“I haven’t seen you since that night, Gaskett,” he said. “What a shocking experience! And to risk damnation with a joke on his lips! But that was Maurice all over. Do you remember how he greeted you, my boy? It ought to have warned us, perhaps, and——”
I was smiling at him, as I leaned, playing with a knife, on the table. He broke off quickly, rose, not altogether steadily, to his feet, and stood staring at me.
“By the Lord, Gaskett!” he said, “what was in your mother’s mind when she pupped you?”
I was so taken aback that I could not utter a word in reply. And the next instant he had recovered himself, and was forcing an embarrassed laugh.
“I think since that night my brain’s full of ghosts,” he said. “Come along now to the drawing-room.”
Asif Fate were moved to introduce some “comic relief” into a drama grown almost intolerably serious, there re-entered astonishingly upon the stage of my affairs at this pass my old chum and schoolfellow, Johnny Dando.
I call him Johnny, and Johnny he was, and so would remain to the end of things. There are Jocks and Jacks and Jackos innumerable in the world. The Johnnies (not the inane breed) form a race apart, and are not to be confounded with any other. They are artless, beaming little men, who never, from cradle to grave, qualify in world-wisdom; but who, at sixty as at six, use the terms of childhood in their dealings with mankind. They are everywhere and at all times simple, modest, and impregnably loyal in their attachments.
MyJohnny, as I recovered him, wore mittens on his dumpy hands, and on his head an odd fur bonnet with flaps to cover his rosy ears. He was wadded all over, and suggested to one a little fat Esquimau. As he swam, like a full moon, into my ken, he might have taken but one step across the years from “Baxter’s” to Evercreech. He had no more hair on his face than when I had last parted from him; no less an appearance in it of a perpetual suppressed laughter. What amused, or appeared to amuse him so inextinguishably, no one had ever been able to discover. He had a manner as of some secret understanding with himself which was based on the eternal hilarity of things. When he shook hands with you, you had a feeling that it was only by gripping hard hold of that support that he could stop himself from exploding in your face. And there he would stand, seemingly fighting down his risibility, until he could emit a “How-de-do?” or “How are you?” with the air of asking a social conundrum while he chuckled inwardly over your inability to answer it. He appeared, somehow, to be always swelling with communicativeness, on which, strain as he would, he could not get a start. It was this consciousness of his conversational disability, perhaps, which made him wont to passing utterances of a fearful and cryptic nature—utterances which had no known bearing on anything that had happened, or was happening, or was ever likely to happen. Thus, it might be, as he passed one fielding at cricket, he would swoop into one’s ear with, “How much for a chirp, Plummer? Hoots!” and pass on his darkling way, leaving one prostrate. Or his head, perhaps, would come round a door, utter the inquiry “Which way to the steamers?” and vanish. Although I was, without doubt, his closest friend, I had never succeeded in fathoming the exact source of any of these recondite inspirations. To question him as to them, was to subdue his expression into one of patient tolerance over your inaccessibility to esoteric suggestion.
It was a chill morning, a day or two after my last recorded experiences, when he was returned upon my hands, like the most surprising of boomerangs or india-rubber balls. I was sitting cowering and glowering over my fire, when I heard his voice at the door, and I started amazed, and “Johnny!” I cried: “that must be Johnny Dando!” And Johnny it was.
He came in smiling, and seized my hand without a word. His eyes dilated; his cheeks, like shining polished apples, seemed to stretch to cracking.
“Johnny,” I cried; “take care!”
His face split at the mouth, easing the pressure.
“Hullo!” he said. “How much for ‘Grafto’?”
We pumped out our salutations, hand in hand, grinning and speechless like a couple of veritable Britons.
“Where have you come from?” I cried at length. “How did you find me out?”
“A young lady brought me down from the house,” he said, and could say no more. “Hullo, Dick!” he added presently, and immediately turned, tiptoed to the door, looked out, and came back.
“She’s gone away,” he said—“sucha beauty, Dick! She told me you’d taken to living in a hermitage, and offered to show me the way.”
“O!” I said. “It was Miss Christmas, I suppose. She’s a ward of Lord Skene’s. But don’t bother about her. Come and tell me about yourself.”
I got him to the fire, filled him a pipe, and put a light to it for him. As he pulled, letting it out every two minutes, he kept chuckling, like one immensely tickled over something.
“O, I’m nothing!” he said, bursting suddenly into a laugh, and snuggling his head into his shoulders and his hands between his knees. “I’m only ‘Grafto,’ you know—how much for the hair of the dog that bit you, eh, Dick? It’s just delightful to see you again; and you’re not a bit altered either, only for that scrub of yellow on your lip! Rub-a-dub-dub, eh?” The joy in his face moderated an instant. “Ican’t grow one,” he said. “It all comes out in perspiration.”
