GILEAD BALM
KNIGHT ERRANT

Gilead Balm had most things to recommend him—youth, comeliness, a bright intelligence, an excellent heart, a flawless digestion; best of all, an indestructible capacity for interesting himself in the affairs of the world into which he was born. He was fresh, fair, shapely, and of that graceful height which, as representing the classic perfection of symmetry, disposes the vision at the most reasonable level for contemplating the true stature of things, and their relative, mundane, proportions. His eyes were calm and fearless, his voice soft, his courtesy unimpeachable. If he had a weakness, it was for seeing two sides to a question, one or the other of which was apt to tickle his sense of humour. But humour, after all, is the saving grace of mankind, and, without it, there may be much achievement but little charity.

With all these advantages, pleasantly worn at the age of twenty-four, Gilead lacked, in the world’s eyes, the crowning advantage of an income. Or, at least, such an one as he enjoyed was far from adequately representing the value of his qualities. He was, in fact, a second division clerk (higher grade) to the Charity Commissioners at Whitehall, on a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and to that, barring promotion, he must look for his living. He was an orphan; his parents had died—fortunately after launching him on his career—insolvent; he had no negotiable prospects, so far as he knew, actual or problematic. But nature had endowed him to his content; and if, at times, some dream of affluence would come to disturb him, its motif was as far removed from an unworthy lust of gain, as his soul was from the ambitions and appetites of the majority of his fellows. Yet, what of vulgar acquisitiveness lacked in him was supplied somewhat by the spirit of the romantic quest. His bright soul would occasionally covet a larger scope for its experiences, and, to that end, the means—the only earthly means—to their enlargement. If he ever thought of money, it was as the golden key to the complex heart of the world.

It was his custom, during the luncheon hour, to read the Daily Post. All government clerks read the Daily Post, because it is the organ of the élite. Gilead differed from the most, however, in that he read the Daily Post wholly and solely for the sake of its front page advertisements; and he was wise. Leading articles will be prejudiced, reporters unscrupulous, foreign telegrams will illustrate the art of political selection. Only in the calling of wares, the births, deaths and marriages, the cries of the Agony Column, does Nature speak in unequivocal terms. It was upon the Agony Column of the Daily Post that Gilead was wont to whet his appetite for the emotional truths of life.

We all know this Agony Column. It is unique amongst its Daily fellows—more stirring, more motley, more shrill with the personal note than any other. It is not that its ciphers are more elegantly cryptic, that its moneylenders are more large-hearted and open-handed in a princely unsuspecting sort of way, that its private enquiry agencies are more distinguished, or its face-creams more modish than those to be found quoted in other Agony Columns—though, to be sure, a certain aroma of exclusiveness might be claimed for the sellers of wares advertised under the ægis of an aristocratic name. It is its perpetual undaunted appeals to the rich and benevolent, or to the fashionable and needy, which make it wholly singular among its class. Reading and pondering these day by day, Gilead came to the conclusion that the Daily Post was not so much the organ of the Tariff, or of any other reformers, as the organ of benevolence pure and simple. How otherwise could this persistent cry for help be maintained in it? There must be some response to justify its clamour.

He seldom read further than that first page. Its matter perennially fascinated and haunted him. He would have liked to trace every one of those essentially human cries to its source, and, according to its motive, still it, or give it cause to howl on a different note. And, if he had wealth, he would do it, he told himself. To play the Haroun Alraschid to suffering worth, to alleviate misery and expose imposture, by way of the countless channels offered by a popular ‘Daily’—what a rare purpose it would give to unmitigated opulence! And what an interest! No picture-galleries, no free-libraries, no lifting of international Cups for ostentation’s sake; but just an unnoticed pursuit of the individual submerged one, and his quiet resuscitation and well-comforted dismissal.

But there was another, and even more attractive side to the picture; and that was the mysteries his quest would penetrate, and of which the Agony Column of the Daily Post afforded some potential examples. How might not one gratify here one’s loving-kindness and one’s romanticism in a breath! The imaginative prospect was quite captivating to Gilead.

