"But," she asked anxiously, "I shall be allowed to see him, shan't I?"
"I think so," he replied evasively. "But even if you do not see him, you can trust to me. Oh, yes! you can," he added insistently, seeing the deeply troubled look that had crept into her face at his words. "I am going to do to-night what I often have to do in the course of my work. I am going to borrow your soul and your mind and allow them to speak through my lips. When I go up stairs, I shall only outwardly be the police officer searching for proofs of a crime: inwardly I shall be a noble-hearted woman trying to discover proofs of her fiancée's innocence. That will be right, dear, won't it?"
She nodded acquiescence, trying to appear content. Then she pleaded once again, dry-eyed and broken-voiced: "You will try and get permission for me to see Lord Radclyffe, won't you?"
"I give you my word," he said solemnly.
Then he went up stairs.
Mr. Warren, quiet and sympathetic, persuaded Louisa to sit down again by the hearth. He took her muff and fur stole from her, and threw a log on the fire. The flames spurted off, giving a cheerful crackle. But Louisa saw no pictures in this fire, her mind was up stairs in Lord Radclyffe's room, wondering what was happening.
Mr. Warren spoke of the murdered man. He had not been present at the inquest, and the news that the tyrant who had ruled over Lord Radclyffe for so long was nothing but an impostor came as a fearful shock to him.
There was the pitifulness of the whole thing! The utter purposelessness of a hideous crime. So many lives wrecked, such awful calamity, such appalling humiliation, such ignominy, and all just for nothing! A very little trouble, almost superficial inquiry, would have revealed the imposture, and saved all that sorrow, all the dire humiliation, and prevented the crime for which the law of men decrees that there shall be no pardon.
The man who lay ill up stairs—and he who was lying in the public mortuary, surrounded by all the pomp and luxury which he had filched by his lies—alone could tell the secret of the extraordinary success of the imposture. Lord Radclyffe had accepted the bricklayer's son almost as his own, with that same obstinate reserve with which he had at first flouted the very thought of the man's pretensions. Who could tell what persuasion was used? what arguments? what threats?
And the man was an impostor after all! And he had been murdered, when one word perhaps would have effaced him from the world as completely and less majestically than had been done by death.