“Never mind, Johnny,” I said. “You’ve got other compensations, haven’t you?”
“Well,” he answered, “I’ve got money enough to ‘corner’ all the moustaches in London, if that’s what you mean. But what’s the good, when I can’t grow one of my own?”
He squeaked over the admission; then relit his pipe joyously.
“And what haveyoubeen doing with yourself all this time?” he said.
“We’ll come to that,” I answered. “I want to hear about you first.”
“About me!” he said, surprised. “O! there’s nothing to tell. Daddy made it all right for me, you know. He was ‘Grafto’—you remember that?Whata man he was, to be sure—olddaddy! His ‘Grafto’ would put a hair-spring into a watch, they used to say. He was a Government analyst when he invented it; and afterwards he became a person. I never knew, Dick, until he died, that he’d worn a wig himself for years.” He looked at me tragically. “Wasn’t that awful? And I inherited ‘Grafto’!”
“How did you like Oxford?” I said.
“O, bully!” he answered. “But I wasn’t there long. There was the estate to take up, you see; and mamma wanted me. She’s the only woman who ever did.”
“O! I can’t believe that.”
“Can’t you? I don’t know what keeps me laughing so. O, the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells! Hullo, Dick! I say, ain’t you fond of poetry?”
“Just.”
“So am I; especially Christmas carols, they’re so comforting. Look here, why did you never answer any of my letters?”
“What letters? I’ve never had a line from you that I know!”
“Not? Good Lord! I remember now we had a beastly Swiss courier, a rascal who tapped our correspondence, and put us to no end of shifts. It must have been he.”
“Very likely. So you called for me at the house?”
“Yes. And the young lady—Miss Christmas did you say it was?—told me that you had taken to living down here like an anchorite, and offered to show me the way. What’s happened to you, Dick? You used to be such a free and open chap.”
I looked into his honest glowing face. The craving for comradeship, the craving to pour out my heart of sorrow and difficulty to a friend, tried, sympathetic and attached as I knew this one to be, rose suddenly in me with an irresistible force. I had dwelt so long, corroding, perishing, in my own fateful atmosphere. In confessing to this dear fellow, I knew that I should only be halving my own burden of secrecy, not imperilling it. I hardly gave a thought to its unfair imposition on shoulders so generous and so undeserving. He would not have wished that I should. In a quick impulse of passion, I told him everything—the whole story of my life with its shames and discoveries and humiliations—all the barrenness and impotence of the thing—since I had last parted with him. And when he had listened to me, silently, wonderingly, lovingly, at the end he only thanked me for my beautiful confidence in himself.
He was all immediately that I could have wished and expected him to be—all, and more—unfortunately a good deal more. His head was not built for plots and counter-plots. A sense of his magnified importance in the world, being chosen the trusted accessory of such a man and in such a secret, puffed him out magnificently. He was eager to be at once not only my confidant but my coadjutor—to work for me, spy for me, be my humble auxiliary and comrade in this work of righting a wrong and forcing retribution on the guilty.
“I’ll watch this Pugsley,” he said, to my astonishment. “I’ll bring him to his knees, and make him confess what he’s up to. If I ain’t got much cleverness myself, I’ve the means to buy up a whole Scotland Yard of it.”
“No, no,” I cried hurriedly. “That would never do, Johnny. I’m playing this off my own bat, you understand. The dodging of open scandal is to be our first consideration.”
I seemed to realise in a moment, the danger of the confidence to which I had committed myself. The thought of Johnny as amateur detective was impossible. It would be necessary, I foresaw, to divert his enthusiasm into some harmless channel.
He was greatly gratified, I could see, by my pluralsing of the personal adjective.
“Of course,” he said. “We’ll keep it all between ourselves, Dick.”
“Yes, indeed,” I said; “we must”—and, on the word, pricked up my ears, hearing a footstep.
But it was only a man come down with a message from Lord Skene, requesting the favour of Mr Dando’s company to lunch.
Johnny, in his severe position of ally, looked across at me doubtingly.
“Of course,” I said. “Thank his lordship from Mr Dando, Williams, and say he will have much pleasure.”
“For it ought to be as great a pleasure as it’s an honour to you, you know, Johnny,” I said reproachfully, when the man was gone; “seeing how it’s meant to imply the just claim of any friend of mine on his lordship’s hospitality.”
Johnny blushed.
