Letter fromMr. Stavangerto hisSon.(Written in Cypher.)
“My Dear Boy,—For you are my dear boy still, although you have of late caused me a great deal of anxiety. You hardly know how much I endured until I received your letter from Malta, and even then I was tormented by a dread of what it might have been found necessary to do. I allude to the death of the steward, which, to say the least, was very lucky for us. You wonder how I know this? I will tell you later on. There is so much to relate that I must start at the beginning, or I shall get mixed up. First and foremost, the business is steadily recovering from the shock given to it by the abstraction of so much portable property. Secondly, my brother has not the slightest suspicion that there is any reason why Harley Riddell should not stay where he is, and I am beginning to be of his opinion. This belief is inspired in me by a strange sequence of circumstances, all ofwhich seem to point to one conclusion. He must really be a very wicked man, or Providence would not work so persistently against him as it seems to do. Everything that could help him and hurt you is almost miraculously rendered powerless, and everybody whom we had cause to dread has been promptly removed. How, therefore, can anyone doubt that Divine vengeance is exacting atonement for some fearful crime which has not yet been brought to light? This being so, we are nothing less than the instruments used by Providence for its own ends, and I regard what you have done as the involuntary outcome of an inexplicable and unconscious cerebral influence.
“But now that the aims of Providence are achieved, I beseech you to assert your own identity and to fight against any impulse to repeat any one of the dangerous proceedings of the past few months.
“And now for such news as I have. Perhaps I ought to have mentioned sooner that your mother and sisters are quite well. Also that I am in like case both mentally and bodily, now that I know you to be rid of your enemies. It would have been an awful Damoclean sword hanging over us if that inquisitive Wear had not been providentially removed from our path. Then there was my poor old friend Mr. Edward Lyon. Did you see in the papers anything about his sudden death while away on his business mission to America? I had nothing but esteem for him. But I must say that I felt immensely relieved when the news of his death reached us. He had turned unpleasantly suspicious just before he sailed, and would most assuredly have begun to make undesirable inquiries on his return. But heaven has seen fit to remove him to abetter world. That it has at the same time removed one who might have been the means of proving Riddell not guilty of the crime for which he suffers is only another proof to me that he is, as I said before, being made to expiate some former sin.
“Nor is this by any means all the proof of my theory. You know Clement Corney? And perhaps you feel uneasy at the mention of his name. If so, you may set your fears at rest, for he also is numbered among those who might have been a witness against you, but is not. A week ago he came to me with a long tale about what he knew and about what he suspected. You seem to have been imprudently confidential with him, and to have allowed him to pry into your affairs far too much. From what he told me I judged him to be a very formidable witness against you and deemed it advisable to accede to his demands for money, but looked with anything but equanimity upon the prospect of having to continue supplying him with money as long as he chose to blackmail me. I should have been left no choice in the matter, as exposure, after having gone so far, would mean ruin. But here Providence once more interposed most strangely. Last night, on opening my evening paper, I came upon the account of the inquest on Clement Corney’s body. He had been jerked from the top step of a ’bus and had broken his neck.
“This is all very strange and wonderful. But the strangest thing of all has to be related yet. As you will see by the postmark of this letter, we have come to St. Ives for our holiday. We arrived here on Monday, and on Tuesday I was walking on the beach and wondering howyou were going on when I saw a group of children become considerably excited. Going up to them I found that one of them was holding a bottle which had been washed up by the tide. Seeing that the bottle was carefully sealed, and appeared to contain papers, I offered the children a shilling for it. They ran off with the shilling in high glee, while I secreted the bottle in my dustcoat, and walked rapidly towards our lodgings with it. I cannot account for the impulse which prompted these apparently irrelevant actions, except upon the hypothesis of Providential interference already mentioned. I do not usually take much interest in the doings of children, and I am not naturally of a prying, inquisitive disposition, and yet I was anxious to open that bottle in the privacy of my own bedroom. And now mark the result.
“That bottle contained papers giving a detailed account of all that Hilton Riddell, alias William Trace, had done, and was doing, to ruin you and liberate his brother. What a sneak the fellow has been to deceive people, and to do the tricky things he was doing. No wonder he came to a bad end. And how vindictive he must have been to write down all he wrote on the papers that have so wonderfully been put in my possession. Why, only one half the details would have reversed the relative positions of his brother and yourself, if anyone but me had secured that bottle. It seems miraculous, doesn’t it, that, after tossing about on the waters of the broad Atlantic, the fragile receptacle of a deadly secret should have been guided to the only person who knew how to make a proper use of it? I broke the bottle, and after reading them destroyed the papers. And what do you to say to the strangefact that I, who had never been in St. Ives before, should chance to be there just when that bottle was washed ashore? Only picture what a calamity it would have been had anyone but myself stumbled upon it.
