidences on the subject of the impressions the visit to Rees had left on their minds.
In the meantime the first thick fog of the season was settling down steadily over London, and when Amos Goodhare rejoined Rees in the little back room, the gas which they were obliged to light shone dimly through a murky mist. The young man lay stretched on the narrow sofa.
“Where is she?” he cried, starting up, with dishevelled hair and wild eyes.
“Who? Lady Marion?” asked Goodhare lightly.
“Lady Marion! No, d—— Lady Marion. I mean Deborah—my beautiful Deborah! I will see her—I must! If she will have me, I’ll give up all thoughts of that lanky caricature of a woman, beg her to forgive me, and marry her.”
“Too late, too late, my impulsive young friend. ‘Your’ beautiful Deborah is on her way back to Carstow, too utterly disgusted with you to give you another thought.”
“But, Goodhare, she did not understand. She is too pure, too good to believe that men can be such blackguards as you have made me. Let me go, I tell you, let me go!”
He struggled to pass Goodhare, who locked the door and put the key in his pocket.
“I am not going to have that poor girl insulted any more,” he said. “If she did not understand what you meant while she was with you, she did before she left London.”
“You infernal scoundrel! You told her! You explained to her! You have ruined and degraded me, and you wanted to make me ruin and degrade her!”
He flew at the elder man, who held him off with long, sinewy hands, as he could not have done before the once athletic young man had become weakened by excesses and dissipation.
“Youdegrade her!Youdegrade that girl!” said Amos, letting the contempt he felt for his poor tool shine for once full from his eyes; “women of her sort are not degraded by such as you, nor by such as I either. You have to marry Lady Marion. I had to bring that about by any means I could. That’s explanation enough. And now to business.”
He let the young man go, for Rees Pennant’s outburst of anger had already given place to sullen passivity, and he had thrown himself limply into a chair. Goodhare took a seat beside him.
“Listen,” he said, “I have something to say to you. You know that we have come to the end of our money?” Rees nodded. “And of our credit?” Rees nodded again. “That at present there are no more new clothes to wear, horses to ride, evenings at the theater, suppers afterwards, trips to Paris, and the rest of it?”
“Well, of course, I know it. Hasn’t every caller been a dun, and every letter a bill, for weeks past?”
“Quite so. Now the question is, whether you want any more of those past pleasures, or whether you would prefer to set to work as a clerk on twenty shillings a week, or to creep back to Carstow, and live on the charity of your younger brothers?”
Rees writhed.
“Out with it. What do you want me to do? You know you have made work impossible to me; quiet life in the country insupportable. What have I got to do?”
“Well, I suppose you know that, in the straits we are in, one mustn’t be too particular.”
“I can’t be a lower rascal than I showed myself this morning. Go on.”
“Put on your hat, button up your overcoat, and come out.”
“Out! What, in this fog, that’s almost blinding even indoors?”
“Yes. I found you one fortune in the bowels of the earth. The second we must hunt for in the dim recesses of the air.”
With a short laugh Goodhare rose, and waited while Rees slowly prepared himself for the walk.
When they reached the street the brown mist was already so thick that the houses on the opposite side of the way were scarcely visible. Goodhare drew his young companion’s arm through his with a laugh.
“Look at this beautiful atmosphere,” he said; “feel it, hug it up to you. Talk of the blue skies of Italy! I wouldn’t give twopence for the brightest of them. These sweet, fair brown skies were made for rogues—like you and me.”
Rees shuddered, but he did not dispute the point.
Slowly, through the ever-thickening fog-cloud, they made their way together towards Trafalgar-square.
Formonths Deborah Audaer suffered from the horrible effect which the incidents of the visit to Rees had left upon her mind. London seemed to her the pestilential centre of all evil, physical and moral. The inky atmosphere, the black, gloomy streets, Rees Pennant’s dingy room, the passage full of deserted, dirty houses, all contributed to form a ghastly background to the picture of evil in which Amos Goodhare, with his cynical stare, and Rees, with his bold, feverish eyes, formed the central figures.
That journey had shown her men and things from a new and hideous point of view. For a time all the sweetness and freshness of life seemed poisoned for her. She saw the ills in the world—poverty, sin, and sorrow, in a harder, colder light. Since Rees whom she loved, could be corrupt and base, what in the wide world could be pure? So she reasoned, womanlike, and suffered in silence for the rest of the year, seeing a new and uglier sadness in the autumn and winter changes of nature, and brooding over her poor lost ideal.
Deborah was much too brave and good a girl for this change in her thoughts and feelings to find outward expression in her actions. Whatever view she might take of life in the abstract, the round of daily duties, which were sufficiently heavy, were fulfilled just as well as ever, and if Mrs. Pennant was shrewd enough to detect a change in the girl, it was not by finding the thin places in the old drawing-room curtains less carefully darned or her early cup of tea forgotten. For Deborah, to save the expense of keeping more than one servant, was perfect mistress of every household duty. This extreme domestic devotion, as Godwin considered it, excited in him great annoyance, the more so that he was now enjoying a salary which enabled him to send home a very handsome allowance.