“I didn’t mean that, Dick,” he said—“not to question his lordship’s condescension. Only——”
“You see, Johnny,” I pursued, twinkling, “you mustn’t begin by tarring them all with the same brush. I owe Lord Skene very much, if I owe his lady very little. He’s been a good second father to me, if she’s been an indifferent first mother. All I want to find out is why she has been. I want to know why, Johnny; and I want to know who my first father was, and how this man Dalston knows what I don’t know, and why he is able to make such crushing use of his knowledge. That’s all it comes to at present; and you mustn’t be looking for reasons in their company, but behave just like an ordinary polite little Johnny as you are. There’ll be time enough to discuss our campaign by-and-by.”
He was obviously relieved, and not in the least offended.
“I can assure you, my dear fellow,” he said, “that I shall be only too glad to put it all out of my mind for the moment. It would be jolly unpleasant sitting there and acting the spy—and with Miss Christmas in the room, too. By-the-by,willshe be there, Dick?”
“O yes! I expect so,” I said, with a snigger. “But I don’t often turn up to lunch, myself; and am rather out in the young lady’s customs.”
“You don’t seem to like her much?” he said.
“No,” I answered. “I don’t know that I do——” At which he gave an unaccountable sigh, as of a burden discharged.
Lord Skene accepted my friend genially, as I had expected; but not as I had expected was Lady Skene’s reception of him. If not actually warm, it was gracious and attentive. She made him sit at her right hand, and she placed me opposite on her left. There was no drawing away of her skirts this time. She even asked me if I wouldmindsitting there, calling me, nervously, and with a heightened spot of colour come to her cheeks, by my name. It was not so frequent on her lips but that the novelty could give me an actual little physical shock. There was a shadow of pathetic propitiation in her manner towards me, I could have thought. No doubt, what between Pugsley’s awed confidences and my own newly encountered and most significant spirit of mutiny, she was beginning to realise the Nemesis her neglect had cast away to flourish of itself. I was like the little weed thrown carelessly into a river; and, lo! when the thrower returned to pursue her course upon the water, there was only a vast hideous tangle of growth where had been an easy stream.
I looked at her boldly, and her eyes fell before me, Good God! how beautiful she was! She might have been no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight—girlhood at its full flood. It hurt me, in the very face of that remorseless thing I had set myself to do, to see her so afraid of me. What she must be suffering under that cold and lovely mask! What horror of the black abyss torn suddenly across her path! And for him she had borne to be adding his wild voice to the jangle of the chase—helping to drive her over the brink into that night!
Though she had deserved it; though she had lied to procure her promotion to a noble position; though she had sinned her sin, and condemned the innocent pledge of it to bear the penance, I could not think of her so haunted and so helpless, and endure the thought. The vision of that tiny life upstairs quite upset me. If I wanted justification for my relenting, where could I find a sweeter one or a more opportune? For God and my brother be my banderole’s motto. One only proof more—or at least the bid for one—and I would speak, and end this terror of her shadows—that I swore.
She asked Johnny some questions about his school days, deprecating her own ignorance of his great friendship for “Richard”; but attributing it to “Richard’s” silence on the subject. She took the dear boy quite captive. He answered: “Of course, what could I have had interesting to say about him?”; and he set to expatiating on my virtues instead. I didn’t even attempt to stop him. It was such an amusing novelty to me to hear my existence so much as admitted, much less absurdly flattered. I laughed out aloud once or twice; but he would not be stopped until he had given me his whole salute of twenty-one guns.
He was all during lunch completely under the spell of loveliness. His hostess awed and subdued him, like the rich glooms of a cathedral; but to Miss Christmas he turned as if to the sunshine without its doors.
The girl was in a mischievous mood—I could see that, though she studiously ignored me throughout the meal. She would angle with great eyes for my friend, and, when he caught the bait, would look down with a start as if confused.
“What did they call you at school, Mr Dando?” she asked once. “All schoolboys have nicknames, haven’t they?”
“Don’t tell her, Johnny!” I cried.
He blushed furiously.
“Yes, I will” he said. “They called me Dandruff, Miss Christmas.”
“Hey! Dandruff? What the deuce did that mean?” demanded his lordship.
“My father invented ‘Grafto,’ sir,” said Johnny; “the—the hair-wash, you know. And he—his name was Dando, you see.”
Lord Skene stared bewildered, but Miss Christmas clasped her hands tragically.
“‘Grafto’!” she exclaimed. “Are you really the son of ‘Grafto’—the ‘Grafto’ that has crowned more heads than Warwick the Kingmaker?”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “That was one of the advertisements. There are lots of others as good or better.”
“Ask her whatsheowes to advertisements, Johnny?” I said rudely; but her mockery of him annoyed me.
He looked all agape.
“Everything, Mr Dando,” said the girl sweetly. “My grandfather made allhismoney out of a pill. What benefactors to the human race we both come of.”
His lordship picked up a late clue.
