The great Skene mystery

by Bernard Capes

My hand, with the letter in it, dropped to my side. Luck! Was this still Luck, or a fierce and merciless fatality? It had answered clear on my cry for light long uttered—an echo returned from a vast distance. “To escape the consequences of an intrigue with some girl.” Oh! an excellent shot, Mr Travers—an intrigue with Lady Skene, née Carey, that was to say. It was Dalston himself all the while, and I had been looking over his head for the principal. There could be no doubt about it. Here was the explanation of the beast’s hold on that wretched lady—a grip doubly dastard, since, it would seem, he had repudiated his responsibility for her shame only so long as he saw the opposite to any profit in admitting it. Could there be in hell a hound more abject?

And to what, but a day earlier, had my inquiries been tending—to proof of what relationship with this infamous creature? That fable, thank God, was discounted before even realised by me. And yet for what alternative? There was none that I could see. If he was not trading upon her belief that I was his child, their child, what subtler knowledge helped him to her bleeding? Could it be one that turned upon the question of my apparent resurrection from the grave? Was I, perhaps, a changeling? It seemed incredible. To whose possible interest could it have been to substitute a living child for a dead one? Not to his assuredly—a piece of good fortune it would have appeared to him in those days, that fruit of his villainy perished and removed. To his victim’s, then? to her mother’s? There was more plausibility there. Yet I could not conceive Lady Skene a party to any such fraud; and yet again his discovery of the imposition, had it been committed, would not have weakened his hold on her—rather substantiated it. Had she done this thing, or her mother for her, in order to levy false tax on the father of her dead child?

It was a horrible thought. All night I sat out by the fire, hating it, and dismissing, and returning to it. The coincidence of this Dalston’s double connection with the family hardly occurred to me. And yet it was a coincidence, as strange as any that the annals of villainy can record. But then Coincidence is the father of Luck.

This strange, strange letter! this old young voice from the clouds, dropping upon me all in an unexpected moment like a ghostly message from Thibet. It must have its meaning in the sequences of Fate—must have been meant to have. That the fellow should have been young Skene’s tutor—his monitor, great God! a vulgar intrigant, with a past, hardly past indeed, and caught, in despite of it, making eyes at “you-know-who”! You-know-who? How odd and plaintive sounded the arch allusion down all that flight of years, like a strange voice laughing very faint in distant attics. Poor little you-know-who! What had been thy pretty name and station, and to whose confidence was this cryptic reference to thee entrusted?

I bent on the thought, and picked up the fallen book from the floor. It was one of those with which Lord Skene had furnished me from the library of his deceased young neighbour—a volume of “Armadale” by Wilkie Collins. I remember it well, a story containing a mystery something analogous with that which was vexing my life. Turning to the title-page, I found inscribed on it a name, George Thesiger—the George, without doubt, of the letter. And he, too, was dead—no hope of enlightenment there—had closed the book perhaps for the last time on a mystery more real and tragic than any contained in its pages. They must have been close friends, those two. I put the book gently away, and fell into frowning thought again. Not all I could learn or discover had brought me one step nearer the truth of my own identity. I might trace out others; myself I could not trace. My name, like Peter Schlemihl’s body, threw no shadow.

I suppose, in the end, I must have fallen asleep where I sat, for I was suddenly conscious of the sound of voices outside the lodge. I rubbed my eyes—it was broad daylight in the room, and shiveringly cold. I staggered to my feet, a stale spectre of nightmare, and walked unsteadily to the window. There was a thin fleece of snow fallen on the grass, and sharply defined on it stood the figures of Johnny and Miss Christmas.

Now I don’t know what influence was at work in me; but quite suddenly and strangely, seeing the girl, my eyes flushed hot and wet. I set my teeth, and gave myself a good curse for my folly; but there it was, and I could not but be conscious of a fierce pleasure in it. I suppose I had been a bit overwrought—spectre-ridden; and this vision touched me like balm. I felt like one who wakes from a dream of damnation to hear the birds singing. She was so young and happy and fresh; so detached from the sordid realism of my story; so remote from me at last. I had never thought her worth my consideration until she was risen above it; and now I was feeling like a child, who, having wandered in the track of some absorbing interest, wakes to the sudden realisation that he is lost. It was just the primal need bubbling in me. My mother was taken from me, true; but perhaps the more for that did I wail for a skirt to cling to.

The two seemed to be in intimate talk, and Johnny’s strained squeak of a laugh reached me irresistibly. A misty sun jewelled the snow, and there were flowers sparkling, and fountains showering, and the rich throats of birds choiring among the trees—but all only in seeming; for love full-hearted has but to look down, and there is a garden sprung about her feet.

Suddenly it struck me, Had this little diffidence been so wrought through with passion as to have dared, on short acquaintance, the most audacious throw a man can stake his all on? If it were so, it would seem that fortune had favoured the bold, for the couple appeared to be already on terms as happy as familiar. And why not? Johnny was no nameless, penniless bastard; but a lord of acres, with a stake in the land and a right to sue to honour. He was my friend, moreover, and not to be grudged by me any such triumph. I trusted, I saw no reason to doubt, that they would prove an excellent match; and, in the midst of that very Christian reflection, was planning how to get rid of the little man with all possible despatch.

Why?