Harry drifted through the fog, the sport of misery and rage. He was a beaten man, and slow as another to own it to himself. Now he swore that he and he alone would unravel the mystery of his father's fate; now the sense of his own impotence appalled him; but at last the bitter fact of his defeat came home to him in all its nakedness.
Yes, he had been beaten by a readier and a keener wit, and the most plausible tongue a villain ever wagged. He had been at the mercy of that specious charlatan, that unscrupulous blackleg, that scoundrel self-confessed. He knew it now. Lowndes had put him in the wrong. He was no match for a man like that. Nevertheless, he was in the right, and one day it would be proved—and one day Lowndes would get his deserts.
And yet—and yet—there were words and looks and tones that had sounded genuine enough. The man was not wholly false or bad. His good side, his staunch side, had shown itself again and again, in good and staunch actions performed without ostentation, and in motive transparently pure. That side existed in him still, and Harry felt that he had spoken as though it did not. He was sorry for many things he had said. He wished he had said other things instead or as well. He wished he had not flung those shares into the fire, though they proved that Lowndes had expected him, and they must have been intended for a sop. Still he was sorry he had thrown them on the fire; and he wished he could unsay that boast about his being a gentleman because he had not listened; other considerations apart, it struck him now almost as a contradiction in terms.
So to existing tortures he must needs add that of savage self-criticism. It was the morbid wont of Harry Ringrose, the penalty of a temperament. In a little, however, sheer perplexity gripped his mind again, and wrenched it from himself. The old unanswered questions were upon him once more.
What had there been between Lowndes and Scrafton and his own poor father? Were these men in league with the fugitive? Had they planned the wrong which had ruined and disgraced his family? Lowndes had long ago confessed that the raising of the £20,000 was his idea, that the actual acquisition of the £10,000 was his deed. The chances were that his scheme had gone further and cut deeper, and that at least a part of the plunder was for himself. Then what had he done with his share—and what had Scrafton done with his?
How else could Scrafton come in?
Harry thought of that ghoulish face, of those cruel hands, and the blood ran cold in every vessel. If ever he had seen a man capable of any crime, a man without bowels, as Lowndes was without principle, that man was Jeremiah Scrafton. What if between them they had murdered the ironmaster for those ten thousand pounds? What if they had driven him out of his mind and clapped him into an asylum, or into some vile den of Scrafton's? Ever quicker to imagine than to reason, the young fellow tasted all the horror of his theories before he realised their absurdity: where, again, were the proceeds of the crime? Lowndes was only now emerging from the very depths of poverty, while as for Scrafton, he was either an extremely poor man, or a stage miser come to life. Besides, there was the letter from Dieppe.
So he went from one blind alley of the brain to another; and of all the faces that passed him in the fog, there was none he knew—he had no friend to turn to in his sore dilemma. And he was trudging westward, going back to face his mother and to live with her in the little flat, with this miserable mystery unsolved, with these haunting suspicions unconfirmed, and therefore to be locked indefinitely in his own bosom. Vultures for his vitals, and yet he must face them, and alone.
No one to tell—no friend to consult. The words were a dirge in his heart. Suddenly they changed their tune and became a question. He stopped dead in the street. It was the Strand. He had just passed the gulf of fog which hid Waterloo Bridge.
He stood some minutes, ostensibly studying the engravings in the shop at the Adam Street corner, and looking again and again at his watch as though anxious to know the time, but too absent to bear it in mind. It was five minutes to one when he looked first; by five minutes past that shop-window and the Strand itself knew Harry Ringrose no more. He was deep in the yellow gulf, which was dimly bridged by the lights of the bridge.
The train took an hour to feel its way to Richmond: it was worse than the hour spent in the waiting-room of the Crofter Fisheries, Limited.
At Richmond the fog was white. To make an end of it, Harry took a cab, and kept the man waiting while he asked if Miss Lowndes was in. A smart parlour-maid told him that she was; otherwise there was no change.
Fanny rose hastily from a low chair in front of a blazing fire; her face was flushed but smiling, and she held up a paper in one hand while she gave Harry the other.
He took it mechanically. He had not meant to take it at all. It was the wretchedTiddler, of all papers, which disarmed him.
"I was just thinking about you," said his friend. "I was trying to find out which is yours this week."
"Yes?"
There was no life in his voice. His heart had leapt with pleasure, only to begin aching in a new place.
"We take it in every week on your account," said Fanny Lowndes.
"You mean that you do," said Harry, pointedly.
She coloured afresh.
"No; it is my father who brings it home from the City."
"Then he never will again!"
For some seconds their eyes were locked.
"Mr. Ringrose, what do you mean? Your tone is so strange. Has anything happened?"
"Not to your father. He and I have quarrelled—that's all."
"When?"
"This morning."
"And you have come to tell me about that!"
"I didn't mean to do so. I came to speak to one of the only two friends I have in the world besides my mother. I came to speak to you while—while you would speak to me. And now I've gone and spoilt it all!"
"Of course you haven't," said the girl, with her kind smile. "Sit down and tell me all about it. I think all the more of you for saying the worst thing first." Yet she looked alarmed, and her tone was only less agitated than his.
"It is not the worst," groaned Harry Ringrose, "and I can't sit down to say the sort of thing I've come to say. Oh, but I was a coward to come to you at all! It was because I had no one else to turn to; and you have always been my friend; but it was a cowardly thing to do! I will go away again without saying a word."
She had sunk down upon her low chair, and was leaning forward so that he could not see her face, but only the red gold of her hair in the ruddy firelight.
"No; now you must go on," she said, without raising her face.
"It is about your father—and mine."
"I expected that."
"I asked him some plain questions which he could not—or would not—answer. In desperation—in distraction—I have come to put those questions to you!"
"It is useless," was the low reply. "I cannot answer them—either."
