“I could have faced the horror of that exposure once—could have braved it, even, as your wife, Charles—you will forgive me—I know your loving generosity so well. But as the mother of your child I cannot face it. ... My falsehood lies like a blight upon his little gentle life; his sweet truth finds a stranger in his mother. Perhaps, when I am gone, by God’s mercy, he will recover, and live to forget me. When just now we were alone together, and I whispered to him that I was going, I am sure he stirred and gave a little sigh as if he were already conscious of something lifted—some load passing from him. Oh, Charles, how cruel, though I have deserved it! I think if you knew—all my tears and penitence in the life I am about to seek—that sin against the Lamb! ... do not distress yourself about me. I shall be secure in the fold. Someday, after my final abjuration of the world, I will let you know ... make what terms you can and will with my betrayer, for your own sake, for the sake of our darling, dear, not for mine. ... This cannot continue—its way is madness. There is no possible foreseeing a limit to his exactions, or to my robbing you. Now, knowing me fled, he will be anxious, perhaps, to come to terms. ... Richard will tell you—my shame is his, but not the right to avenge it. Keep him, with all the force of your persuasion, from that horrible thought. ... Oh, Charles, forgive me!”
“I could have faced the horror of that exposure once—could have braved it, even, as your wife, Charles—you will forgive me—I know your loving generosity so well. But as the mother of your child I cannot face it. ... My falsehood lies like a blight upon his little gentle life; his sweet truth finds a stranger in his mother. Perhaps, when I am gone, by God’s mercy, he will recover, and live to forget me. When just now we were alone together, and I whispered to him that I was going, I am sure he stirred and gave a little sigh as if he were already conscious of something lifted—some load passing from him. Oh, Charles, how cruel, though I have deserved it! I think if you knew—all my tears and penitence in the life I am about to seek—that sin against the Lamb! ... do not distress yourself about me. I shall be secure in the fold. Someday, after my final abjuration of the world, I will let you know ... make what terms you can and will with my betrayer, for your own sake, for the sake of our darling, dear, not for mine. ... This cannot continue—its way is madness. There is no possible foreseeing a limit to his exactions, or to my robbing you. Now, knowing me fled, he will be anxious, perhaps, to come to terms. ... Richard will tell you—my shame is his, but not the right to avenge it. Keep him, with all the force of your persuasion, from that horrible thought. ... Oh, Charles, forgive me!”
His eyes had sought me again restlessly, as I read; and now, seeing me come to an end, he rose quickly and tremulously, and set to pacing up and down.
“What the devil does it all mean, Gaskett? We must stop her—get her back somehow before it’s too late and the scandal’s out. Have you any idea where she can have gone?”
“Give me time to think, sir. It is all very sad.”
“Time, time!” he protested irritably. “It’s just that we want to foreclose on. While it passes, she—good God! you don’t think she’ll do herself any hurt, do you?”
“I don’t think so, sir. You have her word. She’s seeking some asylum, from which she proposes writing to you by-and-by.”
“And you know the reason?”
“Yes. I think I may say I’m sure of it.”
He stared at me, where I had risen by the desk. His usual scrupulous jauntiness was all slack and unstrung. I noticed with concern that the bow of his shepherd’s-plaid tie was twisted an inch out of its place. He looked as if he had been out for many nights on end.
“It’s all deuced odd,” he said at last. “What devil’s abroad in the house of late? First you and your conundrums, and now this. Perhaps you’ll be telling me there’s some connection between the two.”
“Yes; I shall tell you that.”
“Ah!”
“There is a very close connection, sir, as regards one person.”
“What person?”
“Mr Dalston.”
The name obviously conveyed no meaning to him. He only pondered me, dumfoundered, fingering his lips.
“The man is an infernal scoundrel, sir,” I said with emphasis. “I intimated as much to you once before. What I did not, could not, touch upon at the time, was the strange coincidence of his double connection with your family. He was not only your son’s travelling tutor, sir; but he is also, by his own assertion, and in Lady Skene’s belief,myfather.”
For a moment his mind, grasping desperately at the significance of my words, slipped and went under.
“Dalston!” he muttered amazed. “Delane was Charlie’s tutor.”
“Delane or Dalston, sir—it is all the same. The man had his reasons for assuming a name not his own. It was to cover over the tracks of a very discreditable liaison he had had with a young woman, whom he had known when he was an usher at a school at Clapham.”
“At Clapham!” The word seemed to take him in the face. “Go on,” he said presently, with a sudden clinching intonation.
“Is it necessary, sir? You will comprehend me, I think.”
“She deceived me about you?”
“Yes.”
“Anything more?”
“This man, who calls himself my father, has come to trade upon his knowledge of that deceit.”
The old legal terrier was beginning to awake in him—to prick its ears and show its teeth.
“To trade? I understand. Hush-money, eh?”
“He has had one large sum from her already. I believe, on my honour, sir, it was his demanding a second this morning that drove her to this step.”
“Very likely—very probable indeed.”
He resumed his pacing again, plunged into frowning thought. I rejoiced to see this grasp, this stiffening, this recovery in him of an ancient forceful shrewdness, Presently he stopped.
“Do you guess where she is gone, Richard?”
“Yes, I guess, sir.”
“Where?”
“To Mr Pugsley’s.”
“O! Now, why?”
“For one thing, he is her spiritual adviser. For another, he was aware of her deceit from the first, and could even reconcile his condonation of it with his evangelical conscience. In the view of that, sir, I understand, the fraud was not only harmless but praiseworthy, in consideration of its object in reclaiming a brand from the burning.”
“Meaning me.” For the first time a faint smile twitched his lips. “You seem to have interested yourself successfully in your family history, Gaskett.”
“Yes, I have, sir; and to more purpose than this, even.”
“Wait a bit. If your surmise is correct, it would be useless to attempt to persuade her back until this man has been dealt with.”
“I think you would be most unwise to attempt it.”
“I quite agree with you. We must buy him out first.”
“Buyhim out, sir? A cur like that? Stone him out, don’t you mean?”
He was smilingly tolerant of me. His manner had become, almost in a moment, quite confident and reassured. I had guessed already that the deception,per se, would count for little with him; but I was not prepared for his cool reception of its consequences.
“Tut-tut, my boy!” he said. “If you had had my experience, you would know that compromise is nine parts of the law.”
“And a rope the tenth, sir, is it not? Well, you may play your nine parts for me; only I, for what remains, am going to hang Mr Dalston.”
The colour left his face. His new sprightliness was all gone in a moment. He returned to the desk, and seated himself, somewhat in his old tired attitude.
“Well, Richard,” he said. “What else?”
Emotion rose in me. I lingered on the blow I had to deal. But it must out at last.
“I made a point, sir, if you observed, of referring to him ascallinghimself my father.”
“I noticed. He is not your father, then—only the vile deputy of another?”
“No more my father, sir, I do believe, than Lady Skene is my mother. I was born of quite other parentage.”
He held his eyes shaded with one hand. The shaking fingers of the other affected to toy with a pen.
“Go on,” he muttered. “Why do you stop?”
Without pause or hesitation, then, I gave him the full history of my inquisition, from the utterance of the first word which had launched me on it, to my final interview with his wife. And at the end, “Lord Skene,” I said, “judge all this as you will. There is still the worst to come—the corner-stone to such a monument of villainy as I never dreamed of unveiling when I started. I beg, sir, with all the passion of entreaty I can command, that you will brace yourself to hear a very dreadful truth. I told you, on that former occasion, that I had come by accident upon part of a letter written by your son to Mr Thesiger. Here it is.”
I laid the faded sheet before him. He read it through once, twice, three times; and looked up at me with a lost expression.
“Well?” he whispered hoarsely.
“It is your son’s, sir?”
“Yes, it is from Charlie.”
“The reference in it, sir—the ‘You-know-who’?”
“Yes—well?”
“Is to Mrs Dalston, I cannot doubt.Hewas married to her first.”
“Who? Charlie?”
“Yes; and, because of it—O! sir, for all it means to you, compose yourself to meet the blow—because of it, was done to death by the man who is now Mrs Dalston’s husband, and your own wife’s damned betrayer.”
His head sank low. I thought, for all my warning, I had risked too much. But in a moment he lifted it again, and the expression on it, stern, white, self-repressed, was such, I imagined, as might have marked its character when, in past days, he would rise, black-capped, to sentence a prisoner to the last awful penalty.
