Besides, for this last five years there had been another cause for silence. Challis had not been entirely without tidings of the man Keith Horne in his subsequent career. He had identified him—to his own satisfaction, at least—with the central figure of a hideous story told to him by a gaol-chaplain, an observer to whom he was indebted for much material for copy of a most popular sort. This particular atrocity was unfit for publication, even in a modern novel, and made Challis feel grateful to its miserable perpetrator for what would otherwise have been the crowning act in a series of betrayals. He sometimes even felt uncertain whether he ought not to feel unreserved thankfulness, and ascribe credit to him for what may have been the only noble motive of his life. He had endeavoured to trace the ex-convict, but without success.
Perhaps the way in which Challis regarded this man's relation with his first wife and himself may suggest itself from the gaol-chaplain's having laid great stress on the interest this man excited in his colleague, the surgeon of the gaol. If the patching up of an absolutely rotten profligate, that he might complete a term of penal servitude and return to his sins, was a thing to be desired, then that surgeon had a right to his triumph. That does not come into the story. But those who have given any attention to the pathology of disorders incidental to the ways of destroying body and soul adopted by this wretched creature will be able to understand why every year that added to Master Bob's stature, and increased his impudence, without a trace of any visible taint of constitution, was one more nail in the coffin of a painful misgiving, which Challis was only too glad should never have been shared by the mother of Bob's sisters. As Marianne never came to a knowledge of the ugly story, we may dismiss it finally, having only cited it because it appears to supply a justification of Challis's persistent concealment from her of her sister's former marriage.
The story draws a long breath of relief as it returns to Bob, who had come back from school fuming with an uncharitable jealousy against a boy named Tillotson, who had two Camberwell Beauties, while Bob had only one. So the few days he spent at home were chiefly employed tearing over Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park with a butterfly-net in a tropical heat. Then he ate his dinner too fast, and rushed away to his phonograph, at whose maw he gloated over incidents of Love and Jealousy in the plantations of Louisiana. As his father allowed him to do exactly what he liked, he was able to give full vent to his devotion to this pestilent abomination. He even wound it up to stand at his bed's head and soothe his first sleep with "Bill Bailey."
But when Bob departed for Broadstairs, the desolation was worse than ever. Challis met it boldly, writing persistently all day, and spending the evening at his Club. He was rather glad town was so empty; for, indeed, a week or so after the boy said good-bye to his governor, hugging him as a French or Italian boy would have done, no two folk who met seemed ready to accept each other as actual. "You don't mean to say you're here!" was the commonest greeting. But the incredulity of each gave way before the other's attestation of his existence.
Challis's disbelief in the presence in Grosvenor Square of any of The Family was so strong that he had no misgivings whatever on the point when he knocked at the door with drawn cards in his hand, and set phrases of inquiry on his tongue. He felt so reassured by the opacity of the closed windows, parading the emptiness of the mansion, and the insouciance of the nondescript who looked up from the area at him before coming to the door, that he never doubted that his visit would end as he himself at any rate believed he intended it to do. Was he glad or sorry—did he know himself?—when a light step caught him up at the street-corner, and a musical voice said, "Oh, please, Mr. Challis!" It was Cintilla.
Cintilla and Challis had always been on the most familiar terms, so if he did take her dimpled chin between his thumb and forefinger before saying, "Oh, please what, Miss Tenterden?" the butcher's boy need not have pretended to look the other way ostentatiously. Tenterden, by-the-bye, was the little maid's real name—Clemency Tenterden.
"Please I was to catch you and bring you back for Miss Judith."
"You don't mean that Miss Judith is in town?"
"Oh no!—not really in town. Why, you should see the state the house is in! And Mrs. Protheroe has gone to her brother James's widow at Bridport." Mrs. Protheroe was the housekeeper.