The glorious summer weather of the past three or four days was about to terminate in the proverbial English thunder-storm. I seldom remember a more oppressive atmosphere. London still offers a not altogether satisfactory example of applied sanitary science, but, at the date in question, once you left the fashionable districts and main thoroughfares, was frankly malodorous, not to say filthy. Half-way along King’s Road Lavender paid off the coach, and conducted me, on foot, by festering, foul-smelling by-ways, to the back of a row of mean two-storied houses. Gaining access to one of them—which from its dilapidated condition I judged to be empty—through a yard strewn with all manner of unsightly rubbish, a dead cat included, we passed by a narrow passage and stairway to a front room on the first floor. Here two detectives awaited our coming, and here, seated on a remarkably comfortless Windsor chair, by the defaced and broken window I passed what appeared a small eternity, looking out into the ill-paved street, where groups of squalid, half-naked children played and fought, and hawkers plied a noisy, unremunerative trade.
Opposite was a long stretch of much-defiled drab brick wall, pierced by a green-painted door, and furnished with a fringe of broken bottle glass along the top, above which showed the upper branches of a plane-tree and the roof and chimney-pots of an otherwise invisible dwelling. The whole presented a sordid and disheartening picture in the close heavy heat, beneath a sullen grey-blue sky across which masses of heavy cloud stalked upright in the face of a fitful and gusty wind.
And to think this was the place to which Hartover—heir to immense wealth and princely possessions, heir to royal Hover affronting the grandeur of those wind-swept Yorkshire fells—must needs descend to seek comfort, companionship, and some ordinary human kindness of care and woman’s love! The irony, the cynicism, of it struck through me with indignation and disgust.
I am under the impression Lavender did his best to lighten the tedium of my vigil by talking, humorously and well, of matters pertaining to his profession. That he discoursed to me of the differences between English and Continental methods of criminal procedure—the former of which he held notably superior in dignity and in fair-play—while his underlings smoked their pipes in modest silence. But I am afraid I accorded his well-meant efforts for my entertainment scanty attention; nor even, when the storm broke, did I pay much heed to the long-drawn cannonade, the boom and crash of warring elements.
For, throughout that lengthy waiting, the thought of Hartover and of his future had grown to be a veritable obsession, dwarfing all else in my mind. Again his pathetic outcry over the ‘poor, poor, hateful little Chelsea house’—the roof and chimney-pots of which I could see there opposite, above the fringe of broken bottle glass topping the wall—rang in my ears. And, as it did so, Self, by God’s grace, at last, was mastered. Yes, it came to this—to all else would I give the go-by, readily, gladly—to my pleasant studious life at Cambridge and its prospect of solid emoluments, of personal distinction and scholarly renown, to my last lingering hope—for even yet a faint, sweet, foolish hope did linger—of some day making Nellie Braithwaite nearer, and ah! how vastly, exquisitely dearer than a mere friend—if thus I might be permitted to redeem Hartover, to save him from the consequences of his own wayward, though not ignoble, nature, and from the consequences of others’ wholly ignoble conspiracies and sins. I was ready to make my sacrifice without hesitation or return; only, in my weakness, I prayed for some assurance it was accepted, prayed for a sign.
Was the sign given? It seemed so. I sprang to my feet, calling Lavender hurriedly by name.
It was late afternoon now. The worst of the storm over, though big plashy drops still fell, while steam rose off the sun-baked paving-stones. Through this veil of moisture a man walked rapidly to the door in the wall and knocked. Waiting for his knock to be answered, he turned, took off his hat, shook it sharply to dislodge the wet, and, so doing, glanced up at the still lowering sky. I saw his face distinctly.
Lavender stood at my elbow.
‘Well, sir, well, sir?’ he said, an odd eagerness and vibration in his voice.
‘Yes,’ I declared. ‘Marsigli, Lord Longmoor’s former butler, without doubt.’