He divided the advertisements, generally, into five classes, Cosmetic, Private Enquiry, Situations (which revealed some others of the oddest), Nondescript (including anything from “Remember the Cats,” to a request to some titled lady to act as godmother to a gentleman’s child, or a suggestion that a third lady should join two others in arranging, and paying for, a series of painful experiments on human subjects), and, last and most numerous of all, Requests for Loans. Many of these found Gilead doubtful. While the appeals, from clergymen and others, on behalf of poor parishes, ruined homes, unemployed labour and so forth, affected him so sensibly that he would have liked to be able to answer every one of them with help proportionate to the needs it voiced, there were certain piteous entreaties for cash which left him cold. They smacked too much of the cunning and versatility of the professional mendicant; somehow they seemed a little shy of the inquisition of those clear contemplative eyes of his under their level brows. At the best they were couched in that key which argued, if not a constitutional absence, at least a temporary surrender of pride and self-respect. But he was no Pharisee, and very remote from judging wrung poverty by the standards of comfort and a competence. The question was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and to the pursuit of that he would have rejoiced to devote whatever fortune the Fates might allot him.

And, perhaps because his aspirations were so singular in a very ordinary world, taken with the fact that his temperament was even a curiously calm and virginal one, the Fates, who are a rather spinstery and spiteful triplet on the whole, were moved to do the unexpected thing by him—and in a very handsome and appropriate manner—by causing Messrs Plover, Stone and Company, the respectable solicitors, to insert an advertisement in the Agony Column of that very Daily Post, inviting the next-of-kin of the late Mr Lemuel Lamb to call upon them and hear of something considerably to his advantage.

Gilead read the advertisement in due course, and considered it with characteristic sobriety and an even pulse. “If,” he thought, “there is anything out of the common in this, I shall not forget my pledge to the Quest.”

He finished his chop placidly, recalling some traits of the departed Lemuel, who, he could little doubt (though with a philosophic reservation for contingencies) had been his sole surviving relative on the mother’s side. He remembered, with a certain easy gratification, how this disregarded uncle of his, from being a scapegrace and rather impossible waster, had been reported—from Australia, whither he had withdrawn—a reformed character of late years, which he had devoted to the amassing of a considerable fortune made out of stock—but whether soup or sheep Gilead did not know. Nor did he care in the least. All money was dirty stuff in the making. The moral of acquisition was in the cleansing of the hands that followed.

He brushed a crumb or two from his waistcoat, paid his bill, and returned to Whitehall to request a short leave of absence. None might have guessed from his exterior the issues which turned upon that petition.

It is not my purpose to recount the details of the interview which followed, or the processes by which identification was secured, and a claim substantiated. Suffice it to say that ‘Loquacious Lemuel,’ as he was known in the land of his adoption, had turned his natural predatory instincts to phenomenal profit during the few years that opportunity had allotted him for their full play, and had then, in a mood of magnificent atonement, bequeathed the whole of his gigantic fortune to the credulous brother-in-law in England whom he had once been instrumental in impoverishing, and whose sole heir Gilead remained by will. The young man—to jump formalities, and eschew all bewildering calculations of figures—entered upon his new world rich, in the stereotyped phrase, beyond the dreams of avarice—as if avarice ever had any dreams worth mentioning but of orts and candle-ends. But he faced his position with a clear brain, and a full appreciation of the ten thousand rapacities and importunities it would invite. As to that his plans were quite decided. He would employ a confidential secretary, and some subordinate agents and amanuenses, and to them entrust the active business of philanthropy, while he himself would stand in the background (the unconfessed one, the “nominis umbra,” like Junius) to direct operations, and give his personal attention to such cases as seemed to offer scope for the romantic quest.

He advertised, somewhat in the following terms: “Private Secretary wanted by a gentleman of means. Good salary offered to one willing to devote himself wholly to the interests of his employer. Address, in the first instance—” here followed the number of a house in Victoria Street, a suite of rooms in which Gilead had already furnished and turned into a central bureau for his operations. The result gave him food for thought. He received seven hundred and forty-nine replies, one hundred and sixty-eight of which were delivered on the date of the advertisement. He recognized at once his single incapacity for dealing with that vast stack of correspondence, and put on his hat and went to see Mr Plover in Arundel Street.

