Mr. Cranley, “with his own substantial private purpose sun-clear before him” (as Mr. Carlyle would have said, in apologizing for some more celebrated villain), had enticed Margaret from school. Nor had this been, to a person of his experience and resources, a feat of very great difficulty. When he had once learned, by the simplest and readiest means, the nature of Maitland’s telegram to Miss Marlett, his course had been dear. The telegram which followed Maitland’s, and in which Cranley used Maitland’s name, had entirely deceived Miss Marlett, as we have seen. By the most obvious ruses he had prevented Maitland from following his track to London. His housekeeper had entered the “engaged” carriage at Westbourne Park, and shared, as far as the terminus, the compartment previously occupied by himself and Margaret alone. Between Westbourne Park and Paddington he had packed the notable bearskin coat in his portmanteau. The consequence was, that at Paddington no one noticed a gentleman in a bearskin coat, travelling alone with a young lady. A gentleman in a light ulster, travelling with two ladies, by no means answered to the description Maitland gave in his examination of the porters. They, moreover, had paid but a divided attention to Maitland’s inquiries.
The success of Cranley’s device was secured by its elementary simplicity. A gentleman who, for any reason, wishes to obliterate his trail, does wisely to wear some very notable, conspicuous, unmistakable garb at one point of his progress. He then becomes, in the minds of most who see him, “the man in the bearskin coat,” or “the man in the jack-boots,” or “the man with the white hat.” His identity is practically merged in that of the coat, or the boots, or the hat; and when he slips out of them, he seems to leave his personality behind, or to pack it up in his portmanteau, or with his rugs. By acting on this principle (which only requires to be stated to win the assent of pure reason), Mr. Cranley had successfully lost himself and Margaret in London.
With Margaret his task had been less difficult than it looked. She recognized him as an acquaintance of her father’s, and he represented to her that he had been an officer of the man-of-war in which her father had served; that he had lately encountered her father, and pitied his poverty—in poor Shields, an irremediable condition. The father, so he declared, had spoken to him often and anxiously about Margaret, and with dislike and distrust about Maitland. According to Mr. Cranley, Shield’s chief desire in life had been to see Margaret entirely free from Maitland’s guardianship. But he had been conscious that to take the girl away from school would be harmful to her prospects. Finally, with his latest breath, so Mr. Cranley declared, he had commended Margaret to his old officer, and had implored him to abstract her from the charge of the Fellow of St Gatien’s.
Margaret, as we know, did not entertain a very lively kindness for Maitland, nor had she ever heard her father speak of that unlucky young man with the respect which his kindness, his academic rank, and his position in society deserved. It must be remembered that, concerning the manner of her father’s death, she had shrunk from asking questions. She knew it had been sudden; she inferred that it had not been reputable. Often had she dreaded for him one of the accidents against which Providence does not invariably protect the drunkard. Now the accident had arrived, she was fain to be ignorant of the manner of it. Her new guardian, again, was obviously a gentleman; he treated her with perfect politeness and respect, and, from the evening of the day when she left school, she had been in the charge of that apparently correct chaperon, the handsome housekeeper with the disapproving countenance. Mr. Cranley had even given up to her his own rooms in Victoria Square, and had lodged elsewhere; his exact address Margaret did not know. The only really delicate point—Cranley’s assumption of the name of “Mr. Lithgow”—he frankly confessed to her as soon as they were well out of the Dovecot. He represented that, for the fulfilment of her father’s last wish, the ruse of the telegram and the assumed name had been necessary, though highly repugnant to the feelings of an officer and a gentleman. Poor Margaret had seen nothing of gentlemen, except as philanthropists, and (as we know) philanthropists permit themselves a license and discretion not customary in common society.
Finally, even had the girl’s suspicions been awakened, her illness prevented her from too closely reviewing the situation. She was with her father’s friend, an older man by far, and therefore a more acceptable guardian than Maitland. She was fulfilling her father’s wish, and hoped soon to be put in the way of independence, and of earning her own livelihood; and independence was Margaret’s ideal.
Her father’s friend, her own protector—in that light she regarded Cranley, when she was well enough to think consecutively. There could be no more complete hallucination. Cranley was one of those egotists who do undoubtedly exist, but whose existence, when they are discovered, is a perpetual surprise even to the selfish race of men. In him the instinct of self-preservation (without which the race could not have endured for a week) had remained absolutely unmodified, as it is modified in the rest of us, by thousands of years of inherited social experience. Cran-ley’s temper, in every juncture, was precisely that of the first human being who ever found himself and other human beings struggling in a flood for a floating log that will only support one of them. Everything must give way to his desire; he had literally never denied himself anything that he dared taka As certainly as the stone, once tossed up, obeys the only law it knows, and falls back to earth, so surely Cranley would obtain what he desired (if it seemed safe), though a human life, or a human soul, stood between him and his purpose.
Now, Margaret stood, at this moment, between him and the aims on which his greed was desperately bent. It was, therefore, necessary that she should vanish; and to that end he had got her into his power. Cranley’s original idea had been the obvious one of transporting the girl to the Continent, where, under the pretence that a suitable situation of some kind had been found for her, he would so arrange that England should never see her more, and that her place among honest women should be lost forever. But there were difficulties in the way of this tempting plan. For instance, the girl knew some French, and was no tame, unresisting fool; and then Margaret’s illness had occurred, and had caused delay, and given time for reflection.
“After all,” he thought, as he lit his cigar and examined his mustache in the mirror (kindly provided for that purpose in well-appointed hansoms)—“after all it is only, the dead who tell no tales, and make no inconvenient claims.”
For after turning over in his brain the various safe and easy ways of “removing” an inconvenient person, one devilish scheme had flashed across a not uninstructed intellect—a scheme which appeared open to the smallest number of objections.
“She shall take a turn for the worse,” he thought; “and the doctor will be an uncommonly clever man, and particularly well read in criminal jurisprudence, if he sees anything suspicious in it.”