A sort of catalepsy seized me, as I looked and gaped. The coincidence, of course,mightbe just a coincidence. Yet Gaskett was not what one might call an everyday name—and thenRichardGaskett, and to occur in this place of all places!
Suddenly the thought rushed into me, as if a plug had been taken out of my brain: “Gaskett! Was it, perhaps, after all, my mother’s maiden name, and my dishonoured grandfather a publican?”
Here, indeed, would be discovery, though not the most flattering possible to myself. I came out of my trance with a little gasp and giggle. “Noblesse oblige,” I thought again. “Very likely I am suited above all things to be a potman. But in any case I must set this at rest.”
I drove open the door of the private bar and entered. There was no one there but, behind the counter, a plump short man of the conventional Boniface type. He was a bleary, rather unctuous-looking fellow, with a mole near his mouth like a faded patch, an obvious wig (both suggesting anachronisms on an earlier date), and a snow-white apron bent about his portly form. He, also, it appeared, was in right succession from the Regency, though he might not have been more than sixty or so. I looked at him with a fearful speculation, as he lifted a pot or two to wipe the counter underneath. Was there a family likeness here? Who could say? Lady Skene was a teetotaller.
“Richard Gaskett,” I murmured, hardly articulate.
“That’s me,” he said, going on with his work.
“That’sme, too,” I said, snatching at resolution.
He glanced up a moment.
“O!” he said. “Then that makes three of us.”
“Three?”
“My name, your name—and the other chap’s,” said he. “I shouldn’t a’ thought it in reason, and all to happen here. But it seems it is. Now, sir?”
The last was an invitation to me to order something. He drew me my beer from an engine whose handle was worn from his oozy grip.
“Whoisthe other chap?” I asked him. “Do you mind telling me?”
“Why not?” he said, and crossed his legs and leaned one elbow on the counter, like a pottle-bodied Leicester Square Shakespeare.
“Leastways,” he continued, “I will and I won’t, and I can and I can’t, seeing as how he was christened,ifhe were, a matter of what—why it must be twenty year ago.”
“Who was christened?” I asked.
“The other one,” he answered. “Let me think now.”
He crossed and tapped together ruminative the fat forefinger of each hand, as if he were numbering up a score of notches in his memory.
“I misremember the exact date,” he said suddenly: “but the old lady she stands as clear as a Pepper’s Ghost in my mind. Mother Carey they called her; and she lived in White Square down there; and every morning, reg’lar as the postman, she’d come in here at eleven o’clock for her gill of gin and peppermint, like a very particler old duchess. She’d been on the stage in her time, I understood, and wasn’t to be put off with anything lower than the genuine London Old Tom. God bless me! How she comes back!”
He basked a little, in a glow of memory, before he continued luminously:
“I recollect the very day she bought it of me—just as plain I do as if it was print.”
“Bought what?” I ventured.
“My name, sir,” he said. “She come in here, as excited as Punch; and we got talking together. ‘Mr Gaskett,’ she says, ‘I want a name.’ ‘Well,’ I answers, ‘there’s plenty agoing for choice. What do you want it for?’ ‘For a babby,’ she says, ‘as hasn’t got one of his own.’ ‘O-ho!’ I says: ‘that’s the game is it? Well, shall I sell you mine for a pint?’ ‘Done,’ she says; and done it was. She’d a superstition, she said, about giving him one that wasn’t his by right of birth or purchase, and that settled the matter. I don’t know if he was christened that way. If he was, you’re the third; and that makes it funny.”
Not so odd, nevertheless, I thought, by two-thirds of its oddity, if the tremendous suspicion sprung suddenly into my mind were justified. But anyhow it was a certain relief to find that this beery Amphitryon was not my grandfather.
“And you—you never saw your godson, so to call him?” I asked.
“Not I,” said Mr Gaskett stoutly. “But, whoever he was, he might ha’ been worse called—that Iwillsay. I never see the old lady again neither, and that fixes it in me. Now you yourself, sir. I suppose you was called after your father?”
I detected a sudden insolent curiosity in his eye. To be sure, what with my age and inquisitiveness, there seemed a certain coincidence here. But I kept my nerve, and put his question aside with another.
“Whereisthis White Square?”
“Down yonder,” he said coolly—“off the High Street. But she won’t be living there now.”
“Won’t she?” I answered, as coolly for my part. “But I don’t know that it matters to me whether she is or isn’t.”
“Nor to me,” said the landlord, moving away with a sudden repudiation of me and all my concerns. I had offended him, and was not sorry to have done so. He scowled at me balefully as I finished my beer and left the bar.
Once outside, I retraced my steps, with a very sombre mind. I had an overpowering suspicion that there was only one legitimate Richard Gaskett after all. The other two had been resolved into one, and he with nothing but a “pint-pot” claim to the title. Well, so far so good, at least, for romance. Luck had brought me something.
I strolled down again by way of the posts and the rails and the busy old-air circus. Going for a short distance down the High Street beyond, I encountered a policeman and questioned him.
“White Square?” said he; and wheeling stolidly, signified the very passage by which he was standing.
I looked down the gully curiously. It went, on a basis of trampled filth, into an open space a hundred yards beyond, whence came a sound of quarrelling women and squalling children.
“O!” I said. “Do you happen to know if a Mrs Carey lives there?”
He conned me a moment, as if speculating on my possible purpose in asking; then hailed authoritatively an ancient inhabitant who was at that moment shuffling up the lane.
“You, Mullins! Anybody of the name of Carey living in the Square?”
Mr Mullins leered up, fondling his hands obsequiously. The privileges of this Alsatia, it was evident, ended at the passage mouth. He was an obscene-looking old rascal, with a face like a half-blind sheep, and the gaunt framework of once powerful shoulders.
“Carey is it, sir?” said he—“Carey, your honour? I remimber a lady of the name. Mither Carey we’d be afther callin’ her; but she’s gone long sin.”
“When gone?” demanded the officer.
“It’ll be a matther of twinty year, maybe,” said the old man. “My mimiry’s bad.”
“That’s it,” I put in hurriedly, seeing the law about to protest. “It’s of her I want to know.”
Mr Mullins considered me astutely from under his lids. Honour amongst thieves, sure enough; but wasn’t there such a thing as a statute of limitations to the duties one owed? Besides, a reward might be in the air. I pride myself so far on my worldly precocity, that I tipped him, moderately, on the spot. The act refreshed his memory wonderfully.
“I recall she came into money, did the ould lady,” he said; “and tuk herself away. There was a daughter she’d be owning; a fine handsome girl, that had her throuble and married a lord despite. He saw her on the stage, twas said, a young jule of a thing, and lost his heart to her. But there was a parson in them days up at the tin chapel yander—Pugsley was his name, the heretic—and he made her religious—Musha! the scoundrel—and brought her ould lord to terms, and married them.”
He stopped, and covertly bit the coin I had given him to test it.
“And what became of the mother?” I asked, seeing that he proffered no more.
“She tuk herself arrf, your honour,” said he.
“You don’t know where?”