"Wait until you hear what they are. They are very simple. What was there between Scrafton and your father and mine? What had your father and Scrafton to do with my father's flight? That's all I ask—that's all I want to know."
"I cannot tell you what you want to know."
"Cannot," he said gently, "or dare not?"
"Cannot!" she cried, and was on her feet with the word, her burning face flung back and her grey eyes flashing indignation.
Harry bowed.
"That is enough for me," he said, "and I apologise for those last words—but you would understand them if you had heard all that passed this morning."
"I do not want to know what passed. My father's affairs are not necessarily mine. I cannot tell you what you want to know because—I do not know myself."
"You have made that clear to me," said Harry, staring out of the window and through the fog. He could see the gate with the ridiculous name still painted upon it. It stood wide open as he had left it in his haste. He thought of the first time he had seen it and entered by it; he thought of the second time, which had also been the last; and all at once he thought of a question asked upon the other side of the gate, and never answered, nor repeated, nor yet remembered, from that day to this.
He turned to his companion.
"You once told me that you knew my father?"
"Yes, I knew him."
"You have seen him here in this house?"
"Yes."
"I am going to ask you what I asked you once before. You did not answer then. I entreat you to do so now. When was the last time you saw my father in this house?"
The girl drew back in dismay; not a syllable came from her parted lips.
"Was it since I asked you the question last?" cried Harry, his imagination at its wildest work in a moment.
"No."
"Was it after he was supposed to have disappeared?"
"No."
"Was it after he left my mother up north?"
Miss Lowndes turned away, but there was a mirror over the mantelpiece, and in it he could see her scarlet anguish. Harry set his teeth. He must know the truth—the truth came first.
"So he was here on his way through town. I understood it was my mother who saw him last. I have to thank you—I do so from my heart—for setting me so far upon the right track. Oh, I know what it must be to you to have such things forced from you! I hate to press you like this. No, Miss Lowndes, duty or no duty, you have only to say the word, and I will leave you alone." He could not bear the sight of her quivering shoulders, of the pretty pink ear that was all her hands now let him see of her face. Unconsciously, however, he had made his strongest appeal in his latest words; his magnanimity fired that of the girl, his consideration touched her to the quick, and she turned to him with noble impulse in her frank, wet eyes.
"I will tell you of the last time I saw your father," she cried, "on one condition. You are to question me no more when I have finished."
Harry took her hand.
"I promise," he said, and released it instantly. It was no time to think of her. He must think only of his purpose—his duty—his sacred obligation as a son.
"It was on Easter Eve," said his friend steadily. "I was up in my room—it was just dinner-time—and I saw him come in at the gate." She could not conceal a shudder. "He looked terrible—terrible—so sad and so old! My father must have seen him too. I heard their voices, but I did not hear what they said; my father lowered his voice, and I thought I heard him telling Mr. Ringrose to do the same. It was all I did hear. My father came upstairs and said a business friend had come unexpectedly, and would I mind not coming down? So my dinner was sent up to me, and afterwards in the dark I saw them go together to the gate; and at the very gate they met that dreadful man—that man whose face alone is enough to haunt one. Oh, you know him better than any of us! You are a master in the same school."
"Not now," said Harry. "I left yesterday on that man's account. Didn't he come here yesterday to tell your father?"
"Not here. He may have been to the new offices. I saw last night there had been some unpleasantness. Unpleasantness! If you knew what we have suffered from that monster! One reason why we got in such difficulties was because he was always coming——" She checked herself suddenly, with a gesture of disgust and of some underlying emotion.
"And is that all?" asked Harry gently. "Am I to know nothing beyond that meeting at the gate?"
"No, I will tell you the very last I saw of your father—and I will tell you what I think. The very last I saw of him was when they all three went out together after talking for a few minutes in the dining-room below mine. I did not hear a word. What I think is—may God forgive me, whether I am right or wrong—that the flight was arranged in those few minutes."
"You think your father knew all about it?"
"I cannot help thinking that."
"When did he come back?"
The girl turned white.
"Your promise!" she gasped. "You promised to ask no more questions!"
"I see," said Harry, grimly. "Your father crossed the Channel with mine. This is news indeed!"
"It is not!" cried Miss Lowndes. "I don't admit it. I don't know it. I don't believe it. He told me he had been up in Scotland; he was always going up to Scotland then. Oh, why do you try to wring more from me than I know? I have told you all I know for a fact. Why do you break your promise?"
"I didn't mean to," he answered brokenly. "And yet—it was my duty—to my poor father."
"Your father is gone," she cried. "Spare mine—and me."
"Do you mean that he is—dead?"
She looked at him an instant with startled eyes, as though his had read the secret suspicion of her heart; then with a wild sob, "I do not know, I do not know," she cried piteously. With that she burst into tears. He tried to soothe her. "Leave me—leave me," was all her answer, and in his helplessness he turned to do so—to leave her bowed down and weeping passionately—weeping as he had never seen woman weep before—in the chair from which she had risen to welcome him—with that foolish paper still lying crumpled at her feet.
It was so he saw her when he turned again at the door, for a last look at his friend. The white fog pressed against the panes; a little mist there was in the room, but the fire burnt very brightly, and against the glow were those small ears pink with shame, those strong hands racked with anguish, that fine head bowed low, that lissom figure bent double in the beautiful abandon of a woman's grief. Young blood took fire. He forgot everything but her. He could not and he would not leave her so; in an instant his arms were about her, he was kissing her hair.
"I love you—I love you—I love you!" he whispered. "Let us think of nothing else. If we are never to see each other again, thank God I have told you that!"
She pushed him back in horror.
"But it is dreadful, if it is true," she said; and yet she held her breath until he vowed it was.