“Pills, pills!” said he; “and a hair-wash! Tell me the man in the world who wouldn’t rather have a crop of hair on his head than a crop of wisdominit, and hold a pill that settled his liver a better thing than salvation.”
He stopped, and looked across at his wife, with a sudden comical tongue in his cheek. That was a bit of the old Adam slipped out. But Lady Skene did not appear to have heard him.
“I hold old Jack Christmas amongst the archangels,” said his lordship.
“You hear, Miss Christmas?” I said. “There’s a pedigree for you!”
She did not take the least notice of me.
As I walked down with Johnny to the lodge by-and-by, the little man seemed depressed—or, at least, alternately depressed and elated, with the balance running to the down mood. I could see how it went with him. He was in love. It wasveni, vidi, victus sum, with a vengeance. It had become hard for him, and all in an unexpected moment, to reconcile his attraction to the Evercreech ménage with his loyal duty to me. He could not guess, of course, how I rather welcomed the difficulty. It tied him in a manner by the leg, and narrowed the issues of his friendly ardour.
I knocked him up a bed somehow later on, for I had insisted on his being my guest for the night—and we sat and talked into the small hours. I had to go a journey on the morrow—that was inevitable; but I refrained from even hinting its direction to him. Let sleeping Johnnies lie, I thought. It was arranged that we should walk into Footover together, and there part for the time being, I to go to London, he to remain in the neighbourhood, and “keep an eye on my interests.” I trusted to that compromise for safety. “My interests,” I had a shrewd idea, would be found to gravitate largely about the person of Miss Christmas; and why should I grudge him that fiction? The two would make a very good match.
He had sat silent for a long time, when he suddenly looked up with a sigh.
“O! it’s hard, Dick, it’s hard,” he said, “to be born to ‘Grafto’ and an unromantic figger!”
For the first time in my knowledge of him, I noticed that the perennial smile had withered from his face.
Itwas with a feeling of intense suppressed excitement that I came down into the courts surrounding the inner tabernacle of that mystery which my heart was set and my nerves were strung upon resolving. I had had no difficulty in finding the place. Luck, the old spoiler, was in the way to smooth every present obstacle from my path. The ridiculous ease with which I had hit my goal, left me no lack of self-confidence in the question of successfully exploiting it. But there, it will be seen, I reckoned without my host; and in the meanwhile there were some surprises in store for me.
It was a most bitter morning. A north-east wind slashed at Old Paradise Street like the sword of the archangel. The flood moving beyond its outlet—the river of the land of gold—was as unlike Pison as one might conceive. Thick and resistless, it went by with a gloating sound, a sewer rather than a stream. The old palace on its embankment looked numb with cold. There was more life in the fried-fish shop round the corner than in all its historic stones.
I had inquired at this shop for Mother Carey’s number in the street. A slipshod girl, who was sweeping up the floor, gave it me, but with a reservation.
“Do you mean the old miser lady, ai?”
She was a dirty girl, but insolent with life—a reassurance in that deadly climate of Paradise.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Very likely. I only know that her name’s Carey, and that she lives in this street.”
She came to the door, broom in hand, and pointed me out the house. It was not far beyond—a dirty-faced little tenement, between a frowzy barber’s and a frowzy cobbler’s, but having a door and parlour windows of its own instead of a shop front.
“There’ll be what you want,” said the girl—“number six: but you won’t get in.”
“Why not?”
“Nobody does. She lives private and takes her beer on the chain.”
Her beer! Lady Skene’s mother! the parent of that cold and stately apparition—the stem from which that lovely rose had flowered!
Here was a startling beginning! But there was worse to come.
“Well,” I said stoutly, “there’ll be nothing lost by my trying, anyhow.”
The venture ran abroad somehow, for all the uninviting weather, and by the time I reached number six there were heads poking out of windows to canvas my repulse. I knocked at the door, and waited. After a quite reasonable interval a shuffling footstep sounded within, bolts were withdrawn, and the door opened a few inches, and grated on an iron tether.
“Who’s there?” said a querulous thin voice.
“I want to see Mother Carey,” I answered.
“She’s not in; she sees no one; she isn’t fit to be seen; go away!” said the voice, and the door came to sharply; but I had my foot ready.
“She’ll see Richard Gaskett, I’m sure,” I whispered through the crevice.
“Richard!”
An old, old snuffy beak, shining eyes, and a withered mouth agape showed in the crack; and there they dwelt for a full minute.
“What do you want of me?” she muttered at last.
“I want to ask you some things,” I said. “It might pay you to answer them.”
She lingered still a little; then I heard the chain grate stealthily in its socket, a lean talon shot out, and the next moment I was clawed into the passage, and the door slammed to behind me. A faint shout of laughter pursued me into the fastness.