Mr Plover’s appearance and expression needed, perhaps, the assurance of his firm’s time-honoured reputation to make them convincing. He was a slack-lipped, beautifully white-whiskered old gentleman, wearing gold-rimmed pince-nez, which, being near the tip of his nose, were wont occasionally to topple over and get in the way of his speech. One had to put some force upon oneself to read legal profundity in features which seemed to betray even an excess of amiable vacuity. But one knew that the antiquity of the firm and its weighty connexions stood behind, and so one resigned oneself, like Longfellow’s good Christian, to a pious confidence in the things which “are not what they seem.”

Mr Plover applied to the difficulties of this immensely important new client that Napoleonic method which resolves all complexities by annihilation.

“Seven hundred and forty-nine!” said he. “Dear, dear! Now, take my advice, and make a bonfire of the lot, and start afresh.”

“Would that be fair?” said Gilead.

“Only one can succeed, you know,” said Mr Plover. “Make it the seven hundred and fiftieth.”

He sat back in his chair, tilted his head, and his glasses lost their balance. “Seven hundred and fiftieth,” he mumbled crookedly behind their lenses.

“Yes?” said Gilead, calmly inquisitorial.

“I venture to think I know the very man for your purpose,” said Mr Plover, smiling, with the glasses in place once more.

“Yes?” said Gilead again.

“His name is Nestle,” said the lawyer—“Herbert Nestle. He is a man of immense industry and capacity, and at present out of a situation.”

“What was his last?” asked the client.

“He was conveyancing clerk,” said Mr Plover, “to Broker and Borrodaile, since in liquidation. There was some question of trust funds, and Nestle was scandalously misused. A man with clean hands—he has my strong personal recommendation, Mr Balm, if that counts for anything with you.”

“It settles a difficulty,” said Gilead, rising.

He left Mr Plover preparing to draw out and sign several folio pages of cheques, a task, deputed to him by his partners, which he greatly enjoyed, and executed with the minutest care and precision, ruling all the cross lines.

CHAPTER I.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

Mr Herbert Nestle, knocking confidently and entering softly, laid the morning’s Daily Post before his Chief, who had just entered and was pulling off his gloves.

“Anything especial?” asked Gilead.

“I have thumb-marked one,” said the secretary, “which seemed to me perhaps worth your personal attention.”

The Bureau—known as Lamb’s Agency—was already in working order, and daily settling into its pace. Its operations so far had seemed wholly to justify its existence, and its founder was satisfied. During this first month of its being some score of deserving cases had been helped, and almost as many shams exposed. The world was happier and cleaner by that measure; and, for the future, professional cadgers promised to grow shy of risking the inquisition of a body so merciless in its penetration, behind which stood a force so mysterious in its origin, and having, apparently, such inexhaustible funds at its disposal.

Gilead kept his little private office on the floor above the Agency, and from that shrouded adytum issued the motive power to the mechanism below. There he sat, or thence departed, unheard, unapproachable, an enigmatic, formidable figure to his employés, holding vast destinies in the hollow of his hand. No one of them, saving the privileged secretary, was permitted to apply to him on general grounds; and to his rare appearances in the offices was accorded, particularly by the two lady typewriters, a hushed deference almost religious in its character. Much of this was due, no doubt, to the halo of countless gold which surrounded him; but indeed Gilead’s charm of person, serene, passionless, clear-eyed as an angel’s, and as coldly beautiful, had at least its influence on the flutterings of susceptible hearts.

