“My Dear Watson,—I find this must be counted among my unsuccessful cases. I am under the necessity of admitting that the footmarks I have been following were my own. I traced them all the way to the “Black Dog,” and so up the stairs to my bedroom, where the boots themselves lay under a chair.En passant, why did you never remind me, my dear Watson, that they were a pair of yours which I had borrowed, and put off for some of my own when I went out for the second time? It was that misled me. Make my apologies to our friends. I enclose the half of your third-class return ticket, and am off to Siberia by the night mail. An important political prisoner has escaped from Kara Baigarama. I believe him to be hidden under an ice-floe in the Arctic Ocean. Tell this to nobody.”
“My Dear Watson,—I find this must be counted among my unsuccessful cases. I am under the necessity of admitting that the footmarks I have been following were my own. I traced them all the way to the “Black Dog,” and so up the stairs to my bedroom, where the boots themselves lay under a chair.En passant, why did you never remind me, my dear Watson, that they were a pair of yours which I had borrowed, and put off for some of my own when I went out for the second time? It was that misled me. Make my apologies to our friends. I enclose the half of your third-class return ticket, and am off to Siberia by the night mail. An important political prisoner has escaped from Kara Baigarama. I believe him to be hidden under an ice-floe in the Arctic Ocean. Tell this to nobody.”
Mr Shapter looked across at Dr Watson, who had sunk back in his chair, with a piece of bloater sticking out of his mouth. He gasped and swallowed it.
“I believe,” he said, “that that fall into the river gave him water on the brain.”
“I haveto tell you, Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “that your colleague has deserted you.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“He has driven away this morning to catch the early express. Disillusioned for ever, he told me, as to our police methods, disappointed in his one cherished ideal, he has gone to London, to deliver his report and state his case before the court of final appeal as represented by our employer, Mr Dando.”
“Very well, sir. Then, p’raps its time aswegot to business.”
“I don’t understand you, Jannaway.”
“Maybe not, Mr Shapter. Maybe it’s a side of my business to be misunderstood, and a side of yours to know it.”
“Well, I should have thought I knew you pretty well by this time.”
“Shouldyou, sir? With respect, and judging by results, I must take leave to doubt it.”
“Well, Jannaway, well.”
The detective warmed a little, his grievance coming to an irresistible head.
“Look you here, Mr Shapter,” he said. “If we’re all to be judged by what we go a-boasting of ourselves, we might as well petition the Almighty to open Paradise again, and give us that Valombroso for our head gardener. But He’s not to be took in, like some folks, by the clanging of an empty brass pot; and mayhap He’d ask for a little more proof of what was at the inside of all the noise that pretended to such a bellyful of wisdom. It’s time for a cock to crow when it’s out of the egg.”
“But really, inspector, mayn’t silence sometimes be a little empty too?”
“That’s for you to judge, sir.”
“I am your very humble servant, Jannaway.”
“Then, sir, if you’ll come along with me, I’ll show you where the body of this man Dalston is lying at this moment.”
“Dead?”
The bolt, loosed serenely from that official blue, caught us fairly in the wind, and sent us staggering. The whispered cry came from us together. The inspector nodded his head, with his lips set very grim.
“Dead, gentlemen. Look in a well, they say, for truth. It’s worth bearing in mind.”
“In a well!”
“In a well, sir. Mrs Dalston done him. I’ve got her under arrest at this moment.”
“Murder?”
The detective with a swift movement gripped my arm.
“Hold on, sir,” he said. “It’ll pass in a bit.”
“I’m all right,” I whispered huskily. “Did she murder him!”
“I didn’t say she did, now did I?” he protested. “She drove him to kill himself, if you want the truth. We got him up at daybreak, and he’s lying in the parlour now.Histicket’s cancelled for good and all. I want you over there at once, Mr Shapter; but the young gentleman needn’t come unless he likes.”
“I’m ready,” I retorted fiercely. “What do you suppose? Have I run him so far to shirk the end? Come, hurry; what are you waiting for?”
“Well,” said the detective, “he’s not a pretty sight, that’s all. There’s few as is what shoots themselves in the head.”
I stared at him; I would ask no more. In a minute we were on our way.
“Since when have you known this, Jannaway?” asked Mr Shapter, pale and breathless, as we hurried on.
“Only since early this morning for certain, sir,” answered the man. “But I’d been awake and busy half the night before, while the Italian gentleman, I suppose, was a-fuming and a-packing of his bag. He’d better have waited a little longer. I couldn’t have kept the truth from him another day.”
“How long have you been keeping it from him, from us all, as it is?”