"I have loved you for months," he said, "though I didn't know it at first. I never meant to love you. I couldn't help myself—it makes me love you all the more." And his arms were round her once more, in the first earnest passion of his life, in the first sweet flood of that passion.
"If you love me," she whispered, "will you ask no more questions of me—or of anybody? They will not bring your father back. They may only implicate—my ather—just as he is coming through his hard, hard struggles. Can you not leave it in the hands of Providence—for my sake? It is all I ask; and I think—if you do—it may all come right—some day."
"With you?" he cried. "With you and me?"
"Who knows?" she answered. "You may not care for me so long; but when there are no more mysteries—well, yes—perhaps."
"Shall I ever see you meanwhile?"
"Not until there are no more mysteries—or quarrels."
"Yet you will not let me try to clear them up."
"I want you to leave them in the hands of Providence—for my sake."
"It is hard!"
"But if you love me you will promise."
The cab was still waiting in the mist. Harry sprang into it, wild with unhidden grief, as one fresh from a death-bed. His perplexity was returning—his conscience was beginning to gnaw—yet one difficulty was solved.
He had promised.
A hansom stood at the curb below the flats; the porter was taking down the luggage; a lady and a gentleman were on the stairs.
"I hope, for every reason, that we shall find him in," the gentleman was saying. "If not I must wait a little, for I feel that a few words from me may be of value to him at this juncture, quite apart from the little proposal I have to make."
"I would not count on his accepting it," the lady ventured to observe.
"My dear Mary——"
Uncle Spencer got no further. Harry's arms were round his mother's neck. And in a few moments they were all three in the flat, where the porter's wife had the fires lighted and everything comfortable in response to a telegram from Mrs. Ringrose.
"But we must have the gas lit," cried the lady. "I want to look at you, my dear, and I cannot in this fog."
"It'll keep, mother, it'll keep," said Harry, who had his own reasons for not courting a close inspection.
"I quite agree with Henry," said Mr. Walthew. "To light the gas before it is actually dark is an extravagance whichIcannot afford. I do not permit it in my house, Mary." Harry promptly struck a match.
"Come, my boy, and let me have a look at you," said Mrs. Ringrose when the blinds were drawn. She drew his face close to hers. "Let him say what he likes," she whispered: "I have been with them all this time. Never mind, my darling," she cried aloud; "it must have been a horrid place, and I am thankful to have you back."
Mr. Walthew prepared to say what he liked, his pulpit the hearthrug, and his theme the fiasco of the day before.
"I must say, Mary, that your sentiments are astounding. Naturally he looks troubled. He has lost the post it took him four months to secure. I confess, Henry, that I, for my part, was less surprised this morning than when I heard you had obtained your late situation. With the very serious limitations which I learnt from your own lips, however, you could scarcely hope to hold your own in a scholastic avocation. I told you so, in effect, at the time, if you remember. Was it the Greek or the mathematics that caused your downfall?"
Harry had not said what it was in his letter. He now explained, with a grim smile as he thought ofMangnall's QuestionsandLittle Steps to Great Events. He described Scrafton's brutality in a few words, and in fewer still the scene of the day before. His mother's indignation was even louder than her applause. Uncle Spencer looked horrified at them both.
"So it was insubordination!" cried he. "You took the side of the boys against their master and your elder! Really, Henry, there is no more to be said. Your mother's sympathy I consider most misplaced. I tell you frankly that you need expect none from me."
"Did I say I expected any, Uncle Spencer?"
"That," said Mr. Walthew, "is a remark worthy of your friend Mr. Lowndes, the most impudent fellow I ever met in my life."
"He is no longer a friend of mine," said Harry Ringrose.
"I am glad to hear it, Henry."
"Do you mean that you have quarrelled?" cried Mrs. Ringrose.
"For good, mother; you shall hear about it afterwards. I can't forgive a liar, and no more must you. I have bowled Lowndes out in a thundering lie—and told him what I thought of him—that's all."
Mrs. Ringrose looked troubled, but inquisitive for particulars. Her brother did not smile, but for an instant his expression ceased to be that of a professional mute.
"'Liar' and 'lie,'" said he, "are stronger language than I approve of, Henry; but if anybody deserves such epithets I feel sure it is Mr. Gordon Lowndes. The man impressed me as a falsehood-teller when he came to my house, and I feel sure that the prospectus of this new Crofter Company, which reached me this morning, is nothing but a tissue of untruths from beginning to end. A thoroughly bad man, Henry, a lost and irredeemable sinner, who might have dragged you with him to fire eternal!"
"I did not find him thoroughly bad, Uncle Spencer," said his nephew civilly. "On the contrary, I believe there is more good in him than in most of us; but—you can't depend upon him, and there you are."
"Yet you would defend him!" exclaimed Mr. Walthew, with a sneer. "Well, well, I have no time to argue with you, Henry;mytime is precious, so may I ask how you propose to fill yours now? You have tried and failed for the City; you have tried and failed for the Law; and now you have tried schoolmastering, and failed still more conspicuously. What do you think of trying next?"
"Something that I have been trying for some time without failing so badly as at the other things."
"Literature!" cried Mrs. Ringrose.
"Literature, forsooth!" echoed the clergyman, before Harry had time to repudiate the word. "I suppose, Mary, that you are alluding to the productions you have shown me in the paper with the unspeakable name? Well, Henry, if that's your literature, let's say no more about it; only I am almost sorry you did not fail there, too. You cannot, however, devote all or even much of your time to such buffoonery, and it was to speak to you about some permanent occupation that I accompanied your mother this afternoon. What should you say to the Civil Service?"
"I couldn't possibly get into it, uncle."
"Into the higher branches you certainly could not, Henry. But a second-class clerkship in one of the lower branches I think you might obtain, with ordinary application and perseverance. I am only sorry it did not occur to me before."
"What are the lower branches?" asked Harry, doubtfully.