“On what authority,” he began, in a quick loud voice, which sank even upon its utterance—“on what authority?”—and the words died out in a whisper.
“On the authority, sir,” I said, “of a man who was in hiding near by at the time the crime was committed, and who sought afterwards, on the strength of his secret, to bleed the murderer’s pocket, as the murderer has since, on another count, sought to bleed your wife’s. But he proved himself no match against a desperate villain’s resourcefulness; and was caught in the net of his own spreading, and put away for years on a trumped-up charge. You will find his name there—Geoletti.”
Lord Skene looked up at me, and laughed—a painful, twisted, unnatural cachinnation.
“I had observed it already, Richard. I sentenced the man myself—good God!”
He buried his face in his hands, as if overwhelmed. And, indeed, the coincidence was staggering.
“Is that so, sir?” I said in a strained dry voice. “Well, it only remains to say that he has served his sentence to the hilt, and has emerged from it with one only purpose remaining to his ruined life—revenge on the author of his sufferings.”
I felt the question coming from him, and forestalled it.
“How I know this? The man had tracked his quarry home, and I came upon him, quite by chance, foundered by the way. But when he told me his name—great God, sir, I remembered the letter—your son’s letter—and then only a little questioning was needed to extract the whole accursed truth.”
“Where is he?”
“He is waiting outside at this moment.”
“Fetch him in.”
I was moving to obey, when he stopped me.
“Put down that light first. I must hear and see and not be seen. There, would he know me?”
“I believe it is quite out of the question.”
“Go, then.”
I stepped softly into the hall, and beckoning to the Italian, motioned him into the room and shut the door.
“Geoletti,” I said, “I want you now, clearly and briefly, to relate the whole history of your connection with Mr Dalston, from the first committal of the crime with which you charge him, to the moment when, through his wicked agency, you were sentenced, on a false charge, to a long term of penal servitude. You can trust me that the statement will help us all, if you omit nothing and extenuate nothing.”
He bowed his head gravely thereupon, and crushing his hat nervously in his hands before him, and moistening his dry lips, entered upon his narrative as follows:—
ANTONIO GEOLETTI’S STORY[2]My name is Antonio Geoletti, and I am a Piedmontese. Twenty years ago I was by profession a guide of the Val d’Aosta. There was none equal to me in knowledge of that district. From the Glacier di Lys to the chain of Mon Iseran I knew it all, every acre. The valleys of Pellina, du Butier, d’Entreves, Veni, de la Tuile, Grisanche, Savera, di Cogne, Camporcier—they were hackneyed to me one and all. I could trace to its source every mountain torrent which poured from the high Alps into the upper waters of the Dora Baltea. The cravats of Mon Cervin, d’Oren, de Ferret, were no less my familiars than were the passes de la Seigne and of the great and little St Bernards, through which I would often conduct visitors bound adventurously for Savoy. My knowledge of the mountains was unique, wonderful—informed with secrets, moreover, hidden from all others. It was the possession of one such secret, alas! which betrayed me to my ruin.In the Val d’Entreves are the village and baths of Cormayeur. There is also the Hospice of St Marguerite to which invalids resort. Thither, in the spring of 1860, came two ladies, Miss Lucie Love, a young Englishhéritièreand orphan, and her only living relative, Madame Gondran, who was old and sick, with eyes like the dying hawk, and of a self-will and passion quite ungovernable. The young lady was the most beautiful in person and complexion; for which reason, it would appear, and because of the many gifts of health and wealth which Fortune had lavished upon its favourite, her aunt could never expend enough upon her her heart of venom and detestation. I think she would have liked to debar her for ever from all the profits of her estate of youth. But such a flower so sweet, and well-bequeathed, was not long to escape the marauding bee. There arrived to Aosta in these days two gentlemen making the tour, a young English milord and his Gouverneur, of whom the names were respectively Mr Charles Skene and Mr Delane. These two, then, exploring among the mountains, came very shortly across Miss Lucie; and straightway the die was cast. Milord would hear of nothing but that they transfer at once their quarters to Cormayeur; and so there they went and remained for six months and more.In this interval what now has come to pass? You shall hear, as I heard—partly of gossip, partly of acquaintances employed in the Hospice, partly of my own ears; for the gentlemen engaged me constantly to convey them into the places of interest about the neighbourhood.This, then, had happened. Milord and Miss Lucie were become inseparable lovers, and desirous of the plighted troth. But Madame Gondran she would not hear of it. She was all engaged herself to the seductiveness of the Gouverneur, and—for the chief reason that the young lady feared and disliked him in the exact opposite proportion—was determined to sanction him for her nominee to the covetable hand of Miss. He, this Mr Delane, was, of a surety, very pleasing and attentive with her, and the young man, his pupil, not at all; but, like a boy, arrogant and inconsiderate. Milord, no doubt, lacked the experience to know that the diplomacy of wooing is to propitiate the guardian before the ward. It is well, also, to warm a woman’s vanity, if you would see her melt to you.So things went on; until presently a soft gossip began to make itself heard, with turnings of the head, and nudgings, and a pointing of the finger. There were whispers of a fondness betrayed, and of love beginning to reveal in itself the penalty of rashness. One was wondering how the truth could still hide itself from the eyes of the terrible invalid, when suddenly a startling calamity befell: Milord disappeared, and was never heard of again.Now I quote what follows from the testimony of the Hospice walls, which were alway as full of ears and eyes as a honeycomb. It deals with the period before investigation had established the pretty moral certitude that Milord had met with some fatal accident on the mountains, and when he was still supposed, in the popular view, to have slipped away merely from the consequences of an intrigue. The young Madame, it appeared, quite incredulous at the outset, was driven presently, by her Aunt and the Gouverneur, into the conviction that she had been ruined and deserted by a scoundrel. In the first of her desperation, indeed, eager to vindicate both herself and her lover, she declared that they were husband and wife—that, in short, on a certain remembered day, when they had all joined in an expedition to Aosta, he and she had eluded the others for a time, and, by prearrangement, had been married before some civil functionary, who had afterwards certified to the fact in a document, preserved, she believed, by Mr Skene.Well, if this confession was so unpalatable to the listeners as to add a hundredfold to Madame Gondran’s jealousy and hatred, it afforded at the same time a text for ample revenge. The match was no match, they declared, in English law; Miss Lucie was none the less for it betrayed and abandoned. Her seducer, of course, had only caught her into a very ancient snare, and, having tangled her in its meshes, had gone off laughing. Indeed, it would appear, he had hinted as much to Mr Delane before running away, and, by that shameless boast, had caused a rupture between himself and his tutor. He was gone, anyhow and finally, never to return, and utter ruin and disgrace were all that remained to the poor lady out of that short rhapsody of passion; unless—unless what? Why, grieved and shame-stricken though he was over this downfall of a cherished idol, the Gouverneur, still great and magnanimous in his love, would consent to save her reputation, at the cost of his own shattered ideals, by marrying her himself at a moment’s notice, and afterwards removing her to a place where gossip could find no data for detraction.They may have lied, or spoken the truth—I know not. But this I know: she was wax in their powerful hands—a poor, dazed, heartbroken, will-less creature. They took her to Turin, we heard, and there the man married her. And there, on the very morrow of the wedding, the old witch Gondran was found dead in her bed—struck down, in the moment of triumph, by the ecstasy of her spite. She lies in the Cimitero on the Chivasso Road. I have seen the blasted flowers on her grave.But now all this time I was thinking what to do. And all the time I was still thinking and thinking, when the suspicion first arose that Milord, instead of having taken himself off, as supposed, had really, in some adventurous wandering, come by his death in the mountains, since, indeed, he had never been seen to emerge from among them at any part. And suddenly there came over from England a lady, his relative, to inquire into his disappearance; and Mr Delane was questioned, and told all he knew, confessing he had thought Milord had bolted to evade the consequences of a scrape best not referred to. Then one day I went to learn more of what was doing, and found the inquestation over, and Mr Delane gone home to England with his wife. And again that set me to thinking more, and again more.For now I will tell you: I wanted money for a purpose, and I thought I had seen the way to procure it. I was always one that lived strong and wastefully, burning the candle of toil or pleasure at both ends with a