“I mentioned, since this morning, didn’t I, sir? I don’t say as that covers the whole process of my reasoning up to it. But, as to that, you’ll hardly blame me, I suppose, for sitting close. Anyway, its the inferior English method, Mr Shapter, and, being an inferior English detective myself, I’m stupidly prejudiced in favour of it.”
It was wounded dignity’s last shot. We hardly spoke another word as we sped across the fields. For myself, I was so overcome with agitation as to find the mere effort of speech a labour. Yet once I found voice to ask Jannaway a question appalled: “What will be done with her?”
He shook his head, grating his chin.
“What indeed, sir? It might be proved incitement to suicide. More like she’ll be found incapable to plead. I’m detaining her as a matter of form; but the County Asylum’s more in her line than the police station. Don’t you be afraid for her, sir.”
Afraid? Merciful heavens! if this might be found the solution!—my mother—never as yet so realised—never, until made a widow for the second time, and by her own revengeful act, it seemed. Yet, dreadful as that might prove itself, it restored her somehow in my mind to her right place in the triple tragedy of my life.
We found a knot of gaping, whispering rustics gathered about the farm when we reached it. The news had already got abroad, and a potent shadow was henceforth to add itself to the traditional spectres of the place. A stolid hot-faced member of the local police opened the door to us. A fellow-constable was in charge of the prisoner in the study. Thither we went.
She rose, with a smile, upon seeing us—there was a bright unearthly light in her eyes—and glided across to me.
“Hush!” she said. “They have found him, Charlie darling; but it does not matter, he can never hurt you again. How big and strong you have grown while you slept; and he has fallen to nothing. He would be no match for you now; and yet, in spite of all, I used to think him a fine man. He would woo so confidently; and all the time he never guessed what was in my heart. And in the end I did it so cleverly. He just went down there into hiding, into the place which he had discovered and told me of—I let him down myself—and afterwards it was so simple. I had only to wind up the bucket again and leave him. He had never foreseen that, for all his cleverness; and I kept my secret too well. He used to call up to me—the names that had once seemed to give me to him, and I listened and never answered. And then he implored and implored, and I never answered; but I looked over the rim and laughed at him until he knew. I saw his face hang white above the water—whiter and whiter every day—and then once, when evening had fallen, came the sound—O, my God!—and I knew that at last he had shot himself in his despair.”
She flung her hands to her throat, with a gasping cry—
“It was like him to take that way. He knew that the sound would go on for ever and ever in that pit and betray me in the end. Don’t you hear it now, coming from the garden? But you needn’t be afraid to touch me, my lord; my hands are clean. Gentlemen of the Jury, I did not kill him. Please let me pass. He has a headache, and it is my duty to attend to him. He is a very handsome man when he is himself. I should like to tell him that—it is so little—and I have never said as much to him before. I think it might help to cure him and stop the sound. Gentlemen—please!”
At a sign from Jannaway the two constables advanced, and put firm but not ungentle hands upon the poor creature. She struggled, uttering shriek upon shriek.
“Best leave her to us, sir,” panted one of the men. “She’ll go quiet in a little.”
Mr Shapter led me, inexpressibly agitated, from the room, and out into the open at the back. Here the detective took the lead, and, conducting us by way of weed-grown paths and tangled vegetation through a wicket into an old walled fruit garden, turned towards an angle of the enclosure where, on a little elevation, the yoke of a great well sprouted from the ground.
My heart shuddered in me as we approached the thing. It was a pretty massive structure, built for endurance, and calculated to the strain of a heavy load of water. The bucket, the loop of a strong chain connecting it with the windlass barrel, stood empty on the grass by the well rim—a great sheet-iron pail, capable of holding eight or perhaps half-a-score gallons. But the machinery by which it was manipulated was the most curious, being a nest of powerful cog-wheels and blocks, so adjusted under the butt of the windlass that, by turning a handle, a child, or little stronger, could wheel up the full bucket with perfect ease and as many pauses by the way as he chose. What was as striking as anything, perhaps, was the state of preservation of the whole structure; but, no doubt, the entire water supply of the farm depending on it had made that a perennial necessity.
“Will you look down now, gentlemen,” said the detective, “and see if anything strikes you? Hold steady, sir!”
I balanced myself by the upright post of the windlass, and peered into the well. Its heavy wooden lid, pierced by a trap in the middle, through which the bucket could be raised and lowered without disturbing the rest, had been bodily removed, and stood on its rim against the wall hard by. The diameter of the shaft was considerable—a full six feet, I should say—and the depth of the boring, it might be, two hundred, but I am not certain. I know only that the eye of water at the bottom looked no larger than a full moon, and that a surprising interval elapsed between the dropping of a stone from above and its answering plop from below.
“Well, gentlemen?” said Jannaway, after we had been gazing down some moments; “nothing strikes you out of the common?”