His establishment comprised, in addition to the secretary and the two ladies, half a dozen correspondents or book-keepers, and as many active agents, sound men and sagacious, whose business it was to visit and report upon the cases. To them was entrusted the investigation of the ‘Oh, please do help!’ petitions—the five, or fifteen, or fifty, or five-hundred pound loan-requests, for the saving of a home, or the buying of a business, or the stocking of a fashionable millinery, or the settling of debts incurred through Bridge or speculation, or the enabling a sporting curate to purchase a motor-bicycle, or the shipping of a promising family to Canada, or the feeding of a clergyman’s sick aunt on jellies and port wine. The plaints (many from titled lips) soon became susceptible to classification, and were found generally weakest on the side which betrayed the most agonized “derangement of epitaphs” and the most fervent ejaculations. The result in all ways was instructive, as much in its revelation of the systematic fraud which battened on timid uninvestigating charity, as of the pitiful flimsiness of the bulwark which stood between the light of social respectability, with a name and a number on its door, on the one side, and the outer darkness, with its obliteration of all personality, on the other. Gilead’s heart often grew sick, as this dissected stuff of craft and misery, of shamefulness and shamelessness, was submitted to his judgment. But his comfort lay in the sanitary acumen of his Bureau, and so long as that continued to work unimpaired, he had no intention of taking his hand from the lever.

The month, so far as his individual quest was concerned, had proved a dull one, void of romantic incitement. He received, therefore, his secretary’s statement with some quickening of interest. Quiet and unemotional in his decisions, he had satisfied himself that Mr Plover’s eulogium on this man had been justified. He found him acute, resourceful, penetrative, energetic, humane—such a coadjutor as he could most have desired. Nestle virtually managed the agency on its practical side, and possessed his chief’s full confidence. His features and unjarring personality were pleasant things moreover to his master, who was habitually fastidious in the matters of conduct and appearance. The secretary was a very good-looking young man, in a fair boyish way, and so gentle in voice and manner that one might never have guessed the spirit of determination which underlay that soft exterior. In suggestion he was subordinate angel to the other, though somewhat older, and far more full of worldly wisdom. But the only visible mundane feature about him was his spectacles.

Gilead sat down in his padded office-chair, and crossing his legs easily, consulted the paper lying on the desk before him.

“Indeed, Nestle?” he said. “Which is it?”

The secretary, bending respectfully over, ran a fresh white-nailed finger down the Agony Column, and stopped it at a three-line advertisement:—

“Lady (young) a victim to persecution, seeks honourable employment to extricate her from pressing difficulties. Good typewriter and linguist. Address Viatrix, Rufus Cottage, Knight’s Hill, West Norwood.”

Gilead read and considered, his hand thoughtfully caressing his chin. Then he looked up.

“You think it promising?” he said.

The secretary, withdrawn a little, deferred to his employer.

“If I am right, sir, in interpreting your mood.”

Gilead reflected.

“There has been a monotony, I admit, hitherto,” he said. “You differentiate this, somehow, from the others?”

“It is, if I may use the expression, sir, manly—no cringing. There are tokens of culture; and the hint of persecution, the mystery, puts it in another category. Certainly it is a lady—and young.”

“You have misread me, Nestle,” said his master, “if you can hint that as an objection. I should be a useless agent in this business were I constitutionally susceptible. The sex has never more than an abstract attraction for me, and any desire I may have to possess it is limited to its idealised presentments in art.”

He returned to the advertisement, frowning a little, while the secretary murmured an apology. Presently he looked up, with decision.

“I will undertake,” he said, “this case in person. You will of course allow no hint of the fact to escape you.”

“Of course, Mr Balm.”

They spent the subsequent hour or two in discussing the business of the Bureau, and at two o’clock Gilead, having lunched lightly at Victoria Station, took a train thence for West Norwood.

Alighted there, and enquiring his way, he found himself in a decent suburban road, which ascended at a steepish angle between a broken double line of houses, detached or in ranks. There were terraces, some shops, many raw modern villas, a few large mansions, of an older date, standing in their own grounds, and here and there, contemporaneous with these, a detached cottage or maisonette, almost hidden behind the shrubs and foliage of its front garden. Reading Rufus Cottage upon the gate-post of one of these last, situated high on the hill, Gilead turned into a tiny drive, and rang the door bell of a little sober brown-brick house built after the sturdy architecture of the fifties. As he waited, he had time to observe that the scrap of lawn behind the shrubs was weed-grown and neglected, and the general atmosphere of the place fuscous and wet-smelling like an over-ripe walnut. And the next instant the door was opened by a weeping servant maid.

