“Well, sir,” he said, “that settles it. There’s no rope for his neck here. We’ll have to be satisfied with what Italy can give us in its place.”
“Whatever that may be, it must fall far short of his deserts,” said Mr Shapter. “A very pretty scoundrel, on my honour. Well, Mr Gaskett—as I must still call you I suppose” (he took my arm, and we all set off on our way back to his office)—“so far, I think we may say so, excellently good. Whether Italy will confirm our claim, or fail of its evidence, remains to be seen. It would be a pity, apart from our more personal interest, if it did fail, because any such conclusion must mean the escape of a scoundrel of a very choice pattern. But we will hope for the best.”
“Will it be necessary, do you think, to draw further upon Lady Skene’s parent?”
“I hope not; I think not; family feelings must be respected. At the same time it must depend very largely upon the attitude which Lord Skene shall elect to adopt.”
“Well, sir, when is it to be Italy, and for which of us?”
“There must be a delay, I think, of a few days, while Scotland Yard communicates with Turin. Mr Dando insists upon accompanying us; so there will be for the venture he, you, I, Jannaway, and your witness—quite a little regiment—I trust not a forlorn hope. But it all turns upon the question of that marriage—its proof and legitimacy. A lot may come to perish in twenty years. That may stand for a text out of the criminal’s Vade-mecum. I daresay Mr Dalston nowadays is not troubled much with nightmare.”
I pausein the chase to jot down a note or two. It is when the quarry lies close, and the hounds are drawing cover, and a little breathing space is mine for rest and sentiment. A moment, and we shall be on again.
On the day of our visit to Mother Carey I wrote to Lord Skene, giving him the full particulars of that interview, of the circumstances which had ledto, and of the conclusions to be drawnfromit. How he might choose to regard those conclusions, whether in his former sceptical spirit, or in one more accommodating, could only now, I said, affect the temper of my resolution, not its inexorableness. He might make my purpose a dutiful or a rebellious one; he could not turn me from it. The inference to be drawn from that confession, I insisted, was too plain to be mistaken by any not wilfully blind; and the friends who had taken up my cause for me were at least sufficiently convinced of its justice to be determined to spare no trouble nor expense in the effort to secure me its last essential confirmation. I put the whole case to him in a frank, unimpassioned, and perfectly respectful manner; but I expressed through all an insistence on my right to act independently in my own behalf, should he still see fit to refuse me his countenance in the venture. And with that I ended.
His answer, when it came, was courteous, unconvinced,entêté. He was obliged to me, he said, for my information regarding a certain unscrupulous transaction, inasmuch as it furnished him with an effective retort upon the insolence of a scoundrel, should that scoundrel ever have the effrontery to attempt a new move in what was virtually a lost game to him. For the rest, he had not changed in his opinion that it would be the best wisdom to let sleeping dogs lie, and, for me, to reconsider his suggestion of a compromise, lest “aiming at all, I lost all.” In the meantime, he had to inform me that Mr Dalston—aware somehow, no doubt, of a threatening turn in events—had disappeared from the neighbourhood, leaving his lady in sole possession of the Lone Farm; and, consequently, that Lady Skene, induced by circumstances and fortified by my revelation, had been persuaded into reconsidering her resolve to renounce the world, and was now in actual fact returned to her duties as wife and mother at Evercreech, which was after all the end of all ends, so far as he was concerned.
I said to myself, with a bitter laugh, as I put the letter into the fire, that I could quite believe it. It was the end of all ends to him—had always been, and would always be. And then I broke the seal of another letter which represented the end of all ends to me. Perhaps I was inconsistent in blaming him. Was I less infatuated myself? I would have disputed fifty successions that seemed to bar me from that one peaceful possession.
She wanted me, my love—how she wanted me! It was the first letter I had ever received from her—a little sweet pleasance of her soul, crossed with shadow and sunshine. Had I ever guessed, she asked, how love could fly? By so much the greater speed than an express train, that, though she had herself seen me off from Footover Station, she had been waiting on the platform at Waterloo for two hours—scheduled time—when I had reached it. And I had never even noticed her waiting and holding out her arms among the throng; but had jumped into a hansom (there she was wrong; it was an omnibus), and had sped away into the shadows, leaving love forlorn. Should she ever find me again? Lord Skene, she told me, had come to the sudden resolution to take his whole family up to town—they were going to start in a day or two—herself included; and that had given her at first a wild thrill of joy. But then she had remembered that London was farther than Evercreech from the Continent, and her spirits had fallen again. Still, it would be sweet to tread the stones—or thereabouts—which my feet had lately trodden.
She spoke of Death—how dreadful it was that love, like all lesser things, must die—that four hands, clinging at once, had no greater hold on life than two. But there I corrected her very confidently, when I came to answer. “Is not love the seed love the flower, and love the flower love the seed? What is death but the snake casting its skin? The old autumn cloak falls off, and there is spring underneath—not a new spring, Ira, but the same spring as always; you and I as we are at this moment; you and I as we shall be for ever. Our love shall ride on waves of day and night, summer and winter, joy and sorrow, till it reach the shores which are timeless, the shores which are unfruitful because all the ripe fruit of love is gathered there never to reproduce itself again, but to enjoy henceforth all the raptures of itself without the penalties.”
Those were love’s metaphysics. They might not satisfy philosophers; but they satisfied Ira, which was infinitely more to the point. Philosophy may endure the thought of death; it is a sweeter wisdom, I think, to delight in it.
So sounds the view-halloo, and I am off again, fresh from that little breathing space. But one thought now troubles me—troubles us all. What has occurred, if anything has occurred, to send our quarry into hiding?