"The Excise and the Customs are two."
"And the salary?"
"From eighty-five to two hundred pounds in the Excise, which is the service I recommend. I have been making inquiries about it this morning. A parishioner of mine is sending his son in for it. The lad is to attend classes at Exeter Hall, under the auspices of the Young Men's Christian Association, and I understand that mensuration is the only really difficult subject. What I propose to do, Henry, is to present you to-morrow with a ticket for the course of these classes which commences next week."
"You are very kind, Uncle Spencer——"
Mr. Walthew waved his hand as though not totally unaware of it.
"But——"
"But what?" cried Uncle Spencer.
"I believe before very, very long I should make as much money with my pen."
"You decline my offer?"
"I am exceedingly grateful for it."
"Yet you elect to go on writing rubbish for an extremely vulgar paper for the rest of your days."
"Not for the rest of my days, I hope, Uncle Spencer. I mean it to be a stepping-stone to better things."
"So you think you can earn eighty-five pounds a year by your pen!" sneered the clergyman, buttoning up his overcoat.
"I mean to try," said Harry, provoked into a firmer tone.
"Is this your deliberate decision?"
"It is."
"Then I am sorry I wasted my time by coming so far to hold out a helping hand to you. It is the last time, Henry. You may go your own way after this. Only, when your pen brings you to the poorhouse, don't come to me—that's all!"
Harry contrived to keep his temper without effort. Pinpricks do not hurt a man with a mortal wound. As for Mrs. Ringrose, she had fled before the proposal which she knew was coming, and of the result of which she felt equally sure. But she came to her door to bid the offended clergyman good-bye, and at last her boy and she were alone. He flung his arms round her neck.
"I am never going to leave you again!" he cried passionately. "I am not going to look for any more work. I am going to stop at home and write forT.T.until I can teach myself to write something better. I am going to work for you and for us both. I am going to do my work beside you, and you're going to help me. We ought never to have separated. Nothing shall ever separate us again!"
"Until you marry," murmured Mrs. Ringrose.
"I will never marry!" cried her boy.
So it was that Harry Ringrose took finally to his pen towards the close of the most momentous year of his existence; for four years from that date there was but one sort of dramatic interest in his life. There was the dramatic interest of the electric bell; and that was all.
In the early days, when the roll of the little steel drum broke a silence or cut short a speech, the eyes of mother and son would meet involuntarily with the same look. Her needles would cease clicking. His pen would spring from the unfinished word. Each had the other's thought, and neither uttered it. Many a man had fled the country in his panic, to pluck up courage and return in his cooler senses. Many a man effaced himself for a time, but few for ever. The ironmaster's last letter confessed flight and promised self-effacement. He might have thought better of it—that might be he at the bell. One of the two within got over this feeling in time; the other never did.
The dogged plodder at the desk endured other heartburnings of which the little steel drum beat the signal. Knockers these flats had not, and the postman usually rang a second before he thrust the letter through the door. It was a breathless second for Harry Ringrose. He developed an incredibly fine ear for what came through. He was never deceived in the thud of a rejected manuscript. He used to vow that a proof fell with peculiar softness, and, later, that a press-cutting was unmistakable because you could not hear it fall. He had an essay on the subject in his second book, published when he was twenty-five.
His first book had been one of the minor successes of its season. It had made a small, a very small, name for Harry, but had developed his character more than his fame. It is an ominous coincidence, however, that in conception his first book was as barefaced and as cold-blooded as his first verses inUncle Tom's Magazine.
For nearly three years he had been writing up, for as many guineas as possible, those African anecdotes which he had brought home with him for conversational purposes. In this way he had wasted much excellent material, to which, however, he was not too proud to return when he knew better. Heaven knows how many times he used the lion in the moonlight and his friend the Portuguese murderer of Zambesi blacks. One would have thought—he thought himself—that he had squeezed the last drop from his African orange, when one fine day he saw the way to make the pulp pay better than the juice. It was not his own way. It was the way of the greatest humorist then living. Harry took the whole of his two years abroad, and eyed them afresh from that humorist's point of view, as he apprehended it. He saw the things the great man would have seized upon, and the way it seemed to Harry he would have treated them. The result was a comic lion in the moonlight, and a more or less amusing murderer. He had treated these things tragically hitherto.
The book purported to be fact, and was certainly not fiction, for which, indeed, our young author had no definite aptitude. It earned him an ambiguous compliment from various reviewers who insisted on dubbing him the English So-and-so; but it was lucky for Harry that the new humour was then an unmade phrase. His humour was not new, but that would not have saved it from the category. It was keen enough, however, in its way, and not too desperately subtle for the man on the knifeboard. Yet Harry's first book, after "going" for a few weeks, showed a want of staying power, and was but a very moderate success after all. A few papers hailed Mr. Ringrose as the humorist for whom England had been sighing since the death of Charles Dickens, and predicted that his book would be the book of the season and of many seasons to come. Such enthusiasm was inevitable from organs which let loose at least one genius a week; but Harry did not realise the inevitability all at once. For a week or two he could not give his name in a shop without a wholly unnecessary blush; while he took his mother to look at empty houses in West End squares, thanks to indiscriminate praise from irresponsible quarters. On the whole, however, Harry had no reason to complain of the treatment accorded to his first-born; and, to descend to lower details, he sold the copyright for a small sum, which was, nevertheless, quite as much as the publishers could possibly have made out of it.