“I am sorry,” said Gilead, chivalrous to all. “Is anything the matter?”

She was small and moist, of the “tweenie” breed; and her emotion had inflamed her little nose and shaken her cap awry. She gazed at him open-mouthed, seeing an angel alighted on her step; but she answered nothing.

“I called about the advertisement,” he began tentatively; “but, of course—”

She caught at a sob to interrupt him.

“I was to show anyone in as did. O! dear, dear, I doesn’t know what to do!”

The mystery, it seemed, was already crying on the threshold. That was quite as he would have had it.

“Come,” he said; “I am here to help. Tell me what is wrong, child.”

“A telegram come for her,” said the girl, gasping and wiping her eyes on her apron; “and she’d no sooner read it but what she gave a ’eave and fell down flat on the sofy; and there’s she’s laid ever since.”

“You are speaking of?” said Gilead.

“My mistress,” answered the girl.

“How long ago was that?”

“More’n half an hour. O, dear! and I’m all alone with her; and I can’t get her to speak or move; and I doesn’t know what to do.”

“Hadn’t you better run for the doctor?”

The girl hesitated.

“Who’s to look after her while I’m gone?”

“I will,” said Gilead.

She gaped at him aghast, blinking her swollen lids.

“You?” she whispered; then added, “please, what’s your name?”

He told her. Something in the answer, vaguely associating it with a Sunday-school memory of peace and righteousness, appeared to reassure her. She backed against the wall to let him enter. He found himself in a cool dark little hall, having a door ajar and a flight of stairs to the left, and a closed door in front. This last the girl approached, snuffling and on tiptoe, and opening it softly, revealed a pleasant green-toned room which gave, through French windows, upon a square of embowered garden. She peeped fearfully round the door-edge, hesitated, then re-emerged and beckoned the visitor.

“There she is,” she whispered hysterically, “jest as she went down.”

Gilead stepped gently into the room. It was quite warm and cosy and still—like a bower almost to the little green pleasance beyond. And, in keeping with its vernal privacy, it had its sleeping nymph. She lay upon a green sofa, like a waxen figure upon a “property” bank. Gilead’s first thought was of the lovely St. Amaranthe in the Tussaud exhibition, which had once haunted his childish dreams. Only the artificial figure had seemed to breathe more naturally than this. There were here, however, the same beautiful immobile face, the same rose-petal complexion—cream just rounding into pink under the closed eyes—the same ripe perfection of form, the same suggestion of eternal restfulness. That other figure, he remembered, had always stood to his innocent mind for the embodiment of the Sleeping Beauty; and here she was, incarnated out of wax. Her dress—of velvet, or velveteen, a deeper shade of green than the sofa—fell in a slumberous bloom of folds; one milk-white arm, half buried under a coil of brown hair, cushioned her head; the other, limp and motionless, trailed its relaxed fingers upon the carpet, whereon lay a telegraph form.

Gilead stood some moments regarding the beautiful picture with the enthusiasm of a virtuoso. “It would be a black shame,” was something of his thought, “to let this fine work fall into the clutches of a Vandal!” The terms of the advertisement were in his mind.

“It looks like a cataleptic seizure,” he said to the girl. “Is she subject to them, do you know?”

The tweenie shook her poor little watery noddle.

“I’ve never known her do the like,” she said, “since I come here.”

“How long ago was that?”

“A week, sir,” said the girl. “I’ve been with her ever since she took the ’ouse a week ago.”

“Well,” he said, “you’d better go for the doctor at once.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth, when the girl gasped:

“I see her lids twitch! She’s a’comin’ to!”

It appeared that she was right. Some perceptible emotion stirred under the wax-like surface; the flush of pink deepened in the rounded cheeks. The suddenness of the change confirmed Gilead in his suspicion. “These instant recoveries,” he thought, “are characteristic of the complaint.”