selfsame zest. The silent white tents of the mountains or the roaring booths of the fair—they could possess for me an equal madness of attraction. For all my activity I had seldom anything but empty pockets; and so once it came in upon me how easeful a new sensation it would be to marry, and take perhaps an auberge, and rest and ripen on the rich vintage of my experience. Only, where to find the capital? Yes, that was it—that might always have been the difficulty, had I not once become possessed of a secret which it was surely within a certain person’s interest to pay me not to reveal. That secret, then, was my potential.What was it? What was this tremendous secret? It is uttered in a breath. I knew, I had known from the first, that Milord had never run away, but that he had been murdered, and his body hidden in a subterranean chamber, by the man who professed to be his friend and admonitor. I will explain.High above Cormayeur, among the waste and desolation of the hills, there pours itself down a torrent which is called Lapluietonnante—the Rain of Thunder. Once and more, this torrent, entering through rocky ravines, plunges like a mad and foaming horse, until at length, too blind with terror to note where it is going, it leaps from a precipice, and crashes in a ruin of watery splinters on the rocks a score of yards below. Now, at the very point where the water springs from the gorge, there is a certain fissure in the wall of rock, not easily observable amongst others, but which, having once discovered and entered, one will find leads down by a fantastic passage into a chamber or grotto situated right behind the fall and opening on to it. Here was a secret of knowledge, I thought, my own exclusive property, until Milord came to disabuse my mind. He did not confess his discovery to me; but I gathered, from what he let fall, that his daring spirit had penetrated to the arcanum which heretofore had been my solitary possession. “I could show you, Geoletti,” said he once, “a cavern in the water that would be worth a little fortune to you in tips, if you knew it. But I’m going to keep it to myself till I go; and then perhaps I’ll let out.” I smiled to him, confessing nothing; but from that moment I was always on the watch to see if my suspicion were correct. There was a second fissure immediately above the other, but shallow, and with a projection of rock within it apt for cover; and there, when I knew Milord to be abroad in the neighbourhood, I would often hide myself, and spy to see him come. And once at last he came, and the Gouverneur with him.They stopped beside the rock, and talked before they entered. It was then the time when scandal came to whisper of a young maid’s condition. That subject was on their lips.“It’s done, and there’s an end of it,” said Milord in a heat. “I tell you I’ve married her, Mr Mark Dalston.”“Why do you call me by that name?” asked the Gouverneur. He was very quiet and smiling; and he showed his white teeth always.“Because it’s your real one, isn’t it?” said Milord. “And because I want to convince you that mine isn’t the only secret here that might lead to disturbances if revealed. I stand to take the consequences ofmydeeds, Mr Dalston, whatever you may do.”“Have you, then,” said the Gouverneur, “written to confess to your father?”“No, but I’m going to,” answered Milord. “It can’t be delayed much longer. Only I’ll do it in my own time and way, and stand no dictating from anybody.” Then he seemed to soften a little. “Hang it, Delane!” he said. “I’m sorry if you are sweet on the girl yourself. But one could never tell from your manner—you’re such a deep chap.”“Am I?” said the Gouverneur, and he laughed. “But you have beaten us all in depth, Skene. Well, as you remark, the thing’s done, and there’s no more to be said about it for the moment. Now show me the way into this wonderful cave you’ve discovered.”They passed in, one after the other, Milord going first—and he never came out again. Only, presently, there jumped from the opening on to the grass a man very white but smiling still, who flicked the dust from his clothes, and sat down on a rock, looking into the curve of the fall as if his eyes were needles to pierce it. And suddenly he came to his feet.“My God, Lucie!” he said to the water, “how I love you! My God, how I love you!” and with that he turned and went away.And presently I too went down into the cave.He had shot him with a pistol from the back. He lay on his face, and his head was like a trampled bush. Near the body, flung from it in its fall, was a little tin case such as they make for sandwiches; and in it I found, when I could force the nerve to look, the certificate of Milord’s marriage with Miss Lucie.I put it back; I touched nothing more; like a murderer myself I stole away, and left everything as I had found it. From that day to this the cave shall have held its secret undiscovered. There still the body must be lying as when it fell never to stir again. You know the rest.
ANTONIO GEOLETTI’S STORY[2]
My name is Antonio Geoletti, and I am a Piedmontese. Twenty years ago I was by profession a guide of the Val d’Aosta. There was none equal to me in knowledge of that district. From the Glacier di Lys to the chain of Mon Iseran I knew it all, every acre. The valleys of Pellina, du Butier, d’Entreves, Veni, de la Tuile, Grisanche, Savera, di Cogne, Camporcier—they were hackneyed to me one and all. I could trace to its source every mountain torrent which poured from the high Alps into the upper waters of the Dora Baltea. The cravats of Mon Cervin, d’Oren, de Ferret, were no less my familiars than were the passes de la Seigne and of the great and little St Bernards, through which I would often conduct visitors bound adventurously for Savoy. My knowledge of the mountains was unique, wonderful—informed with secrets, moreover, hidden from all others. It was the possession of one such secret, alas! which betrayed me to my ruin.
In the Val d’Entreves are the village and baths of Cormayeur. There is also the Hospice of St Marguerite to which invalids resort. Thither, in the spring of 1860, came two ladies, Miss Lucie Love, a young Englishhéritièreand orphan, and her only living relative, Madame Gondran, who was old and sick, with eyes like the dying hawk, and of a self-will and passion quite ungovernable. The young lady was the most beautiful in person and complexion; for which reason, it would appear, and because of the many gifts of health and wealth which Fortune had lavished upon its favourite, her aunt could never expend enough upon her her heart of venom and detestation. I think she would have liked to debar her for ever from all the profits of her estate of youth. But such a flower so sweet, and well-bequeathed, was not long to escape the marauding bee. There arrived to Aosta in these days two gentlemen making the tour, a young English milord and his Gouverneur, of whom the names were respectively Mr Charles Skene and Mr Delane. These two, then, exploring among the mountains, came very shortly across Miss Lucie; and straightway the die was cast. Milord would hear of nothing but that they transfer at once their quarters to Cormayeur; and so there they went and remained for six months and more.
In this interval what now has come to pass? You shall hear, as I heard—partly of gossip, partly of acquaintances employed in the Hospice, partly of my own ears; for the gentlemen engaged me constantly to convey them into the places of interest about the neighbourhood.
This, then, had happened. Milord and Miss Lucie were become inseparable lovers, and desirous of the plighted troth. But Madame Gondran she would not hear of it. She was all engaged herself to the seductiveness of the Gouverneur, and—for the chief reason that the young lady feared and disliked him in the exact opposite proportion—was determined to sanction him for her nominee to the covetable hand of Miss. He, this Mr Delane, was, of a surety, very pleasing and attentive with her, and the young man, his pupil, not at all; but, like a boy, arrogant and inconsiderate. Milord, no doubt, lacked the experience to know that the diplomacy of wooing is to propitiate the guardian before the ward. It is well, also, to warm a woman’s vanity, if you would see her melt to you.
So things went on; until presently a soft gossip began to make itself heard, with turnings of the head, and nudgings, and a pointing of the finger. There were whispers of a fondness betrayed, and of love beginning to reveal in itself the penalty of rashness. One was wondering how the truth could still hide itself from the eyes of the terrible invalid, when suddenly a startling calamity befell: Milord disappeared, and was never heard of again.
Now I quote what follows from the testimony of the Hospice walls, which were alway as full of ears and eyes as a honeycomb. It deals with the period before investigation had established the pretty moral certitude that Milord had met with some fatal accident on the mountains, and when he was still supposed, in the popular view, to have slipped away merely from the consequences of an intrigue. The young Madame, it appeared, quite incredulous at the outset, was driven presently, by her Aunt and the Gouverneur, into the conviction that she had been ruined and deserted by a scoundrel. In the first of her desperation, indeed, eager to vindicate both herself and her lover, she declared that they were husband and wife—that, in short, on a certain remembered day, when they had all joined in an expedition to Aosta, he and she had eluded the others for a time, and, by prearrangement, had been married before some civil functionary, who had afterwards certified to the fact in a document, preserved, she believed, by Mr Skene.