It was close twilight within, filthy, noxious, indescribable. The narrow hall was bare of everything but stench and decay; the room into which the old horror motioned me was similarly furnished, but with first causes more in evidence. When, very cautiously, she had unbarred the window-shutters and let in a grudging thread of light, I was made conscious of the fact. There were a table here and a tattered chair or two, the stuffing of the latter rank from the contact of unclean generations. There were also piles of refuse, in the corners, under the rusty grate, dropping from a disembowelled cupboard, burst with its own noisome surfeit. The walls, hung with old daguerreotypes, old tinted lithographs, old records of a faded past—all in mouldering frames, and all, it appeared, illustrative of the one-time graces of a single simpering personality—were the cleanest places to be seen. Bugs were theéliteof Number six Old Paradise Street.
I felt utterly stupefied—bowled over by the shock of my surroundings. For the moment I could only gasp and suffer, until a violent fit of sneezing came to my relief. The old woman, standing before me, softly pawed at my waistcoat during the paroxysm, peering up into my face. Water and she were long strangers; a mildewed cap she wore, tied under her chin, seemed to have grown on her like a fungus on a tree stump; her dress was of the complexion and savour of tobacco rag. She was amignonnesmall-boned creature, and might even once—the Lord forgive me—have been pretty. Even now, old thread of fustiness as she was, there was an indescribable trick of jauntiness in her conduct of her creaking old body; and the frisky shuffle of her feet, in their mouldering slippers, seemed sometimes suggestive of a sort of St Vitus’s ballet dance.
She was taken with a rending fit of coughing while she held me. It seemed to rattle in her like the plaster inside crumbling walls where the rats are busy.
“So you’re Richard Gaskett, O the devil,” she said, when she could gasp out a word at length. “And you’ve come to look up your old grandma, eh?”
I had not regarded it in that light, and I was fain to tell her so. I had come to visit Mother Carey. She started on the word, and a sudden terror flew to her eyes.
“Who’s your mammy?” she cried shrilly, stepping back. “Tell me—quick, now.”
“Lady Skene is my mother,” I said.
“Ah!”
Her self-confidence returned. It had struck her, “all of a heap,” how she might have been beguiled into admitting some villain with a design on her hoardings. She approached me again, curiously.
“Eh!” she wondered. “So this is my Georgie’s child, is it, the deuce? And how does your mammy treat you, my pretty?”
“Lady Skene has got another son now,” I said. “Didn’t you know it?”
“I hear nothing, and I know nothing in these days, dovey the devil,” she answered. “So long as I’m given my little provision as her mother, Georgie’s welcome to make out her own life as she pleases for me. We usen’t to get on very well together, not always, her and me. She’d come to me in her troubles, she would, like her father’s own gal; but most times we lived apart.”
“She came to you when she was in trouble about me, I suppose?” I said.
She conned me a little, unanswering. The wintry pupils of her eyes seemed to sharpen like a cat’s.
“Not she—a married woman,” she protested cunningly.
“She was not married before she married Lord Skene,” I said. “I was born to her out of wedlock, and he was not allowed to know it.”
Again she was silent, panting a little; and suddenly she was seized with a second paroxysm of coughing.
“O dear! O dear!” she gasped, when she could speak. “O, the deuce and all! O, my lungs are like emery paper, and the joints of my bones gone scroopy. O, get me a chair, ducky, get me a chair! I’m all wore out with pain, I am, and I sha’n’t trouble anyone much longer. There, I shall be better in a minute—I can feel it passing. O the deuce and the devil!”
I helped her to seat herself, and stood over her while she recovered. When she did at length, she went on ejaculating, “O, the deuce and the devil!” in spasmodic whispers, until her speech found breath for further irrelevancies:
“Welcome to live as she likes for me O, the deuce and all!—in her fine castle, my pretty—so long as I’m left undisturbed in my little ’ouse—in my little O the devil ducky!”
I waited for the stream to run out, and then spoke again.
“Lord Skene was not allowed to know it, I say.”
She answered me, without looking up.
“I was no party to that, my dovey the deuce. I swear I wasn’t O, the devil! It was all Pugsley’s doing, the deuce and the devil take him!”
“Was it he, too,” I said, “who christened me out of a pint pot? You see I’ve found out something, old mother.”
She rocked to and fro—in a sort of obscene secret laughter, I could have fancied. It was as much as I could do to keep my wits steadily to the point at issue. In all the sure success of my pursuit, I had never foreseen any end to it like this, or even approaching it.
“Just like him,” she muttered. “He always called me that, a deuced providence.”
“Who called you?” I demanded sternly. “Who are you talking about?”