“No, by the powers, I don’t; and that’s the thruth,” he said; and indeed there could be no purpose in his lying.
Then I had only one other question to ask, and out it came:
“Do you remember who was her partner in that—that little trouble you mentioned?”
Mr Mullins leered horribly.
“There was quare tales,” he said—“I recollect that same. One would call him here, and another there; and a third would be whispering of a master in the Grammar School beyant. But that was just talking. Mother Carey could be close, when she wanted.”
“What washisname—the master’s?”
“It’s clane gone from me,” said Mr Mullins, blankly.
“One might trace it out at the school itself, perhaps?”
I turned to the policeman.
“Gone, too,” he said. “It was all closed before my time. There’s shops there now.”
So I was temporarily baffled; but, as, having invented something plausible to the men to account to them for my curiosity, I went on my way, I was taking a fierce oath in my heart that not stone nor briar, nor water nor fire should turn me now from a pursuit to which accident, or Luck if you like, had already hallooed me so promisingly. If this Mother Carey lived, she was my quarry. But where and how to find her!
Themention of stone and quarry by Mr Richard Gaskett fits significantly enough here into the context of sinister events. They are to be found nowhere in more suggestive juxtaposition than in the island of Portland, where the great prison is.
One fair November morning the gates of this terrific stronghold were opened to discharge a time-expired convict. The man walked plump out of Hades into Elysium. Like many another expurgatus, he bore the scars of his cleansing indelibly printed on him. The governor of Hades, it must be remembered, fathered the Furies, and the business of the Furies is to lash, lash, irrespective of any consideration of moral deserts.
This prisoner had, for full twenty years, been persistently clamorous of his innocence—at first in Italian; later in Italian English; finally in a dialect hybrid of English and despair. He had forgotten his tongue, his personality, his meaning in the world: only the sense of a gigantic wrong remained with him.
For some time prior to his discharge he had been permitted to resume himself, to grow his hair and beard, so that he might never protest that he had been restored to existence a marked man. His hair and beard came white where they had been black; his face was the drawn grey face of an old man; he could resume nothing of his past whatever, not even that deadly conviction of injury, for that indeed had dwelt with him throughout. Save for it, he walked out of the gates reborn to age, not youth.
They had been glad enough to get rid of him. Even prison officialdom grows weary of kicking back into its kennel the caged and struggling wolf, so helplessly barred from his natural diet, and so naturally seeking an escape to it. This Antonio Geoletti had made more than one such attempt, and been ruinously flogged for it. He had suffered darkness, famine, solitary confinement, more than reason, his own or others, could comfortably consider; yet what was to be done with a man who could not be induced to accept an error of the law—if such, indeed, had been committed—with an accommodating philosophy? As a convict—which was solely how officialdom was called upon to regard him—he had been unspeakable—a very bad egg indeed. His good marks were nil; his livery of disgrace, when he was summoned to doff it, was still of the most conspicuous colour—the bright yellow which betokens the irreclaimable standard; it had been to the official discomfiture, no less than to his own, that his conduct had obliged the law to exact of him his full term of punishment. And in the end, the only profit was his: he crept out of Hades an unticketed man, free to pursue, unwatched, the solitary purpose that survived to him—vengeance on the authors of his unheard-of sufferings.
The question remained, were those beings still in being? Antonio never even put that question to himself. Vengeance is timeless. For all those twenty years of elsewise obliteration, the lust for it was as red in him at this day as when he had heard himself convicted on false evidence of a heinous offence, and had vainly striven, a foreigner and incoherent, to explain to the Court the real purport of a villain’s traducing. He could not believe for an instant that the God of his superstition had let the work of his legitimate hands be anticipated by another. No; the men remained to him somewhere. Only to find them!
I do not ask your sympathy for this Antonio Geoletti. If he had been convicted unjustly, he had been purposing a crime at the moment which merited a just conviction. He may have got his deserts indirectly; though, to be sure, there was no automatic standard for apportioning its exact term of punishment to either offence. The measures of the law are not even comparative measures, and many men all over the land are suffering under widely different sentences for a like crime. Only, self-consciousness of one evil-doing does not reconcile one to punishment for an imaginary other. That is human nature; and for all the moral purposes of this record, Antonio felt himself the divinely commissioned, though long wickedly withheld, minister of retribution. But at last his time was come.
It was the sense, the indelible haunting of this obligation which upheld him through all the terrific experience of his first re-emergence into the arena of living things. The pale November sunlight smote upon his eyes like the blast from a sudden-opened furnace; the speech of free people struck him as almost a sacrilege, being uttered unconcerned in this boundless temple of God’s own liberty; he blinked and staggered like a disentombed miner.
The prison frowned behind him; the island with its quarries smiled before. How often had he cursed those indurate blocks, symbols of the system to which he appealed in vain—thrown down his ringing tools upon them in a monstrous rage of helplessness, and turned to find a warder’s gun barrel at his head! Now they lay in the mist as soft as fairy bales, all their sinister weight drawn out of them, objects potentially suggestive of the noble fabrics in which each was to have its place. He heard a robin singing, and his eyes came wet with tears. Sobbing, God help him, like a woman, and always, and never changing, with that dream of blood in his heart, he crept out into the world.
How beautiful a thing it was, apart from its people! He had forgotten how soft the sunlight lay on it, how green the grass could grow, how fathomless was the blue of heaven. Limit and close obstruction were all he had known for so long. Even the daily tramp to the quarries had entailed a guard on speech and sight. Now he was free to gaze to drunkenness; to sing, if he would.
Yet it was a world no newer to him relatively than when he had last left it a double decade ago. He had not awakened like Rip Van Winkle to the repossession of his own. It was England the strange island which, in those far-distant days, he had scarcely crossed the Channel to see, and exploit, before he had been caught into the toils of its inexplicable laws, and put away to rage out his heart in an age-long confinement for a crime which he had never committed. Once, he recalled, he had been an astute Piedmontese rascal, a guide and porter at an hotel in the High Alps, who had suddenly, in bad times, elected to travel, with the purpose to sell to a certain person a certain secret, of which Fortune had made him the possessor. That was all done with; only the sense of the blood-lust, of the inherent vendetta, existed to identify him with that old Antonio Geoletti.
For the rest, he had seen so little of this England, that a twenty years’ hiatus in its history made no difference to him whatever. It was no stranger to him now than it had been then. He had found useful compatriots in it; he would find them, or others like them, again. One or two he had encountered in the course of his long punishment. He had their approximate addresses, and the addresses of a score of English “pals”—scoundrels, whose sympathies had naturally gravitated towards one who had not only been imprisoned for breaking the law, but who had broken over and over again the laws of imprisonment.
But he did not need these at present. One and all he dismissed them from his mind. To seek any out would be, he knew, to attract the attention of the police to himself. And he desired only to steal away and be forgotten—to pursue, unobserved and unsuspected, the single deadly purpose which haunted his soul. White, haggard, unmanned in all else but this, he might, as he stole on his way, have passed for the very personification of an inhuman Nemesis.