Well, if this confession was so unpalatable to the listeners as to add a hundredfold to Madame Gondran’s jealousy and hatred, it afforded at the same time a text for ample revenge. The match was no match, they declared, in English law; Miss Lucie was none the less for it betrayed and abandoned. Her seducer, of course, had only caught her into a very ancient snare, and, having tangled her in its meshes, had gone off laughing. Indeed, it would appear, he had hinted as much to Mr Delane before running away, and, by that shameless boast, had caused a rupture between himself and his tutor. He was gone, anyhow and finally, never to return, and utter ruin and disgrace were all that remained to the poor lady out of that short rhapsody of passion; unless—unless what? Why, grieved and shame-stricken though he was over this downfall of a cherished idol, the Gouverneur, still great and magnanimous in his love, would consent to save her reputation, at the cost of his own shattered ideals, by marrying her himself at a moment’s notice, and afterwards removing her to a place where gossip could find no data for detraction.
They may have lied, or spoken the truth—I know not. But this I know: she was wax in their powerful hands—a poor, dazed, heartbroken, will-less creature. They took her to Turin, we heard, and there the man married her. And there, on the very morrow of the wedding, the old witch Gondran was found dead in her bed—struck down, in the moment of triumph, by the ecstasy of her spite. She lies in the Cimitero on the Chivasso Road. I have seen the blasted flowers on her grave.
But now all this time I was thinking what to do. And all the time I was still thinking and thinking, when the suspicion first arose that Milord, instead of having taken himself off, as supposed, had really, in some adventurous wandering, come by his death in the mountains, since, indeed, he had never been seen to emerge from among them at any part. And suddenly there came over from England a lady, his relative, to inquire into his disappearance; and Mr Delane was questioned, and told all he knew, confessing he had thought Milord had bolted to evade the consequences of a scrape best not referred to. Then one day I went to learn more of what was doing, and found the inquestation over, and Mr Delane gone home to England with his wife. And again that set me to thinking more, and again more.
For now I will tell you: I wanted money for a purpose, and I thought I had seen the way to procure it. I was always one that lived strong and wastefully, burning the candle of toil or pleasure at both ends with a selfsame zest. The silent white tents of the mountains or the roaring booths of the fair—they could possess for me an equal madness of attraction. For all my activity I had seldom anything but empty pockets; and so once it came in upon me how easeful a new sensation it would be to marry, and take perhaps an auberge, and rest and ripen on the rich vintage of my experience. Only, where to find the capital? Yes, that was it—that might always have been the difficulty, had I not once become possessed of a secret which it was surely within a certain person’s interest to pay me not to reveal. That secret, then, was my potential.
What was it? What was this tremendous secret? It is uttered in a breath. I knew, I had known from the first, that Milord had never run away, but that he had been murdered, and his body hidden in a subterranean chamber, by the man who professed to be his friend and admonitor. I will explain.
High above Cormayeur, among the waste and desolation of the hills, there pours itself down a torrent which is called Lapluietonnante—the Rain of Thunder. Once and more, this torrent, entering through rocky ravines, plunges like a mad and foaming horse, until at length, too blind with terror to note where it is going, it leaps from a precipice, and crashes in a ruin of watery splinters on the rocks a score of yards below. Now, at the very point where the water springs from the gorge, there is a certain fissure in the wall of rock, not easily observable amongst others, but which, having once discovered and entered, one will find leads down by a fantastic passage into a chamber or grotto situated right behind the fall and opening on to it. Here was a secret of knowledge, I thought, my own exclusive property, until Milord came to disabuse my mind. He did not confess his discovery to me; but I gathered, from what he let fall, that his daring spirit had penetrated to the arcanum which heretofore had been my solitary possession. “I could show you, Geoletti,” said he once, “a cavern in the water that would be worth a little fortune to you in tips, if you knew it. But I’m going to keep it to myself till I go; and then perhaps I’ll let out.” I smiled to him, confessing nothing; but from that moment I was always on the watch to see if my suspicion were correct. There was a second fissure immediately above the other, but shallow, and with a projection of rock within it apt for cover; and there, when I knew Milord to be abroad in the neighbourhood, I would often hide myself, and spy to see him come. And once at last he came, and the Gouverneur with him.
They stopped beside the rock, and talked before they entered. It was then the time when scandal came to whisper of a young maid’s condition. That subject was on their lips.
“It’s done, and there’s an end of it,” said Milord in a heat. “I tell you I’ve married her, Mr Mark Dalston.”
“Why do you call me by that name?” asked the Gouverneur. He was very quiet and smiling; and he showed his white teeth always.
“Because it’s your real one, isn’t it?” said Milord. “And because I want to convince you that mine isn’t the only secret here that might lead to disturbances if revealed. I stand to take the consequences ofmydeeds, Mr Dalston, whatever you may do.”
“Have you, then,” said the Gouverneur, “written to confess to your father?”
“No, but I’m going to,” answered Milord. “It can’t be delayed much longer. Only I’ll do it in my own time and way, and stand no dictating from anybody.” Then he seemed to soften a little. “Hang it, Delane!” he said. “I’m sorry if you are sweet on the girl yourself. But one could never tell from your manner—you’re such a deep chap.”
“Am I?” said the Gouverneur, and he laughed. “But you have beaten us all in depth, Skene. Well, as you remark, the thing’s done, and there’s no more to be said about it for the moment. Now show me the way into this wonderful cave you’ve discovered.”
They passed in, one after the other, Milord going first—and he never came out again. Only, presently, there jumped from the opening on to the grass a man very white but smiling still, who flicked the dust from his clothes, and sat down on a rock, looking into the curve of the fall as if his eyes were needles to pierce it. And suddenly he came to his feet.
“My God, Lucie!” he said to the water, “how I love you! My God, how I love you!” and with that he turned and went away.
And presently I too went down into the cave.
He had shot him with a pistol from the back. He lay on his face, and his head was like a trampled bush. Near the body, flung from it in its fall, was a little tin case such as they make for sandwiches; and in it I found, when I could force the nerve to look, the certificate of Milord’s marriage with Miss Lucie.
I put it back; I touched nothing more; like a murderer myself I stole away, and left everything as I had found it. From that day to this the cave shall have held its secret undiscovered. There still the body must be lying as when it fell never to stir again. You know the rest.
I knew it from his own lips: how, a few months after the married couple had returned to England, an Italian courier, discharged in Aosta for drunkenness, had persuaded Geoletti to profit by his knowledge of London, and go there with him; how, from Soho, the potential blackmailer had taken his bearings, and, by the aid of compatriots, run his quarry to earth, and forced an interview upon him and revealed his knowledge and his purpose; how Mr Dalston, temporising a moment, had referred him, for final settlement, to the house of a certain doctor in Kennington, to which he had gone by secret appointment and with what fatal results to himself. The listener needed only these links in the chain of evidence to complete the story for him; and, when they had been supplied, a deep and tragic silence fell upon the room.
Presently, not raising his head, he motioned to the narrator, a gesture of dismissal.
“Go,” I whispered to Geoletti, “and return to the lodge.”
I stood, when we were alone, a moment in indecision; then crossed the room softly.
“If the hurt has come frommyhand, sir,” I said, “you will know why I ask you to forgive me for it, will you not?”
He was muttering to himself; he hardly seemed to notice me.
“My God! poor Charlie—my God! poor Charlie”—over and over again.
Suddenly he got stiffly to his feet.
“Hush! Didn’t I hear the boy crying?” he said, listening in a startled way. “He’s left to me yet—he sha’n’t be disinherited—his mother must come back to me and end all this. There was never a woman so beautiful or so foolish in all the world.”
He seemed to recollect himself, and me, and my question; and now he answered that obliquely, not looking at me, but fingering some papers on his desk.
“You know your course, Gaskett? It’s obvious enough, I should think.”
The formal address, the reluctance of his manner, woke a strange chill in me.
“I think so, sir,” I said, withdrawing a little. “It is to visit Lady Skene’s mother again, and face her with a new and sufficient reason for confessing the truth.”
He drew in his breath softly, as if to a wince of pain; then turned to canvass me fully for the first time.
“Well,” he said, “you have hit me pretty hard in my old age, Gaskett; and you’ll not be surprised that I find your hand a bit stunning. You must grant me to-night to think it all over; and to-morrow I’ll give you my answer. Come up at midday. The man’s safe with you, I suppose. That’s all that it’s essential to ensure for the moment. I shall not come in to dinner. Good-night!”