Clankand fury and scream; by day and by night; squibbing like a fallen unspent comet the length of France, and leaving a shining trail as we go; by flat grey pastures, hardly billowing, and little churches with unfamiliar belfries, and rows of plumelike poplars, that pass and come again and flicker and dazzle like tall palings endlessly repeated; swooping at a perilous poise round the wine-shop ends of hamlets seemingly strayed and stranded in the fields, or grazing slow-crawling carts of a strange build, driven by stranger waggoners, as if the railway track were but a track after all, which we are wont to lose, and take up, and lose again; rushing, shrieking, upon little blue-smocked men, or, as often, women, who stand waving absurd flags at level-crossings, and only missing them, it appears, by the breadth of a wind-shaving; on again with a yell of baffled fury; ripping, periodically, if we may judge by the sound, a passage through match-wood stations, which fly into splinters about us, and disregarding all warning signals of long white arms flung up—so through a land, infinitely strange and wonderful to me, we go roaring southwards to our destiny.
A wild new experience to a woodland hermit—marvellous by day; weird beyond expression in the rushing dark. What islander, self-contained in his little sphere, might have guessed the wizard potency of that slender streak of water called the Channel? One takes it at a gulp, and, lo! there is a world about one continents removed, it seems, from the life of one’s knowledge. A seventy times seven leagued boot is the little steamer into which one puts one’s foot, to reach at a step from Dover to Calais. It is a longer stride by all the world than from Dan to Beersheba. The red trousers of the soldiers on the pier strike the first colour note of dissonance. They have walked with Napoleon in Egypt. The blood mystery of the Sphinx is in their hue.
And when night at last veils the scene from one’s aching eyes, and the shrieks, the eternal shrieks, are uttered in darkness, urging one on to what potential awakening in livid dawns—then is the time for dreams such as one has never dreamt before. When the throb of the engine claims one’s pulses to its beat, and its breath paints one with a sooty rime, and one feels oneself being slowly absorbed into the system of that crashing, hurtling monster—a small integral part of its mechanism—what hope seems left at last of any detachment from the chimera to which one has committed one’s destinies!
Such spaces may be covered in those long night hours. I had never realised the like before—had never been sped so far, by hundreds of miles, against my own will of volition. My helplessness affected me like a personal humiliation. We would catch up tempests, and tunnel a mad course through them, and leave them battling and booming in our rear. In ragged spaces of the clouds the moon would shine out, tossing like a lightship on tumultuous waters, and disappear, and be another beacon on another shoal when seen again. The shadow of a world rushed by our windows, phantom fabrics caught in starry glimpses, and always seeming stranger as we fled. But I slept at last, and was whirled a passionless straw upon the tide.
Very strange, in truth, was all this long journey to me. Yet it was taken in fullest possession of the antidote to its worst penalties. Johnny symbolised that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. I had already suspected the fact; now I was convinced of it. The subtle aroma of his godhead had flown abroad, and our way thenceforth was to be clouded with the incense of mammon-worship. It was not enough that his purse had secured us every luxury meet to the amelioration of our hard lot; obsequious officials, in a democratic land, clamoured for the privilege of making our primrose path primrosier and the down of our cushions downier. They were so downy themselves, that if they had plucked their breasts like swans for our nesting, we should have been suffocated long before they were denuded. However, the attention brought its advantages to all but poor Johnny himself, whose way was made rocks and briars to him.
On and on unceasing tears the mad comet, until striking, after æons of flight, it seems, a mountain rampart, with a mighty crash and scatteration of sparks it goes to earth, and is quenched and buried from the eyes of the world in the Mont Cenis tunnel.
They advise you to keep the windows shut, as you go cork-screwing up that infernal staircase. You might find it worse if you did not; it is bad enough when you do. Drifts of asphyxiating smoke, fitfully lambent, stream by the glass, and writh about and nozzle where they fancy they have detected an opening. It may not be large enough for them to enter by, but whiffs of their poisonous breath leak in, and give you a taste of what you might expect were they to find you napping. The train itself, in that choking atmosphere, seems to go weak at the wheels, and to drag itself wearily upward, as if every revolution must be its last, committing you in prospect to the alternatives of entombment in the heart of a mountain or a back-descent at rocket-speed into France. A throb as of thunderous subterranean waters fills your ears; the wind of your passage clacks like a monstrous tongue on the stony roof above you; it seems impossible that any work of man can withstand the hugeness of that deafening uproar and vibration. But it is all, of course, acoustically exaggerated to you in your confined pen. You are going up a spiral chimney, with a sufficient ventilation at the top. The clamour of your rising emerges there with the smoke and steam, and, like a piston rod, you expel them before you as you advance. And so, at last, when you have almost given up hope, a flash—and Elysium.
I think the world can give one no first experience at once so sombre and so dazzlingly impressive as that of the passage of the Col de Fréjus, with its entry from low France and emergence into high Italy. Thirty minutes are but half-an-hour out in the daylight; in the Mont Cenis tunnel they amount to a good long spell of purgatory. There the wails of the damned go past in drifts of lurid smoke, most agitating in their bearing on the fragile pane which alone separates the eternal from the temporal classes. One finds oneself hoping that the ministers of justice have fully understood their instructions about one, and that one will be permitted to reach redemption without the window being broken. Curiously, too, the system of bought indulgence strikes one for the first time as having something in it. The cost would be very small to shorten this tunnel by a spiritual mile or two.
And yet, when it is ended, one would not have had it shorter by a metre, because every foot taken from it would mean just so much ecstasy filched from one’s awakening from a nightmare. For, behold! from travelling in a steaming suffocating drain pipe, one is spat out suddenly into Paradise in winter.
After that, it seems bathos to compare the prospect with a transformation scene at a pantomime; yet, I think, perhaps, the latter analogy is the apter. The instant glide from terrific night into fairyland; the stupendous brown gullies, dripping icicles from a sabre’s length to a maypole’s; snow in fields, on slopes, in ravines, all of a blinding lustre, and stained in its shadows of a celestial blue; a world of high-lifted iridescence, streaked with gold leaf, spangled with glass dust, discharging ice-crusted torrents under archways of glittering rock, climbing peak over peak to the heaven-painted “cloth” of light, living and violet, which makes its background—that is how the vision of Italy first broke upon me, emerging from the portal of the underworld.