In his hugging and caressing of his monomania, it occurred to him presently that Fate had at least vouchsafed to him one compensation for his sufferings. They had disguised him effectively from recognition by his enemies. Who would think to identify this grizzled time-worn beast with the vigorous rogue who had been haled from the dock to a living death? He wondered sometimes that his enemies had never foreseen this crisis to their villainy—late, but inevitable in its arrival. Yet perhaps they had foreseen it, and calculated contemptuously upon the thousand possible accidents of time, or at least upon the taming influence of penal servitude. If that were so, that were well. He would not for all the world have his purpose suspected or provided against. Craft—a patient, unsleeping, unobtrusive craft—must guide all his footsteps henceforth.
He had some money in his pocket, hardly earned, but still in human justice not withheld. The last thing they wanted was to see him back at Portland. He would nurse every penny of it as if it were a jewel. Beyond this he had his railway ticket to London. It was there he wanted to go, he had said, and thither they had sent him. But not to Soho: no more of Soho for him!
* * * * * * * *
One wintry afternoon, a certain doctor came striding back from his rounds to his house in Doddington Grove, Kennington. It was a highly respectable street, with substantial dwellings on either side, and a double plantation of lime-trees on the pavement in front to justify to the world its title. The doctor was of a brisk, impatient manner, and he opened his door with a latch-key as if the second the act lost him were a second made unprofitable. Once inside, he turned up the gas in the hall—it was foggy twilight without—and hurriedly examined a slate, for engagements made during his absence. While he was reading, hat on head, his housemaid appeared.
“There’s a man waiting in the consulting-room, sir,” she said.
The doctor nodded, pondered a case or two, put the slate down, and went to his visitor.
“Hey!” he barked. “What’s your name?”
The man, who had risen on his’ entrance, stood motionless before him, his left hand pressed heavily upon his right, which, thickly bandaged, it seemed, he held against his chest. The fingers of the exposed hand were scarred and stunted; the face of the man was grey and rigid as a corpse’s—showing a grin of teeth, too; only the eyes in the face were piercingly alive like a crouching cat’s. He muttered something inaudible.
“What!” snapped the doctor. “Speak out. I can’t hear you.”
Again the stranger murmured.
“Hey!” said the doctor testily. “Can’t you speak louder? What is it? An accident—something the matter with your hand?”
He was of a quick nervous temperament, and harassed with much business. The figure before him was decent and respectable enough, but quite uneloquent of any sumptuary promise. And time with him meant money. He was opening his lips to speak again, and pretty summarily, to finish, when something in the stranger’s aspect, or attitude, arrested him. In an instant he had leapt, and, after a brief vicious struggle, had wrenched a knife from the man’s right hand. The apparent bandage on that had merely covered, it seemed, a deadly purpose. Geoletti, disarmed, stood quivering slightly, but otherwise impassive.
“I see,” said the doctor softly—“I see.” Watchful of the other, he glanced at the blade he had secured. It was a waspish sting of a thing, keen-tempered, folding into a handle which, when needed, became a hilt.
“Meant for me?” he inquired, lifting his brows. When bearded by a patient, he became frost and whipcord.
“No, no—not.” The words were spoken low, but distinct enough at last.
“For whom, then?”
The tip of Geoletti’s tongue travelled between his lips. He was evidently trying to master the reaction from a tremendous strain, and at the same time to find speech to lay the suspicion of any.
“For no one—no, that is the truth,” he whispered out at length.
The doctor tapped the blade in his hand peremptorily.
“A lie! Have you ever seen me before?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been to this house before?”
He dismissed the coming denial with a flick of his hand. His sharp merciless penetrativeness had its instant effect. The Italian responded to it automatic, like a close echo to the tap of a drum.
“Have you?”
“Yes.”
“When? How long ago?”
“Twenty year.”
The doctor was always one of those lucky downright people, who, quite scornful of the laws of defamation when they find a man meriting their chastisement, go through life speaking their minds with impunity.
“That was when my predecessor lived here,” he said shortly. “He was a drunken blackguard and worse—a disgrace to his calling. It has taken me fifteen years to build up a practice on the ruins of his infamy. His name was Blague. Was it him you knew?”
“Yes.”
“And meant to knife?”
“Yes.”
“I daresay. What had he done to you?”
The stranger’s eyes seemed suddenly to roll in his head. He clasped his hands convulsively to his breast. Words come from him in a broken stream:
“It was in this ver’ room—yes. I arrive by appointiment to meet wonn ozer—a zhentleman, yes, that I want to see—ver’ much I want to see him. I have a little word I wish to spik to him; and he send me message to com’ here, and he will follow to me. He not arrive when I arrive—no. I told to wait for him in zis room; and still it is a long time, and he not come. Zen presently there enter a yong woman, a paziente of Blague, and he shut us in togezer; and all quite sudden she begin to scream and tear herself. Then Blague he rush in, and I am accuse; and the coppar he com’ and drag me to the stazione, and I am accuse; and again before the judge I am accuse. And I try to spik the truth of what I com’ to Blague’s house for, and I am told it nozzing—no bearing on the case whatever, except it show me bad character. And the yong woman she swear against me—lies, lies, all; and I sent to prison for twen-ty year—for twen-ty year I sent. Zen I know zat Blague and ze zhentleman make zis op togezer, so to get rid of me; and I swear vengeance on zem. For twen-ty year though I wait, it sall com’ at last.”
The doctor was shutting up the dagger-knife very coolly as he listened.
“Not to one of them, at least, my friend,” he said. “Blague’s been dead of the horrors this ten years, and a good riddance to him.”
“Dead!”
The word seemed to stun the man.
“Yes, dead.”
“And ze ozer?”
“I know nothing of him, and don’t want to know.”
“His name——”
“I don’t wish to hear it. That’ll do. Here, take back your knife.”
Geoletti received the weapon in silence.
“You no help me?” he said presently in a slow voice.
“Certainly not. I become no party to this business. Besides, what were you here for?—blackmail it smells like. I daresay you got your deserts. Now be off with you.”
He made a rapid step, opened the door, and imperiously beckoned the man out. Geoletti, after a moment’s hesitation, stole softly into the hall, and disappeared thence into the fog.
“H’m,” thought the doctor, returning: “victim or not, there’s been black work there. I shouldn’t grudge that knife, I think, in the ribs of one of Blague’s confederates. Like as not he’ll get it; but I’ve neither business nor inclination to interfere. So far as I’m concerned, the matter’s ended.”
* * * * * * * * *
There was a board “To Let” up before a certain house in Eaton Square. Both the board, and the house which it advertised, appeared particularly decayed and out of repair. There were even windows broken in the latter; and what with its dingy walls, and flaking stucco, and the vision of a wrecked venetian blind or two dropping forlorn slats across the inner obscurity, the house looked actually frowsy for such a neighbourhood. Thither one morning came Geoletti and stealthily examined the legend painted on the board. “Apply to Foot & Liddel, Poultry,” he read with difficulty; and straightway, or as direct as persistent inquiry and answer could help him, betook himself to the house agent’s offices in the city. He was about to enter, when his hand on the varnished door caught his attention. After an instants thought, he withdrew, bought and donned a pair of cheap woollen gloves from a shop hard by, and returned to the swing doors.