She wiped, or rather smeared her eyes with her sleeve. The old life in her, I believed, was foundering between craft and senility; but the ancient habit still predominated. Once more she spoke, and again away from the point.
“A proud creatur’ was my gal—Georgie was always proud above her station. She held herself aloof from the common sort, she did. Not that such beauties oughtn’t to command the best. But she made her mistake—there, I’ll own to it. It was all from her turning religious and trying to reform people, the deuce take her. And she’d have been left to suffer the consequences to this day if it hadn’t a’ been for me—a good mother though I say it, the devil and the deuce.”
“Old mother,” I said quietly, seeing that for some reason she hailed the term, “who was it helped her to that mistake? Tell me his name, and I’ll give you money.”
She paused suddenly in her sibilations. Her old face leered up at me with infinite acrimony.
“How much?” she snapped. “But, there—I dursen’t—it’s no bid.”
Something, some chord of ancient memory in me, tightened and quivered.
“My God!” I cried. “I remember now. It was you that had the care of me when I was a baby!”
“Ah!” she piped. “It was me, was it, Richard? And to think you should have growed to this, and all the understanding in you!”
“Wasn’t it you, I say?”
“You may say it with truth, dovey,” she answered. “She wanted me to adopt you altogether, did my daughter; but I just struck when I found I wasn’t to be included in her ladyship’s promotion. But I made her pay for it, I did—more than if I’d kept you; and then she and Pugsley had to put their deuced heads together, and account for you to his lordship in their own way.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”
“You know it?” She lowered her frowzy noddle, mumbling to herself; then looked up fulsomely.
“Tell old Mother Carey, my pretty,” she coaxed, “just exactly how much youdoknow.”
“That you were on the stage——” I began.
“Ah!” she leered across at the photographs on the wall; her horrible old feet drummed on the floor. “The stage, to be sure! My daughter could never come anigh me as a dancer—no, nor in looks, for that matter. There’s nothing criminal in being on the stage, ducky dear; and Georgie herself was born in wedlock.”
“That Lady Skene was taken from the boards by her husband,” I went on; but she interrupted me:
“There you’re wrong. It was Pugsley rescued her, as he called it, when she’d returned to them after your little affair, and who trimmed her up and made her meat for his lordship.”
“That you bought me my name of a publican—his name—for a pint of beer,” I continued.
She admitted that frankly, with a giggle.
“You had to have one, you know, deary. And to give you your mother’s might have let out things. And hasn’t this fine lordship, now, ever shown any curiosity about who was your father?”
“No,” I said. “The curiosity is all mine. Who was he?”
“Idon’t know,” she proclaimed blankly, and at once.
“You do,” I said sternly.
“No, I don’t,” she answered, suddenly truculent. “Why should I, now? The gal came to her mother in her trouble—that was all it mattered to me. She wouldn’t confess to the author of her shame, not she. She was always one of the silent sort. Ask the old deuce of a doctor, now—old Patterson, drat him—if he could ever get a word out of her.”
“I believe you are lying. I’ll pay you, I say.”
She skipped to her feet, with a little blasphemous screech.
“The deuce and the devil! O you” (sanguine) “spark! I don’t want your money. I believe you’re after mine. O I’ll rouse the neighbourhood if you don’t get out of this! A pretty gentleman, on my sinful word, to think to come and bleed his poor old grandmother to pay for his pop-lollies and opera-boxes! O burst my lungs if I don’t have the police on you! O the deuce get out!”
She was whipping herself to a frenzy, real or diplomatic. My efforts to quiet her were only so much oil on her old smouldering fire. She began to scream pipingly, and to drive me outward with vicious feeble blows. In the end, baffled and disappointed, I had to make an ignominious exit. The door slammed and the chain grated behind me.
The Street was awaiting my reappearance with interest. It greeted my expulsion with a howl of laughter, and pursued my retreat with a dropping fire of chaff. As I went on my way, I had leisure to reflect that I had extracted from Mother Carey everything that was of the least importance either to herself or me—just so much and no more. I had established the fact of her unsavoury existence, and that was the bare fruit of my enterprise.
But I had still one forlorn hope to follow; one last nearly blank little card to play. And, as Luck would have it, that card was to prove the fateful one. What a trumpery pip, to be sure, looks an ace—a one-shotted gun. Yet the fortress capitulates to it, the knaves shiver before it, whole rows of arrogant royalties go down to its bang.