Soon after the eventful visit to London, Godwin paid his mother a Saturday to Monday visit, and took the opportunity of the old lady’s afternoon nap to make a formal remonstrance with Deborah.
She was sitting on the old-fashioned fender-stool by the drawing-room fire, stroking the head of his fox terrier, when he came very softly down the long, cold-looking room, and stood behind her. She was bending down over the dog, talking to him softly; but presently, lifting up her head and perceiving the blocking out of the light from the window behind her, she turned with a start.
“Oh, Godwin, you startled me! I didn’t hear you come in. I thought you’d gone over to Llancader.”
“I changed my mind; I wanted to have a talk with you.” Deborah moved impatiently. He went on quickly, noticing this movement, “Oh, not on the old subject; don’t be afraid. I see you are not in the mood for one of my matter-of-fact proposals. I’m not even going to ask you why you are so particularly brusque, not to say snappish, to me this time. But I want to know why you don’t keep another servant. You know very well that, with what I send to her, my mother can afford it.”
Deborah, who had got up from the fender-stool and seated herself firmly on a chair, spoke very coldly and decisively.
“Is there anything wrong about the house, then—dirty windows, unswept carpets, or bad cooking—that you are dissatisfied with our arrangement?”
Godwin bounced up from the chair he had taken, and, standing with his back to the fireplace, stared over her head defiantly.
“Well, of all the disagreeable, bad-tempered girls I ever met, you are the most impossible to do anything with,” he said, at last losing his temper. “What do you suppose I want you to keep another servant for, except to save you trouble? Considering that I don’t live at home, what would it matter to me if the washing were hung over the front garden wall, and the knives cleaned on the drawing-room table?”
“What are you grumbling for, then?”
“I was not grumbling at all. I merely thought that a second servant would allow you to have more time to yourself.”
“That was not your reason at all. You thought it more in accordance with the family dignity—that is, your dignity—that there should be two servants in your mother’s house.”
Godwin brought his eyes quickly down from the window, and looked at her with a keenness which made her uncomfortable.
“You are unhappy,” he said at last, shortly, and not at all tenderly. “You never used to fish among people’s motives for a mean one like that. You have had some annoyance or disappointment, and, like an unreasoning woman, you visit it on me, because you think you can hurt me. But you shan’t! you shan’t!”
And he put his hands in his pockets, and walked away up the room with a defiant air.
Deborah felt sorry and ashamed. He was quite right, and she knew it.
All women, when they have had their belief in man in the abstract destroyed by the perfidy of one particular individual, like to visit their disappointment and resentment upon some other individual whom they at the bottom of their hearts know that they can implicitly trust. If he had known it, therefore, Deborah’s snappishness, which she reserved for him alone, was only the natural expression of her indignation that he, the man she did not love, was sound to the core, while the man she did love had proved himself a contemptible wretch.
She was not going to own herself in the wrong, though. Oh, no! She bit her lips with a moment’s self-reproach, and then said, quite coldly:
“Whether I am happy or not is, you will admit, my own affair. Whether we keep one servant or twenty is, I admit, yours, since you pay them. But I tell you frankly that I feel much more comfortable with only one, because like that, by careful management and without any pinching, I am saving a large sum out of the money you send mamma, which she means to give you to furnish your house when you marry.”
Of course Deborah knew that she was hurting him, though she would not have owned it.
“How dare you talk of my marrying?” he burst out, almost dancing with rage. “You know I don’t mean to marry; you know you don’t want me to marry.”
He had gone a little too near the truth. Naturally enough, Deborah would not have liked to see her own devoted admirer enslaved by another woman, however indifferent to him she herself might be. She gave him one look of speechless indignation, and without heeding the grovelling apologies which he hurriedly began to make, sailed out of the room with the dignity of an empress.
She would not speak to him for the remainder of his short visit, except such few words as were absolutely necessary; and these she uttered in a loftily distant tone. Poor Mrs. Pennant saw that something was wrong, and make several discreet, but ineffectual, efforts to put it right. Deborah even took care to be out of the way when, on the following morning, Godwin went away again.
Mrs. Pennant heard very little from her other absent son, her darling Rees, although she wrote to him regularly. Indeed, as winter drew on, her letters became more frequent than ever, for the London papers published alarming accounts of a gang of skilful and desperate thieves, who, taking advantage of the foggy season, which was now at its height, waylaid well-dressed men even in much-frequented thoroughfares, and robbed them of everything of value they had about them, often with considerable violence. Rees’s answers to his mother’s letters were always very short; but he re-assured her as to his personal safety and also as to his prospects. He had got another situation, he said, better than the last, and was saving money. However, he sent home no proof of his altered fortune until Christmas, when Mrs. Pennant received from him a parcel containing a handsome fur collar and muff for herself and a beautiful chased silver clasp for Deborah.