“Nothing whatever.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed, satisfied. “They was pretty cute in those days. Now, I’ll tell you, thereissomething peculiar, and not more’n thirty or forty feet down; but you’d never guess it from here, would you? If you doubt me, go and satisfy yourselves. I don’t ask you to, mind you. I say only as I’ve been the journey myself this morning, and more than once; and if that’s enough for you, you can take my word on it.”
I came away instantly from the post.
“I’m going down,” I said.
“No!” exclaimed Mr Shapter violently.
“Yes,” I insisted.
“He’ll do all right, sir,” said the detective, after a moment’s survey of me. “I should be glad, as a matter of fact, of the corroborative testimony, and there’s no more danger in it than in a fire escape, if he keeps his hold and his nerve.”
“I am going down,” I repeated. “What shall I do, Jannaway?”
“Nothing more, sir, than sit on the bucket edge, with your legs inside, and hold on to the chain. When you come to it, shout, and I’ll stop.”
I did as he bid me. He went to the windlass handle, and without a moment’s hesitation began to turn. Instantly the bucket containing me swung free, and, after a little sluggish oscillation, descended slow and smooth, dropping into the bowels of the earth. It was a curious rather awful sensation, going down so into that smooth-walled shaft, with its deep-sunk eye watching for the breaking of the thread which was to precipitate me to an unthinkable death. I could not find the nerve, after one glance, to look down again. But, on the other hand, the brightness of my descent both surprised and comforted me. I had peered from above into a pit of gloom, rather appalling and fathomless to the eye; now, descending into it, under its open circular skylight all was as clear as day, so that I could see the shadows under the projecting bricks, and the little hartstongues in the crevices of mortar a vivid green.
I must have dropped already some thirty or more feet, when I saw a curious hooded bulge, so slight as to be imperceptible from above, swell from the curve of the wall; and immediately afterwards the wall itself appeared to gape beneath it like a yawning mouth. I shouted in another moment, and the bucket stopped. Right opposite me, gouged out of the wellside, was a deep niche like an oriel, forming a sort of grotto or retreat. It was quite roomy, and lined and floored with brick; and a stone ledge in it formed a seat. At the entrance an iron stanchion was let into the wall, so that one, setting the bucket gently swinging, might easily grasp that hold and land himself in the cave. A man might lie hid there indefinitely, with the aid of a confederate above, and not a soul guess the secret of his disappearance. It was as cunning a cover, I am convinced, as persecution had ever inspired.
Now, as I gazed fascinated, a certain token of some late human occupation there entered into my vision and set the brain of it reeling. I screeched out, and clung frantically to the chain. In an instant I was going upward, and in a little more the wholesome daylight came about me.
“Swing!” cried the detective, bending at the crank; and he slipped in a block that held up the machinery.
I obeyed, as well as my shaken nerves would let me; and in a little they had caught the rim of the bucket, and held it to the side while I stepped out.
“Why the devil didn’t you tell me of the blood?” I gasped, wiping my wet forehead as I stood away.
The inspector looked at me queerly.
“Truth is, sir,” he said, “I never thought. We’d had to get him out, you see; and a nice job it was. What was left of it didn’t seem to matter.”
Mr Shapter, with his eyes like grey agates, was holding my left hand in his left, his right placed sympathetically on my shoulder.
“What was it, my boy?” he said.
“A cave, sir,” I answered—“a scoop in the wall where he’d hidden—water and a cave like that other. And the shot in his head! My God! who fired it? My God, sir!”
“An awful retribution,” he said. “But come, come—you are overwrought; and no wonder. Let us go back to the house—or into the open fields, if you prefer it; and Jannaway shall give us the story of his discovery, in good matter-of-fact reviving prose.”
* * * * * * * * *
The detective took from his pocket the letter which he had obtained from Mrs Dalston, and held it up to the light for our inspection.
“Do you observe the water-mark, gentlemen—Nolans, the big North Hampshire paper mills? It was that first put me on the scent. Here was local-made foreign note-paper, asserted to have been received from Spain. He might, of course, have took some with him; but it wasn’t likely, was it, seeing as how the letter itself refers to the journey as unpremeditated, and him away from home, or wished it to be supposed so, at the time? Inference, that he’d wrote it here for a blind, and give it to be produced by Mrs D. in case of inquiry, while he himself dropped into hiding.
“He was clever, and he knew a good deal—not the least of his knowledge that the game was threatening to be up with him—but the best of his sort make their slips. He’d made his, and it left me pretty convinced that he’d be found lying close somewheres about the neighbourhood, while the hunt ran abroad.
