We had hardly rested in our flight back from the Continent, since the finding of the inquest held upon those pitiful remains had supplied us with the argumentum ad rem for procuring the extradition of Mr Mark Dalston; but, quick as we had travelled, the news of our presumptive mission had preceded us. For many reasons we should have preferred for the present to have throttled all journalistic gossip; but where was the lethal spot to be found in that myriad-necked Hydra? The story, or a travesty of it, leaked out and ran faster than we could, and was threatening us already, on our arrival in London, with a most undesired fame. The absurdest surmises were rife; the most ingenious inventions drawn upon to provide them. I have no time nor patience to stop and retail a fraction of the nonsense talked by the newspapers. The serious thing to us in it all was that it brought into a full glare of notoriety a case which, in its first processes, it was of the utmost importance should be kept secret. Signor Valombroso was, of course, as cutting as a whip upon the paradox involved. “Why do you not also publish portrait cards of your London detectives, with their character parts included?” he asked. “It would give the poor criminal yet one other chance.” He would have proposed a newspaper censorship as the remedy. But it was certainly aggravating. If it was true that Mr Dalston, having got wind somehow—perhaps through Mother Carey—of the trend of my inquiries, and being baffled in his designs on his victim, had already slipped into hiding, it was hardly probable that this public exposure and esclandre would bring him out of it. The puzzling thing was that he should have left so vexatious a witness behind him at the Lone Farm; but, as to that, it had to be borne in mind that he was presumably unaware of her treachery to himself. In any case, hither had been our obvious direction from the moment of our landing.
I had written to Ira, while still in Italy, a full account of the discovery, with all its tragic incidents and consequences. Afterwards, arriving in London, I filled in the sheet with a brief account of our subsequent doings and present intentions, and posted it to her where she was staying with the family at Claridge’s Hotel. It was misery to be so near and apart; but the peremptoriness of my mission admitted of no delay; while the nature of our relations precluded any present thought of a meeting under the Skene ægis.
But how desolate seemed the country, void of the consciousness of that young darling presence in it. I could almost welcome the dripping skies, the sodden fields, the deathly soak and stillness, as things attuned to a mood abandoned of love and shivering under a sort of creeping paralysis of terror. For how could I forget for a moment the relations in which I stood towards the unhappy woman of whom it was the very purpose of our visit to make a traitor and informer? She had borne children to him. I was not the only fruit of her motherhood. I could not but feel my part somehow an execrable one; and most in its self-consciousness of a still-existing repugnance towards the object of our schemes, which was surely unnatural, but which I could not, for all my striving, overcome. Was not this, indeed, one of the bitterest features of a bitter tragedy? At the present moment, even, my thoughts, for all the filial warmth and graciousness they could command, turned instinctively to Lady Skene.
The foreboding solemnity of my mood seemed to impart itself to my companions. We plashed and plodded along the field paths with hardly a word to exchange amongst us. Inspector Jannaway, it is true, had his own reasons for reserve. Holding the very tangible fact of a warrant for Mr Dalston’s arrest in his pocket, he seemed bent on leaving it to his Italian colleague to justify its production. “Let him have his head, gentlemen. He knows all about it. He’s agoing to prove the superiority of his system over ours. Very well; I’m not the man to interfere—not just yet awhile, anyway.” He did not speak these words, but his attitude unmistakably expressed them. He was a great English detective on the high horse, aggrieved by insolent comparisons. Let Valombroso have our confidence; let all fools have their paradise. We should find ourselves on the wrong side of ours in due time. When we wanted him—and we should want him—he was here at our service. In the meantime, he kept his thoughts—and his theories, if he had any—to himself, and acquiesced passively and pleasantly in all that was suggested. But he offered no suggestions of his own.
A dive through a dripping copse, a final flounder along a little muddy lane, brought us into view of the house. It was certainly entitled to its name—a lonely haunted tenement, flung away into the fields to rot and perish of its own reputation. The fabric of it dated from the Tudors, but it had been patched and shored with a number of unseemly anachronisms, until it looked like a crippled house on crutches. Old barns, old byres, an old dove-cot, toppled hard by to their fall. The only modern feature about it was the filth, which discharged in one place its moister particles into a little green duck pond with no ducks in it. The house itself was half buried in trees, through which one caught a glimpse of a considerable garden to the rear, full of vegetables, but neglected. Tradition pointed to the farm as a refuge, during the Marian persecutions, of a number of non-juring ministers, who had nevertheless come to be routed out and despatched to the flames for their obduracy. It was certainly quarried with vaults, and priests’ holes, and other such sanctuaries of the desperate.
“H’m!” muttered Mr Shapter, with his hand on the bell. “A very warren this, I shouldn’t be surprised. What do you think, Jannaway?”
“I think as you think, sir,” answered the detective serenely.
Shapter turned away impatiently. The clang of the bell answering from those bowels of silence made us all start. And, almost with the cessation of its deep voice, she stood in the opening of the door before us.
The same mean sapless figure; the same unmoving face, worn and unwholesome, and scored with its grey lines of suffering or endurance. Only the eyes in it lived—the eyes of the “petite demoiselle, so white and pink.” I could not picture it—I could not. Age has no past for youth—no memory of joys like its own. I shrank before the fire of those eyes; but their vision had no direction—not even for me. They looked beyond us all.
Valombroso swept off his hat, and returned it to his head, being careful of the tilt.