The girl took her gifts in silence, and interrupted by no comment Mrs. Pennant’s ecstasies. It was Christmas Eve, and Godwin, who was expected home, had already sent his presents.
“Why, Deborah, Deborah, this clasp is the very thing for the mantle Godwin has given you!”
“Yes, mamma,” answered the girl, quietly.
But on the following morning, when she put on her new cloak to go to church with Mrs. Pennant and her sons, the clasp was not on it. The old lady remarked on this with some displeasure, thinking her eldest son’s gift despised. Deborah, however, steadily excused herself from wearing it, and there was a slight coolness in consequence between the ladies, which resulted in Mrs. Pennant walking with Hervey instead of with her adopted daughter, and leaving the latter to follow with Godwin.
“Why won’t you wear Rees’s present, Deb?” ventured Godwin, diffidently, as they walked along. “No such luck as that you have give up thinking about him, I suppose?”
“No,” answered the girl in a tremulous voice; “but don’t let us talk about Rees; I can’t tell you why, but I can’t bear it.”
He walked on by her side, obediently changing the subject. Only just before they passed under the heavy porch of the old Norman church, he asked:
“May I walk home too with you, Deb? I won’t talk about anything to—to worry you.”
“Of course,” answered she, with a gentle and grateful smile.
But when the service was over and the congregation poured out of the church, Deborah was seized and surrounded by the Llancader ladies, who had come to Monmouthshire to pass Christmas. Only Lady Marion was absent. Deborah inquired after her of Lady Kate.
“Oh, don’t you know. Of course, it’s a secret, but still it’s one that everyone seems to know—except papa and mamma,” babbled out Lady Kate, in a confidential tone. “Marion is so dreadfully, idiotically fond of that Rees of yours that she has gone to stay with Aunt Lucilla, in Eaton Square, so that she may stay in the same town with him. She is making a perfect fool of herself about him. I must say so, Mr. Pennant, though I know he is your brother.”
“Oh, I’m not at all offended, Lady Kate. You can’t expect two geniuses in one family. But I think its a pity Lord St. Austell isn’t told of their pranks.”
“Nobody dares tell papa anything since last Friday,” answered Kate in a lower voice.
“He was knocked down and robbed as he was walking at night with one of his friends. He had been out to dinner, and it was so foggy that he dared not drive home. And—of course we are not supposed to talk about it—but he believes he recognised one of the men who attacked him.”
“Who was it?” asked Godwin, interested.
“Why—you won’t say anything about it, will you?—but he thinks the man who knocked him down was the man who used to be librarian here—Amos Goodhare!”
“By Jove!” cried Godwin. “You don’t mean it?”
“Yes, I do. This man struck papa down quite savagely, and held him down, and was going to kick him as he lay on the ground if one of the men with him—there were three altogether—had not interfered.”
A sharply uttered exclamation burst from Deborah’s lips. Godwin and Lady Kate turned quickly, and saw that the color had left her cheeks and that her face wore a terror-struck expression.
“What is the matter, dear?” asked plump little Lady Kate, in much concern.
“Nothing, nothing. I—I was only thinking—of—of what a narrow escape your father might have had with those—ruffians, and how glad I am that one of them had the humanity to save him from being hurt.”
“Yes, indeed, we were surprised ourselves at that. It is quite like Claude Duval and the days of chivalry, isn’t it? But I mustn’t laugh about it for really poor papa has a dreadful bruise at the back of his head, and he might have been killed, of course.”
“Yes, I—I am very thankful,” said Deborah.
Godwin saw that something was the matter, and he managed to cut short Lady Kate’s chatter, so that he could take Deborah home. But not all his artfully made suggestions and inquiries could drag from her the secret of the fear which made her creep about with startled eyes and a terror-struck white face all through that Christmas Day.
Reesmeanwhile was spending his Christmas at his lodgings in St. Martin’s-lane, with the faithful Sep Jocelyn for company. Sep was still as much outwardly devoted as ever to his more brilliant friend; but the fast life they were leading, acting upon a constitution already weakened by former excesses, was telling upon him even more plainly than upon the younger man. Sep was losing his nerve. As he sat with Rees by the fire on the evening of Christmas Day, heavy with late sleep and with a drinking bout of the previous night, every slight noise made by a movement of his companion, or by the traffic in the street outside, caused him to start, and sometimes to shiver. He had grown much older looking during the past year; his face was swollen and puckered about the eyes, while the threads of grey in his fair hair had multiplied into wide white streaks. His starts and tremors began to irritate Rees, who put out his hand to stop Sep as the latter was about to help himself from a decanter which stood on the table.
“That will do, Sep. Goodhare will be here in a minute to settle our next plans, and you’ll want all your wits about you.”
“But I’m so cold,” pleaded the other, in a husky voice.
“Well, brandy won’t warm you. Sit nearer to the fire.”
“I can’t get any nearer, unless I sit in the fender,” complained Sep, rather sullenly.
For Rees had used rather a bullying tone.
