By Right of Sword

by Arthur W. Marchmont

I walked with my sister to her home, and then returned to my rooms and sat down to think out seriously and in detail the extraordinary position into which I had fallen.

The more I considered it the more I liked it, and I am bound to add the more dangerous it seemed. Obviously it was one thing to be mistaken for a man and to pass for him for a few minutes or hours: but it was quite another to take up his life where he had dropped it and play the part day by day and week after week. There must be a thousand threads of the existence of which no one but himself could know, yet each would have to be laid correctly in continuation of the due pattern of his life; or discovery would follow.

Here lay my difficulty, and for a time I did not see a way round it or through it or under it. So far as I could judge by all that my sister had told me, the resemblance between the real Alexis and myself was strictly limited to physical qualities. A freak of nature had made us counterparts of one another in size, look, complexion, voice, and certain gestures. But it stopped there. My other self was a subtle, cunning, intriguing, traitorous conspirator, and very much of a coward: while I—well, I was not that.

I come of a very old Cornish family with many of the Celtic characteristics most strongly developed. I believe that I have a certain amount of mother wit or shrewdness, but no process that was ever known or tried with me was sufficient to drive into me even sufficient learning to enable me to scrape through a career. I was the despair first of the Russian schoolmasters for over ten years, and next of all the English tutors who took me in hand during the next ten. I went to a large English school, and was expelled, after a hundred scrapes, because I learnt nothing. I tried to cram for Oxford, but never could get through Smalls; and the good old Master, who loved a strong man, almost cried when, after two years of ploughs, he had to send me down, when I was the best oar in the eight, the smartest field and hardest hitter in the eleven, the fastest mile and half-mile in the Varsity, and one of the three strongest men in all Oxford.

But I had to go, and I went to an army crammer to try and be stuffed for the service. I never had a chance with the books; but I carried all before me in every possible form of sport. It was there I picked up my fencing and revolver shooting. It became a sort of passion with me. I could use the revolver like a trickster and shoot to a hair's breadth; while with either broadsword or rapier I could beat the fencing master all over the school. However, I was beaten by the examiners and my couple of years' work succeeded only in giving my muscles the hardness of steel and flexibility of whipcord. I am not a big man, nearly two inches under 6ft, but at that time I had never met anyone who could beat me in any trial where strength, endurance, or agility was needed. But these would not satisfy the examiners, so I gave up all thought of getting into the army that way.

I tried the ranks, therefore, and joined a regiment in which a couple of brainless family men had enlisted, as a step toward a commission. But I was only in for six months: and my surprise is that I stopped so long. There was a beast of a sergeant—a strong fellow in his way who had been cock of the dunghill until I came—and after I'd thrashed him first with the single-sticks, and then with the gloves, and in a wrestling bout had given him a taste of our Cornish methods, he marked me out for special petty illtreatment. It came to a climax one day when a couple of dozen of us were sent off on a train journey. I left on the platform some bit of the gear. He noticed it and bringing it to the carriage window, flung it in at me and, with a sneer and a big coarse oath, cried:—"D'ye think I'm here to wet-nurse you, you damnation great baby?" And he waited a moment with the sneer still on his face: and he didn't wait in vain, either. Forgetting all about discipline and thinking only of his insult, I flung out my left and hit him fair on the mouth, sending him down like a ninepin. Then I picked up my things and went straight away to report myself to the officer in charge of us. There was a big row, with the result that the sergeant was reduced to the ranks, and I was allowed to buy myself out, being given plainly to understand that if I stayed in, my chance of a commission was as good as lost. This closed my army career.

For a few years I was at a loose end altogether—a man of action without a sphere. Then the natural result followed. I fell madly in love with my best friend's sister, Edith Balestier. I cursed my folly in having wasted my life, and filled the air with vows that I would set to work to increase my income of £250 a year to an amount such as would let me give her a home worthy of her. She loved me. I know that. But her mother didn't; and in the end, the mother won. Edith tossed me over ruthlessly, while I was away for a couple of months; and all in a hurry she married another man for his title and money.

It was only the old tale. I knew that well enough; but it seemed to break my last hope. Everything I'd ever really wanted, I'd always failed to get. I was like a lunatic; and vowed I'd kill myself after I'd punished the woman who'd done worse than kill me.

I thought out a scheme and played it shrewdly enough. I shut the resolve out of sight, and laughed and jibed as though I felt no wound. And I waited. The chance came surely enough. I went down to a dance at a place a bit out of town and took my revolver with me. After a waltz I led my Lady Cargill out into the shrubbery and when she least suspected what I was about, whipped out the weapon and told her what I was going to do. She knew me well enough to feel I was in deadly earnest; but she made no scene, such as another woman might. Her white beauty held my hand an instant, and in that time her husband, Sir Philip, came up. Then I had a flash of genius. I knew he was as jealous as a man could be and as he had known nothing of my relations with Edith, like many another self-sufficient idiot, he imagined she had loved him and no one else. I opened his eyes that night. Keeping him in control with the pistol, I made him hear the whole passionful story of her love for me from her own lips; and I shall never forget how the white of his craven fear changed to the dull grey of a sickened heart as he heard. At a stroke it killed my desire to kill. I had had a revenge a thousand times more powerful. I had made the wife see the husband's craven poltroonery, and the husband the wife's heart infidelity; and I let them live for their mutual distrust and punishment.

A month later I stood on the Moscow platform, my back turned on England for ever, my face turned war-wards, and my heart ready for any devilment that might offer, when my fate was tossed topsy-turvy into a cauldron of welcome dangers, promising death and certainly calculated to give me that distraction from my own troubles which I desired so keenly.