But it was in indirect ways that this book did most for Harry Ringrose. It made new friends for him at a time when his acquaintance was badly in need of some fresh blood. Years of immersion in solitary work must narrow and may warp a man; and the almost exclusive companionship of his dear mother, whose only interest he was in the present, and who vastly overrated his merits, was a joy too great not to be purchased at a price. It kept the lad's heart tender and his life of fair report, but it tended to monopolise his sympathies, and it did not increase his knowledge of the outside world. In the world of letters he had made but one friend in those first three years. This was a youth of Harry's own age, who, with a board-school education, was on the staff of an evening paper, in a position which the public-school boy was certainly not competent to fill. Harry stormed this fortress with a little article on "Portuguese Africa"—which the Editor would label "By an Afrikander"—and the acquaintance was struck up outside that gentleman's door. It ripened in a bar to which the young fellows used to repair whenever Harry was in the Strand. There, over a glass of bitter—or two—or three—he used to hear at first hand of the great novelists whom he longed to meet, but with whom his friend the journalist seemed on enviable terms. It was merely that the latter was in the heart of the big game, whereas Harry was playing a very little game of his own, in an exceedingly remote corner of the field.
His book was not a huge success, but it succeeded well enough to take him out of his corner. His friend the journalist (who managed to review the thing himself in his paper) wrote to tell Harry of a distinguished lady who was so enchanted with it that she begged him to take the author to see her. Harry had no means of knowing that the lady's enchantment was as chronic as the enthusiasm of the paper which had hailed him as a genius, and that the demand was not for himself, but for the latest name. He was still a very simple-minded person, and he waited on this lady with all alacrity, and under her wing made his bow in the sort of society of which he had heard with envy in the Gaiety bar. It cannot be said, however, that he did anybody much credit; he had been too long in his corner, and had an awkward manner when not perfectly at home. Yet a number of other ladies asked him to go and see them, and one invited him to dinner at her smart house—where the wretched Harry distinguished himself by freezing into a solid block of self-consciousness and hardly opening his mouth.
But it was all very valuable experience, and, instead of two or three, he knew a good many people by the end of that winter. He became a member of a club, and got on intimate terms with men whose names and work had become familiar to him in these years. They enlarged his sympathies—they extended his boundaries on every side. And they made him know himself as he had not known himself before. All at once he realised that he had fewer interests than other men, that his nose had been too close to his own grindstone, that the mind he had been slaving to develop had grown narrow in the process. It was a rather bitter discovery, until one day it struck him there was another side to narrowness, and he sat down and began his "Plea for Narrow Minds" on the spot. This article secured a better place in the periodicals than anything Harry Ringrose had then written. It attracted some attention during the month of its appearance, and even on republication in his second book. But it was generally considered a frivolous adventure in mere paradox (on a par with a companion paper "On Enjoying Bad Health"), whereas it was really a reaction against the writer's own self-criticism.
"Cant is not necessarily humbug," declared our scribe, "and there is probably less hypocrisy in the cant of breadth than in any other kind of cant. It may spring from a laudable ambition to be on the side of the good angels in all things. But it is apt to crystallise in a pose. For my part, when I meet a typically broad-minded man, who sees good in everybody and merit in everything, either I suspect his sincerity or I doubt his depth. I want to know if he is saying (a) what he thinks, or (b) what he thinks he ought to think. Either he is insincere and a prig, or he means what he says and is shallow. Those wonderfully wide sympathies are too often sympathy spread thin. The odds are against your being very deep as well as very broad."
There were those critics who remarked that the sapient essayist came under both his own categories, whereupon Harry lay awake all night wondering whether he did. And it was "A Plea for Narrow Minds" that drew from Miss Lowndes the letter which she never posted, but which came into Harry's hands long afterwards. She agreed with him in part, but by no means on the whole; in fact, her letter was a remonstrance, written impulsively in a dainty boudoir of Berkeley Square, and found long afterwards in an escritoire. Harry often wondered whether the woman he loved ever read what he wrote. She read everything he signed, and would never have droppedTommy Tiddlerhad she dreamt he was still a comic singer in its columns. But Harry saw nothing and heard but little of his quondam friends. He knew they lived in Berkeley Square—he knew they were very rich. He had heard of the dividend the Crofter Fisheries were paying, and what he would have to give now for the shares which he had committed to the flames. He had also readTruth'sopinion of the concern, and wondered why the action for so obvious a libel hung fire. He sometimes wondered, too, how it was that he never met either the father or the daughter from whom he had severed with such different emotions on the same thick November day. He did not know that the daughter once fled from a party on hearing he was expected—and was sorry afterwards.
Curiously enough, the very article which failed to gain the good opinion he coveted most, was so fortunate as to secure that of Harry's most severe and least respected critic. The Reverend Spencer Walthew read religion between the lines, and, having written to thank his nephew for his spirited though veiled attack on the Broad Church party, concluded by begging him to have a go at the Ritualists.
"I have seldom had a more unexpected pleasure," wrote the Evangelical divine, "than you have given me by this shrewd blow against the vice of tolerance and the ultra-charitable spirit which I regard as one of the great dangers of the age. We want no charity for the heretic and the ritualist—with whom I trust you will deal unmercifully without delay. I cannot conclude, Henry, without telling you what a relief it is to me to see you at last turning your attention to serious subjects. I feel sure that they are the only ones worthy of a Christian's pen. I have never concealed from you my pain and disgust at the levity of almost all your writings hitherto, although I have tried to do justice to the literary quality, which, on the whole, has been distinctly better than might have been expected. It is the greater pleasure to me, therefore, to recognise the serious purpose and the lofty aim of your latest essay. May you never again descend to 'humorous' accounts of your 'adventures,' or to inferior versifying for papers which are not to be seen in respectable houses!"
Harry, however, had never ceased his connection with theTiddler, although it was not one of the things he mentioned to the notorious interviewer who came to patronise him in those days, and to whom he caught his mother showing the parody on Gray's Elegy.T.T.had been a good friend to Harry at the foot of the hill, and he was not going to desert just yet, even if he could have afforded to do so. Of the £51 10s. 9d. which he managed to make in the first year, £34 4s. was from theTiddler'scoffers; of the third year's £223 14s. 6d. (a mighty leap from the intermediate year), £55 12s. was from the same genial source. And so we find him towards the end of the fourth year—not quite such a good one as the last—fighting hard to touch the second hundred for the second time, and writing verses in his pyjamas at midnight at the close of a long day's work on an ungrateful book.