A clerk at the broad counter within accepted him with an encouraging courtesy. It was the rule at Foot & Liddels. On the principle that dirt may hold much gold in solution, unexpected affluence was often found in the most unpromising-looking customers. Grubbiness, in consequence, was no bar to the firm’s affability. The youngest employé could quote of his knowledge the instance of a would-be client, who had shed fleas on the order-book all the time he was cheapening a marble mansion in Park Lane. He had had a nose like a tapir’s, and might have been held for a first example of gold dust in deposit, if he had exhibited any sign whatever of its ever having been washed out of him.
Geoletti asked if he might have an order to view the house in Eaton Square, and was answered, “Certainly,” by the polite young gentleman whom he accosted. Here, probably enough to the auctioneering view, was one of those self-madecontadini, who, like the Brothers Gatti, had turned, in the profitable processes of time, a little ice-cream shop into a gilded and bemarbled saloon. Moreover the house in Eaton Square had for long, and for some inexplicable reason, remained a drug in the market. It would be a good stroke of business to let it to an Italian parvenu.
Geoletti, being asked for his name and address, gave both glibly, without a hint of premeditation. He was Antonio Geoletti of Portland; a quarry master, he said. Not the shadow of a chuckle in himself answered to thisespièglerieas he received his ticket. He looked across steadily at the young gentleman.
“Who own ze house? Who it belong to?” he asked.
“There is no tenant there at present,” said the clerk. “A Mr Dalston is the landlord.”
“Yes, yes,” said the Italian, a trifle too eagerly. “Can I see him—ze landlord—personally?”
The clerk became a little cold.
“We act for him, sir. You can approach him through us.”
“Ah! Zen he live—som’wheres near?”
“I am not at liberty to give his address. We are in a confidential position in these matters. If you like to write, we will forward your letter with pleasure.”
Again baffled!
Geoletti considered gloomily: then shook his head.
“Wait, while I see ze house,” he said; and walked off with his order. It directed him, for the key, to a caretaker on the opposite side of the Square. The woman offered to come with him; but he insisted on being alone. It was with a queer fury of the blood that he mounted the unwashed steps, and prepared to enter the deserted house.
The door, stuck to its lintel from disuse, snapped open with a dusty jar. Turning as he closed it, Geoletti saw an addressed letter lying among a litter of circulars and advertisements on the floor. He took it up, and read its superscription—M. Dalston, Esq., Eaton Square, London. Was there a possible way here to the knowledge he desired? Pondering a few moments, he suddenly woke to action, left the house, closing the door behind him, and, with the letter, found his way to the nearest post office.
“I find zis behind ze door—zere,” said he, pointing to the address on the envelope.
The clerk, who received the letter from him, glanced from it to him and back again suspiciously.
“Don’t understand,” he said. “Wheredid you find it?”
“Zere,” said Antonio. “I go, wiz an order, to view an empty ’ouse, and zis have fall through the letter-box.”
The clerk whispered with another, nodded understandingly, and threw the letter on a shelf.
“All right” he said. “Should have been readdressed,” and prepared to go on with his work. That, one might say, was the post-office servant all over.
Antonio, patient and unoffended, essayed a hopeless question.
“Should be readdress?” he asked. “To where, zen?”
The clerk sniggered aloud to his next companion, a young lady, one of the newly emancipated sisterhood with a nose already above her station.
“That’s not your business,” said she. “We’ll see to it,” and the two ignored him ostentatiously.
Baffled again, and yet again!
Geoletti went back to the house. This time he made a thorough examination of it. It appeared just a repository for old dust and echoes. The only living things that inhabited there were mice and spiders; and what they thrived upon the Lord knew. The nozzles of the scullery taps were thick with brassy scum; the edges of the broken window-panes were yellow and blunted with the weather; there was an acrid deserted smell about everything. It was a large house, a property suggestive of handsome returns to its landlord; yet the atmosphere of it seemed costive with uninhabitableness. There are many such places in London, which, having every apparent advantage of position and accommodation, fail and fail to find a tenant. Certain ghosts, perhaps, are their bodiless caretakers; and these may resent the intrusion of their possible ousters. They do not want the scent of their hauntings crossed by lovelier and more desirable spirits.
Antonio went wandering, with a dull half aimlessness, up and down. Presently, in a small ground-floor room to the rear, his foot kicked against some paper. He wrenched up the rusty bar of the shutters, and let in a flood of squalid light.
The thing he had encountered was a torn catalogue. He stooped and secured it. It was a thickish quarto of flimsy paper, a long dictionary of houses, many illustrated with plates, advertised for sale or lease by the firm of Foot & Liddel.
A hope gripped him. Rapidly and hungrily, moistening his right-hand second finger, he swept over the pages. Suddenly, a mark arrested his eager review of them. It was pencilled against an entry, describing a property, the Lone Farm, situated in the neighbourhood of Market Grazing, Hampshire. The place was described as desirable, and cheap. Geoletti looked all round the room, noted its time-stained paper and ragged skirting, and came back to the catalogue. Then, very carefully and comprehensively, he went through the whole book page by page, and convinced himself that there was no other marked entry whatever.
Very jealously, then, he extracted the page containing this solitary clue, folded, and put it into the pocket which contained his folded knife. Two secret things, potential, possibly, of retribution. There was at least the hope.
He went quietly about the house, effacing every sign of his examination; then passed out into the street, crossed the Square, and returned the key to its custodian.
Thenceforth he was seen no more in London.
WhenI got back to my woodland hermitage—which I regained, as I had foreseen I should, without my absence from the house having excited any comment—I put up, in a little frenzy of mockery, an altar to the God of Luck. I drew a picture of a clergyman (Mr Pugsley it was meant for) christening a baby out of a pint pot, and turning to demand of a villainous old pew-opener (my imaginary presentment of Mother Carey), who stood beside, the infant’s proposed title. The question, within a scroll, issued from his lips, and the answer—“Richard Gaskett, godson of the publican of that name”—from hers. I had bought in Footover, on my way back, a bottle of gin and one of peppermint essence; and these I clasped round with a single label bearing the motto “In vino veritas,” and stood them on a little table underneath the drawing, which I nailed to the wall. No one but Miss Christmas—barring my stepfather on a rare occasion—had ever invaded, or was like to invade, my snuggery; and, if anyone did, I was reckless about consequences. Then I sat down to consider, over a pipe, my present position and gains.
These amounted to something at least. The discovery that my mother, and my mother’s mother (I could hardly bring myself to acknowledge the old bibulous harpy for my grandmother) had both been on the stage; the discovery that their name was Carey; the discovery that the elder had “come into money”—been pensioned off, belike, by Lord Skene—and that the younger had “found religion” at the hands of Mr Pugsley of the tin tabernacle—all these little enlightenments and confirmations made a certain definite “grounding,” on which I might hope to embroider that web which should catch Lady Skene’s feet tripping. True, the main object of my venture was not realised. Yet even there Luck was shaping me out a promise. An usher at the Grammar School!—that villain who had taken base advantage of a poor ingénue’s warmth over his reformation! It was as much in reason as anything else. That a pedagoguecouldbe something less than immaculate, quote Eugene Aram, not to speak of the Stockwell schoolmaster who chopped up his wife and put her in a box. But, whether it were a pedagogue or his pupil, a learned Theban or a scented puppy, I was confident that time, served by cunning and caution, would betray him to me soon or late. I had learned much already; and knowledge is always an investment which pays itself automatically at compound interest.