The blows to which he had been subjected had tried him, no doubt, to the very limit of endurance; yet, somehow, this was not the sequel to them that I had expected. My heart was like a stone in me. I turned and went out of the room without another word.
And, then—sweet balm in Gilead!
She was waiting for me, flitting like a ghost-moth about the dark old panels of the room from which she had dismissed me a little while ago. She put her finger to her lips, and hushed me in, and shut the door. She had dressed for dinner during the interval of my absence, and was a lovelier, more fairy-like apparition by twenty degrees. I felt like taking a dream into my arms—the sweet soft fragrance of her hair, and lifted face, and young white innocent bosom. A thread of diamonds dewed her neck—she melted to me like a very dew of girlhood, and loved and clung to me, and whispered impassioned that I was hers, she could not spare me to another, and I might claim her when I would and she would come to me.
Her love, her rapture, her absorbing sympathy, were inexpressibly touching to me in my moody distress. Let all the world go by, so long as this dear flower of it sweetened on my heart.
“Ira,” I whispered, fondling her in an ecstasy, “I believe I know where your aunt has gone.”
“O, Richard!” she answered. “That is heavenly. Am I to know no more?”
“Wait a little, you lovely thing. I may want you all before long. I am very much alone. Perhaps—Ira, will you meet me to-morrow, under the old hawthorn?”
“Yes, Richard. Anywhere, and at any time you tell me.”
“Say at three o’clock.”
“Shall I make a note of it, Richard?”
“I’ll do it for you—look, on the inside of your elbow. Now bend your arm, and keep it hidden from everybody.”
Henceforththe chase runs on, swift and relentless; and I give myself, with a fierce joy, to lead it over rocks and wounding briars, since it will drive me where by justice I should follow. Hounded and harassed of all the world, save in the instance of its two dear loyalest hearts, I turn at bay at length, and fight the bitter quarrel to an end. Then, though I lose, my persecutors shall bear for ever the marks of that affray, while I—while I am healing of my wounds in Avalon. When all is done, mine, I think, shall be the sweeter solace.
All that morning following the interview, I waited, in a conflict of emotions, for the hour of my appointment with Lord Skene. I would not doubt its upshot—and yet I doubted. It seemed incredible that I could have come so far to win so little. Was he so obsessed, so infatuated a spouse, that all other interests were subordinated in his mind to the one passion of uxoriousness? I believe indeed that that was the case. So he only might recover his beautiful partner, all less importunate pleas for restitution were as the silence of the dead to him. He would subscribe to any conditions, would do, or leave undone, whatever appeared to speed him to that amorous conclusion.
And what about the dead? Alas! a yearning for their reincarnation is always, I fear, the most artificial of sentiments. A re-embodied spirit would be the last to find a welcome in his old place. His effect upon the laws of property would be so destructive, would it not? his claims on our maturer sympathies, such an anachronism and a bore? Jerusalem, I think, must have been deeply relieved when its wandering dead lay down again.
Now, I was in the very act of starting for the house, when I saw the figure of his lordship himself coming briskly over the snow towards me—and from the direction of the road. I paused, in some astonishment, to await him. Already, I think, a premonition of the truth was foreclosing on me. There was an indescribable air of elation in his face, pink with exercise, and in his sprightly step and the almost imperceptible cock of his hat. Could this be the collapsed and stricken soul from whom I had parted not so many hours ago? A sort of desperate effrontery seized me.
“You have come from Market Grazing, sir?” I said as he reached me. “Well, that was against my advice.”
The roses in his cheeks deepened, I could have thought, to damask. But he was full of good humour, and would not be put out of it.
“Pooh!” he said, with a little embarrassed laugh; and, taking my arm, walked me slowly up the path through the woods. “You have established a claim to some licence, Gaskett; but you must remember that advice is not prescription.”
“I am glad, at least, you admit the claim, sir. It would appear a more gracious admission, perhaps, if you were to address me less formally.”
He turned to look at me with an odd expression of challenge, or, it might be, propitiation.
“Well, as to that,” he said, “I have something to say. In the meantime, I am to congratulate you, and myself, on the correctness of your surmise.”
“She was there—at Pugsley’s?”
“Yes.”
“Well, sir?”
“I have full hopes the matter may be accommodated—hushed up. It comes to be merely a question of the figure.”
“Good God, sir!”
We stopped simultaneously, falling apart. For a moment a silence fell between us. The colour had left his face a little; but his mouth was set in a line of resolution—defiance, even.
“Do you mean to tell me, sir,” I said in a low voice, “that what you are implying is a money compromise with Mr Dalston?”
“Yes, that is exactly it,” he answered shortly.
I drew and expelled a deep breath. It was to be battle, then—my rights against a sentiment.
“Lord Skene,” I said clearly, “do you understand what this decision means to me? Have you drawn any real inference from the facts I have put before you?”
“Hush, my boy, hush!” he said pacifically. “I have reached a point, certainly, as you have, beyond which all is speculation and surmise.”
“As yet—yes.”
“Why test it further? It is an incredible enough tale as it stands. I have listened to many less improbable in my time, and found them one and all to crumble under the weight of evidence. What chief witness remains to this? Why one who has never spoken the truth in her life, but whose reputation, on the other hand, would involve in its exposure the very soul of truth. I must ask you to bear in mind, Richard, that this wretched woman is still my wife’s mother.”
“I bear it in mind, sir, as I do also bear in mind, and most firmly believe, that she helped Mr Dalston, who had made me fatherless, to make me motherless also.”
He remained silent a little, seeming to struggle for expression.
“Well,” he said at last, “it may be conceded as a plausible theory, at least. But what if, after all, so dark and fantastic a tale failed of itself before the test of daylight? You would hardly have bettered your position in that case, Richard. But let it stand at the point where it has arrived, and I, for my part, am willing to accept it on its merits.”
“In which case, sir?”
“In which case I should admit the moral of your more intimate claim on my regard, both sentimental and practical.”
“You would not, do you not mean, acknowledge me as a grandson, but you would undertake that I received the provision of one?”
“Yes—distinctly—that is what I mean.”
“You are no niggard, sir, I see, in your bids for silence. Had not I and Mr Dalston better make a common purse of it, and set up trade together as murderers and blackmailers?”
He drew back instantly.
“You have your choice of refusing,” he said coldly.
“And I refuse,” I answered, with a most bitter scorn. “I am no Esau, sir, though Fate has made me a hunter. Throw dust in your own eyes if you will. For me, I do not stop nor rest until I have probed this matter to an end. Have no fear for Lady Skene. Believing what I believe, the humiliation of your family is the thing farthest from my thoughts. It will not suffer, I think, from the vindication of the truth.”
He listened to my outburst with an expression which lightened from gloom to a certain wonder.
“Well,” he said, “well—if you are prepared to take the consequences of failure.”
“From you?” I cried.
I moved a step nearer to him.
“Lord Skene,” I said, “will you please to look at me? Is there a likeness or is there not? Have not you yourself been strangely conscious of it more than once? Did not Sir Maurice Carnac call me by his name?”
He bit his lip.
“O! I daresay Charlie was no Joseph,” he said.
“O!” I answered, much enlightened; “I beg your pardon. Very blind of me, to be sure. I may be a bastard none the less, you mean? Well, it is in the reckoning; but, for all your assumption, sir, you seem to dread the test more than I do.”
“Well, frankly, I think I do,” he said. “Truth, you see, is often a confoundedly unwelcome sort of visitor—like a poor relation—very upsetting to the conveniences. I notice, by the way, her name’s pretty familiar on your tongue. Do you hold it compatible with your very strict worship of her to suborn a young lady under the nose of her guardian?”
If I had startled him, he had retorted effectually. He sniggered a little, though with an aggravated sound, witnessing my astonishment. But I at least was in no mood for compromises.
“Miss Christmas has engaged herself to me,” I said shortly.
He gave a soft whistle, raising his eyebrows.
“Indeed?” he said drily. Then he looked at me searchingly. “She is not of age. It is in my power, of course you know, to refuse my consent.”
There was a significance in his tone that I could not misunderstand.
“Not even for that bribe, sir,” I said. “If needs must be, I’ll win to both name and wife without your help.”
His cheek went like fire. He turned without a word, and strode off a few paces; but suddenly wheeled and came back.