“I didn’t much cotton to the house, myself, for a solution. It was reasonable to suppose, of course, that, during his tenancy of the place, he hadn’t overlooked its best facilities for concealment. But, then, wherehecould find a way, others could too, and the reputation of the farm promised a pretty searching inquiry into its holes and corners. No, I thought, if our gentleman’s to be unearthed at all, it will be from somewheres characteristic of his genius, and the least likely to be considered by the ordinary. Probability pointed to the house for that: therefore I made it my business to look outside.
“Now, I don’t know if you may recall, gentlemen, a rather queer thing—and that was the odd laugh the lady give in answer to our Italian friend’s remark that she’d been too precipitate? She had—she admitted it indirectly. She’d always been looking, the inference was, for this solution to the long grudge she’d bore against him, and, when at last it come, it come too late. Why? By God, gentlemen, the answer took me in a flash. It was because she herself had already anticipated the law by killing him.
“Once, in my mind, I couldn’t get it out. Yet, if it was true, it only made the puzzle deeper. For where could she have hid him, none the less? and why had she chosen this particular time more than another for the deed? The plain answer to that second seemed because he must have put himself suddenly at her mercy, in a way he’d never done before, and the temptation had proved too strong for her. It was then for the first time that the well occurred to me. Could she have pushed him in unexpected when he was gone to draw water?
“I had observed the thing, of course, often enough before. Its size and depth and the machinery about it was only too conspicuous to draw my serious notice. But now I went to a closer examination—and, by the Lord, gentlemen, what do you think I found caught among the cogs? Why, a finger-stall. That was something, at least, for on the day we first saw her, Mrs D. was wearing such a thing.
“That decided me. I tested the machinery, and found the bucket drop like oil. A child could have worked it. I determined to go down into that well, and find out, if I could, what a little fishing at its bottom might bring to light. You see, the discovery of the grotto was an accident. I’d been looking for murder, not suicide, and the truth met me, like you, sir, half way. Only God or a Jury can give it a name. That was no earlier than this morning, when I got over a couple of the locals, and had the cover off and was let down.He’dnever wanted the cover off. The man must have been built of stone and steel. To sit there those days and nights famished and deserted, waiting for his release that never came! The most of us, I think, would have dropped into the water and ended it long before he did. But he always had his revolver, that’s true. He could afford to stake up to the last chance. I don’t know how long he himself had known about the grotto; but he only let his wife into the secret of it a fortnight ago. He’d seen or heard from the woman Carey, as far as I can gather, and thought as we should be down upon him at once. He bolted for his hiding at the first in a panic, arranging with Mrs D. that she was to come and wind him up at evenfall if nothing happened; and that was the last the world saw of him. It come on the woman in a moment as how she’d got him in a trap, and her chance was given her at last. I had it all out of her, while she kept the reason to speak it, and that wasn’t long. When she sawhimbeing brought in, she broke out like a screech-owl; and a mercy for her if she could be turned into one in actual fact, poor creatur’.”
“Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “I owe you an apology.”
“I’ll cancel the debt, sir,” answered the inspector. “After all, your sayingyoucouldn’t understand me was a compliment.”
Mystory draws to a close. I linger only yet a little by the way—a balmy breathing space, a last restful interlude between the acts—before I rally to the final struggle.
Before the inquest could be held, my unhappy mother’s complaint had so increased upon her that it became an imperative necessity to remove her to the asylum from which her poor broken spirit was only to be released by death. The whole painful business, with the material difficulties it entailed upon me at a crucial pass, was undertaken for me by Mr Shapter (acting on my good Johnny’s private instructions) with the most feeling tact and helpfulness. These are matters to be touched upon with no less delicacy than was shown in their accommodation. Never has man been blessed with a finer and more generous-hearted friend than I.
Yet, conscious of a hundred unmerited graces, a blight as of abandonment by all the world seemed to fall upon me as I left the room where the inquest had been held. The inquiry was over; the last flicker of its excitement was dead for me; the madhouse and the unhallowed acre had closed upon the scene. The Jury, equal to Inspector Jannaway’s faith in them, had brought in a verdict of Justifiablefelo de se; and, with the snap of that final spark, the curtain had fallen, committing me to a profound gloom.
That, in its essence, no doubt, was fruit of the inevitable reaction from long nervous tension. In the exhaustion following any such prolonged struggle, one is always apt to make a selfish grievance of one’s state—to resent the self-imposition of one’s burden as a duty enforced upon one by the callous egotism of one’s fellows. The disease of ungraciousness soured my vision, and painted the world to me a bilious yellow. True, my friend had very handsomely provided the material means to my success; but why, in the justice of things, should Fate have imposed uponmethe necessity of securing that success at all? A dozen issues were involved in the question, and I knew it; but my reason was clouded under the sense of personal desertion, at the crisis, by those who appeared to think that their moral sympathy with me at a distance was all-sufficing. In fact, and to end the matter, I had not heard from the two dearest to me for a week and more, and the shadow of that silence was obscuring my mind, and peopling it with a hundred spectres of apprehension.