He backed towards the door.

“She mustn’t find me here,” he whispered. “The shock might cause a relapse. I’ll wait outside. Let me know by and by if she wishes, or does not wish, to see me.”

Even as he spoke, a deep sigh issued from the sleeper’s lips, and he went hastily from the room, closing the door behind him.

He had, not, however, lingered, the most scrupulous of intruders, ten minutes in the little cold hall, when the girl came out to him radiant.

“She’d like to see you now, sir, if you please,” she said.

CHAPTER II.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (continued)

Gilead re-entered the quiet little room with a feeling as if he were desecrating a woodland shrine. As yet he could not associate that figure of immortal loveliness with the piteous vision of the advertisement. He saw her risen to greet him, all warm and flushed, a maid, yet seeming young-motherly in the soft plenitude of her form, with evidences of some suppressed emotion in her eyes. Her drooped right hand held the telegram. She addressed him in a voice of sweet low embarrassment:—

“Your visit, I am afraid, was badly timed—for me. I am so sorry. It has reference, I understand, to my advertisement in the Daily Post. Will you please tell me in what way?”

She motioned him to seat himself, and herself sank somewhat languidly upon the sofa she had just quitted.

“I trust,” he began; but she stopped him:—

“Please do not speak of it. It was a momentary recurrence of a seizure which had overtaken me once before, and was due—”

She paused. “To the receipt of a telegram?” he suggested gently.

She turned her head away; then refaced him, with a deeper flush on her cheeks.

“I am quite recovered,” she said. “I am very much to blame for my weakness.”

“I beg you not to think me impertinent,” said Gilead. “Your servant volunteered the information.”

She smiled, a little wanly.

“Well, it is quite true,” she said; “and I can have no purpose in denying it.”

“You must pardon me,” said the young man, “if I associate this seizure somehow with the persecution complained of in your advertisement.”

She looked down, twisting the telegram in her lap in an agitated manner.

“Yes,” she said, in a low voice. “I must admit it.”

“Have you the least objection,” he asked earnestly, “to giving me your name?”

She hesitated a moment; then raised her eyes to his steadily.

“Would it not be right for you to acquaint me first,” she said, “of the object of your visit?”

“Here, as always,” he answered, with measured clearness, “to succour the unfortunate or unhappy.”

A little irrepressible sigh escaped her.

“Naturally,” he continued, “you will ask my credentials. Is it possible that you have heard mention of ‘Lamb’s Agency’?”

She shook her head slightly.

“It was founded,” said Gilead, “by a person having great wealth, and a keen desire to apply it to the most helpful uses. Any wronged or persecuted innocence has a first claim upon it, I may say. My name is Gilead Balm, and I represent the Agency in this instance.”

Her eyes opened upon him wonderingly.

“Does such an institution exist?” she murmured. “I am very fortunate.”

He bowed gravely.

“The good fortune is ours, madam, where our purpose is vindicated.”

“I understand you,” she said. “You must guard against the wiles of the unscrupulous?”

“An exhaustive investigation is the only way,” he said.

“That needs no apology,” she answered, flushing a little. “I cannot be blind to the fact that the terms of my advertisement invited some comment. I was indeed very distracted when I wrote it.”

“You will not, then,” said Gilead, “attribute to mere prying impertinence on my part a desire to ascertain the nature of this persecution, whether to arm myself for your protection against it, or—”

“Or,” she interrupted him, with a faint smile, “to form your own opinion as to the truth of my story?”

“As to our capacity for assisting you,” he corrected her, staidly and courteously.

“Thank you for putting it that way,” she said quietly. “My name is Vera Halifax. Were I to give you the outlines of my history, you would accept the statement as a confidence, I am sure?”

“Most certainly,” he answered.

“I mean a personal confidence,” said the girl.

“If you should desire it.”

“I do desire it, if you please. Ill-chosen as were, no doubt, the terms of my appeal, I never proposed to myself to enlarge upon them save to the sympathy which should seem to justify my trust by its practical sincerity. You will understand me, I am sure, Mr Balm, when I ask you how you propose to deal with my difficulties, if convinced of their reality?”