“That was infernally insulting,” he exclaimed. “What did you mean to imply by it?”
“I am very untutored, sir,” I answered in a tone of mock humility; “and I beg your pardon. I thought you were offering me a wife to keep me quiet. But, of course, the prospect of honouring her through a successful vindication of the truth is my chief stimulus to action. You could have no objection to the match in the event of my triumphing, I am sure.”
He turned again resolutely.
“Go your damned way,” he said. “Only favour me by being quick about it. You’ll understand, of course, that so long as you are pursuing it, pig-headed, my hands are tied.”
From that weak and evil compromise, he meant.
“Trust me, sir,” I said, “not to linger out the agony; and trust me once again to hold the honour of your family sacred through everything.”
“A cock-and-bull story,” he muttered fuming, and, without another look at me, took the path to the house.
I stood a little, watching his retreat. What form of possession was this which could so cloud, yes and pollute, the very spring of justice? Had his jurisdiction always been at the mercy of his senses? It was not the least of the anomaly, perhaps, that he should have been of that order of judge which visits a certain sort of offence with the full weight of the law, betraying, possibly, in its sentences on others, the measure of its own self-condemnation. “There,” he might, perhaps, have said, in dooming Geoletti, “but for the mercy of God, goes Charles Skene!” But, maybe, I myself was judging him hardly. He had a wider experience than I of the criminal genius’s infinite capacity for deception. No doubt the Italian’s story had really left him incredulous.
But, whatever the premises, the conclusion was manifest. I must be satisfied henceforth to play my part independent of him. He would not interfere, I gathered, but he would not help. So be it. The burden of the proof should be appropriated to my sole shoulders from that moment.
The end found me curiously exalted. I felt as if I were breathing a fuller, more intoxicating air. It was to be Ira and I at last, each for the other, against all the world. That seemed to simplify the issues; to make my task a less complicated one. Ira and I, foot to foot, side to side, to run the race together, and win if we might, or, if we lost, to sink no less breathless to our reward in the grass by the roadside. I pictured it thus. I could believe in my dear love still, thank God!
The mood had not left me when I came down over the snow to the old hawthorn in Hags Lane, and found her there awaiting me. I took her worshipfully into my arms, as befitted a fragile figure of such price.
“Ira,” I said, “would you like to have me tell you everything at last?”
“O, Richard! will you?”
“Wait a minute. Let me feel your bones—these ribs are like a rabbit’s. I doubt if they could stand such a hammering.”
“Try them, Richard. Have you never read ‘Maud’? Don’t you remember the shell that a finger-nail could break, but that the cataract shock of the seas could not? Only an unloving word from you could break me, Richard.”
“You ineffable dear. I like to hear you quote like that; I like to see you capable of thinking of anything again but ghosts and shadows. Let us get the last of them out of the way—shall we? and prepare for the time when there shall never be a secret left between us.”
“O yes, yes!—if you please, my lord.”
“My lord, you Pythoness? Do you know what a prophetic word you have used?”
“How can I know anything when you have told me nothing?”
“It is so difficult to begin, Ira; and there are things, such essential things, which I am wondering how I can put without offence to my innocent love. I don’t know how I shall do it, unless—unless you can imagine yourself to be my wife in actual earnest. Do you think you can?”
“Perhaps, Richard—if I shut my eyes very tight.”
“Yes; shut them—that is the way—and a seal on each. Now they can’t open till I break the seal. You are quite blind, Ira? and you must trust yourself to me. I am going to lead you through gloom and wicked places—dreadful, ghastly places; but you mustn’t mind—nothing shall hurt you. Now, are you holding me tight?”
“Yes, Richard. Can’t you feel me?”
* * * * * * * * *
“What do you think, Ira?”
“May I open my eyes?”
“Yes—but wait a minute. There!”
“Shall I be the Honourable Mrs Skene, Richard?”
“So you have jumped to that conclusion? I did not know if you would see it. What wits women have. Don’t cry so, my pretty bird.”
“How can I help it? Such a horrible, horrible story—and the poor body lying there still—hardly your own age, Richard. ... This man!—it makes me ill to think I have spoken to him—touched him in passing, perhaps. What are you going to do?”
“What does that matter to you, cry-baby?”
“I thought we were married, Richard. Make me shut my eyes again.”
“No, keep them open. You put me in such an ecstasy. What ought I to do?”
“I don’t think you ought to do anything. It is Uncle Charlie’s business.”
“Well, he just wants to pay the man to go away and hold his tongue, and, because I don’t see it in that light, has rather quarrelled with me.”
“It is infamous. Why should you be expected to incur any risk or danger? Richard, don’t dare this dreadful man on your own account—O, don’t, Richard!”
“I will be very careful. Shall I tell you what I had thought of doing?”
“What?”
“Going straight to Johnny Dando, and getting him to help me.”
“Mr Dando, Richard! How could that funny little creature help you?”
“Funny? Don’t you know that he is enormously rich?”
“What difference does that make? His gilding only seems to show up his roundness, like one of grandpapa’s pills.”
“Don’t talk of pills, miss, to a scion of the Skene family.”
“I am very sorry.”
“You have the curative principle in you, you little duck of a quack. Perhaps you have inherited it. I was very bad till I took you. Would you like a testimonial, dear? But seriously, there is no calculating what this business may cost me; and my savings don’t amount to much.”
“Richard!”
“Now, I know what you’re going to say. I will steal your heart, Ira; I will rob your lips, like a greedy boy in an orchard; I will thieve every bit of you else, but your money I won’t take. Think, if I touched it, in what a light it would seem to show me! No; Johnny put his wealth at my disposal once, and then I refused; but things have altered since. What was a speculation then, seems now a fairly promising investment. There’s only one objection.”
“What is it, dear?”
“Why, it would mean his helping me to you.”
“Why is that an objection?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No, indeed I can’t.”
“He loves you too, Ira.”
“Nonsense, Richard.”
“He does, really and truly.”
“Then, if he does, he’ll want to make me happy.”
O, the poignant, lovely inhumanity of women!
“Will he?” I said. “Well, to do him justice, I believe he would. But, supposing it were the other way about, and I was the rich one, and you and he were engaged and he wanted my help?”
“Then it would be very unwise of him to ask it, for I should fall in love with you, of course.”
“And now, I suppose, if he helps me, you’ll fall in love with him?”
“O, Richard! how absurd you are! Can’t you see, dear? And they call women illogical.”
“Never mind about that, Ira. You’re a very much abused sex, by all who don’t know you. Well, you think I’m justified in going to Johnny?”
“Yes, indeed. I think now, perhaps, it might be the very best thing you could do. I’m sure he’d take care of you for my sake. Only——”
“Only what, Ira?”
She put her young arms about my neck, tearfully, entreatingly:
“Must you take this man with you, Richard?”
“Geoletti, do you mean?”
“How is he so much better than the other? To know of that dreadful thing, and keep it secret just for his own profit!”
“He was educated to another code of morals than ours, Ira. It’s no good thinking of the gulf between us; but you must see that his company is indispensable to me.”
“I suppose I must. Will you be gone for long?”
“I can’t say. But I will write to you every day, and twice a day, if you like.”
“Will you? Will you really? I shall be miserable until you are safe home again. Richard”—she held me closer—“there is one thing yet which I haven’t dared to speak about—Mrs Dalston.”
With a woman’s sensitive intuition, she had found, and touched in sympathy, the real most poignant nerve of this complex tragedy. The point had not even occurred to Lord Skene.
“I understand what you mean, dearest,” I said softly. “If all surmise is justified, I am hounding to his doom the husband of my mother.”
“And she would wish it so, you believe?”
“I am bound to believe it.”
“O, Richard! is it not the most tragic thing of all that you should have wasted all your poor heart of love in pleading to a mother that was no mother to you, and, when the real one came, that you should have turned from her like a stranger?”
“It is the most tragic thing, Ira—and the worst that I cannot bring myself even now to look upon her as anything but Mrs Dalston.”
She sighed. “It is all a dreadful tangle. I wish it were unravelled and done with.”
“I am going to unravel it, for better or worse. And, if for worse, Ira?”
She kissed me, of her own sweet will, in a passion of tears.