But, as to Geoletti, the man was translated like Bottom the weaver. If, to me, the world had suddenly sprung into a vision of “cloud-capped towers” and glittering pinnacles chiming unearthly music from diamond bells, to him it was as the thronging of old familiar spirits gathered to greet his return. He gazed and gazed, and danced on his seat, and uttered uncouth ejaculations. He hugged himself in spasms, and bit his nails, and glared with burning eyes that the rising waters of his soul could hardly quench. Have you ever seen the wild spirit of the sea wake in a captive gull when the wind came on to blow? So wrought the spirit of his mountains on Geoletti. I think there was not one of us whose soul did not respond in some measure to the tragic pathos of that revelation. For what trifling messes of pottage cannot the fool in us be induced to part with his inheritance!
But enough of all this. My theme is Cain, not Esau; murder, not mountains. The comet, slackening now in its descent, bears us down by beautiful winding valleys to the plains of Piedmont, and spent and slow at length, discharges us upon Turin and Signor Valombroso.
That was his magnificent name, no less. He was not only the first of Piedmontese detectives, but an accomplished linguist to boot, and had been engaged from London, regardless of expense, to the service of Milord Johnny di Dando. He took us all under his wing at once, Inspector Jannaway even condescendingly, and shepherded the flock of us with a masterful volubility.
He was a tiny slim-waisted man, but his chest was stupendous. He might have packed all the rest of himself into it, and still have found room for a superior conceit or two. It stood for Valombroso in Valombroso’s own opinion. The frill, or comb, which strutted from it, through the unbuttoned upper half of its owner’s neat frock coat, proclaimed him cock of the walk in his own exclusive department. In further emphasis of Valombroso’s supremacy, Valombroso’s silk hat was put at an angle on his head like an acute accent on Valombroso, and Valombroso’s moustachios, waxed into stinglike points, were accents also, acute and grave, on Valombroso’s speech, which was copious and confident. In the course, indeed, of our acquaintance, Valombroso was to convince us, in flourishing rhetoric, that in foresight, in acumen, in penetration, as also in the conquering simplicity of his system, there was no detective—save one perhaps—in all the world who could approach Valombroso.
The possible exception was the English amateur, Mr Holmes, no less. Valombroso had the greatest admiration for this certainly unique man.
“He knows very well,” he said, “that it is not the criminal who want to mystify, but the public who want to be mystified. So he keep the clue, which is the obvious one, in his own hand, and send all the newspapers astray on many false scents. Then the time come when they are lost, every Jack’s son of them, and he bring them back, very gradual and gentle, to the path which shall end to the view of Mr Holmes holding his prisoner in the handcuffs. But there he was from the first, though they knew it not. He did not want them to know, for where then would have shown his cleverness? We all scorn the obvious, do we not? It is so unexciting. There is no reputation to be gained by seizing on it—not in England. Mr Holmes adapt himself to a demand—he is very clever. But your police, they make the demand by their stupidity. ‘Look,’ they say, ‘there is a man stealing a handkerchief from a lady’s pocket! let us watch him and watch him to make sure that he does not want only to blow his nose and return it.’ But presently he steals another handkerchief, and then another, and so they say, ‘Three handkerchiefs are more than the allowance to one nose; he must be a thief; let us arrest him’; and by that time there are three ladies who are without the means to blow their noses. So again, if a murder is committed and the murderer suspect—do they arrest him and put him by the heels while they bring the charge home? Not at all; they watch that he commit himself, and they tell the newspapers in the meantime all of what they are thinking and doing so cleverly, as if that murderer was the only one out of all the country that not read the newspapers. But the public applaud, and that is enough. It is not my way. I do not walk twenty kilometres to get across the street. I say, ‘Show me my man and I go for him.’ Frankness, frankness always—that is my method. Plain dealing is the last thing the criminal expect. It is against his nature. He feels for ever in his expectation the sudden pinioning from the back. He has no fear that I shall walk up to his face and take him by the hand. Now, I say, show me this body in its cave, and I ask no more. I go straight to England to procure Mr Dalston’s extradition. It is enough for what it is until I get him here locked safe. Then I will proceed to formulate my case. It is well to bring down your bird before you put the pot on to boil.”
We were all very much impressed—all of us, that is to say, but Jannaway. He maintained his insular reserve, and insular prejudice in favour of insular methods.
“Handkerchers, indeed!” said he, with a withering intonation. “I’d back any one of our London pickpockets to take and blow his nose inhishandkercher and put it all back into his pocket without his knowing. He’d never guess but that it was the echo of himself a-blowing of his own trumpet.”
This lack of the right appreciation rather disillusioned us, I think, about Jannaway. Assurance is always so much more convincing than reserve. We sneer at conceit, but we allow it the privileges of its self-estimation. Valombroso must know himself so much better than we could possibly know him; and so, as his method was frankness, what reason had we to doubt his being the greatest detective in the world? It was simply Jannaway’s jealousy.
From Turin we went north to Aosta, an old walled and turreted town, situated in a beautiful fertile valley under the mountains, and rich in Roman remains. I have no time nor will to enlarge on the thousand wondering sensations which all this novel experience awoke in me. They were poignant enough, but they do not come into the story. More germane to that is it to describe something of the feelings with which I approached this Mecca of my pilgrimage, and thought, with an agitation hardly to be repressed, how it was here that my father and mother had come, stealing away from their party, to put a bond upon their love. How old and far away and strange it all seemed! a pretty antique pastoral, smelling of pot-pourri, until—ah! one could not long forget the end of it, sordid and horrible, behind those tumbling waters.
Yet now, being here, a very strange and sweet realisation of my relationship to the dead came to me—for the first time, I think, as a full conviction. Not even, seeing his young eyes laugh down from that portrait on the wall at Evercreech, had I ever felt him so near to me and so understanding as when, in this place, I looked up to the hills and thought of what was lying hidden from me in their quiet folds. Charlie Skene—the lover and young husband of those days—the boy, still less than my own present age as he lay up there at this moment, and yet my father! Was it not all ghastly pitiful! and to think how that dastard blow had fallen upon three lives in one. O, Mr Mark Dalston—if they would only hang in Italy!