Nor were my discoveries the only profit I had brought back from my journey. A firmer confidence in myself; a more obdurate determination; a certain newly realised sense of humour—these were to be included in the gains. I felt a reinvigorated sense of mastery, a larger grasp of the world; I felt an insolent sense of security in Luck’s favouritism; I felt somehow like a weasel that watches a rickyard from cover. How I could make the rats squeal and run if once I elected to show myself in the open! I was in a very detestable humour, that is the truth.
On the morning after my return I took a long stroll round about the skirts of the estate, beginning with the “bare ruined choirs” of the woodlands, and coming round by Hags Lane, where the hawthorns had been stripped stark by the wrecking winds. Winter, with all its moan and mystery, shivered upon the air; the sheep on the pastures seemed to crop, with haunted ears pricked to it; there was a stiffness as of dread expectation over all the land.
To the many figures which danced and crowded into my mind throughout that lonely tramp, the figure of the girl whom I had hated and scorned would sometimes, my scorn despite, add itself. It even became, all at once, a persistent demon, thrusting itself forward, pleading for a monopoly of my attention. An impudent, outrageous claim. What was the creature to me, or I to her, in this play of “leading parts”? My concern was with the real actors and actresses—not with the skipping figurante, who came to fill the interludes of scene-shifting. This Ira, good Lord, of the Hebraic name! Was she a “watcher,” as her name implied? Perhaps she was; perhaps—all in an instant the thought struck me: what if she were Lady Skene’s spy—the agent of a guilty conscience, deputed to discover the reasons for my withdrawal from its control?
The thought was so sudden, so ineffable, that it made me gasp. She had been down to my lodge during my absence, that I knew. The signs of her woman’s handiwork there were unmistakable. I will even admit that my instant recognition of them had given me an odd little thrill, compound of triumph and something like pity. That she should have continued true to her principles of expiation, though I was not there to witness, had gone some little way towards forcing from me a grudging belief in her sincerity. But now!—if there was all the time a method in her humility!
On the thought, the memory of my altar came into my mind. Had I been already fool enough, in my boasted emancipation, to give my case away to a spy? I hurried, with all speed, back to my den—and there was the girl standing before the picture.
She had on a blue-sprigged apron with a tucker. A broom was in her hand, and her furs and jacket were thrown upon a chair. She turned round instantly upon hearing me, and her face flew pink with some sudden emotion.
“Richard!” she said, pointing to the caricature. “What on earth is the meaning of that?”
“Go on with your work,” I answered savagely. “I shouldn’t have come back if I’d known you were here.”
She bit her underlip, but obeyed at once. I sat down, watching her morosely from under my lids as she swept, and dusted, and laid the cloth for lunch—all silently. Then I called her to me.
“Come here.”
She left the table and stood before me.
“Kneel down.”
She knelt at my feet, looking up, and panting a little. I took her soft chin in my hand; and she did not move; and I kept her so, glaring into her young eyes.
“You are very loyal to Lady Skene, are you not?” I said. “You told me so, you know.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Were you instructed by her to take this means to come and spy on me?”
“No. How could you think it!”
“If you cry, I shall turn you out at once. You aren’t watching me, then, to find out what I’m up to?”
“No, indeed.”
“Why do you come here?”
“I’m so sorry for you.”
“Is that all?”
“And so anxious to earn your pardon.”
“You needn’t worry yourself about that. I don’t take the tricks of such midges as you into my philosophy.”
“But you haven’t forgiven me.”
“I don’t consider you at all. Are you offering to cry again?”
“No, I’m not—I’m not really.”
“Well, what did you make of that picture?”
“Nothing whatever.”
“Its a picture of my christening—the christening of Richard Gaskett. I got my name out of a pint pot. That old woman’s my grandmother. She’s fond of gin and peppermint; that’s why I put the bottles underneath. You know I’ve been away?”
“Yes.”
“Well, my journey was useful to me. I found out things. Would you like to go and tell Lady Skene about the picture, or do I come first in your loyalty?”
“You do.”
Her answer took me like a sting, sweet and piercing. I don’t know what madness, what revolt was in my blood; but I bent down suddenly and kissed her lips. And then, having done it, the instant revulsion came, and I thrust her rudely from me. She sank back, sitting on her heels, and hid her face in her hands.
“There, go!” I cried, jumping to my feet. “I took that, not for myself, but—damn it! don’t you know that Lord Skene disapproves of your coming here? I told him you came by your own will, not mine; and if your will isn’t his, he can just look after his own. But you take the risk of any consequences if you come. I warn you, I’m master here, and I kiss or ill treat whom I choose. Do you understand? You’re a ‘unique young party’ according to him, and you’ve been kissed by the grandson of that old pottle-pot yonder. How do you like the thought? You’ve bound yourself slave to something worse than you expected, haven’t you! But I’ll manumit you. Take your furs and go, before you find out how dangerous I can be! Do you hear? Go, while there’s time!”
I was half beside myself with rage and scorn for my act. I had never in all my life kissed woman before, and this first fierce contact smote me like a blasphemy against my clean youth. Nor had I had in my mind at the moment a thought of all that rage of justification for my deed which had afterwards suggested itself. It had been just the leap of a mad impulse, born of the girl’s soft and emotional submission. And, having torn that unresisting flower, I was ashamed.
I went and leaned against the mantelshelf and turned my eyes from her. She did not rise at once; but presently I heard her go and take her things from the chair. Then, somehow, I hoped that she would dwell just the little minute necessary for putting them on. I suppose the bully’s instinct is always to keep by him the thing he has just injured, perhaps in the sneaking hope that it will justify in some way his brutality to himself. He hates the frightened thing for trying to escape from him, silently and tremblingly after the deed.
But Miss Christmas did not linger that minute. She swept up her jacket and furs, as I knew by the sound, and ran with them out into the cold. A wild impulse to stride and stop her surged up in me. I even followed her footsteps into the passage; but there I checked myself, and flung to the open door with a resounding slam that must have caught her heart for a moment. Then I went back to my room, biting a savage curse between my teeth.
I was furious with myself; furious with the girl; furious with the means I had seized to misrepresent my feelings towards her. Why had she put herself in my way, just to awaken the beast in me? She had no proper pride of womanhood; and, if for that only, was beneath my notice. And yet I had kissed her—why? because I despised her; and all the time the fragrance of that contact hung on my lips like a sweet poison.