“I don’t care about a name, Richard. I don’t want to be Lady Skene. You could never be more to me than you are. If you will only come back to me, the same as you are now, my heart will have room for not one other joy.”
Awaywith wooer’s gallivanting, and all the soft and sugary stuff of dreams. A sterner wind than Zephyr speeds me on my way, and lands me, hard of purpose, in the midst of London, and blows me with a crack up against Johnny’s door. He is established for the time being, with his mother, in a luxurious flat in Victoria Street, and the round red-glass stove in his hall is not more glowing with a warmth of welcome than is the face with which he greets me.
“I say, Dick,” he says presently, “who spoke of fairies?”
“Not I, Johnny.”
“Didn’t you? I say, how’s Miss Christmas, Dick?”
“She is very well, Johnny; she and I are engaged to be married.”
I would not appeal to his generosity—of that I had been determined—through any shadow of misunderstanding. He bore the blow like a Briton, a little huskily, with a little affectation, in the first of the shock, of bending down to tie his shoe.
“O!” he said, rising apoplectic, and with a quivering lip. “I’m sure I give you joy, old boy. I could never quite believe, you know, in your indifference. Who could, with such a prize before him? It’s all in the right order of things, you know; like—like thehoni soit, andquis separabitand the rest of them. I hope Lord Skene approves?”
“Not he.”
“Then he’s no gentleman.”
“He’s no fool, perhaps. Johnny, I’ve come primed with an enormous budget of news to explode on you.”
“Explode away, then.”
Whether it was the sobering effect of my first astounding stroke, or the absence of emotional distractions, I don’t know; but he received my story from beginning to end this time with a grasp and understanding that were positively pathetic.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, when I had reached a finish. “You must come with me to-morrow and see Shapter. He’s our family solicitor, and as sharp as flints. This thing’s got beyond the private and personal note—don’t you agree with me?”
“I’m afraid I must, Johnny.”
“Now, look here, Dicky; you’re giving me my first chance at what I have always pined for and never had the luck nor the figure to get—a personal part in a real, picturesque, mystery-and-murder romance. I’m not going to be excused out of it, nor forbidden to engineer it as lavish as I please. It’s the great opportunity of my life, and I shall take it unkind if you refuse me a free hand to work it. You’re not to have a share at all in the financing of the venture—you understand that. If I allowed you one, it would rub all the gilt off my own make-believe.”
I understood him, and his fine delicacy. This was his way of assuring me the practical help which I could not but need.
“Put it as you like, Johnny,” I said. “You’re a dear good fellow every way.”
“Very well,” he answered; “that’s understood. Shapter will stage-manage the thing, and all we’ve got to do is to dress up and play our parts like professionals. My eye! I hope there’s a coronet among the properties. You see, it’s got to the point when, in my opinion, a reputable independent witness is not only wanted, but indispensable. You can’t run this any longer on your own responsibility—you might get into no end of scrapes; and, as to me, why, I haven’t shown any partic’lar gift for doing the detective, have I?”
“You betray a tendency, perhaps, Johnny, to jump too hastily to conclusions.”
“Ah! you may go into fits, if you like. I had my turn of ’em with Drysalter. My word hewasa pepper-castor! I say, Dick——”
“Yes, Johnny?”
“You’re quite sure you and Miss Christmas are engaged?”
“Perfectly certain, Johnny.”
“You ain’t by chance thinking of anybody else, similar sort of name, are you?”
“No; there’s no mistake about it.”
“Ah!”
He pondered a little, sombrely.
“Did she know you were coming here, to see me?” he asked presently.
“Yes, I told her. Perhaps you would like to know what she remarked upon it.”
“Shouldn’t I!”
“She said, ‘I’m sure, for my sake, Richard, he’ll take care of you.’”
“Didshe say that, Dick—didshe?”
“Her very words, old fellow.”
“By George! tell her I’ll never let you out of my sight until it’s to give you back to her.”
He got up in some emotion, and walked to the window. If in all that hurrying panorama beneath his eyes, that endless procession of shapes and shadows all set on overtaking and outstripping one another in the race for wealth, there was moving onward one only other soul as disinterestedly intent as he on a brother’s welfare, the old dark city, I am sure, might yet boast of the seed of promise in its veins.
I dined at the flat that evening. I was not introduced to Johnny’s mamma until, having entered the banqueting-hall, my attention was called to an extraordinary old lady seated already at the head of the table in a wheel-chair in the nature of a portable throne. She was enormously squat and fat, like a loaf, and her head, I fear, bore no more testimony to the efficacy of “Grafto” than had the late lamented analyst’s. The pile on it, nominally golden, but of a hue that never was on sea or land, was so glaringly, even so loosely adjusted, that, if she had turned a great bird’s nest upside down on her head, the deception could not have been more flagrant. It’s size and precariousness so engrossed my attention, that once, when a blundering footman knocked it crooked with a plate, and she said placidly, “You nearly upset my hair, Richard!” I felt as if the rebuke were personal to myself, and blushed over the involuntary movement I had made to catch it before it fell into the soup. The man put it straight like a dish cover, without his mistress, or himself, or anybody else exhibiting the least disturbance; and then I comprehended upon what purely undissembling terms the article stood, and felt that one could no more quarrel with it on the score of mendacity than with a bonnet.
I have never seen a mass of woman so complacent and imperturbable. She sat basking in speechless comfort, and only emitted, at intervals and at large, rich oracular remarks about the food. These might be understood to owe their provocation either to the nice constitution of some particular dish, or dishes, or to one’s unappreciative attitude towards such in their passing. Thus, the dictum “The leg of a pheasant and the wing of a grouse,” pronounced significantly during the game course, may have been interpretable into a general proposition of fitness or a personal admonition—there was no telling from the expression of the speaker, because she was absolutely without any, nor from the direction of her eyes, which she could only move by moving her whole body with them, a process much too laborious for the occasion. I could never get rid, however, of an uncomfortable feeling that there was something in these utterances aimed aggressively at myself and my gastronomic perversity, as when, as if in correction of some spirit of contradictoriness observed in me, she suddenly decreed, “Fry bread-crumbs in butter, but sippets in dripping,” or appeared, when I was in the very act of helping myself from a particular dish, to throw an unfounded aspersion upon my age by asserting with finality, “Crack no nuts at all, if you can’t crack ’em with your teeth.”
Her last remark but one occurred at dessert, when she suddenly asseverated, without looking at anything, “The late Prince Consort always ate his orange with a spoon,” a statement which caused me blushingly to lay down my knife and fork. And finally, having eaten a stupendous dinner, with the large unimpassioned confidence of one who had never yet been mistaken in her digestion, with the observation on her lips that “The late Duke of Wellington used to remark that when it’s time to turn over it’s time to turn out,” she was wheeled from the room by the man called Richard, and disappeared from my ken for ever.
But Johnny (who, by the way, wore a white waistcoat, with real turquoise buttons), put my inward sniggering all to shame by his perfectly natural acceptance of this remarkable parent. He was dutiful, and attentive, and always respectful in his attitude towards her—unconscious of any reason, indeed, why she should figure as something slightly abnormal to alien eyes. It had occurred to me, irresistibly but abominably, how Ira would have regarded such a mother-in-law. Now, hearing the good fellow expatiating on his mamma’s generosity and loving-kindness, I was ashamed of myself and joined warmly in the eulogium.
These two lived in the lap of wealth. The whole flat was alive with gorgeous, soft-stepping flunkeys, whose plush breeches took the doorways with beauty. Mrs Dando herself, for all her bulk, had been caked with diamonds. Yet, I believe, the enormous residuum of that wealth, when the price of its ostentation was deducted, was devoted almost exclusively to good works. Which of us, humbler endowed, could make the same boast relatively? Certainly I had no reason to criticise a display, whose moral, as it affected me alone, was all of a delicate helpfulness and generosity.
Johnny and I sat up pretty late together, discussing my affairs; and when I left my friend, to return to the modest quarters where I had left Geoletti awaiting me, it was only to breach, by a little interval of sleep, the business on whose full tide his wealth, and help, and devotion were to launch me.
At eleven o’clock on the following morning I went to my appointment, accompanied by the Italian. Mr Shapter’s offices were in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; and it gave me my first real inkling, perhaps, of the worldly consequence of my little half-condescended-to old schoolfellow, when I observed with what deference, and with what disregard of the prior claims of lesser waiting clients, he was ushered into the great man’s presence.