“The whole thing has only served to strengthen the belief expressed nearer the beginning of this letter, and I no longer feel the slightest qualms of conscience on his behalf. Nor do I feel much further uneasiness about you. Wear is dead. Mr. Lyon is dead. Clement Corney is dead. The carefully-prepared proofs against you which Hilton Riddell consigned to the waves have perished in a more deadly element, and he himself is powerless to do you further injury unless the sea gives up its dead. All things taken together, therefore, you may consider yourself perfectly safe, and I do not think there would be the slightest risk in your returning to England, and resuming your duties at the shop. Let me know as soon as possible whether you intend to do so or not. You will have had sufficient holiday, and ought to try to make up for all the worry you have caused me lately.
“One thing puzzles me a little. How did Hilton Riddell get to know that you were sailing in the ‘Merry Maid,’ and what led him to pitch his suspicions on you? It couldn’t be all chance, and, but for his timely extinction things might have been very awkward for you by this time.
“But enough of this subject. You know all there is to know, and I know as much as I want to know. Nor do I desire ever to open the subject again.
“You will be interested to hear that Mr. Leonard Claridge is violently in love with Ada, and is very anxious to marry her off-hand. I am just as anxious that the marriageshould take place as he is, for it would be a great thing to have Ada so advantageously settled. She pretends to turn her nose up at an offer from a grocer. But she is a very sensible girl, after all, and will reflect that if Mr. Claridge is a grocer he is not in the retail line, and will be able to provide her with an establishment quite equal to her mother’s.
“Fanny is likely to be much more troublesome to us. She is very passionate and intractable, and nobody seems able to manage her since the night you left home. That night was also the one on which Wear came to such a sudden and tragic end. It was also the night on which that governess disappeared, who seemed to have such a genius for managing Fanny. When I returned home, after seeing you safe on board the ‘Merry Maid,’ the governess had gone out. It was odd that she never came back, wasn’t it?”
Yes, it was certainly odd. Indeed, it was the one fly in Mr. Stavanger’s ointment. Just now the fact did not trouble him, because he was not aware of it.
At one of the principal hotels in Bombay a young man sat reading the letter from which the above long extract is given. He would have been fairly good-looking but for the unpleasant expression which his reckless indulgence in vicious pleasures and his aggressively selfish temperament had given him. In height and breadth he somewhat exceeded the average, but his gait was seen to be clumsy when he walked, although his proportions were regular enough. His hands and feet were small and well shaped, his complexion of a clear, but healthy enough paleness when he condescended to lead an abstemious life. Just now it was full of tell-tale pimples. His features wereregular; his teeth well-shaped, but slightly discoloured; his hair, eyes, and expression all as black as they can be found anywhere.
Such was Hugh Stavanger, known on the hotel books as Harry Staley. He had been to the “poste restante” for his letter, and as his eyes wandered from one page to another, rapidly deciphering the contents that would have proved so baffling to anyone not initiated in the business of Stavanger, Stavanger, and Co., the heavy scowl on his face gave way to a look of evil triumph, not unmingled with astonishment.
“Well, of all the lucky accidents, these beat everything,” he murmured. “To think of all those people being bowled over like that. But what a caution the governor is, to be sure, with his talk about wickedness and Providence. And he really writes as if he believes what he preaches. There is one thing, though, in which he is quite right. The sea can’t give up its dead, at any rate not in such a condition as to be able to speak against me. Hullo! What’s this? Curse that girl. There is no mistake about her now. She was a spy when pretending to be governess. She disappeared from our house the night I sailed. This means that she found out where I was going to, and set that scoundrel of a Riddell on my trail. Her next manœuvre was to follow me out to Malta. These people evidently know who really took the diamonds. And they are moving heaven and earth to bring me to book. Ah! well! They mean to win. So do I, and all the odds are now in my favour. They may suspect what they like, but they haven’t a proof left. As the governor says, Providence is dead against them. We all know that it’s nouse flying in the face of Providence, so my enemies are foredoomed to disappointment.
“So the governor thinks I had better go home again, and that I should be quite safe. I don’t exactly agree with him, and I have an idea that I can work a trick worth two of that. This interesting young lady, whom I imagine to be Miss Cory, wants to discover my whereabouts. I have, very foolishly, been running away from her. I think I will reverse my tactics. It would be completing the good offices of Providence if I were to permit my enemies to overtake me. Nay, I will go further than that. I will give them indirect information of my whereabouts. Then, just when they imagine the hour of their triumph has arrived, I will remove them from my path with even less compunction than I felt over Hilton Riddell.
“Yes, the hunted shall turn hunter, and whether it is God or devil that is helping me, I mean to win.”