I could eat no lunch, I was so angry and disturbed. And all the afternoon I sat idly with a book, affecting to read, but seeing nothing on the page. Dusk came on, and with it sharp squalls of wind and sleet that brought the dead leaves whirling about my windows. My fire had gone out, and I sat and shivered, not finding the energy to relight it. It grew uncanny sitting there in the white gloom, not a living soul within a half mile of me, the deep and sodden woodland all around. The storm, with its loaded flakes, rushed upon the glass in swoops and charges; and, when it fell back, I always seemed to hear a small and urgent whisper rallying it. Sometimes, I felt tinglingly, it would burst in, and then—what would come with it! And at that very instant, glancing up, I saw a face pressed against the glass.
It had risen, swiftly and silently, like death in the night—a horrible sinister face, I thought it, in the first shock of discovery. The eyes were searchingly alive; the upper lip was lifted, showing the teeth; the mist of its breath shrank and dilated on the pane as the wind took it. I held my own, staring in a sort of awful trance. The eyes in the motionless head whipped to and fro, as if hurrying to penetrate and devour the substance of the room’s every shadow. Fortunately the one in which I sat was too dense for their resolving. I congratulated myself on my dead hearth, though, for whatever reason, I was shivering all through. But over and over again the eyes passed me by, and I knew that I was not yet discovered.
And then suddenly they were gone, and I heard stealthy steps coming round by the door; and I rose quietly, with a shamefaced oath for my cowardice, and waited to see what would happen. Reassurance as to the human nature of the apparition had broken all the spell; and now I feared nothing but to be balked of recognition in my turn.
The man tried the door, gently but unavailingly, for I had bolted it, and then in a moment I heard him going away through the woodland. At that I stole upstairs, and, peering warily from my bedroom window, made out his figure pressing up the path towards the “Baby’s Garden.” And even in that first glance I recognised him. It was the man Dalston, who had been of the company on the night of old Carnac’s seizure.
I stuck there a little, smitten with astonishment. What on earth was the fellow doing here, prying, and using the place as if it were his own? Then, too, I had not on that one occasion read into his face any such suggestion of evil—naked and incontinent—as it had seemed to convey to me through the window. On the contrary, it had appeared a fine and handsome face, bold, if bold at all, with the natural self-reliance of a favoured worldling. But, no doubt, my overwrought fancy was to account for the present impression.
It could not account, however, for his presence here—or could it? An idea, half whimsical, half stunning, seized me. I had heard of plausible rogues imposing themselves on quiet neighbourhoods, insinuating themselves into the leading society, and then, their plans having matured, disappearing with the plate and family jewels of Lord this or Sir thingummy that. Was it possible that Mr Dalston was such an impostor? His quiet arrival in the district; his renting of that remote uncanny farm; his strange silent wife—or accomplice; finally the vision of him here, stealing up through the woods—for what? All these things smote me with a double edge of suspicion. Possibly he was even now on his way to examine the house with a view to its burglarious entry. Whatever the extravagant thought was worth, it decided me. In another instant I was down and on his heels. The wind and the flying sleet, no less than my long experience of the way, served me well. He had no suspicion, I felt sure, of the shadow creeping in his wake, slipping from tree to tree, taking advantage of every shriller whine of the squall to decrease the distance between itself and its quarry.
He went up unhesitating towards the “Baby’s Garden,” though often having to battle his way with his head down; and having reached there, came to a halt, leaning against a tree. And in the same moment I had slipped undetected into my eyrie of espial in the withered ash.
He was then so close to me that I could hear him panting from his hard ascent. But even with our arrival the squall had passed, and the little close pleasance was full of nothing but cold dripping sounds. That was my Luck again. It had muffled me in wind and rain while I needed privacy, and withdrawn them only when I needed nothing but clear hearing and clear vision.
Now I had leisure to wonder how, if secret watching were his business, this Mr Dalston made no nearer approach to the house, which, indeed, stood nowhere within the range of this part of the garden. But he showed no intention of moving farther, and, for all the wet crust of snow under his feet, established himself serenely where he stood, flicking his boot with his cane, and breathing softly into the air a little sentimental ditty about moons and lagoons. And then, all of a sudden, the figure of a woman had appeared on the opposite side of the garden, and, after a moment’s hesitation, was coming hurrying towards him.
Now, at that, I was not, at the first, so shocked as amused, because, it seemed, I had been stalking for a burglary what appeared to be just a vulgar tryst. But what was my astonishment upon discovering, on its nearer approach, that the figure was that of Lady Skene.
The man did not move at all until she was close upon him; and then he only detached himself a step or two from his support, and laughed gently as he gave his boot a harder switch.
“Well answered, Georgie!” he said in his soft voice.
She shrank back from him, clutching her fingers into the shawl which she held over her face and bosom. I could see that she was deathly white.
“Not that—no!” she whispered, as if half choking. “What right have you?”
“I should really be the last to insist on it,” he said. “You know my easy good nature, I congratulate you on your position with all my heart; and should never think of crossing your legitimate title to it, unless——”
“Unless what?” she said with difficulty, seeing he prolonged the pause wickedly.
“Unless you oblige me to, that’s all,” he said.
Now though she had been, as I considered, an inhuman mother to me, to see her, so obviously and so amazingly, held at the mercy of this man, filled me with a rage of fury. Not he, nor anyone but myself, I thought, should have the right or the power to exact retribution of her. If I hated her, I already hated him with a tenfold violence. What title had he to come between me and my vengeance?
“Why,” she cried, with one little broken note of protest, which she instantly subdued, as if knowing its uselessness, “have you come into my life again?”
“I am really sorry,” he said. “It became necessary, that’s all. I wouldn’t otherwise for the world have disturbed this dream of evangelical and aristocratic peace in which your soul has so long found its security from troublesome memories. But the plain truth is Ihadto look you up. It’s a vulgar confession; but I want money.”
“I thought—I heard—you married it.”
“My charmer, I did. But love, though a perpetual investment in itself, is far from guaranteeing the immaculateness of its brokers. From one of Mrs Dalston’s we suffered shattering losses. Nothing throughout our married life, in fact, has prospered with us. The heir I longed for has been persistently denied me” (a momentary emotion seemed to shake his voice; but he gripped and stilled it); “our house in London, heavily mortgaged as it is, refuses for some inexplicable reason to let; we have come down, down, down. Why this should be so, in the designs of a just but inscrutable Providence, I cannot pretend to explain. Our deserts have not been less than most men’s; our sins like others may be called the natural fruit of circumstance. At this moment, I am ashamed to say, I have not positively the wherewithal to meet a bill, which, dishonoured within the week, will ruin me. I speak most, of course, of the moral wreck which will result. To you, knowing you as I do, that will serve for my paramount appeal.”
“How much do you want?”
He seemed to ignore her question for the moment intentionally. It was his policy to specify at its fullest value his claim on her. That must amount inevitably, as I foresaw, to his possession of the very secret which I had made, as I thought, my own. He knew somehow that she had been no widow when she had married Lord Skene; and, indeed, his next words proved the justice of my surmise.
“Compare our positions,” said he. “Here am I—as I have described. Here are you—started from exactly similar premises—the mistress of all, or nearly all, that your heart could desire—a fortune, a title, an unsullied reputation; the respect of a noble husband, the love of a beautiful child—born in wedlock, too, that holy institution, and destined in the future to regard his mother as the pure fount of honour.”