And so one morning we went up to Cormayeur, and found the Hospice of St Marguerite hardly altered, by Geoletti’s showing, from the Hospice of twenty years ago. There was even the same Directrice presiding over its establishment—a vivid, brown-eyed old dame, with cavernous cheeks and a vulturine neck. She remembered Geoletti, and the gossip about his utter evanishment; she remembered the young English milord, and his no less startling, if more explainable, disappearance; she remembered very well, better than all the rest, the little demoiselle, white and pink, and the old aunt, grim andde mauvaise humeur, whose cruelty had betrayed to scandal what should have adorned a pretty tale of love and matrimony. And were the cold ashes of that scandal to be raked over for the benefit of a new generation? she protested. Alas! if the dead were to be consulted for their countenances, better bury all men in the Abbey La Sagra di S. Michele, where the soil would convert them in a little into natural mummies—a significant suggestion, to be sure.
I have given a French tone to these observations, but, as a matter of fact, they talked a hybrid patois, nearer Savoyard than Italian, up in these remote tributary valleys of the Aosta. Valombroso had to be our interpreter to its meaning; but he was always equal to any exigencies of talk. He loved the sound of his own tongue impartially in all the dialects of Babel. He could give us a reason, too, for the strange anachronisms of dress which still prevailed in part among these mountaineers—cocked hats, to wit, and bright-coloured long-skirted coats, and breeches and stockings and shoe buckles. They were the scum of an old upheaval of the ancient order risen to the top, and not yet entirely skimmed away by the spirit of democracy. As to the coquettish bibbed caps of the women, they were designed, after the fashion of other whited sepulchres, to conceal the disfigurement of the goître.
But now all this becomes likened in my memory to the crackling of thorns under a pot, while I turn to face the real tragic purpose of our mission.
Emergingfrom the pine woods at last, we saw before us a vast barren slope scattered with an infinite débris of rocks and stones. The hill went up, shouldering itself hugely against a cold white sky. There might have been, from our point of view, no higher altitudes beyond; yet but a short climb was needed to reveal this waste as but a low-down step to the majesty of the peaks. They rose into view before us as we advanced, remote and ethereal, springing loftier with our every step, a whipped froth of pinnacles white as cream.
Presently, bearing to the right, we saw a cleft open in the ridge of the hill, and Geoletti, pointing to it, stopped us with a quivering cry:
“Ecco! Lapluietonnante!”
Thenceforth we moved on in a burdened silence. Even Valombroso seemed subdued under the weight of the responsibility approaching him. We neared the cleft, and the murmur of descending waters grew upon our ears. Then in a moment a crease seemed to open in the slope, and we recognised that we were coming to the brow of a falling gully or ravine, which divided the hill into two. The murmur increased, as we advanced, to a roar, tumultuous, astounding; and suddenly, ascending among rocks, we came out upon a little mossy sward, with the curved edge of a cataract whirling beyond it, like a section of a huge half-buried fly-wheel. It poured over a ledge a couple of yards above us, and, as one could see by peering cautiously, plunged in one unbroken fall of fifty feet or more into the sharp corner of a wooded gorge. It came sweeping in the beginning through a great yat or gate in the rocks above—a sluice regulating the overflow of some vast cistern of the mountains—and, after rebounding from that first mad descent, went crashing stair by stair down into the green basements of the world, where it sped itself away in a flurry of foam.
Huge rocks toppled to the lip of the fall, and piled themselves landward in a fantastic jumble. They were cracked, and split, and creviced in a thousand directions, but, among all the fissures, there was none that, to an ordinary soul, seemed potential of revelations. Mr Shapter, looking about him with a very white face, put our common thought into words:
“It must have needed an ingenious as well as an adventurous spirit to discover the clue to this secret.”
“Signore,” said Geoletti proudly, “Milord was not the first.”
The man, exalted to these rocky attics which were his home, was become another being from the hang-dog creature of my knowledge. His eyes had brightened, his step become elastic, he walked like one entitled to the command of the expedition.
“Behold,” he said, “the door!”
In an instant he had sprung upon a ledge—we saw him stoop—and he was gone. But his voice rallied us from a resonant hollow:
“It is here! Com’!”
I think we all hung fire for an instant—a natural enough qualm. It was not the adventure in itself, but—merciful God! what, after all these years, were we expecting to find? One’s imagination, drifted to the very threshold at last, sickened as in the emanations from a charnel vault. Twenty years! and lying in what abnormal atmosphere—subject to what unspeakable transformation! It could have wrought of him surely nothing “rich and strange” like drowned Alonso? It——
I felt Valombroso pushing by me, and I held him back instantly, and took the leap—and almost struck against an upright slab of stone. Then I saw that behind this veiling slab there was a low-down aperture in the rock face, narrow and uninviting enough to one of my bulk. But Geoletti’s hand came through, and, with difficulty, guided me in—and instantly the thunder of the waters fell to a murmur.
“Stand up, signore,” he said whisperingly. “There is plenty room in here.”
I straightened myself nervously; but there was indeed no necessity for precaution. The narrow rent or gully in which we stood was just a disparted fracture in the mass of rock, extending from crown to base and from verge to verge. A man, though a Titan in height, might have walked its length unhurt.
“Animo!” whispered my guide. “You follow me down, sir, and we reach it ver’ soon.”
I felt him, as I thought, sinking from me, and caught at him like a frightened child.
“Si, si,” he said. “You shall see the light com’ at once.”
It appeared even with his words—an odd globing radiance, that throbbed and flickered on the walls of rock, like the glimmer of a distant torch to one lost in the labyrinths of a catacomb. But with our every downward step it dilated—broadened—drew nearer and steadier—and lo! at one stride its source was revealed—a square of green casement lit as it were by a rising dawn.
I halted, stupefied, as Geoletti halted. It was minutes before I could realise that we had reached, were actually standing in, the sleeping-room of death. But gradually understanding came to me, and I saw.