Something that Mother Carey had let out (inadvertently, even fatuously, I could not but think) stuck in my mind. Impelled by a faint hope of promise in it, I made my way by the Albert Embankment and the South Lambeth Road to Stockwell, whence, from the Swan Tavern, I took a tram for Clapham. My purpose was to inquire about a certain problematic Dr Patterson, and it was my good fortune (paceLuck) to learn not only that that respected practitioner was an existent actuality, but that he was still, after all these years, active in promoting the birth rate of his native suburb. I was even lucky enough to find him at home, in a very comfortable semi-detached house, of an old-time complexion, which faced the common on its south side. He had moved into this many years before, from a much smaller dwelling in Park Road down by the “Plough,” his practice having risen high in the interval on a modest foundation. So my informant—one of those garrulous terrors whowillvolunteer more than they are asked to answer—confided to me.
I found the doctor a very complacent brisk little man, having spectacles, black side-whiskers supported by an ample collar, and a head as shiny and almost as bald as a gas globe.
“Now, sir, what can I do for you?” he said, having hurried into the room and made his bow.
I apologised, with some embarrassment, for my venturing to claim even a fraction of his precious time to a matter which, to put it brusquely, was unconnected with professional emoluments. Naturally enough, perhaps, he requested me thereupon to state my business with a reasonable brevity.
“It touches, sir,” I said, “upon the birth of a child some twenty or more years ago; at which birth, I believe, you assisted.”
“Wait,” he said. “A police case, is it?”
“Not,” I answered, venturing something, “if that can be avoided.”
“Well,” he said, “of whose child do you speak?”
“The mother was a young woman of the name of Carey. She lived in White Square.”
He lifted, and readjusted his spectacles; then, canvassing me over them, knitted his fingers lightly before him, and twiddled his thumbs.
“My memory, sir, is, I may say, retentive. The case recurs to me. What about it?”
“It is desired to find the father of that child.”
He shook his head, smiling.
“My dear sir, I am no clairvoyant. What is my position in these matters? I come, I see, I deliver. The mother is my sole concern.”
“You don’t know who he was?”
“Not from Adam.”
My face fell, obviously enough, I suppose.
“By the way,” he remarked casually, “you know, of course, that the child died very shortly after it was born?”
What was he saying in that matter-of-fact voice? what unimpassioned thunderbolt launching from the blue of his little spectacled eyes? A quick sharp vertigo seemed to seize my brain. I stared stupidly at him.
“Died!” I muttered. “O, you must be mistaken!”
“Wait,” he said. “I keep, and have always kept, a minute record of my cases. I can verify it in an instant.”
He went to a shelf, selected from it one of several thin manuscript volumes, and rapidly skipped over its leaves.
“Here it is,” he said. “February 7th, 1860: Carey (Georgina), White Square: obstetric: child, male; died two days later. Certified cause, atelectasis pulmonum.”
He shut the book with a snap, returned it to its shelf, and faced round on me, his hands under his coat tails.
“Anything more I can do for you?”
“But,” I stammered, “if—if the child died, it must have been buried?”
“Doubtless,” he answered; “but scarcely by me. Still, it was buried, I suppose.”
“You don’t know?”
“O, my dear sir! Think for a moment. White Square! and its reputation—but perhaps you are ignorant there. There are ways and places—for disposing economically of these superfluous defunct. I don’t assert anything; but I daresay you have read of them. The child died, that is all I can certainly state.”
I came to myself, and held out my hand gratefully.
“I am infinitely obliged to you, sir,” I said. “You have enlightened me on a very important point; and—and I am infinitely obliged to you.”
“Not at all,” he said. “Would you mind leaving your name and address?”
I hesitated a moment—and gave them.
“H’m! dear me!” he said. “There’s a person of that very name a patient of mine. Well, good-morning to you.”
Out in the street, I moved on like one in a dream.
“Dead!” I thought—“dead!”
I stopped suddenly, looking stupidly about me.
“Where am I?—Who am I?—Dead!”
I wantedabove all things to be alone; to re-order my disordered thoughts; to marshal into some sort of coherence the fantastic figures which ran riot in my brain. I felt like some stunned animal turning to creep away and bury itself in shadow and solitude. The clack of the train in my head was like the worry of a screw shaft to a sea-sick passenger. I had to adapt all my reflections to its mechanic monotony. I could not detach my thoughts from those regular beats. They even assumed to my mind presently a definite measurement. A thought was exactly three inches long, and the wheels tapped it out, tapped it out to one endlessly repeated pattern.
I was horribly, ungraciously apprehensive of running across Johnny Dando in Footover. The vision of his round beneficent face would rise like an obtrusive moon over the troubled waters of my soul. To gain time for self-communion before he learned of my return was my most feverish desire. I was even, truth to tell, wishing the poor dear boy out of my way altogether. There was no longer room in my philosophy for even this gentlefarceur.