“I’m going into a decline, I think,” Sep began again. “This life’s too much for me, what with the danger, and the work, and the risks, and then the pace we go when we’re in funds.”
“Do you want to go back to Carstow and your old auntie, then?” asked Rees, with what was meant for a sneer, but which proved to be a rather feeble one.
“No-o; at least if I did, I suppose you wouldn’t let me go; and if you would, Goodhare wouldn’t,” said Sep, hopelessly.
The idea of starting an independent course of action was now further than ever beyond his capacity.
“I shouldn’t prevent you,” said Rees, gloomily. “This occupation of gentlemanly footpad is not more to my taste than to yours. I believe Goodhare likes violence; it’s one vent to the savagery he has been saving up all these years. But, for my part, if I had my chances over again, I should choose life in the country with——”
He stopped.
“With Deborah Audaer?” suggested Sep.
Rees got up and stretched himself.
“What’s the use of talking, when there’s one of Marion’s ecstatic effusions to be answered, and Goodhare may be in any minute.”
“I’m sick of Goodhare, Rees; aren’t you? He’s a selfish, greedy old rascal, and he always contrives to get the lion’s share of the plunder and the fox’s share of the risk. He hardly lets one call one’s soul one’s own.”
“Have we any souls?” said Rees. “I don’t feel as if I had any such relic of respectability about me. Whatever I may have had left of that sort Deborah took away with her the day she came here with my mother. When I’m tired of this life I shall go to Carstow and claim it back from her.”
“Do you think, Rees,” suggested Sep, after a pause, “that a man who’s led the sort of life we have is—is—well—quite good enough for a woman like Miss Audaer?”
“My dear boy, why trouble ourselves with questions of that sort? As long as they’ll have us and worship us, no matter what sort of lives we’ve led, why should we worry ourselves by trying to lead any better?”
“And you think Miss Audaer worships you still?”
Rees got up, swaggered confidently across the room to his desk, unlocked it, and took from an inner drawer a woman’s little morocco purse, which he flung across the table carelessly to his companion.
“Look inside,” said he.
Sep opened it almost reverently, and found that it contained ten sovereigns.
“Her savings for half a year at least,” explained Rees. “The day she came here she left it on the desk, sliding it under a piece of blotting paper, because she knew I was badly off. You see I have not touched it,” he added, magnanimously.
“So I should think,” said Sep, laconically. “Are you sure, though, Rees, whether she left it at the beginning or the end of her visit—on her coming in or on her going away?”
“What do you mean?” asked Rees sharply.
“Why, that perhaps she left it for the old Rees, whom she had known, and would not have left it for the new Rees whom she had to learn to know.”
Limp and undecided in action, Sep was shrewd of thought and could be plain of speech. Rees received his suggestion very haughtily, and the two men were on the verge of a quarrel when the sound of the turn of a latch-key in the front door caused them instantly to drop their voices. For mistrust of their elder was the bond on which the friendship between the two younger men now chiefly rested.
Amos Goodhare entered in brisk and jaunty fashion. He alone of the three seemed to have found their alternately riotous and risky life perfectly agreeable to his tastes and constitution. After having grown old in the pursuit of learning, he was now growing young again at the fountain of pleasure. If he had lost something in dignity, he had gained in distinction, and the man on whom all had looked as an intellectual marvel seemed now remarkable rather for his well-cut clothes and the easy condescension of his manner.
“Well, boys,” was his greeting, “you don’t seem to understand how to make Christmas merry. I’ve come to show you how it can be made useful.”
“By taking a lesson at Drury Lane, perhaps, and buttering the pavement outside rich old gentlemen’s doors,” suggested Rees ironically.
Amos gave the young man a glance of no particular warmth and said:
“No, not exactly that. We have a game in hand that nobody, I think, need despise for its facility. What do you say, boys, to carrying off the Crown jewels, or at least part of them?”
“I should say it was a very bad joke, and might, if indulged in, lead to a very good term of penal servitude,” answered Rees, picking out a cigar very carefully from the case Goodhare offered.
“But I suppose that, like many other bad jokes, you won’t be unwilling to lend a hand to carry it out.”
Rees considered a few moments, and then laughed.
“No,” said he. “It would be a new sensation, at all events.”
But Sep began to shiver, and to look with glances of alarm from the one to the other.
“Leave me out this time, Goodhare,” he said at last, hoarsely.
“Can’t, my dear boy. Your shrewdness and methodical way of carrying out instructions is just as necessary to our combination as Rees’s dash and my inventiveness. You sketch, don’t you?”
“Ye-es, a little,” admitted Sep reluctantly.
“And you have been in America, and could get up, I suppose, very fairly as artist and correspondent to a New York paper?”
“If I must, I suppose I could.”
“And you, Rees,” continued Amos, “who can do anything which needs smartness and dexterity of fingers, can use a file, or could learn to do it?”
“I could learn to do it, of course.”
“Very well, then. The Christmas holidays are now on, and people flock to the Tower in swarms. By-the-by, I suppose that you know that St. Austell’s brother, the Honorable Charles Cenarth, is keeper of the regalia?”
