With tears in her honest old eyes, she drew his head down, and kissed him. “I’ll swear to you, Phil,” she said—“by that!”
He ran out into the darkness, and left her standing, in the light of the candle, in the little parlour.
CHAPTER XV
THE SHADY ’UN AS A MORAL CHARACTER
It must be confessed that Mr. Ogledon—better known, in some shady circles, as “The Count”—was in an awkward situation. For a whole week, he had secretly congratulated himself on the fact that his unfortunate cousin Dandy Chater was safely out of the way; moreover, he had carefully rehearsed the part he was to play, when first told of Dandy’s disappearance; had decided how best to show his pain and indignation, and his determination to hunt down the mystery, and find the murderer. In a word, he had carefully arranged so that no possible suspicion should fall upon himself; and now he discovered—to his consternation—that all these precautions were unnecessary, and that some ghastly replica of the murdered man had taken his place, and was accepted, by all and sundry as the genuine man. It must be said at once, that Ogledon, having no knowledge of the real story, and goaded by his own guilty conscience, found no solution in his mind of the mystery in any practical form. He saw, in this creature who had sprung up in the likeness of the man whose life had been brutally beaten out of him, only something horrible and intangible, come straight from the Land of Shadows, to mock at him, and drive him to distraction. If, on that lonely river bank, at the dead of night, the victim he had struck down lifeless had suddenly risen up in full vigour, unharmed and smiling, the murderer could not have been more appalled than he was by this quiet acceptance, by every one, of the figure which had stared through the window at him from the terrace of Chater Hall. Never for an instant suspecting the presence of the second man, that solution of the mystery did not occur to him; he saw in this Dandy Chater, risen from the grave, only his own embodied conscience, come to haunt and terrify him.
He remained that night in the dining-room with the Doctor; fearing to go to bed, or to be left alone for a moment. And, as the Doctor, whenever he got the opportunity, applied himself assiduously to the consumption of neat brandy, Mr. Ogledon as the time drew on towards morning, found himself pretty fully occupied in shaking his companion, and keeping him awake.
But day had its terrors, too; for the first person who entered the room made a casual and innocent enquiry concerning “Master Dandy,” and when he might be expected. Ogledon, dismissing this man with an oath, turned to the Doctor.
“Cripps,”—he shook the little man, for perhaps the hundredth time, the better to impress his meaning upon him—“Cripps—I’m going to make a bolt for it. I must get away, for a time, until this thing has blown over, and been forgotten. I shall go mad, if I stay here——Well—what do you want?”
This last was addressed to a servant, who had entered the room. The man informed him that a Mr. Tokely—connected, he believed, with the police—wished to see him.
Ogledon grasped the back of a chair, and turned a ghastly face towards Cripps. Telling the man to show the visitor in, he turned to Cripps, when they were alone together again, and spoke in a frightened hurried whisper.
“Stand by me, Cripps—stand by me, and back me up,” he said. “Ask what you will of me afterwards—only stand by me now.”