But he did not cross my path, and I succeeded in reaching my cold hermitage unobserved. There was no fire in it this doleful evening—no sign of any feminine grace or thought for me. I had to make out my own comforts—lay my grate, provide my own meal. Well, that was nothing new; nor was it any new discovery that a passing indulgence often makes a spoilt content. But I confess I was peevish at having only myself to help myself again.
However, I persisted, and, after feeding ravenously on meats I had brought with me, for I was fairly famished, I took a book, haphazard and for form’s sake, from the shelf, lit my pipe, and sat down before the glow to excogitate the moral and practical effect I was called upon to give to an amazing revelation.
As to that, it was patent at once that it had thrown all the machinery of my life out of gear. The questions of love, duty, resentment, retribution must all be unpieced and readjusted, to suit a new point of view. I had no longer, it appeared, true relations with the old. My position was become one of independence; my attitude one of hard triumphant aloofness. Only the mystery of my being was deepened, not resolved. If my mother’s baby had died, I could not be my mother’s son. That, paradoxically, was the postulate. Then, if not hers, whose son was I, and for what inexplicable reason had she undertaken the risk and responsibility of acknowledging me for her own? That there had been foul play somewhere—trickery, fraud, monstrous imposition—was very plain, I thought. My mission, if it had proved abortive in one direction, had been deadly prolific in another. How to wrench truth from the maze of lies!
The wildest theories flashed into my mind, only to be flouted. Was it possible that Lady Skene could have done this donna Quixotic thing for a friend—have imposed on her husband as her own, in some fit of Evangelical Samaritanism, the fruit of a poor sister’s frailty? Out of the question. She was utterly truthful, by temperament and religion. If, on a single occasion, she had let a misunderstanding pass by default, she had had not only the sanction but the encouragement of her Church to justify her. Then Pugsley, at least, believed I was her son, and, as certainly, in all things she believed what Pugsley believed. Granting which, one must grant her innocence of any partnership in a fraud which had apparently imposed upon her, the principal, as it had imposed upon him the unwitting agent.
Yet, had it imposed? or was she, after all, a practised queen of guile—a Lamia, with the serpent in her blood? I thought of her villainous antecedents; I thought of the old obscene harpy down in Lambeth; and my heart would take cold at the thought, insisting that she knew the truth, that she must know it, and that therein was confessed the real secret of her antipathy to me.
Then, so much admitted, or assumed, was it not a consequent assumption that his secret knowledge of the fact that I was not Lady Skene’s child constituted Dalston’s hold over her? That would be to infer that he, at least, was cognisant of my true parentage. But would it be that she was? or, even more inexplicably, that he was practising upon her ignorance of the truth? But howcouldshe be ignorant—howcouldshe? The hypothesis appeared incredible, monstrous.
One only clear fact seemed to detach itself from the inextricable tangle of things—that I was not my supposed mother’s son.
Now—so perverse is human nature—I was no sooner self-assured of my moral quittance from the bonds which had held me so long and so wistfully to an imaginary grievance, than my soul rose in mutiny against my own emancipation. Was she not actually, then, my mother after all—this cold, beautiful spirit, whose countenance I had so longed to gain, whose aversion, so little concealed, had been the cruel pain of my life? It would appear so, indeed; it would appear that I had been wasting my heart on the shadow of a love—the blasphemy of a worship which God Himself had suddenly exposed for a sham. I was stripped in a moment even of the cold comfort of that false religion. I had no longer the right of natural appeal from an inhuman sentence.
And I had only myself to thank for my awakening. Wilfully, with my eyes open, I had gone about this business of my own damnation.
There was such an intolerable sting in the thought, that, in its last full realisation, I jumped to my feet, restless to pace away the agitation it caused me. As I did so, the book which I had taken from the shelf dropped roughly from my knees to the floor, and a folded paper fell from it.
I stooped mechanically to pick up the latter, as mechanically opened it out, and, two-thirds preoccupied, ran my eyes down the sheet. Instantly, with a little shock of amazement, they were caught and riveted to a name written thereon.
A sigh, as of one just awakened, came from me, What was to follow? I thought I could tell already. There was a signature at the foot of the paper, and I believed I knew whose it would be—the signature of Charlie Skene, his lordship’s dead son; and so it proved. It gave me an odd thrill to look at it—the boyish scrawl in its faded ink; and attesting—what? You shall hear. Walking on tiptoe, as if in some instinctive emotion towards secrecy, I carried my “find” to the lamp and examined it.
It was the half, the second half, of a sheet of foreign notepaper, and had been used evidently by some reader (probably the correspondent to whom it had been addressed) for a marker in the volume I had dropped. Heedless trifling with a thing so pregnant with destiny! Yet Luck, no doubt, had arranged it so. It ran as follows, starting on a broken sentence:—