The flat is no longer that in which Harry Ringrose found his mother; it is a slightly larger one in the same mansions on a higher floor; and instead of Weber's Last Waltz, a lusty youth, who arrived there on the same night as Harry, supplies the unsolicited accompaniment inseparable from life in a flat.
Only one room has been gained by the change; but in it sleeps a servant, an old retainer of the family; and the sitting-room is larger, so that there is ample room in it for the rather luxurious desk which Harry has bought himself, and at which we find him seated, his back to the books and his nose in his rhyming dictionary, taking his most trivial task seriously, as was ever his wont, on a warm night in the middle of September.
He is a little altered—not much. He is thicker set; the legs in the pyjamas are less lean. His face is older, but still extremely young. He has tried to grow a moustache, but failed, and given it up; and the two blots of whisker show that he has no candid girl friend now; and the blue stubble on his chin means that his mother is away. His black hair inclines to length, not altogether because he thinks it looks interesting, but chiefly because he has been too busy to get it cut. He has not yet affected thepince-nezor the spectacles of the average literary man. But he is smoking at his desk; he will be smoking presently in his bed; and on a small table stand a bottle of whisky and a syphon.
Suddenly a ring at the bell.
At half-past twelve at night a prolonged tattoo on the little steel drum!
Harry was greatly startled, as a man may easily be who is working at night after working all day. Yet he would have been much more startled the September before.
Since then his books had come out, and he had made a number of friends. Only the night before a play-actor had looked in after his "show," and they had sat up reading Keats against Shelley, and capping Swinburne with Rossetti, until the whisky was finished and daylight shamed them in their cups. Harry thoroughly enjoyed a Bohemian life in his mother's absence, though indeed she let him do exactly as he liked when she was there. Was it the actor again, or was it....
Not for months had the old fancy seized him with the ringing of the bell. It was only the lateness of the hour which brought it back to-night. Yet the look with which the young fellow rose was one that he wore often enough when there were none to see. It was a look of utter misery barbed with shame unspeakable and undying. Sometimes the mother had seen it—and taken the shame and the misery for his share of their common hidden grief. She little knew!
The gas was burning in the passage, but lowered on the common landing outside. Harry could see nothing through the ground glass which formed the upper portion of the door. He flung it open. A tall man was standing on the mat.
"Good evening, Mr. Ringrose," said he, and took a tremendous pinch of snuff as Harry drew back in dismay.
It was Jeremiah Scrafton.
Harry had not heard of him for nearly four years, had not set eyes on him since their scuffle at the school. But only a few days later Leonard Bickersteth had called at the flat with strange news of Scrafton. He had never returned to the Hollies; he had disappeared from his lodgings; it was impossible to trace his whereabouts. The motive of his flight, on the other hand, seemed pretty clear. Mrs. Bickersteth had been questioning the boys, with the result that Harry's charges were sufficiently proved, as Scrafton must have known they would be, and hence his sudden desertion. Leonard Bickersteth had proceeded, on his mother's behalf, to make Harry an apology and an offer which did that lady equal credit. But the younger man was too perturbed either to accept the one or to decline the other as cordially or as civilly as he desired. He had his own explanation of Scrafton's flight. It had been a nightmare to him ever since. And here was the central figure of that nightmare standing before him in the flesh, with his snuff-box in his hand, and the old ferocious grin upon his pallid glistening face.
"Surprised to see me, are you?" cried Scrafton, taking another pinch.
"I am," said Harry, looking the other in the face, and yet reflecting its pallor.
"You'll be still more surprised when you hear what I've come to tell you. Ain't you going to ask me in?"
"Come in by all means, if you wish," said Harry, coldly.
"I do wish," was the answer. "Are you alone?"
"Absolutely," said Harry, as he closed the door and led the way into the sitting-room.
"I thought you lived with your mother?"
"She is away."
"Do you keep a servant?"
"Yes."
"Not next door, I hope?" said Scrafton, tapping the wall to gauge its thickness.
"No, at the other end of the flat; and she's used to late comers."
Scrafton glanced at Harry obliquely out of his light-blue eyes. Then they fell on the whisky bottle, and he favoured Harry with a different look.
"Help yourself."
Scrafton did so with his left hand so clasped about the glass that it was impossible to see how much he took. His hand seemed bonier than formerly, but it was no less grimy, and the fingernails were still rimmed with black. He was dressed as of old, only better. It was a moderately new frock-coat, and as he sat down with his glass Harry saw that he did wear socks. His beard and moustache were whiter; they showed the snuff-stains all the more.
It was the rocking-chair this man was desecrating with his pestilent person; while Harry, having shut the door, had reseated himself at his desk, but turned his chair so that he sat facing Scrafton, with an elbow on his blotting-pad.
"I have come," said the visitor, putting his glass down empty, "to tell you the truth about your father."
"I thought as much."
"The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," continued Scrafton, eying the bottle wistfully. "Do you suppose now that he is living or dead?"
"I have no idea."
"He is dead."
Harry did not open his mouth. He could not appreciate the news of his father's death, but then he would have been equally slow to realise that he was alive. So completely had the missing ironmaster passed out of the world of ascertainable fact and of positive statement; so dead was he already to his son.
"When did he die?" asked the latter presently; and his voice was unmoved.
"On the night between Good Friday and Easter Day."
"This year?"
"No; over four years ago."
Harry leapt to his feet.
"Where was it he died?"
"At sea——"
"At sea!"