It was the oddest chamber—a sort of cave or embrasure (it might have been sixteen feet in width by a dozen in depth), opening upon the under-sweep of the cataract some two yards beneath its leap, and lit by the strangest window, it appeared, of green agitated spun glass. That ran for ever, as it seemed, off an invisible reel, and shook and fluctuated in its descent. I could hear the swish of its going like the tear of rain—it “droned like a hive”—my God! “And all you can see is the trees and the hills pulled crooked, like we saw ourselves in that looking-glass”—I saw them, warped eccentric demons of things, reaching and clawing and shrinking, as my father had seen them and described them to his friend twenty years ago—I saw them, and——
A cry from Geoletti caught me to my senses:
“Zitto! zitto! Ah Dio di compassione! Look, signore! it is there—it has never stirred. The shroud of the waters has enwrapped it where it lay.”
I followed the direction of his hand. The cave was humid with a fine floating spray. Something shapeless, grotesque lay on the floor of it near to its farther end—a thing which, in a first hurried glance, I had taken for a mere natural excrescence of the rock.
“What?” I gasped—“Geoletti—great God!”
We approached it, holding to one another, over the slippery floor, and looked down. A horrible thing; blurred out of mortal recognition; fungussed with lime, preserved in it, decay arrested and perpetuated—a horrible thing. It resembled nothing so much as one of those pitiful casts taken from the ashy moulds in dead Pompeii—grey as pumice-stone—my father.
A smaller excrescence lay near it—quite a little one. Geoletti stooped and pulled, and it came away in his hand.
“Signore!—the box!” he whispered.
“Ah!” I cried. “Go, while I watch, and fetch the others. They must come—they must see this—Valombroso will know what to do. Go, do you hear? I am not afraid any longer. Do you not understand what he was to me?”
Itwas on a dreary wet morning, laden with the very spirit of depression, that I led my little party of three across the fields to the Lone Farm. We had talked, or slept, out the night at the “Black Dog” in Market Grazing; and now, in grim fulfilment of the purpose which had brought us so far, were advancing to the assault of the inner abode of that mystery, whose final ramification had ended for us under the waterfall in far-away Piedmont. We numbered, besides myself, Mr Shapter and the two detectives. Johnny and Geoletti had stopped by the way in London, to provide us with the necessary correspondents in that prescriptive centre to all such operations.
We had hardly rested in our flight back from the Continent, since the finding of the inquest held upon those pitiful remains had supplied us with theargumentum ad remfor procuring the extradition of Mr Mark Dalston; but, quick as we had travelled, the news of our presumptive mission had preceded us. For many reasons we should have preferred for the present to have throttled all journalistic gossip; but where was the lethal spot to be found in that myriad-necked Hydra? The story, or a travesty of it, leaked out and ran faster than we could, and was threatening us already, on our arrival in London, with a most undesired fame. The absurdest surmises were rife; the most ingenious inventions drawn upon to provide them. I have no time nor patience to stop and retail a fraction of the nonsense talked by the newspapers. The serious thing to us in it all was that it brought into a full glare of notoriety a case which, in its first processes, it was of the utmost importance should be kept secret. Signor Valombroso was, of course, as cutting as a whip upon the paradox involved. “Why do you not also publish portrait cards of your London detectives, with their character parts included?” he asked. “It would give the poor criminal yet one other chance.” He would have proposed a newspaper censorship as the remedy. But it was certainly aggravating. If it was true that Mr Dalston, having got wind somehow—perhaps through Mother Carey—of the trend of my inquiries, and being baffled in his designs on his victim, had already slipped into hiding, it was hardly probable that this public exposure andesclandrewould bring him out of it. The puzzling thing was that he should have left so vexatious a witness behind him at the Lone Farm; but, as to that, it had to be borne in mind that he was presumably unaware of her treachery to himself. In any case, hither had been our obvious direction from the moment of our landing.
I had written to Ira, while still in Italy, a full account of the discovery, with all its tragic incidents and consequences. Afterwards, arriving in London, I filled in the sheet with a brief account of our subsequent doings and present intentions, and posted it to her where she was staying with the family at Claridge’s Hotel. It was misery to be so near and apart; but the peremptoriness of my mission admitted of no delay; while the nature of our relations precluded any present thought of a meeting under the Skene ægis.
But how desolate seemed the country, void of the consciousness of that young darling presence in it. I could almost welcome the dripping skies, the sodden fields, the deathly soak and stillness, as things attuned to a mood abandoned of love and shivering under a sort of creeping paralysis of terror. For how could I forget for a moment the relations in which I stood towards the unhappy woman of whom it was the very purpose of our visit to make a traitor and informer? She had borne children to him. I was not the only fruit of her motherhood. I could not but feel my part somehow an execrable one; and most in its self-consciousness of a still-existing repugnance towards the object of our schemes, which was surely unnatural, but which I could not, for all my striving, overcome. Was not this, indeed, one of the bitterest features of a bitter tragedy? At the present moment, even, my thoughts, for all the filial warmth and graciousness they could command, turned instinctively to Lady Skene.
The foreboding solemnity of my mood seemed to impart itself to my companions. We plashed and plodded along the field paths with hardly a word to exchange amongst us. Inspector Jannaway, it is true, had his own reasons for reserve. Holding the very tangible fact of a warrant for Mr Dalston’s arrest in his pocket, he seemed bent on leaving it to his Italian colleague to justify its production. “Let him have his head, gentlemen. He knows all about it. He’s agoing to prove the superiority of his system over ours. Very well; I’m not the man to interfere—not just yet awhile, anyway.” He did not speak these words, but his attitude unmistakably expressed them. He was a great English detective on the high horse, aggrieved by insolent comparisons. Let Valombroso have our confidence; let all fools have their paradise. We should find ourselves on the wrong side of ours in due time. When we wanted him—and we should want him—he was here at our service. In the meantime, he kept his thoughts—and his theories, if he had any—to himself, and acquiesced passively and pleasantly in all that was suggested. But he offered no suggestions of his own.