And so, returning to the “Black Dog,” I found a telegram awaiting me:
If possible be at lodge in Caddle three-thirty this afternoon. Particular business Gas and Gaiters. J. D.
If possible be at lodge in Caddle three-thirty this afternoon. Particular business Gas and Gaiters. J. D.
It was like finding a bottle of champagne in a glooming wilderness. At the first gulp the clouds lifted, a crevice opened in them, and sunshine poured into my heart. Cryptic as ever, there was no telling Johnny’s meaning; but, Johnny being Johnny, and all things equal, helpfulness shone in some sort potential.
I looked at the clock. With barely time to keep the appointment, I started, with a bounding heart, on my way.
Reaching near to the wicket at last, I was aware of a station fly loitering along the road ahead, as if in waiting for a discharged fare. I hesitated an instant, then, passing through the gate, plunged into the wintry coppices, and went resolutely for the lodge. I had not once entered this old hermitage of mine since my return. I had felt it, indeed, morally barred to me while the great question was at issue. But now I could not resist the sudden recall, since, as I told myself, I was visiting it an invited guest.
How familiar and yet strange it looked, as I drew near, viewed in the light of my wider experiences—a dark and lonely little tenement, but haunted by what wistful ghost at last, a spirit more potent than all its old-time spectres of melancholy and decay. Whatever might come to be, it was hallowed for evermore in the memory of that possession. My heart was very full as I approached it, and entered by the open door, and stepped softly into what had been my sanctuary.
“Ira,” I whispered, half choking—“if only it could be Ira!”
“O, Richard! it is me.”
Sweet imperfection of sweet lips and slips! What has love to do with grammar? With a sob I had her in my arms. I could not help it—this dream, this rapture—and I was overwrought.
The gentle lovely child! How she understood, and quieted my quivering face with her soft hand, and spoke to me in murmurs of heavenly pity as if I were her child, her baby, the first-born of her heart. And I bent to her in an ecstasy of submission, until I felt the manhood in me rise and strike for conquest.
* * * * * * * * *
“And it is all over, Richard?”
“All over, Ira; and he is dead; and she is mad for ever, I fear.”
“Is it not better so? O, my dear! if she should live to realise what she had done!”
“I hope she will die.”
“It is best to hope it.”
“Everything shall be best now—now that I have you again. I have been afraid, Ira.”
“Afraid of what, Richard?”
“I had not heard from you for so long. I was troubled.”
“Troubled?”
“I imagined things. My mind has been in such a state.”
“What things, bad boy? Poor, poor little fellow! There! he shall be told the worst at once and get it over. Miss Christmas, sir, has been offered a husband by her guardian.”
“What husband?”
“O, not you, sir—don’t think it. It is Lord Sycamore. He is very tall, and very silly, but only fairly well off; and he has no roof to his mouth, or to his head—I forget which; but anyhow, if it was the dome of St Paul’s, I shouldn’t want him.”
“I should hope not. And Lord Skene thinks to impose this ass on you?”
“Richard, don’t shout so. Yes; and he is enormously angry over my refusal.”
“I owe a debt to my grandfather for it. He seems determined to add to my obligations to him. And Lady Skene, Ira?”
She answered very softly, the dew of love in her eyes:
“She is not angry, Richard. I think, if one knew, she is your friend now. She is very quiet and unself-assertive—always now since she came back to us. Once I saw her looking so strangely at me, and I hurried to her, and knelt and took her hands in mine without a word. ‘Be a good wife to him,’ she whispered suddenly; ‘he has suffered such wrong from us all’—and she was crying, Richard, as she got up and left me. And afterwards, as I passed the nursery door, she was sitting huddled on the floor by baby’s cot; and I could not see her face because her hands were held quite still to it, and the firelight was dancing in her beautiful hair. She has grown so humble, it makes me cry. And, Richard, I think Uncle Charlie feels the change in her; and it has made him more masterful—more peremptory. Once Mr Pugsley came, and he would not let him see her, but got rid of him without ceremony, and she did not say anything when she heard. It is as if she knows that she has forfeited her right to a voice in the conduct of her own affairs.”
“I have no quarrel with her, Ira; and now less than ever. She will always be my mother in my heart—God forgive me, and her. But with Lord Skene it is another matter. He knows how I stand with you, and this persecution of his only shows his determination to resist all natural claims of mine on his consideration.”
“He scoffs at the whole story, Richard. I think he looks upon it as the fabrication of a pretender.”