She gave a sudden little cry.
“Why won’t you say? What do you want of me?”
But still he would drive the anguish home.
“And to think,” he went on steadily, “that one little word from me could shatter at a blow all this elaborate fabric of respectability! It must necessarily have a value, that word—a high value, if the truth must be spoken.”
“I have nothing of my own. You know it.”
“I know it, my dear girl, as surely as I know that you are wedded to a man who has always been as lavish a spouse as he promises to be an infatuated father. He would not question, I think, for his own and his heir’s sake, the morality of your keeping his eyes sealed.”
“Youwillnot speak it. We are not as rich as you think.”
“Well suggested, Georgie—I really beg your pardon. But we are quite remote here. That’s why I ventured to suggest the place for a rendezvous, after your husband, on the afternoon I called here, had shown me over his estate. A very pretty legend, and a very pretty setting for it—the ‘Baby’s Garden’! and very aptly named for our interview.”
She fell back a little, holding her hand to her forehead terribly; seeming to speak to herself.
“After all, it is only your word against mine.”
“Well, not quite,” he said—“not quite. Aren’t you forgetting Mother Carey?”
She stared at him, gulping once or twice.
“I never lose sight,” he said, “of possible witnesses to my interests. It’s not been to those to lay that dear old ghost of our past, though you would seem to have thought it to yours. A bad policy, child. Do you even know if she is living or dead? You should, if you were wise. But I can see you don’t. An undutiful daughter, to be sure. But she’s living, Georgie—I don’t even mind telling you where. She’s living down in Lambeth—in Old Paradise Street, bless her appropriate quarters—and always ready to testify, atherreasonable price. She’s degenerated into something of a miser, too, I understand, and hoards her ill-gotten gains. How do I know? Why, through some lawyers, my dear, friends of mine, who happen to pay her one of her little quarterly stipends of hush-money. (You, I believe, compromised with her for a lump sum—again a poor policy.) O, you may take my word for it! and do what you like with the information. Lady Skene, I think, will hardly rush to establish her claim to that connection. And, even if she did, I’ve means of controlling Mother Carey. What if I say three hundred pounds?”
“You shall have it.”
“So I supposed. Then we’ll say five hundred.”
“Ruin me, if you will.”
“Hush, my dear! What an inference! To esteem me capable of such a blind villainy! You’re still a very beautiful woman, Georgie.”
“Will you leave me now?”
“It would be safer, perhaps. God bless you, Georgie!”
He was going, when she ran to him and touched him for the first time. I could see her little shoes, frail and delicate, sopped by the frozen slush.
“Your wife!” she said hoarsely. “Is she your accomplice?”
He started and turned round; and, on the instant, his face was like a devil’s.
“Leave her out of this,” he said low and fierce, “if you value your soul. She’s innocent—as innocent as heaven, I tell you. If——”
He broke off—seemed to make a menacing gesture, and again was going. And again she stopped him.
“Not that way!”
He was himself directly.
“Why not? It’s private. It’s the way I came.”
“The way!” she said, choking. “Do you know who lives down there?”
He laughed.
“I make it my business to know everything. Perhapsyoudon’t know that he’s away for the moment—gone to take a trip on his own account. Boys will grow up. Rest satisfied, I made sure of his not being there as I came by the lodge.”
Then she stepped back, and I heard him going lightly down the path into the Caddle. And presently she turned, and, pulling her shawl about her face, moved towards the house, but suddenly stumbled and stood swaying.
My heart beat as if it would break. “Mother, mother!” I whispered in an agony, “why don’t you ask for me—trust me—love me!”
But in a moment she recovered herself, cold, self-willed spirit as she was, and went off quietly through the trees.
I wasso stunned, so amazed by this sudden and utterly unexpected turn of events, that, for a time, only a monstrous sense of indignation could make room for its consideration in my brain. That another should be found to have a title equal with mine, and a knowledge obviously greater, to claim those preserves of retribution which I had considered my exclusive property, was sufficiently disturbing; that I should be brought to realise how, to all the intents and purposes of this inquisition, I was suddenly confessed the confederate, the mean subordinate even, of a common blackmailer, was infinitely, sickeningly worse. For the first time I was awake to a healthy scorn of myself for ever having condescended to a habit of espionage. That it should have reduced me to something the level of this fellow!—no outright, hard-fisted burglar, as, to his better credit, I had assumed him to be, but just an obscene Jerry Sneak! It had been awful to me to see that cold exclusive beauty writhing in the grip of such a scoundrel. I felt fouled, humiliated, ashamed. There and then I swore an oath that I would let Lady Skene understand, on the first reasonable opportunity, the nature of my claim on her—not to bleed her pocket but her heart.
And, in the meanwhile, how to engineer my discovery? Should I use it to my more crushing indictment of a guilty woman—a bludgeon in my already loaded hand? A gentle son! a human merciful spirit! To admit myself one in purpose with this vulgar conspirator? Never, never! To convince her, rather, of her insensibility to the means for reprisal, for defence, at least, which lay ready to her hand. What was her sin to me, if only she would once expiate it in a word, a look of remorse?
I asked for no more. Yet, lacking it, she must lack a faithful Paladin. I had thought I hated her; and it had needed only this menace from another quarter to reawaken all my maddest cravings. She was my mother, and in direful peril. The pity and the sorrow of it quite blinded me for the moment to all subordinate issues.
Yet Luck again had served me well for these. I remembered, when the passing of my moody grief left room for other thoughts, how it had put into my hands the one and very clue I needed. I knew at length where to find the old creature—godmother, grandmother, what you will—who alone, it seemed to me, could be induced, or bought, to make the revelation which I desired. Well, even so, that secret were safer in my keeping than solely in a villain’s. Though shared by another, or others, its possession by me could hardly weaken my position as a threatened mother’s champion. For all my wild pity, I was inexorably resolved to take an early opportunity of putting that discovery to the test.