A dive through a dripping copse, a final flounder along a little muddy lane, brought us into view of the house. It was certainly entitled to its name—a lonely haunted tenement, flung away into the fields to rot and perish of its own reputation. The fabric of it dated from the Tudors, but it had been patched and shored with a number of unseemly anachronisms, until it looked like a crippled house on crutches. Old barns, old byres, an old dove-cot, toppled hard by to their fall. The only modern feature about it was the filth, which discharged in one place its moister particles into a little green duck pond with no ducks in it. The house itself was half buried in trees, through which one caught a glimpse of a considerable garden to the rear, full of vegetables, but neglected. Tradition pointed to the farm as a refuge, during the Marian persecutions, of a number of non-juring ministers, who had nevertheless come to be routed out and despatched to the flames for their obduracy. It was certainly quarried with vaults, and priests’ holes, and other such sanctuaries of the desperate.
“H’m!” muttered Mr Shapter, with his hand on the bell. “A very warren this, I shouldn’t be surprised. What do you think, Jannaway?”
“I think as you think, sir,” answered the detective serenely.
Shapter turned away impatiently. The clang of the bell answering from those bowels of silence made us all start. And, almost with the cessation of its deep voice, she stood in the opening of the door before us.
The same mean sapless figure; the same unmoving face, worn and unwholesome, and scored with its grey lines of suffering or endurance. Only the eyes in it lived—the eyes of the “petitedemoiselle, so white and pink.” I could not picture it—I could not. Age has no past for youth—no memory of joys like its own. I shrank before the fire of those eyes; but their vision had no direction—not even for me. They looked beyond us all.
Valombroso swept off his hat, and returned it to his head, being careful of the tilt.
“Good-morning, madama,” he said. “Is your husband at home? We desire the honour of a word with him.”
“You have come to arrest him?”
The voice was as lifeless as the face.
“Madama is too precipitate,” answered the detective. “A word is not necessarily a warrant.”
“I have always been waiting for it to come,” she went on, in the same cold low tone, and with the same hot vision always challenging something beyond us that we could not see. “I have always expected and lived for this moment. Now, is it not in the eternal curse of things that it has come too late? Too precipitate. O, yes! too precipitate.”
She gave a frozen little laugh—horrible, because the muscles of her mouth, the breath of her bosom did not seem to stir to it.
“He killed my husband, my dear first love, did he not?” she asked.
Not one of us could find words to answer her.
“O, I know it!” she said. “I have always known it. Voices and visions used to come to me—they were for ever coming. One was of a little child I bore; but it went, and I knew then that it was not of the dead. Only the dead speak to me. The others are like murmurs behind a wall. I hear them as the dead hear the steps and laughter overhead. He killed him out of love of me—he struck him through my heart and killed my heart. The rest was his to take. He could not gain back what he had killed. His will was strong, but that was beyond it. And he made a passionate wooer, too. But it wanted more than his warmth to melt that dead stone of my heart. The children of his passion—they were born with the chill of it on them, and they too died, one by one.”
Not once did her voice rise above that lifeless current of sound. She stood like one speaking in an hypnotic trance, compelled to say the things she said. Now, in a pause, Valombroso spoke again:
“Will madama explain what she means by its being too late?”
Her eyes came down to him, with the strangest challenge.
“Did you know him, and think to take him so easily? Look where you will; you will not find him here.”
“We shall avail ourselves very fully of your permission, madam,” said Mr Shapter civilly. “It obviates for us the unpleasant necessity to fall back upon our search warrant. Mr Dalston is gone, then, you say. Will you perhaps acquaint us where?”
“He is gone abroad—a long journey. I have a letter from him. You can see it if you like.”
She turned and led the way into the house, and we all followed her into a low dark inky-panelled sitting-room. Melancholy green light flowed in here through a wide lozenge-paned window at the back. A round-headed bush was stooped to the glass outside, as if listening with its ear to it. It was an unchancy creepy place, and shudderingly cold.
We exchanged some significant glances while the unhappy woman was searching a bureau for the letter. Crazed—that was their common implication; and perhaps by reason of her madness spared much. It was very pitiful.
Presently she found what she sought, and brought it to us. Our heads crowded together to read it. It was indisputably his, couched in affectionate terms, and dated from some port in Spain, a week back. It related the writer’s sudden inducement to seize a business chance which had offered, talked of a short absence, and gave some directions for his wife’s abandonment of the farm and withdrawal to a certain address in London, which was mentioned. Valombroso, finishing with it, shrugged his shoulders and handed the sheet on to Jannaway, who put it in his pocket.
“It is very well, then. And now, with your permission, madama, we will get to work,” said the Italian.
She answered not a word, but stood leaning on the desk, and looking strangely after us as we trooped out of the room. Mr Shapter, leading us across the passage, halted in a little dull study which had presumably been the master’s, and faced the detectives with a question—“Well?”
Valombroso shrugged his shoulders again; Inspector Jannaway did and said nothing.
“Come,” said the lawyer impatiently to the former. “Is the letter in your opinion genuine?”
“In-con-test-abilmente, signore.”
“Then it is no good our searching here?”
“Very like, but we must search nevertheless. He may have gone and come back. I say only this: Show me once my man, and I go for him.”
Jannaway uttered a curious sound. If his face had not been so immovable. I should have taken it for a laugh. Mr Shapter glanced at him sharply.
“You seem amused, Inspector Jannaway,” he said.
“Do I, sir?” answered the detective. “I have to seem a lot of things in the course of my duty.”
Shapter flounced his shoulders slightly, and turned away.
“The sooner we get to business the sooner we shall satisfy ourselves,” he said. “Come.”
We left the room together, but outside, by the lawyer’s advice, separated, and took each his independent direction—as one the living rooms, one the offices and cellars, and a third the attics. Inspector Jannaway decided, on his own initiative, for the grounds and ruined outbuildings.
Our search, as might have been expected, yielded us no human quarry—not so much as a scullery-maid. Mrs Dalston, it appeared, existed, for whatever reason, the sole tenant of this remote and dismal homestead.