I am not going to detail the processes of the interview which followed. It would be merely to retread well-trodden ground. My story and Geoletti’s were heard, and balanced, and compared, and the right inferences drawn from them, with an insight and acumen which gave me a high opinion of the qualities upon which great legal reputations are based. The conclusion is the essential thing, and that is related in a line. It was to be Mother Carey first; and, after her, Aosta and Lapluietonnante.
Thelast of the snow was gurgling itself away into the black drain-traps, and the face of the town was smeared like a sweep’s under a dreary drizzle, when Mr Shapter, and I, and a certain hard-faced gentleman, with a habit of rubbing his jaw grittily under reflection, came down to the grimy little tenement in Old Paradise Street. At the door, the hard-faced gentleman, motioning us to one side and bending to the keyhole, gave a call like an itinerant potman’s. The commendable ruse proving successful, brought, after the briefest interview, an old remembered step shuffling along the passage. The key turned and the chain ran gratingly, and, following the unbaring, a filthy claw, grasping a jug, was protruded through the aperture revealed. Quick and soft as the swoop of an owl, the hard-faced man’s fingers closed on the boney wrist, and the jug dropped to the pavement with a crash. And straightway, like a hooked fish’s, the nose and flexuous mouth of old Mother Carey came wobbling and gasping to the light of day. The screech of fear and fury, which she struggled on the instant to omit, sticking in her throat, the detective took quick advantage of that momentary paralysis.
“Come along now,” he said. “I’m the law, do you understand? and you’re wanted on a charge of murder. You’d best let me in, and hear what I’ve got to say.”
As with the jug on one side of the door, so, on the other, down went Mother Carey. She tumbled in a heap, rending away from the clutch on her wrist, and appeared to lie in the hall moaning. Very swiftly and neatly then, using a tool he had taken from his pocket, the detective, nearly closing the door first, ran the chain along its socket within, and made himself master of the filthy stronghold. Once entered, he beckoned to us, and stooping to the collapsed figure a moment, rose to his height again.
“All right, gentlemen,” he said. “She’s all right. Shut that door please—now my good people” (this to the inevitable congregation gathering outside), “this ain’t an inquest, you know. Come clear away, clear away.”
He stepped across the whispering bundle on the boards, drew us in, and closed the door on the little breathless group of faces.
“Now,” he said, “if you’ll please to go and make a light somewheres, will you, sir, so as we can see ourselves speak? Better take the back for privacy.”
We went as directed, and found a reasty little kitchen, black with grease and soot, its walls flaking, its floor vermin-riddled, its long cold grate one refuse-bin of garbage. There was a tattered curtain pinned across the window, and this we unfastened to let in the daylight. It seemed to awaken immemorial odours in its entrance. The squalor of the place took on a festering sickness.
Hardly had we pulled the rag from its string, when the detective came bearing in his capture professionalwise. He did not actually carry the old woman, but he lifted her before him at a sort of helpless run. I was glad to see at least that she had recovered her nerves of motion, as I had feared that her downfall might have signified a stroke of some sort.
He flopped her unceremoniously into a chair, where she sat rocking and weeping and mumbling, and swaying her head and hands up and down like a Japanese tortoise. But, for all her apparent collapse, I had a shrewd idea that her eyes were not failing to take stock of me, and that her mind was busy over that association of ideas which my return in company with the law could not have failed to suggest. She kept up her mechanical moaning, I thought, simply to gain time.
“Now, ma’am,” said the detective suavely. “When you’re quite recovered.”
Her moans rose the windier at that, but presently with scraps of articulation threading them.
“O good sir the deuce! ... O my heart and lungs! ... the shock of it good sir ... wouldn’t hurt a fly the devil take it ... O what a libel and slander on poor old Mother Carey the deuce!”
“Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “we can’t undertake to breathe this atmosphere indefinitely. You’d better call a cab, and remove this woman.”
“Very well, sir.”
The suggestion wrought its desired effect. Mother Carey became all in a moment distinct to tearfulness.
“O good gentlemen, what is it you want of me? O that I should have lived to hear my deuced self accused of the devil and all! Is it anything about this young gentleman? O I’ll tell you the truth I will!”
“That’ll do, then,” said the detective. “It won’t serve you the worse perhaps in the long run. You’re pretty deep involved, you know, old lady; but mayhap there’s another deeper yet. Don’t be saying now you was never in collusion with Mr Dalston, because I know better. We’re coming to him in good time; but just for the present the question stands with you. Do you understand what I mean, a-linking of you and him together? Of course you do, a woman of your cleverness. Well, look at this young gentleman. Have you seen him afore?”
She whispered something, huddled into herself.
“What! more than once, perhaps,” said Mr Jannaway. “Right you are, I do believe. It was him, wasn’t it now, you played the dutiful grandmother to once upon a time, and ended by palming off on your daughter as her own very partic’lar offspring? That was a cute move, upon my word; and it paid you, didn’t it—paid you nigh as well as Mr Dalston did for putting that other out of the way?”
She uttered a thin screech, and sank upon her quaking ignoble old knees.
“I didn’t do it, good gentlemen,” she cried—“before God and the deuce of my poor lungs I didn’t. O I’ve always been expecting something of this sort to be charged to me, ever since him there came prying in with his rakings-up and smellings-out of old deuces. I never put anything out of the way I didn’t. My Georgie’s baby was dead already when Dalston brought the other. Ask the devil of a doctor if you don’t believe me.”
“Ah!” The detective shot a significant glance at Mr Shapter. “Dead was it—the fruits of the little mistake as your daughter had made with Mr Dalston, eh?”
“It was that drove me to send a message to him,” cried the miserable old woman. “I told him he needn’t expect on that account to escape the consequences of his deuced deed, but that I’d prove it against him, and ruin him with his fine new lady none the less, if he didn’t come to terms.”
“Exactly. And he answered?”
“He answered, O the devil, by turning up with a live baby as his fine lady had borne to another, and by proposing to exchange it for the dead one. She’d never know, he said, and Georgie would never know neither, as they was both, the two of them, lying light-headed from their confinements. It was true of my daughter, anyhow; and, when she came to herself at last, she never thought but to accept the other one’s baby for her own, though to be sure, as things turned out, she never could abide it. He told me, for his part, that he’d no mind as the child of another should come to inherit his lady’s money; and so we agreed to make the exchange, and he paid me to keep the secret, and that is the devil and all of the truth, so God burst my lungs if it isn’t.”
“And bad enough, old lady. It couldn’t be much worse, to my mind, short of murder.”
“I never killed nothing,” she moaned. “I wouldn’t put my hand to such a wickedness.”
“You’ll have to put it to a document attesting all this, though,” said the detective, “if you want to save your bacon.”
“I’ll do it, sir,” she said; “I’ll do it, on the deuce of my honour, if you’ll only promise not to let him get at me.”
Mr Shapter, standing with me in the background, caught and pressed my hand congratulatory, and then stepped forward.
“Come, Jannaway,” he said; “paper and ink. We’ll clinch this matter while we are about it.”
It was what I had half expected, half foreseen; but the assurance of its actuality found me stunned from speech. I could only look on and listen in a sort of stupor, while the lawyer wrote, and finished, and read out what he had written—the evidence—circumstantial, if you like—to my parentage.
They had to support the old woman between them while she put her trembling signature to the statement; and, when they released her, she sank moaning once more to the floor.
“Don’t tell him I done it, good deuced gentlemen; don’t set him on to me.”
“Now, look here, old lady,” said the detective, “if what we’re aiming at doing comes to pass,hewon’t be in a position to be set on to anything but a galley bench. All you’ve got to do is to lie quiet and hold your mouth until you hear from us again; and then possibly, I say possibly, it may come to happen that you don’t hear from us at all.”
She looked up with a sudden relief of craft in her watery eyes.
“And my little settlement as I draw from his lawyers the deuce bless you, dears—it won’t be interfered with?—now say it won’t, dovies.”
“Come, Jannaway!” said Mr Shapter sharply.
She gathered herself together hurriedly, and got to her feet with a scrambling skip, and followed us protesting and entreating all down the passage. Finally, perceiving her prayers to be entirely disregarded, she slammed the door upon us with a screaming oath.
Outside, the detective pondered me, grating his chin.