And so I fell upon harder reflections. Who was this plausible dog, with his soft voice, his sentimental gaze, his compelling personality? Who was this astute villain—yet none so clever, nevertheless, but that Luck, my Luck, had been able easily to hoodwink him? His hold on Lady Skene must be a substantial one—one so potential of profit, it would appear, that, after all this lapse of years, it was still worth his while to take a house—a gambling office, one might call it—in the neighbourhood, for the sole purpose of exploiting her. How and where had he acquired an incriminating knowledge of her so damning? Alas! had I not learned enough already of her “maiden meditations” to be sceptical of their singleness? She had been an actress—on the stage, at least—and presumably a true child of her traditions. I could not forget Sir Maurice Carnac’s roguish innuendoes—his allusions to my stepfather’s feet “netted” to matrimony in their intended frolic over a wilder course; his sly maudlin reference to me as a pledge of “widowed respectability.” Likely enough he too had known, or guessed, the truth. Likely enough Lord Skene himself had not been so blind to it as the pious throwers of dust in his eyes had once assumed. Nor did I feel convinced that the question of it would much have affected his lordship in those days of his relapse from virtue, so long as its pretensions appeared to justify, in the worldly view, his marriage with the beautiful creature who had ravished his heart. Grant all that, and it made no difference in the present situation—offered Lady Skene no less a bait to vile persecution. If her husband had not been blind, she had been blind to his shrewd seeing. If he knew, she did not know he knew, and her ignorance of that inference of his, did it actually exist, constituted her real accessibility by scoundrelism. She never thought, one must conclude, but that she possessed a secret which, if revealed, would spell her social and domestic ruin; and, so long as she could be kept in that belief, the bloodsuckers might have their way with her. Had she not the traditions of eighteen or so years of a spotless and dignified wifehood to vindicate? It was for the very reason that she had justified her exaltation so nobly, that she figured such a helpless victim to the beasts of prey. She was a woman of position—a fact of which her religious world took strict account; and she had come to pledge herself to that world, and to be quoted for its local light. It was there, I knew, and she knew probably, that her downfall would be criticised most ruinously. Her husband, it was conceivable, she might win over to her sin’s condonement; that narrow world never. There, in any question of her victimising by a blackguard, was confessed her main vulnerable point—or it had been. For, indeed, at the last there had come to expose itself one more infinitely sensitive. She had borne a son, heir to his mother’s fame or infamy.
I declare that my heart bled for her, as I reviewed her present position, or such as I presumed it to be. What was it to me that she had been a sinner—even a reckless sinner? Circumstance makes evil, as it makes virtue. Let the righteous plume themselves on circumstance. If I were a child of sin, I would be loyal to the maternity which suffered for me. Only I wanted time to think and plan.
I dreaded more than I can describe the ordeal of the dinner hour that night. Yet I was resolved to put in an appearance at the table. As likely as not Miss Christmas had spoken of my return; and what reflections would that induce in Lady Skene! and, if I kept away, how would she regard my absence—with what suspicion, what fearful apprehensions for her secret’s safety! For had she not believed me far removed from the scene of her recent humiliation? I must face the music, at once and boldly.
I faced it; and with what immediate result? As I entered the dining-room, she was standing by her chair before taking her seat, and, as I passed her by, going to my own, withdrew her skirts from my contact. It was the instinctive act of a moment, and regretted, I think, as soon as done; but it hurt me so cruelly, that my devil, for an instant, returned uppermost. “Very well,” I thought, “if youwillhave me your Nemesis!”
Lord Skene greeted me kindly but abstractedly. He made no comment on my late absence, except to ask me where I had been gone these three or four days.
“To Clapham, sir,” I said, perfectly self-possessed. “It occurred to me to explore the field of Mr Pugsley’s early ministrations. I am thinking of writing his life.”
He grinned first; then looked a little startled, glancing across uneasily at his wife. She had suddenly put down her spoon, I observed, leaving her soup unfinished.
“What!” said his lordship. “Are you thinking of turning author?”
“No, sir,” I answered. “Only of studying truth and godliness at first hand.”
“Well,” he said, “you might occupy yourself worse.”
He was fairly puzzled, I could see, and, to protect himself, turned the talk in other directions, leaving me to my own cogitations. Miss Christmas, sitting opposite me, seized the opportunity to engage him to herself—no great task, for the old man was genuinely attached to her.
“What do you think of my frock, dear?” she said. “I want your opinion, because you are a judge, you know.”
But he accepted her banter seriously. He was in an oddly sober mood.
“I think,” he said, “that, like charity, it covers a multitude of sins.”
“O!” she cried, “how terribly severe! I am only a whited sepulchre after all. In the midst of life we are in death.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” I said. “It sounds like one of Mr Pugsley’s original reflections. But of course we are. Don’t you feel it, my lady?”
I don’t know what demon was urging me. Lord Skene suddenly exclaimed: “Georgina! is anything the matter?”
She was leaning back in her chair, looking white and faint; but she rallied immediately.
“Nothing whatever,” she said. “What makes you think so? Go on with your dinner—please do.”
He obeyed uneasily. I saw Miss Christmas steal her hand under the cloth, and “poor” her hostess’s with a little lovely look of sympathy. It meant nothing, of course, but sex. What could she know of the other’s real indisposition? But a sudden unaccountable pang of jealousy shot through me witnessing the act.
I had put the girl utterly out of my mind. She had become nothing, and less than nothing, in the tragic sequence of events. Now, all in a moment, I was moved to reconsider her—wonderingly, even. I thought her face was pale—white, with a sort of pathetic sickness which follows after much crying; and I was sorry for her, sorry, with a sudden strange turmoil of the heart, which spoke most, I think, of sorrow for myself. What was she to me? Nothing. I had taken brutal pains, indeed, to convince her of the fact; and she must surely feel convinced at last, and hold herself acquitted of any further obligations to me. Yet, is it not human nature to view with jealousy another’s fond appreciation of the thing we have held too cheap for our own use? The value of it, it may be, has never struck us until we have lost it. I don’t mean to say that I had arrived, already and at once, at that extravagant pitch of regret; but I was certainly awake, and suddenly, to points of attraction about the girl which had never appealed to me before. Her hair grew very prettily on her forehead, dividing from it in wings of the softest fawn. There was an unspoiled frankness in her face, for all its temptation to chartered coquetry, and her eyes had grown honest. She had developed into a little being quite remote from my early conception of her. Her complexion was of an unsoiled purity, just the natural maturing of pink-skinned babydom, when its cheeks have ripened to a contour and moulded themselves to a meaning. Her lips were always as red as if a Cupid had just left kissing them, and there was an attractive robin note in her voice, whether it spoke or laughed.
Now, noting all this, a quick sharp feeling as of loss, as of an utter loneliness never until this moment fully realised, smote into me. What possible sympathy, in all this turmoil of my hates and loves and grievances, had I willingly foregone! But it was of no use: Ihadrejected it, and I must take the consequences. She was even at this moment ostentatiously ignoring me, and I saw that my hold on her was gone.
What did I care? Why should I? Yet, I confess, to see these gentle feminine spirits leagued together in revolt against my brutality wounded me smartly. I had thought myself their master, and I was master of nothing but their fear. Bill Sikes could better me there. Something gained from that consciousness—call it what you will—was promising to educate me finely.
Not once during the dinner did either of the ladies speak to me. I chose bitterly to put their neglect down to the presumption of a “by-blow” in assuming a claim on their notice. I was glad, though with an impotent rage of jealousy, when they rose and left me alone with my stepfather.
There was a gravity that night about Lord Skene which was new in him. The sudden death of his old comrade, taken with the glass of joy at his lips, as it were, would seem to have had a curiously sobering effect on him. No doubt the mood was fleeting; but it had all the force of a reformation while it lasted. He questioned me more seriously than he had ever done yet as to my prospects and intentions; dwelling, even, upon the necessity of prayer as a medium for exhorting from the Deity the truth as to one’s vocation. Once or twice, as I noticed, he put out his hand to the decanter, and withdrew it empty. And presently he fell into a fit of musing, in which I did not venture to disturb him. Then suddenly he looked up.