But, if the place was void of any sign or shadow of what we sought, the voices of a hundred unseen demons seemed to people it. They rang in peals of laughter up the stairs; they answered mockingly to one’s tap on hollow panels; they rose in reverberant boomings from the cellars, and echoed away down dark passages to a scampering of tiny feet. When, by-and-by, we reassembled in the hall, Valombroso’s instant utterance spoke, I think, the common feeling:
“God of mercy, signore! there is only one way to penetrate the secrets of this house—and that is to pull it down.”
He wiped his white face with a ball of handkerchief. Inspector Jannaway’s appeared the only composed countenance amongst us. But even his answered with a momentary pallor to the shock of a sudden screech of laughter uttered hard by. It came, or seemed to come, from the room where we had left Mrs Dalston. Mr Shapter, after a second’s paralysis, turned the handle of the door resolutely, and we all looked in. She was standing still where we had left her. A handkerchief was in her hand. Her bosom was rising and falling in hard pants.
“Great God, madam!” said the lawyer. “Was it you made that noise?”
She gave no answer—she seemed fighting for breath—but presently she spoke:
“You have not found him, then?”
“Not yet; but we shall come again; we have not finished.”
“It is open to you, now and always,” she said, still with difficulty. “I am at your service; we are all here at your service.”
We?
I shivered in the thought of those viewless colleagues of hers. A vision of the cheery inn where we had quartered ourselves suddenly rose before me, before us all, I think, irresistibly attractive. It would be possible only in some such healthy commonplace to resolve upon reason and a course of action. Without another word, we turned and left the house.
We must have walked half-a-mile, I believe, before any one of us spoke; and then it was Inspector Jannaway, answering a mute appeal of the lawyer’s eyes.
“Mad, sir,” he said. “As mad as a hatter.”
Itwas evident that things had come to a deadlock between the two detectives. They could not work together, and they would not work apart. Mr Shapter was summoned at length to arbitrate between them. He found Valombroso bristling, and Jannaway conscience-calm. The Italian opened on him.
“Signore, if I am to have an English colleague, it shall be other than this serene man. Yes, I will call him that for politeness.”
“What is the matter with him, detective?”
“The matter? Nothing is the matter. He enjoy the most perfect constitution in my experience. Nothing shall move or trouble him. I say to him ‘Suppose I think this Dalston somewheres in the neighbourhood?’ ‘Well, think it,’ he say. Again if I remark, ‘I believe of this letter that it is genuine,’ ‘You are quite welcome to your belief,’ he answer. Once more, ‘Suppose I decide it the good policy,’ I say, ‘to go and watch at the address which our man give for his wife in London?’ What is his reply? Why ‘Go along and watch yourself silly, if you like’—just that. But he will not come too; and so I shall refuse to go without him. He desire anything to put me wrong, so he may presently take to himself the credit when it arrive. We are baffled here at present, yes. We shall continue the same while this sort of thing shall last. But it shall not last. I say now at once, that, unless you give me the colleague I desire, I throw up the case. I cannot work at it any longer with a mule.”
“And who is this suggested colleague, Valombroso? Is it Mr Holmes?”
“Who else, signore? Am I not Valombroso?”
Mr Shapter shrugged his shoulders. But he hadcarte blanchefrom Johnny to employ whom he pleased; and expense was no consideration.
“Well, have you any objection, Jannaway?” he asked resignedly.
“None whatever, sir,” answered the inspector. “It won’t be the first time me and Mr Holmes have met over a case. He’s got the makings of a respectable detective in him, or used to have; and if heshouldcome to fail here, like Mr Valombroso, why, there’s still me to fall back upon for a forlorn hope.”
Whatdidhe mean? Had he or had he not something up his sleeve, which he was retaining merely for the greater discomfiture of his rival, should that gentleman once come to admit his own defeat? Nothing could be plausibly guessed but that he felt himself aggrieved over our moral assumption of the other’s supremacy, and was regarding with a mischievous enjoyment somefaux pasinto which our mistaken faith was leading us. It seemed incredible that a man of his reputation could havenoideas in the matter. We could so little believe it, in fact, that, through all this puzzling perversity of his mood, it never occurred to us for a moment, I think, to dispense with his services, negative as those were. At the very least, he might become, as he himself suggested, our ark of refuge.
Valombroso snorted fearfully over the assumption of his failure.
“You, to think you shall see to the end of my resource, Inspec-tar-r-r-r Jannaway!” he said, and ended with a furious ironic laugh.
Jannaway stood impassive.
“Very well, then,” said Mr Shapter hastily. “I will telegraph to Mr Holmes. I cannot, of course, answer for his being disengaged at the moment.”
But fortunately a favourable answer was received. Mr Holmes himself would follow by the midday train.
I confess I was extremely curious to see this extraordinary man, with whose eagle countenance, penetrating eyes and slender aristocratic figure report had made me familiar. Nor, when I had my opportunity, was it marked by that disillusionment which is often the penalty of over-expectation. It is true that there was a trifle more grey in the hair, a trifle more vagueness, or shall I say less brilliancy in the eye than I had looked for; but it must be remembered that at this period Mr Holmes was at least approaching that state of premature superannuation which his adventures, countless and diversified beyond the common human experience or endurance, had necessarily imposed upon him. Nevertheless he was still a striking-looking man, very pale in the face, and with a curious bump on his head, any mute and stealthy observation of which he was wont characteristically to detect, and to regard, it seemed, with suspicion or annoyance. He drove from Footover in a station fly, and of course his friend Dr Watson accompanied him. The two, it was well known, were inseparable.
Mr Shapter and I were waiting for him, as he alighted; but he took not the least notice of us for a moment, turning to his companion with the remark: “I believe you are perfectly right in what you are thinking, my dear Watson. The breach between the D.’s is eternal; they will never come together again.”
The doctor, long accustomed, it appeared, to the other’s method of deductive reasoning, showed no astonishment, but merely replied, “Yes, you have answered the thought in my mind exactly. No doubt it will interest these gentlemen to hear the processes by which you reached that conclusion.”