"Between Newhaven and Dieppe."
"But how—how?"
"He was murdered."
Harry seemed to have known it all along. He could not utter another syllable. But his wild eyes and his outstretched hands asked their question plainly.
"By your friend Gordon Lowndes," said Scrafton coolly.
Harry came down heavily in his chair, and his hands lay on the desk, and his face lay in his hands; but he was acutely conscious, and he heard the furtive trickle as Scrafton seized the opportunity of replenishing his glass. The man drank. To anybody but an innocent it might have been obvious four years ago. He was one of those whom drink made pallid and ferocious; to get more from him while still sober, Harry started up as suddenly as he had subsided, causing the other to spill some liquor in his beard.
"Take all you want," cried Harry, "only tell me everything first. I must know everything now. I have suspected it so long."
He leant forward to listen, this time with an elbow on each knee, but with his face again buried in his hands. Scrafton kept a gleaming eye upon him, as he dried his beard with his coat-sleeve, and supplemented the spirit with a couple of his most sickening inhalations.
"I will begin at the beginning," said he; "but you needn't have any fears about my not reaching the end, for I've never had less than a bottle a night when I could get it, and the man doesn't breathe who ever saw Jeremiah Scrafton the worse. What you have here is only enough to make me thirsty, and I may want another bottle broached before I'm done. Meanwhile, to begin at the beginning, you must know that it is some years now since I made our friend's acquaintance at Richmond. We spotted each other one night by the river, and though he was old enough to be your father, and I was old enough to be his, I'm hanged if it wasn't like a man and a woman! He took to me, and I took to him. We were both clever men, and we were both poor men. His head was full of ways of making his pile, and my head was full of one way worth all his put together. You're a dunce at mathematics, Master Ringrose. Have you ever played roulette?"
"Never."
"Then you wouldn't understand my system, even if I was to tell it you, and I wouldn't do that for a thousand pounds. Lowndes has offered me more than that for it—wanted to form a syndicate to work it—offered me half profits; but not for Jeremiah! I'll double the capital that's put in, and I'll pay it back with cent. per cent. interest, but I'll rot before I do more. I told him so years ago, and I've never budged. I never told him or anybody else my system, and I never will. I may not live to work it now. I may never get another chance of the capital. But if I don't benefit from it, nobody else ever shall; it's my secret, and it'll go with me to the worm. One comfort is that nobody else is likely to hit upon it—no other living mathematician has the brain!"
Harry could not help looking up; and there sat Scrafton in his mother's chair, his head thrown sublimely back, a grin of exultation amid the rank hair upon his face, and the light of drunken genius in his fiery blue eyes. There was something arrestive about the man; a certain vile distinction; a certain demoniac fascination, which diverted Harry's attention in spite of himself. It was with an effort that he shook the creature from his brain, and asked how all this affected his poor father's fate.
"There is a weak point common to every system," replied Scrafton, "and want of money was the one weak point of mine. Without capital it was no use."
"Well?"
"With a thousand I'd have backed myself to bring it off; with five it was a moral certainty; with ten a dead certainty. Now do you see where your father came in?"
"It was ten thousand pounds Lowndes got him!"
"And twenty I'd have handed him, cent. per cent., on what he put in."
"Go on," said Harry, hoarsely.
Scrafton grinned until his yellow fangs gleamed through their snuffy screen; he took another pinch before complying. "It's waste of breath," said he, "for you must see for yourself what happened next. Lowndes knows I've been waiting all my life for a man with ten thousand pounds and the nerve to trust me, but he comes to make sure of me before going down to your father with the ten thousand and the dodge of making it twenty. I'm his man, of course; but your father won't listen to it; as good as shows our friend the door, but keeps the money, and says he'll pay it back himself, and then fail like an honest man. Back comes old Lowndes to Richmond, with his tail between his legs, on the Thursday night. Next day's Good Friday, and your father spends it at home—thinking about it—thinking about it—saying good-bye to everything—making up his mind to fail next day. All right, I'll stop if you like; he couldn't do it, that's all; and on the Saturday evening, just as I was going to ask Lowndes if the crash had come, and if we couldn't run down together and try again before it did, who should I meet coming out of the gate but Lowndes and the man himself! He'd caved in of his own accord. I was the very man they wanted, and in five minutes we were all three on our way to the station. It was then after eight, I recollect, but we just caught a fast train to Waterloo, and from there we galloped to London Bridge, and jumped into the boat-train as she was moving out of the station at nine sharp."
"Which boat-train?" asked Harry suspiciously. It was his first chance of cross-examination. Up to this point every statement tallied with the statements of Fanny Lowndes, made now nearly four years ago, but unforgettable in the smallest detail. And for an instant he was back in the little room at Richmond, the bright fire within, the white fog without, and the face of his beloved red with shame and wet with agony. Good God, what a barrier it had been! Her father the murderer of his! He remembered that the thought had occurred to him, but only in his wild moments, never seriously. And she must have suspected—might even have known it—at the time!
"What did you say?" said Harry, for, in the sudden tumult of his thoughts, Scrafton's answer had been lost upon him.
"It was the train for Newhaven, that runs in connection with the boat to Dieppe."
"What was your destination?" asked Harry, alert and suspicious once more.
"Monte Carlo."
"That was no way to go."
"It was an unusual way; your father insisted upon it on that account; he was the less likely to be seen and recognised."
Harry started up, mixed some whisky and soda water for himself, and tossed it off at a gulp.
"Now," he said, "tell me the worst—tell me the end—and you shall finish the bottle."