“He chooses to look upon it so, dear. A son, an old man’s Benjamin, stands in my way. Well, if it were not for the vile insult implied to my father, I think I could almost honour his infatuation, and be content to waive my claim for—for that? I was going to say for a younger brother; but things have altered. Just imagine it, Ira; that little cradle creature is my uncle.”
That set her off laughing.
“And you are asked to make room for him, dear. Doesn’t it sound like that horrible vulgar song? You should hear Lord Sycamore drone it out—it is one of his most admired performances—with the little brays to give it tone:
“‘Richard, make room for your uncle—haw!There’s a little de-ar—haw!’”
“‘Richard, make room for your uncle—haw!There’s a little de-ar—haw!’”
“‘Richard, make room for your uncle—haw!
There’s a little de-ar—haw!’”
She buried her face against me, and withdrew it for a moment, flushed and half weeping between laughter and indignation.
“I am ashamed to tell you such nonsense, dear. But it has really been very painful—you see, I am not of age yet—and so—and so, I have got something to confess.”
“Confess away. Your lips, you know, can always make their own bid for absolution.”
“You wicked priest. But it’s nothing very dreadful—at least I hope you don’t think it so—only that things became so unbearable in the end that I thought it best to go on a visit. I wonder if you can guess where?”
“Tell me.”
“Why, to the Dandos. I wrote to your friend—was it very unmaidenly of me? and the invitation came back directly. O, Richard, what a glorious little man he is, loving you so, and, I think, attached to me too—but of course you told me that.”
“Did I? So you went? And what did you think of Mrs Dando?”
“Now, Richard! I won’t answer you as you want. She is immense.”
“Enormous.”
“I didn’t mean that. To hear the way they both spoke up for you.”
“Did she too? But I really had no reason to suppose she would—may her shadow never grow less. But Johnny, of course.”
“Of course. He is mad about the way you are being treated, and insists on seeing you through to the end, and establishing your claim before the world.”
“I am so blessed in my love and friendship, darling, that I live in a perpetual fools’ paradise about myself and my merits. And so that is the explanation of this escapade, I suppose.”
“Yes; he brought me.”
“Who? Johnny?”
“I hope you don’t mind. He’s waiting in the fly to take me back when we’ve done.”
“I shall go with you. I’m finished here.”
“O, Richard! Will you—will you?”
“Clasp your hands to me, baby. You look as if you were all made of tinted sugar, and I’ve a business not to eat you. There. In spite of everything my heart sings to choke me. How can I ever let you go again! Yes. I’ll telegraph to Shapter when we get to town. An hour ago I felt as if the world had done me; now I feel like a giant for rounding on it. What is your particular power, you weak little thing? Give me your hand. Don’t you remember how I made it carry that pailful of water, beast that I was! It would have served me right if you had dumped it on my toes. Ira, supposing I never made good my claim?”
“What, to me?”
“To you, conceit? No, to the title, I meant, of course.”
“O! I had forgotten. But what does it matter, Richard, so long as we have one another?”
What did it matter, indeed? I ring down the curtain on that unanswerable query.
Yousee the heading to this chapter? Your fathers used to see and greet it for many a long day in their newspapers—especially in the evening issues, when a little excitement was needed to beguile the tedious minutes of the journey homeward from the city to Clapham, or Streatham, or Hampstead. How the boys used to shrill it out, decorated with its daily official furbelows, and make their halfpenny profits on thatcause célèbre! There may be comfortable newsvendors now who owe their position to the social furore it created. I know that many lifelong friendships, not to speak of heads, were broken in the differences of opinion to which it led. You may unearth the full report of it all, if you will, from the dusty files of ’82. I am not going to be so silly as to retail it to an indifferent generation. Even the great Arthur—great in bulk as in impudence—has shrunk to-day into little more than a buffer for legal precedents. What modern can gauge the force of the contests which raged about the Tichborne or Skene standards, or find himself more than politely interested in the story of the blood spilt and reputations overthrown on those doughty fields?—lost, both, by their claimants, or pretenders; yet, I trust, in one case, an honourable defeat, a few words as to which must now suffice.
Lord Skene persisting obstinately in disputing my claim, and my cause being warmly espoused by my friends, led to the institution of those legal proceedings which were to result in that action at law before the Lords of the Court of Common Pleas, which came to be known as the Great Skene Mystery, and which in the end found me non-suited and disinherited. The case lasted many weeks, and entailed the production of a little army of witnesses. Its expenses shake my memory to this day; though, thank Heaven, some subsequent successes were to enable me to come to some sort of a compromise for them with their guarantor—my blessed and admirable Johnny. Its chief weakness consisted in its failure to procure any reliable depositions from the witness who should have been its first—my poor stricken mother. A disastrous blow to it was the death of Mother Carey on the very evening following her receipt of an official citation to the Court to give her evidence. That, resolving itself into a matter of second-hand, brought about my discomfiture. Whatever was the moral of the case—and their appreciation of its true bent was conveyed to me spontaneously by a large number of independent persons, legal and otherwise—so reckless a dealing with our institutions as would be entailed in the upsetting of an hereditary title on circumstantial evidence was hardly to be thought of. My claim was dismissed as, in Scottish parlance, not proven, and Master Baby was confirmed in his succession to the lordship of Evercreech.
