“I thought—I hoped, even, it might be so. Listen, then, I’ll help you to your end. So like, my God! it seems a Providence. Dead! Yes, but how? he was going to tell me when Mark came in.”
“Hush, madam! hush! Who was dead?”
“My baby—my darling. He might have been like you now—your age—his father’s son. It was twenty years ago. I had a nurse—Ellen Trimmer was her name—she was killed in a street accident; but before she died she made a confession to the man she had been going to marry, and he came on with it to me. I had heard just so much, and then Mark spoke. He had been hidden behind the curtains of my bed all the time; and he spoke quite softly to the man, and the man declared that he had asserted nothing, and believed nothing, and had only been a fool for attaching any value to the ravings of a delirious girl. And he promised for all his life was worth to say and think no more about it, and Mark saw to it that he would keep his promise. What had he been going to say—what? I never had the heart or will to ask. But you—you can still find out if you like, and if he is still living.”
Was she, herself, raving? Sometimes, as I listened to that disjointed outpouring, I was convinced of it; sometimes I seemed to gather from its incoherence the shadow of a truth, a purpose, the cry of a long-fettered despair struggling for articulation.
“Hush!” she said suddenly. “He may be back at any time—here, now, watching us and laughing in his sleeve. He is so terrible—so swift and secret. The souls he desires for his own must go to him. Look—here is the man’s address. I have never parted with it. Find him, if you can, and prove the stronger will. If I could repay him after all these years—remember, and repay him!”
She thrust a paper into my hand, and was gone. I stood stupidly, staring at her retreating figure. Repay him? repay whom and for what? Surely, if there were a purpose in her ravings, it must turn on something ghastly and incredible. It was her husband, I could not doubt, whom she thus held her awful debtor. But for what deed, what crime, that could so move her at this last to take a stranger for her factor? There was something very fearful in the vision of this apostate from the faith of matrimony. Was it possible that there were others in the world, who, through twenty years of seeming apathy, could so be nursing horrible things in their bosoms—vipers—fattening for an opportunity?
I glanced down at the paper. It contained a name, and an address somewhere in Kennington—nothing more. The rest was for me to do. A baby! and dead!—Dalston, and Mother Carey, and a dead baby! There was a coincidence here, at least. What an unconsecrated plot in a graveyard was my mind become! And how the deadly branches twined and shut it in!
Well, I would go and see this man, if he existed. Somewhere and somehow light must be let into the tangle.
CHAPTER XVII.
NURSE ELLEN’S “YOUNG MAN”
After twenty years; and he was still in his old place of business. That was characteristic of the man. I found Mr Churton in his workshop, planing a board which seemed destined for a coffin. He had a paper cap on his head; his indeterminate eyes were pale blue; his whiskers were of the colour of the sawdust which powdered the bench at which he wrought. From time to time, as I talked to him, his wife, a great strenuous woman of an imposing person and virulence, put in her head at the door, sniffed, each time in crescendo, and departed. There was an air of dogged helplessness about the man himself.