Rees started.
“Why on earth can’t you leave that family alone, Goodhare?”
Amos laughed harshly, and a look of diabolical malice flashed out of his eyes.
“Oh, in this case my reason will explain itself as it goes on,” said he. “In the meantime you will both, in the course of the holidays, visit the Tower more than once to familiarise yourselves with it. Go on Mondays and Saturdays, the free days, when there is a crush. Use disguise, but of the simplest and neatest sort. Rees, you will practise the filing away of iron bars without noise. And there is something else for you to do. Lord Wenlock, the general, is a great chum of St. Austell’s, isn’t he?”
“I believe so.”
“Have you ever seen any of his handwriting?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Then you must get Lady Marion to procure you a couple of his letters. Say they’re for autographs. Study the handwriting, and then forge a letter requesting the keeper to give the bearer (whom you will call an American journalist of note), permission to sketch the regalia. I think you will find these instructions enough for the present.”
“Yes, quite enough to land us at Portland,” said Rees, cheerfully.
Reckless as impunity in crime had made him, he was not dull enough to ignore the stupendous risk of such a colossal piece of knavery. But the excitement of carrying out Goodhare’s daring plans had now become necessary to his jaded senses, on which the risks of smaller and meaner thefts were beginning to pall. Trusting, therefore, to the fertile invention of the elder man for the details of the plot, he at once set to work on the preliminaries Amos had suggested, and persuaded the reluctant Sep to do the same.
Weeks passed on, during which Amos put the younger men through their paces with regard to their recently acquired knowledge of the geography of the Tower, tested Rees’s progress in the art of using a file expeditiously and without noise, and caused him to forge letters from Lord Wenlock, until he produced one which the general himself might have mistaken for the production of his own pen.
Then, when all was ready, came a spell of bright weather; and Amos, who had implicit faith in the disorganising powers of fog, waited until the kindly brown cloak was again drawn over the sky.
One morning in the middle of February he announced that all was ready, and that the attempt would be made that day. Sep, whom Amos had kept under his own eye for a week or more, made his way through a thick sepia-colored mist to the Tower, presented the forged letter, and after only a short delay was admitted to the Wakefield, or Record, Tower, where the Crown jewels were kept, and accommodated with a seat.
The day was so dark, and the consequent difficulties of locomotion were so great, that only very few visitors came to the tower at all. These few were chiefly of the country cousin sort, and those who came into the Record Tower did not scruple to crowd round Sep, and to pass their opinion, in loud whispers, on the merits of the series of neat little pen-and-ink drawings which he was making from different points of view, so that from time to time the warder, who stood at the door, had to come forward and beg them not to interrupt the gentleman.
Presently, in the midst of a small batch of strangely-dressed people fresh from the colonies, there sauntered in, guide-book in hand, a young fellow of rather rustic appearance, dressed in the sort of clothes a respectable carpenter might wear for his Sunday suit. He was greatly interested in the work of the artist, who was making his way, by easy stages, all round the great cage, in the centre of the small stone room, in which the Crown and other jewels are kept. Wherever the American artist stopped, the young carpenter stopped too, carried away by his interest in the sketches. The warder, who never remained for many minutes out of the room, grew interested also, and watched the progress of the little pictures with much admiration. The day was so dark, and the fog so thick even inside the stone chamber, that the gas jets between the deeply-embrasured windows were all alight, giving to the precious gems a fiery lustre as they glittered through the murky atmosphere.
Sep had almost reached that side of the room which was furthest from the door when a tall, well-dressed man appeared at the entrance, and peeping in, said in cheery tones:
“Hallo! you’ve got an illumination up here, I see! What a mistake it is, this showing the State jewels at sixpence a head, like the Chamber of Horrors at a waxworks! What do you think, warder?”
“Well, I don’t know, my lord; they’re the people’s treasures after all, and it pleases them to see ’em.”
At the words “my lord,” the American correspondent and the young carpenter looked around. The latter started. Seen by a cursory observer, not careful to mark trifling differences of stature and feature, the easy-mannered gentleman at the door, who wore an overcoat of “horsey” cut, and carried a small dressing-bag, would have passed for Lord St. Austell.
“I find my brother is not in,” went on Amos, still in the earl’s well-known genial manner, “so I’ve come up for a chat with you. They wanted to stop my bag at the gate—for a dynamitard’s, I suppose. But the sight of my hair brushes and pomatum pots reassured them, I believe. You can keep it under your own eye, at any rate.”
And the pseudo earl threw his bag down inside the doorway of the stone chamber, and proceeded to ask the alarmed warder if he had heard that it was proposed to do away with the body of men of which he formed so distinguished and ornamental a member, and to replace them with a staff chosen from the ranks of the metropolitan police.