Not so many weeks ago I strolled into the old Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, and tried to regather from its mouldering echoes some whisper of the enormous babble which my solitary voice had once awakened there. Quiet sunshine came in through the windows; there was an atmosphere in the place as of one of those little done-with and locked-away graveyards which one comes on unexpectedly in the green nooks of London. It was difficult to reincarnate in fancy from that silent dust the roar and scuffle of a dead generation. Its figures, and the emotions they had once evoked in me, would not be stirred to more than a very shadowy demonstration. They were not, in fact, so much the fallen precipitate of time as of a dead phase of my own existence. Between them and the present lay the verdict of the Court. Only on the hither side of that verdict was life a vivid and strenuous reality to me. Hence, though the case itself, with its judges, and droning counsels, and motley witnesses, and pomp and circumstance of legal warfare, was become as the shadow of a fantasia, every detail of its immediate issues was as clear to me as if it had happened yesterday. The verdict had severed my past from my present self, as a surgeon’s knife cuts away a diseased limb. I could recall the very queer stunned feeling with which I had awakened from the operation amidst the rising buzz and shuffle of the court, or theatre. The solemn withdrawal of the judges—figures like old ermine-muffled dowagers making for their chariots; the yawning and stretching barristers, laughing as they gathered their papers; the excited gossip of the audience; the general movement, and rush of draughts, and gusty wind of cab-hailing voices, loud or indistinct as the doors opened and shut like an organ-swell—it all came back to me like a last week’s harlequinade to a child.
Someone takes me by the arm, and leads me out, unresisting, into the mild May evening. A sense as of something rather comical bubbles in me like weak laughter. There is a smell of water carts in the roads, and the unconcerned sparrows are hopping in the intervals of the traffic.
“Never mind, old fellow,” says the dear voice in my ear. “You’re the one that comes out of it with credit.”
I stop, reeling a little, as if stupidly drunk.
“O, credit, Johnny!” I answer, with an inane giggle. “You’ll have to give me that with a vengeance.”
“Come, Dicky!” he says, peremptorily for him. “That’s neither sense nor kindness, old man. Nor it isn’t fair to me, you know. I didn’t lead you on to this for my own profit. What I lose is what you lose, and nothing more—faith in men’s justice, that’s all. The rest counts for nothing; and if you’re the friend I believe, you’ll see it as I do.”
I may be morally intoxicated. I am not ashamed to own, nevertheless, that, there in the open street, I take his good hand and kiss it.
“Now, come along home,” he says, flushing; “and hear what she’s got to say about it all. Your defeat will pay you with her, if I know her, better than any victory would. I only wish I was you, by golly!”
We reach the flat, and he leaves me to mount the stairs alone. There, in the gorgeous drawing-room, ablaze with lights, I find her—a little soft radiant figure, “born to consume the soil” and the bleeding hearts of its labourers. I look round and about me with a renunciatory laugh and shrug of my shoulders, and my eyes, bitter and defiant, come back to her.
“Yes, Miss Christmas,” I say, “this is your proper setting. I have lost my case.”
The vile brute in me—the vile brute! She does not answer a word; but, with a quick sob, she wrenches the diamond from her bosom, the pearls from her hair, and that falls and half veils her face. And the next moment she is prostrate at my feet.
“Richard! I will be poor—O, I will be poor!”
Hush! Who is this come suddenly upon us from the shadows, where Ira, hearing my step, had hidden her?
“Will you make my burden, Richard, more than I can bear?”
I turn in amazement. It is Lady Skene.
“I have dared much to come to you—to her,” she says, in a low agitated voice. “I knew from my husband that you could never win—not there—not in that Court. But here, Richard? O, it is great to be generous in triumph, but greater in defeat.”
“Generous! What have I left to give in all the world?”
“Yourself.”
“Ira!” I cry, as if waking from a dream. “What have I been saying? What wicked nonsense have I been talking? Why, what has all this to do with you and me? Money and titles? I don’t remember their ever having had anything to do with the understanding between us. Or had they? I am stupid, and I can’t remember.”
“Richard!”
I am on my knees to her.
“What tomfoolery, of course. I can’t imagine what I was thinking of. To quarrel with my own heart because it wouldn’t stop beating!”