"As you like," said the other. "It isn't the most hospitable way of treating a man; but as you like—especially as there's very little to tell. I'll tell you exactly what I saw and discovered; neither more nor less; for, first of all, you must understand that we were all three to travel separately. I went third in the train and second on the boat, but they took first-class tickets right through. They were not to look at me, nor I at them. At Newhaven I saw them, but turned my back. They were both very quiet, and I foresaw no trouble. Of foul play I never dreamt until Lowndes stole into the second saloon and touched me on the shoulder. Nobody saw him, for it was a nasty night, and all but me were sick and prostrate. But I was practising my little combination with a pencil and a bit of paper, and I tell you his face gave me a turn. He said it was sea-sickness; but I knew better even then.
"I was to go aft and see Ringrose that minute. What was the matter? He was trying to back out—swearing he'd return by the next boat and face his creditors like a man. Would I go and reassure him of the absolute certainty of doubling his ten thousand? So I got up, and Lowndes led the way to the private cabin your father had taken for the night.
"And a wicked night it was! I recollect holding on for dear life as we made our way aft along the gallery where the private berths were. On one side the rail hung over the sea, on the other a line of doors and portholes hung over us, and underneath you had a wet deck at an angle that felt like forty-five. It was very dark, just light enough to see that we had the lee-side down there to ourselves. And when Lowndes opened one of the doors and climbed into one of the cabins he nearly fell out again on top of me. Or so he pretended. The cabin was empty. I pushed him in and shut the door, and stood with my back to it. Your father had vanished; yet there were his ulster and his travelling cap on the settee; and Lowndes's teeth were chattering in his head.
"'He's jumped overboard!' says he.
"'You pushed him over,' says I. 'You may as well make a clean breast of it, for I see it in your face.'
"In another minute he had confessed the whole thing. Your father had been leaning over that rail, feeling fit to die, and swearing he was going back by the next boat. In a fit of passion Lowndes had tipped him over the side, and in the black darkness, and the noise of the wind and the engines, he had gone down without a cry. That was the end of Henry Ringrose. He was drowned in the Channel in the small hours of Easter Day, four years and a half ago. Instead of a runaway swindler he was a murdered man—and now you know who murdered him!"
Harry never spoke. His face was still in his hands.
Scrafton opened his snuff-box and took an impatient pinch.
"I tell you that your father is a murdered man," he cried, "and Gordon Lowndes is his murderer!"
Harry looked up with a curious smile.
"It's a lie," said he. "He wrote to my mother from Dieppe."
"Show me the letter."
"I can't; and wouldn't if I could."
"It was a forgery."
"But I have seen it."
"I can't help that."
"I thought it might be a forgery until I came to examine it," admitted Harry.
"It was one. You can only have examined the first page."
"What do you mean?"
"It was genuine; the next was not. The letter was written on both sides of half a sheet, and the other half torn off. If you could get hold of it I would show you in a minute."
"You shall show me!" cried Harry Ringrose. "If you prove what you say——"
He checked himself with a gesture of misery and bewilderment. What was he to do if the man proved what he said? What would it be his duty to do?
He knew where his mother kept the letters she most prized, the ones that he had himself written her from Africa, and this last letter from her husband. He went into her room and broke open her desk without compunction. It was no time for nice scruples on so vital a point. And yet when he returned to the other room, and found Scrafton smacking his lips over the tumbler that he had filled and almost drained in those few moments, it seemed a sacrilege to let such eyes see such a letter. Instinctively he drew back from those outstretched unclean talons; but Scrafton only burst into hoarse laughter.
"Don't I tell you it's more than half a forgery?" cried he. "Oh, keep it yourself, by all manner of means. I've seen it before, thank you. But it's waste of time looking at the front page; that's genuine, I tell you; turn over and try the other."
"I believe that's genuine too."
"Then you'd believe anything. Why, it's written in different ink, to begin with. Hold it to the light and you'll see."
Harry did so; and the ink on both sides looked black at first sight; but closer inspection revealed a subtle difference.
"It was begun in blue-black ink," gasped Harry, "and finished in some other kind."
"Exactly."
"But the pen seems to have been the same."
"It was the gold pen your father used to carry about with him in his waistcoat pocket. But it seems he felt hot when he returned to the berth, after writing this letter in the saloon, for I found his waistcoat hanging on one of the hooks, and the pen was in the pocket."
"You say 'after writing this letter.'"
"I meant the first page of it. The second is a forgery. Look again at both, and you will see that whereas there is a kind of regular irregularity about the first page, due to the motion of the boat, the irregularity of the second is a sham. It was the most difficult part to imitate."
Harry could see that it was so; but at these last words he looked up suddenly from the letter.
"You speak as though you had committed the forgery yourself," said he.
"I did," was the calm reply. "Lowndes couldn't have used his pen like that to save his life. Don't excite yourself, young fellow. I make no secret that I was his accessory after the fact. I am going to confess that in open court, and I don't much care what they do with me—so long as they hang the dog who refused to give me a sixpence this evening."
He glared horribly out of his now bloodshot eyes, and took snuff with a truculent snap of his filthy fingers.
"So that's what brings you to me?" said Harry Ringrose. "You would have done better to take your confession straight to the police; but since you are here you had better go on if you want to convince me. You say my father went overboard in mid-Channel. How was it he was afterwards seen in Dieppe?"
Scrafton leant forward with his demon's grin.
"He wasn't," said he. "Iwas seen in his ulster, with his comforter round my beard, and his travelling cap over my eyes. It was I who walked into thin air, as the papers said, from thecaféin Dieppe. And it was in thecaféthe second page of the letter was written, as you see it now. As your father wrote it, the letter finished on the fourth page, the two in between being left blank. I finished it on the second page, and then tore off the fourth. I have it here."
And he produced the greasy pocket-book which he had used as a score-book in Bushey Park.
"Let me see it," whispered Harry.
"Will you give me your word to return it instantly?"
"My word of honour."
The page of writing that was now put into Harry's trembling hands is printed underneath the genuine beginning of his father's letter, and above the forgery.