The alarmed warder listened in consternation to this suggestion, which, coming from the lips of a gentleman who had so much access to persons in authority as the Earl of St. Austell, bore a frightful impress of probability. They discussed the rumor with much warmth, the sham nobleman growing even more excited and loud than the warder. A few visitors passed into the chamber and out again, while still the noble visitor and the alarmed guardian conversed at the door. With the last batch came the young carpenter and the American, the latter full of thanks to the warder for his courteous assistance. Still they discussed, the poor veteran much comforted, in the midst of his alarm, by the promise of his noble companion to “use his influence” for him and the body to which he belonged.
At last, however, with a start, the gentleman affected to remember that his brother, the Honorable Charles Cenarth, would have returned and be waiting for him. Snatching up his bag, he thrust a half-sovereign into the warder’s hand, and made his way in a sauntering, jaunty manner, down the stone staircase.
That handsome “tip” was, however, dearly bought. A quarter of an hour later the poor warder, having recovered his equanimity a little, made his accustomed perfunctory tour of the chamber in which the Crown jewels lay. At the innermost point of the stone apartment he stopped, sick with horror. Some of the jewels were gone.
With clammy, trembling hands, the unhappy man touched the cage, behind the bars of which the treasures had seemed so safe. They gave way at the touch. The bars had been filed through, the glass neatly and noiselessly cut, and the jewels taken without the least warning sound. In a moment the whole building rang with the alarm. The soldiers turned out, the gates were closed, the few visitors still groping their way about in the fog were closely searched—all to no purpose.
By that time there was a bundle of clothes—“horsey” overcoat, carpenter’s suit, American tourist’s rig out—sinking, heavily-weighted, to the bottom of the Thames; while Amos Goodhare, Sep, and Rees were finding their way to the lodging in St. Martin’s-lane by different routes.
An hour later there lay on the table in the dingy back sitting-room two Royal crowns—the so-called Queen’s diadem, a massive circlet set with pearls and diamonds of enormous size, and St. Edward’s golden crown, a larger and still more magnificent treasure, ablaze with precious stones. Besides these lay an old golden spoon and a collar studded with gems.
The three plotters, having carried through their adventures so successfully, stood staring at their treasure in bewilderment.
For even Amos, the oldest and craftiest, began to understand, in the face of this splendid prize, that they were very much in the position of gentlemen who, having obscurity as their only hope of safety, find themselves suddenly the possessors of a fine white elephant.
Amos Goodharewas the first to recover from the sort of stupefaction into which the sight of their royal plunder had thrown the three confederates.
“Well, boys,” he said, “I think we may rest on our laurels a little while after this feat. It would take an expert in jewels, which I don’t profess to be, to tell you what value we have there. But here is a diamond in this,” and he took up the diadem, “which cannot, I should think, be worth less than five thousand pounds. While this crown,” and he laid his hand upon the other and still more magnificent prize, “ought to bring us in enough to live in modest comfort for the remainder of our lives.”
“Well, there can’t be much of them left to run at the rate we’re going on,” moaned Sep, who was altogether unhinged by the life of enforced abstinence he had led for the last few days under Goodhare’s supervision, by the risks of the morning, and by the still greater risks in the disposal of the jewels which he knew would fall to his share.
“Sep, you’re out of sorts. Drink a health to the Honorable Charles Cenarth, keeper of the regalia, and may he come half as easily out of this scrape as we have done!”
He went to the little rickety sideboard, and, taking out a decanter and glasses, filled three bumpers, and pushed one over to Sep, who emptied part of the spirit into another tumbler, and drank the rest, diluted with two-thirds of water.
“Now, to the health of the Honorable——” began Goodhare again.
But Sep interrupted him. Glancing restlessly round the room, he laid his hand on the elder man’s arm, and whispered hoarsely:
“Don’t. Its unlucky.”
“And instead of spending our time drinking healths we’d better be deciding what to do with these dangerous little toys, now we’ve got them,” suggested Rees drily. “As long as they remain in their present form the sight of them by an outsider might expose our motives to misconstruction.”
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the door burst open, and the landlady, a rheumatic old woman in a rusty black cap, entered with only that perfunctory knock which is more like a fall against the door in the act of opening it, than a respectful request for permission to enter. Mrs. Williamson was quite taken aback at the sight of the treasures on the table. Luckily for them, the confederates also were so utterly overwhelmed by this unexpected surprise, that no one of them made so much as an instinctive movement as if to hide the jewels.
After a few moments’ dead pause, during which the old woman remained blinking at the gems, and the three men felt as if the handcuffs were already on their wrists, Mrs. Williamson, with a short laugh, put all their fears to flight with half a dozen words.
“Well, I never,” she said. “What finery to be sure!”
It had not for a moment occurred to this matter-of-fact Londoner that the crowns were “real.” Her words suddenly opened the eyes of the three men to a different view of the gold and precious stones before them. Knowing them to be genuine, they had seen them illuminated by the glow with which the consciousness of their value endowed them. Looking at them all at once from the landlady’s point of view, they saw that in the weak and murky daylight which came through the dirty window the jewels looked wonderfully little better than theatrical properties. The resourceful Amos hailed this idea with delight. Seizing one of the crowns, he held it over his own head, and asked gaily:
“Well, Mrs. Williamson, what do you think of my crown? You didn’t know that I went in for acting, did you? I’m going to play Richard the Third to-night.”
“And a very handsome-looking king too, I’m sure, sir. But you should have gone to ’Ales, in Wellington-street, for your crown, begging your pardon for suggesting it. He’d never have sent you such a one as that, with a dirty old piece of velvet in the middle not fit to touch. I’ve had a actor—not an amateur like you, sir, but one who did it for his living—on my third floor, and he had a much better one than that from ’Ales, much brighter and bigger jewels.”
“Well, I must remember that for the next time. I think now this will have to serve my purpose.”
“Mrs. Williamson thought they were real at first, I believe,” laughed Rees, throwing himself on the sofa.
“Indeed, sir, I did not,” said the old woman indignantly. “I’ve not always been redooced to letting lodgings, and there was a time when I had jewellery of my own, though you mayn’t choose to believe it. And I don’t suppose now there’s many better judges about of what’s good than what I am, sir. However, I hadn’t come to tell you that, but to know whether I should lay the cloth for dinner?”
“Certainly, and Mr. Goodhare will dine with us to-day,” said Rees.
Sep and Rees had each a little room on the second floor, but Goodhare’s lodgings were at Westminster. There was too much business to be settled, however, for them to separate for the present. So they ate a hurried meal, had the table cleared, and then very gently, very noiselessly, opened the window and looked out.
The fog was thicker than ever, settling down upon the city for such a night as the three confederates loved. Only a little bit of sky was visible at all from this ground floor room, for the backs of the houses behind came very close, leaving between the two walls of blackened brick nothing but a passage paved with worn and irregular flags. When a good look to right and left had assured the three men that no one was about and that the fog was thick enough to hide them from a chance observer at any of the adjacent windows, one by one they dropped through their own window into the passage, turned to the right, and over the wall at the end into a second and much narrower passage, which ran at right angles to the first, along the backs of the deserted houses which had struck Deborah Audaer with such a sense of poverty and desolation.
The back doors of all these houses were boarded up as carefully as the windows and doors in front. But Rees, who was the first of the three to venture on this errand, stopped at the door of the fourth house, with one strong pull wrenched off the two lowest boards, and crawled through the opening thus made. For the door itself had been taken bodily away. A minute later, Sep, and then Goodhare, had passed through also.
As soon as they were all inside they drew up the displaced boards, which were joined together, fastened them in their place with bolts, and proceeded together along the passage which ran from the back to the front of the house. Without striking a light they felt for and found, about half way along the passage, an opening in the floor which led, by a narrow ladder-staircase, into the cellars.
The first they entered was at the front, underneath that part of the house which had once been a shop. It was very dimly lighted through a rusty grating just below the shop window, and was full of scraps of paper, heaps of dust, and rubbish of the most worthless kind, such as not even the poorest rag-picker would find it worth while to carry away. Behind this miserable and mouldy-smelling cellar was a second, more miserable and mouldy still. It had been sunk some three feet deeper into the earth than the front one, from which it was divided by a brick wall, in which a wooden door had been inserted, artfully painted so as to be undistinguishable, except by an experienced eye, from the brickwork on either side. Into this lower cellar all three men dropped and shut the door behind them.
Then Goodhare struck a light. The cellar was small, and ventilated only by a hole about a foot square in the floor of the back shop above. Immediately under this hole was a small, roughly-made square grate, and above the grate there swung a huge melting-pot. The rest of the furniture consisted of a couple of benches, a dirty table on which was a piece of brown paper containing tools, a large collection of wine and spirit bottles, both empty and full, and a wide, comfortable-looking, old-fashioned couch.
Rees and Sep set to work without delay, extracting the precious stones from their heavy setting with accustomed fingers. In the meantime Amos built up a fire in the rusty grate, and as fast as a piece of gold was deprived of its jewels, he threw it into the melting-pot. While he did so he issued his next instructions to the two younger men.
“We shall have a day or two to work in, boys, because I expect they’ll try to recover the things first without raising a hue and cry. Cenarth will know it’s life and death to him to get them back quietly. You, Sep, will have to cross to Amsterdam to-night. I’ll take care to make up such a parcel as no one shall suspect. You will represent yourself as a merchant of—Tunis, say—who has been trading in South Africa. When you have disposed of as much there as you safely can, go on to Paris, and try—not the big firms—they’ll be on the alert by that time—but rich private Americans. Try the swell hotels. Stay at the Grand or the Louvre, and look out for Bertram, the railway millionaire; he’s due in Paris in a day or two. With him you may suggest the real source they came from; you needn’t give him all particulars. But if you manage well, he’ll nibble. And there will be no haggling. Do you understand? Keep your head clear—but you always do when there’s work in hand. I must do you that justice.”