I look round. Lady Skene has gone.
“Ira!” I cry once more—and heaven flows upon me under the tangle of her hair.
I haveonly a note or two to add, inessential but explanatory to the curious.
Lord Skene never forgave me for that stand made in my own rights, but persisted to the end in regarding me as an impostor who had got even something better than his deserts. His ward coming of age soon after the trial, and persisting no less obstinately in her attachment to a rascal, he washed his hands of her and committed us both to the devil. The death of his mother-in-law, I am satisfied to think, caused him some retributive pangs; for, out of pocket as he was by the action, he could not afford to ignore her substantial leavings, or fail to suffer the social penalties entailed thereby through his obligation to admit his wife’s relationship with the horrible old miser. After Mother Carey’s demise, bonds, scrip, and securities to a handsome tune were discovered hidden about her premises, besides a considerable amount of property in hard, but dirty, cash. I hope his lordship enjoyed handling it. But I bear him no grudge. Old kindly memories of him predominate in my mind.
From facts subsequently unearthed by Mr Shapter, it was believed that Mr Mark Dalston had originally purposed the infanticide, through the co-operation of his friend, Dr Blague, of the teller of this narrative, and that it was nothing more that the accidental interposition of Mother Carey which had suggested to him the compromise which, though after a long interval, was to bring about his undoing. If he had been imbued with only a little less confidence in his own managing villainy, he might have been a respected citizen at this day, and my story had never been written.
The trial had at least one sequel satisfying to justice. It led—largely through Johnny’s instrumentality—to an inquiry into the circumstances of Geoletti’s conviction (an inquiry only less notable than the one to which it was supernumerary), with the result that the victim was granted a free pardon, together with some pecuniary compensation nicely adapted to his deserts at the time of his arrest. It was sufficient, however, to his expectations; and returning with the sum to his native land, he was enabled to realise the desire of his heart in the purchase of an auberge in the Aosta Valley, where in after days I called upon him, in company with my wife, and found him a quiet prosperous man, not speaking much, but possessed with an insatiable craving to make up for past abstinences from tobacco and wine.
And, finally—of ourselves? Under the seal of love’s confessional lies locked all that is worth knowing there; but we were married, if the term is essential to the propriety of an ending. I am not fond of it myself, I confess. It is the conventional expression for a conventionally vulgar festivity. But one has to endure it, and get away from it as quickly as possible, and commit to one’s fancy a picture of the thing as one would have liked it to be—something out in the woods, perhaps, with maids dancing, and garlanded heifers, and a gentle poem of wedlock, as binding as its natural symbol in the oak and eglantine. It is nothing but a question of terms, when the sweet and solemn oath is exchanged, after all.
Well, the thing had to be, and my fairy, who should have come dressed like the green lace-wing, must drag after her a preposterous train of watered tabby, or moiré antique bombazine, or some such unnameable stuff at something terrifying the yard. Johnny, the best of men, was likewise my best man; and, in the enthusiasm of both parts, pursued us, flying, with a dropping fire of telegrams in cypher, which punctuated our honeymoon with merriment.
And afterwards? Why, I started life dependent on my wife; and what was to say against it? A sense of honour? Pooh! Fine honour or kindness to wreck two lives on a sentiment of vanity! That curse of the golden balance! Go, fall into love, my friend—really into love, I mean—and marry you a wife, and learn what mutual confidence means. After the second day you will be beating your brains to remember which of you it was brought the money into the concern. But that is not to say you will be justified in leading an idle life.
Méchant poulain, says an old French proverb,peut devenir bon cheval. Nature having given me a certain fanciful inventiveness, which might appear to be my most negotiable asset, I thought I would try writing for a living, and even began with some illusions about Literature (with a capital), and the certainty of high purpose and high endeavour meeting in time with their due recognition and reward. But long was not wanted to put me out of that preposterous conceit, and make me understand the terms upon which “literature” is permitted to include itself among the high arts, such as the forming of a trust, or the exploiting of a pill or hair wash. I then stuffed a manuscript into an old potted beef tin, and forwarded it to an enterprising publisher, with the intimation that it had been discovered on a dust-heap, and that my terms were such and such, not as author but as entrepreneur. The ruse, being appreciated at its worth by a sagacious spirit, and the venture launched on a flood-tide of puffery, proved an instant success. The literary value of the book may have been anything or nothing; it ran into its twenty-fifth edition on a much solider basis; and I found myself suddenly the possessor of capital. Ira and Johnny were both immensely indignant with me when they discovered the truth. That occurred on the very day on which my wife had unearthed from Keats a quotation which she considered peculiarly applicable to my destiny and the ideals which ruled it: