CHAPTER XXXIV.—AT BUNDELCUND MANSIONS.
‘I will take your card in to Mr Sturgis, sir. I don’t know, I’m sure, about his being well enough to see you; but perhaps you’ll please to wait,’ said the tall, prim, grim parlour-maid who acted as janitress of the front-door of a slack-baked villa at Putney, one of twin villas, which were called—at the express desire of the inhabitant of the other one, old Colonel Chutnee, H.E.I.C.S.—Bundelcund Mansions. They were capacious villas these, as might be augured from the grandiloquent name that had been fathered upon them; and they had pleasant gardens, with shaven turf, weeping-willows, and azalea beds in the first style of suburban gardening, sloping down to the river at the gentle curve of Putney Reach.
No. 1 Bundelcund Mansions belonged, so far as lease and furniture went, to Colonel Chutnee; No. 2 Bundelcund Mansions, to Ebenezer Sturgis, Esq., retired from the practice of law. Lord Harrogate, who was the visitor-expectant at the ex-lawyer’s outer portals, had often heard of Mr Sturgis, as having been formerly solicitor to that young Baroness Harrogate who had been so unfortunate as wife and mother, and to his own father the Earl; but he had never seen Mr Sturgis.
The Aldershot Autumn Manœuvres were over, the troops dispersed, and the victory of Lord Moffat over Sir David Roberts—hard won, and much trumpeted by the newspapers, whose correspondents had accompanied the respective staffs of the belligerent generals—was already as much forgotten by the public as the shreds of cartridge-case that lay strewn among the Wessex stubble-fields. Lord Harrogate had time now to attend to the queer business broached by that respectable person, Mr Richard Hold.
‘Master will see you, sir—my lord,’ said the grim, prim parlour-maid, dropping a flurried courtesy, in acknowledgment of the rank of the visitor, as she returned. ‘Only you must please walk into the garden. He’s mostly there in the fine weather.’
Hard by the water’s edge, in a leafy arbour, overrun with American creepers, with the morning newspapers neatly arranged upon a table beside him, and a long slender fishing-rod lying on the turf within reach, was Mr Sturgis, a little nervous-mannered, trimly attired old gentleman, who shaded his eyes with one thin white hand, and then held it out in salutation.
‘You’ve a De Vere face, my lord,’ he said, rising from his chair. ‘A boy you were, a boy, when I saw you last. But I have known so many of the name.’
Mr Sturgis was deaf; and it was through the serpentine tube of an ear-trumpet that Lord Harrogate had to explain the object of his visit. He wished, he said, that Mr Sturgis would so far oblige him as to recall his recollections of the time when Clare, Baroness Harrogate, lost that only child who would in due course have succeeded her in the title that had now lapsed to the Wolverhampton line. Was it not true—a proper explanation should be forthcoming as to the reason for the inquiry—that Mr Sturgis had been at the late Lady Harrogate’s cottage-residence, beside the Thames, on the very day of the child’s drowning? Was it not also true that there were some suspicions of foul play?
The little old lawyer fidgeted very much with his yellow silk pocket-handkerchief, his gold-rimmed spectacles, and a tiny gold snuff-box that lay on the table at his elbow, before he returned any answer to these questions. ‘Poor young thing! poor young creature!’ he said at last ‘Yes; I was there. I attended her ladyship in Berkshire, there, at her request, to see to the proper execution of some legal documents relating to the trifling property her late husband the Colonel had left behind him; and within a few minutes of my reaching Holly Cottage, the accident occurred. Ah, to be sure! It was sad, very sad!’
‘You speak of it, I perceive, as an accident?’ said Lord Harrogate interrogatively. ‘There were reports, I believe, to the contrary?’
‘Why, yes,’ replied Mr Sturgis, in a slow reluctant tone. ‘The vulgar, your lordship knows, like a spice of the marvellous, especially when a death is in question, and there were ugly rumours flying about—soon hushed up and forgotten, though.’
‘Do you imagine that there was any substratum of solid truth underlying these rumours?’ asked Lord Harrogate through the trumpet.
‘Now, my dear sir—my dear lord—that’s a leading question,’ said the little lawyer argumentatively, and laying one weak hand on his visitor’s coat-sleeve. ‘What we have to deal with, as men of business and men of the world, are first facts, and then probabilities. The case primâ facie was a very simple one. Child, of tender years, left alone on terrace overlooking river—scream heard—infant’s body vainly sought for in the Thames—a very melancholy but commonplace concatenation of circumstances. Nothing but the rank of the parties called attention to the misfortune.’
‘And yet, Mr Sturgis, you do not believe that things passed in this commonplace, everyday fashion?’ said Lord Harrogate.
‘Argumentum ad hominem, my lord—argumentum ad—— Ah! whisssh!’ exclaimed Mr Sturgis, tottering to his feet and flourishing his arms like an insane semaphore—‘whisssh! you bloodthirsty animal!’
And as he spoke, he flung a short cudgel, that lay concealed among the leafy walls of the arbour, into a clump of rose-bushes a few yards distant. A large cat, scared by the hostile demonstration, scuttled hastily towards the boundary-wall, leaped into a tree, and regaining the neutral ground of the brickwork, turned, with arching back and swollen tail, and glared at its human enemy.
‘One of old Chutnee’s cats—the Colonel’s cats; Persians, he calls them; but they are neither deaf nor white, so that’s all nonsense—after my pigeons!’ explained Mr Sturgis. ‘I saw the brindled monster, the same that robbed me of two pretty fantails and a pouter, stealing like a tigerkin through the bushes. Most encroaching, unprincipled, odious, old fellow is that neighbour of mine. I wish he were back with his sepoys. I wish he had stopped in that detestable Bundelcund, the heathenish name of which he was pigheaded enough to get painted on this house of mine, as if I, of all people, were a Qui Hi, like himself.’
‘Uncongenial tastes,’ said Lord Harrogate, smiling, ‘must detract a great deal from the pleasures of good neighbourhood.’
‘Good neighbourhood indeed!’ cried Mr Sturgis irritably. ‘I might as well be cheek-by-jowl with a Pindharee or a Dacoo, or any other of the outlandish robbers that the Colonel spent such part of his life in hunting as he could spare from billiards and bitter beer and brandy pawnee. It’s not only his cats—it’s everything! His very hookah, in which he smokes rascally eastern drugs, to which tobacco is harmless, poisons the air. He trespasses on everything. He ground-baits for fish until the dace in the river turn up their noses at paste or gentle. He lets long lines, all over hooks, trail down the current, entangling the tackle of other anglers. There’s nothing, really nothing, of which that redfaced Half-pay is not capable, and until he dies of apoplexy, there will be no comfort for me!’
It was evident that there was a standing feud between the man of war and the man of peace. It cost Lord Harrogate some trouble to divert the ex-lawyer’s mind from Colonel Chutnee and his misdoings to his own reminiscences as to that sad little episode that had been enacted years before at Holly Cottage. And it proved impossible to pin so slippery a witness to the point as concerned his own impressions with respect to the cause of the catastrophe. Mr Sturgis was one of those casuists who have been blessed, or the reverse, with that peculiarly legal intellect which takes delight in the niceties of mental straw-splitting, and the edge of which is too fine for the practical work of this rough-and-ready world. He was timid too, and nervously reluctant—having the fear of the law of libel perpetually before his eyes, wherever Colonel Chutnee was not the subject of discourse—to speak his mind. Nevertheless, Lord Harrogate gathered from the ex-solicitor’s guarded talk that the speaker’s delicately balanced opinion inclined towards the hypothesis that there had been something wrong. It was singular that the poor little thing’s body had never been recovered. Men had been dragging, dragging night and day; and not the river Thames alone, but every creek, backwater, weir, and pool had been examined within miles. That the infant had been murdered, was a supposition grossly improbable. It was no one’s interest to make away with the heiress of a barren title. Kidnapping was, under the circumstances, almost as unlikely as murder. Gipsies, credited in popular belief with such offences, had never been taxed with stealing a child too young to beg, and who would therefore be useless to the strolling tribe. Nor would the lithest Zingari be bold and deft enough to venture on a theft so audacious, so difficult, and so unprofitable.
Yet, though Mr Sturgis glibly enumerated all the grounds on which a verdict of ‘Accidental drowning’ might be returned by a coroner’s jury, Lord Harrogate felt more and more convinced that the little lawyer in his heart of hearts believed that something was amiss.
‘Rumours were afloat at the time,’ said Lord Harrogate; ‘and unless I am greatly mistaken, inquiries were made?’
Mr Sturgis assented. ‘Idle tongues wagged,’ he said, ‘in various circles of society; and we sifted, as was our duty—I speak of myself and of my esteemed coadjutors, Messrs Pounce and Pontifex—much loose gossip, and found a residuum of—nothing. There was much assertion, but not an iota of proof.’
However, at the close of the interview, Mr Sturgis hospitably pressed on his visitor a glass of old Madeira—‘Very rare, my lord, existing only in a few private cellars; the present, forty years since, of a ducal client of mine.’
After some further quiet conversation upon the mysterious subject in hand, the lawyer put into the possession of Lord Harrogate the half of a card torn in two, which had for two decades reposed peaceably in the recesses of his own desk; and told him that this card, picked up on the towing-path by one of the men employed in searching for the child’s body, was the only fragment of mute evidence that was now in exigence.