“Justice!” echoed Sep sulkily. “I shall get a little too much of that before this affair is over, I fancy. There’s nothing in what we’ve done up to now. It might have been done over and over again if the rascals who thought of the Crown jewels before us hadn’t remembered the certainty of discovery afterwards. I’m tired of playing cat’s-paw. Go to Amsterdam yourself. You’re much more like a Tunisian merchant than I am. And you’ve more nerve. I don’t know what’s become of mine, but it’s gone.”
And Sep shivered as he cast round him another of the restless glances which Amos had noticed in him all day. Goodhare looked at him searchingly, and then laid an encouraging hand on his shoulder.
“I’d go with pleasure, my boy, if I could do what is to be done as well as you. But my Greek and Hebrew would not serve me as your knowledge of modern languages serves you; besides, you have been a traveller, and I a stay-at-home, and there is a difference between those two classes which I could not hide.”
“Come, Sep, don’t make difficulties,” said Rees impatiently. “We have all our different departments and separate work. Goodhare organises, I have the chief hand in carrying out——”
“And I do the dirty work,” added Sep querulously. “I shall have to go, of course; I know that. But it will be the last time; I feel it. So look out for yourselves.”
“What do you mean? You’re not going to round on us, I suppose?” said Rees, savagely.
“No, I haven’t the spirit to do that, as you know. But I—I’ve been seen—I’m sure of it. On my way back from that cursed Tower I seemed to see faces peering out of the fog—Charles Cenarth’s and Lord St. Austell’s. Of course I’ll go if you insist, but I tell you it will be a d——d unlucky journey.”
His companions laughed at his fears, did their best to raise his drooping spirits, and at last, chiefly by the aid of consoling potations, restored him to something like his old cheerful submissiveness. Then, taking swift advantage of the change in him, they equipped him for his journey with a disguise which Amos had had ready, with clothing, with money, and with a travelling bag with a false bottom, in which, between layers of tissue paper, the stolen jewels were packed. All these preparations being completed, Amos mixed a loving cup, which they all drank solemnly to their usual toast on the eve of one of their nefarious enterprises:
“Success to the Princes of the Fog.”
But somehow the old spirit flagged. As the light from the glowing charcoal fire flickered up on their faces, each seemed to see distorting shadows of fear and failure on the features of his companions. They finished the ceremony with unusual haste and in unusual silence, and climbing up out of the damp yet stifling underground retreat, slipped out into the raw air, and getting over the palings unseen in the mist, emerged into Charing Cross-road. Rees and Goodhare accompanied Sep as far as St. Martin’s Church, and left him with just time to catch the continental mail train from Charing Cross. Then they returned to Rees Pennant’s lodgings.
“For,” whispered Amos, as soon as their companion had left them, “I have something for you also to do.”
As soon as they were again within closed doors, the older man unburdened himself of his instructions.
“I didn’t wish to frighten Jocelyn,” he began ominously, “for the lad’s turning soft and doesn’t need warning to be careful at any time. But there’s no denying that this is a dangerous business, the most ticklish thing we’ve had on our hands yet.”
“Yes, of course,” assented Rees gloomily.
“So I think we had better get as near the safe side as possible.”
He paused.
“Well?” said Rees.
“Now, the best shelter we can get behind is—influence.”
“Whose?”
“Lord St. Austell’s.”
Rees started.
“The man we both hate?”
“Why should that prevent our making use of him? Now he can’t, in common decency, let me suffer if he can help it. It lies with you to make it equally impossible for him to let you suffer.”
“Go on; out with it.”
“Become his son-in-law without delay. Marion will jump at you.”
Rees moved uneasily.
“I know that. If she were a little less ready, I might be a little more so.”
“This is not a time to stick at trifles. You had an appointment with her to-night at a friend’s house?”
“Yes, but I can’t go—fog’s too thick for me to venture out.”
“She’ll venture, I suppose?”
The young man shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
“Of course. She’d walk through the Thames to meet me at any time.”
“Then your unparalleled devotion must stand even this test. You must meet her to-night and arrange to marry her with as little delay as possible.”
Rees made a grimace.
“Can’t it be put off until we see how things really turn out?”
“No,” answered Amos, decisively, “we can really only reckon on safety for a few hours. You see we were all seen. Our best chance, yours and mine, is to remain where we are, keep perfectly quiet, and trust to Sep’s keeping his head; in the meantime we must take all the precautions we can, and yours is—Lady Marion.”
Rees got up from his chair with a very sour face.
“All right,” he said briefly. “If it’s got to be done, here goes.”
He ran upstairs to his room without another word, and returned in twenty minutes in evening dress and overcoat, wearing the tired and blasé air which was now no affectation with him. His pale face, curly hair, and great black eyes with dark rings under them, made him look what ladies call “interesting,” a fact of which he did not appear to be ignorant.
“Will it do?” he asked, carelessly, as he took up his gloves.
“First-rate,” answered Amos, with a nod.
And with much apparent reluctance, part of which was real and part affected, Rees Pennant jumped into a hansom and gave the driver an address in a street near Russell-square.