“Why, my dear Watson,” said Mr Holmes promptly, “do you not remember that little oath you uttered under your breath when our flyman jogged us over an offensively large stone? The ejaculation inevitably suggested a big letter to you—the bigness of the letter a certain popular operetta—the operetta, a pinafore—a pinafore, overcoats in general. At that moment you glanced up; the coat our coachman was wearing had obviously been made for a smaller man, and the seam had parted at the back never to rejoin. I saw you observe it. The association of ideas was complete. The D.’s and the breach between them rushed into your mind at the very instant that we came to the door of this capital hostelry, and into the presence, if I mistake not” (he turned with a charming bow and smile), “of our respected telegraphic correspondents.”
The formal greeting over, we conveyed our visitors into our private sitting-room, where the two detectives were awaiting us. Mr Holmes greeted the inspector with a “Ha, Jannaway!” and we promptly got to business.
The great amateur was severely interested in the tale unfolded to him, though his companion, I could not but think, appeared somewhat bored by it. He yawned a good deal, and kept looking at his watch. I was not mentally as familiar with his figure as with the other’s, and, beyond the fact of his face being a mutton-chop-whiskered one, had no more than an idea of his general appearance. Still, I had not seemed to associate quite so much bulk with it. Doctor Watson, I fear, had grown rather fat and inert, and, in suggestion, not unlike a prosperous impresario.
The story related and the letter examined, Mr Holmes sat in profound silence for a while.
“I take it, then,” he said presently, “that the point of contention is the present whereabouts of Mr Dalston?”
I was a little surprised, as thatwasthe point; and no other, in fact, had been raised.
“I believe,” said Mr Holmes after further reflection, “that Mr Dalston went abroad, and that he wrote that letterfromabroad. That is not necessarily to conclude, however, that he is abroad at this moment. The farm, by your showing, offers itself a very potential retreat to one desirous, shall we say, of evading his social obligations. At the same time it does not appear to be rich in the material necessities of existence. It is at least conceivable that this man, rendered desperate by an enforced abstinence, may be caught sneaking from his well-chosen burrow there at night, in order to satisfy those insatiable appetites which his position renders him unable to indulge by day. Your criminal is notoriously a sensuous animal, and one the least capable of resisting the calls of his nature. Have you, may I ask, ever thought of putting a watch upon the place at night?”
No, it appeared we had not. Our interlocutor smiled, shaking a long finger at Jannaway.
“Inspector, inspector!” he murmured—“the old fundamental insufficiency!”
Valombroso skipped with delight.
“Signore,” he began, “only showmemy man, and——”
Mr Holmes interrupted him, rising.
“I will do my best,” he said. “But this is very sad.”
He went out, and we did not see him again until dinner-time, when he turned up—rather late, to Dr Watson’s obvious annoyance—and luminous, so to speak, with preoccupation. He smoked a heavy pipe, filled with tobacco of a peculiarly pungent brand, throughout the meal, but ate very little—an abstinence which was fully compensated by his friend, who, not to misjudge him, appeared to think a good deal of his food, and eyed every dish interestedly as it was put on the table. The fare, proving exhilarating, moved the doctor, even, to some ill-timed levity; for when Mr Holmes at dessert slipped, apparently in a fit of abstraction, the nutcrackers into his pocket, he asked him banteringly if he hadn’t better send the dishful of nuts after them. Mr Holmes was very angry, and demanded to know how, after all these years of their acquaintance, he had learned no better than to question him openly as to the meaning of any action of his however seemingly uncalled for.
“For what do you exist, my dear Watson,” he said, with an infinite but perfectly gentlemanly irony, “but as a screen of vulgar commonplace between me and the public. You are not here to expose my methods, but to cover them.”
The doctor was completely, and rightly, set down; though it is only fair to him to admit that Mr Holmes afterwards confessed to us in private that the act had been an involuntary one on his part, due, no doubt, to some association of ideas between the implements, and his recognition of the fact that he had here a particularly hard nut to crack.
He left us again after dinner; and, seeing him well out of the room, the doctor, presumably in a spit of resentment, took the occasion to tap his own head significantly.
“He has never been,” he murmured, “quite the man he was since that fall.”
If this admission, or insinuation served to “give us pause,” our spirits were to be reassured in a few hours by the return of Mr Holmes in a great state of suppressed excitement.
“Give me a foot-rule,” he said. “I believe my theory was correct and that I am on his tracks.”
His enthusiasm communicated itself to us all.
“Great heavens, sir!” said Mr Shapter. “Do you mean to say you believe him to be really in hiding at the farm?”
“I lend myself to no positive assertion, my dear sir,” answered the other, with a smile. “I state, only, that I have come upon a number of footmarks about the house that were not there this afternoon. They may be his; they may not be. A great deal depends upon the postulate. But nothing can be lost, at least, by following them up; and that is my sole present intention. I shall be absent, probably, during the greater part of the night, and even, it may be, well into to-morrow morning. See that the door is left on the latch.”
You may be sure that none of us—save only Dr Watson, whose snores shook the partitions—slept much that night. We were all awake with daylight, and eager for news. It came, presently, with the astounding information that Mr Holmes, returning to the house in the early hours of the morning, had ordered incontinently a fly for the station, and had left in it before any of us were down. We stared at one another in mute consternation.
But Dr Watson, when he appeared, took the thunderbolt unruffled. This sudden disappearance was only, in his opinion, part of the plot. Likely enough the tracks had led his friend to Footover.
In the meantime he laid himself out to enjoy his respite in the consumption of much excellent fare and tobacco, to which latter indulgence he never resorted without first fitting on his head an embroidered black velvet smoking-cap with a large gold tassel pendent from its crown. His engagements, he said, left him free till Easter, when he was to take his usual little holiday at Clacton-on-Sea. No doubt there would be developments in a day or two.
But there were no developments, not that day nor the next, and we were beginning to foresee a difficulty in ridding ourselves of this self-complacent incubus, when there arrived a letter to him from Mr Holmes, which settled the business. He read it, and, in a fit, I cannot but think, of temporary aberration, threw it across to Mr Shapter. It ran as follows:—