“Why, how can I answer,” he said, breaking into a smile, “until I know their nature?”

She looked down, toying with the telegraph form. “I should have thought,” she said, “that that mention of my poor accomplishments would have been sufficiently illuminating.”

“Pardon me, then,” he answered, “for being explicit. You are threatened, I am to assume, with a loss of livelihood?”

“Yes, utter,” she said low.

“Very well,” he answered. “Then you are to understand, please, that we will endeavour to compensate you in proportion as our estimate of the wrong you have suffered tallies with yours.”

“Compensate!” she exclaimed.

“I mean,” he said, “with all respect for your independence. You shall work for your living—if you desire it, at the Agency itself.”

She glanced at him swiftly, and away. There were signs of tears in her beautiful eyes.

“I can only acknowledge such consideration, such generosity,” she said, “with a full confession of the truth. Would you wish to hear it?”

“I seek it perpetually,” he answered, “and from many lips. If it is an ugly truth here, even yours shall not redeem it or win its pardon.”

She blushed deeply, and half averting her face, held out to him the telegram which had been responsible for her seizure.

“Will you glance at that first?” she murmured. “You will not understand it; but it will pave the way to an explanation.”

He took the paper from her hand, and read these four enigmatic words:—

“Be prepared. Winsom Wyllie.”

“Winsom Wyllie!” he ejaculated in astonishment, looking up.

She shivered, and gave a little gulp.

“He is the cause, he is the cause!” she whispered, and appeared for the moment incapable of further speech. And then suddenly she collected herself.

“I must appear insane to you,” she said. “Perhaps it is true that an exaggerated fear has unhinged my mind for the moment. But I will tell you my story.”

“If you please,” he said; and she began:—

“My mother died when I was quite young, leaving me the sole charge of a preoccupied father. He was a man of science, devoted to the pursuit of insects, and for the greater part of his life was engaged in procuring material for his great work on the Butterflies of Europe. After my mother’s death, I was put to a school in Cheltenham, where I remained for a number of years, forgotten, but on the whole happy, doing fair credit to my training, and spending my holidays, for the most part, at the homes of the various mistresses. When I was eighteen, a chance visit to the Cotswold Hills reminded my father of my existence. He was growing old, and his eyesight dim, and it occurred to him that I might prove useful to him in his occupation. He took me from school, and thenceforth I was his companion and assistant in his varied journeyings at home and abroad. I had no other relation in the world, and no fixed home; but I confess I enjoyed the life, with its freedom from restraint, and its perpetual charms of change and open-air employment. My father, as each specimen was captured, was in the habit of sitting down and making on the spot an exact water-colour drawing of it to scale. This work, finding I had a natural facility with the brush, he deputed to me as also much of the netting of the insects themselves, at which, being active and clear-sighted, I soon proved myself an expert. I was quite happy and engrossed in my curious life until the day when there entered into it a stranger of an unusual and sinister cast. His name was Winsom Wyllie.”

She paused a moment in some agitation, and, putting her handkerchief to her lips, averted her face yet a little more.

“He professed a profound interest in the great work,” she continued presently, “and was indeed not a little forward in contributing to it. He attached himself to us, accompanied us everywhere, and quickly made himself indispensable to my father, who regarded his skill and courage with something approaching infatuation. There was no rock so high, no swamp so perilous, but Mr Wyllie would dare it in pursuit of valuable specimens. He seemed endowed with a demoniac energy, to possess a charmed life. He was wonderful, I admit; but there was always something about him that repelled me, that made me conscious of an instinctive antipathy in his presence. My dear father would habitually, when possible, revive and release the drugged insects after finishing with them; Mr Wyllie, on the contrary, would strip off their beautiful wings with a savage zest, or crush them between his coarse fingers into glittering meal. He was a dangerous man, and he always carried about with him, pinned into the inside crown of his flat-topped felt hat, a dried specimen of the moth called the Death’s Head. It was his piratical emblem, he would declare; and indeed it was a suitable one. Judge, then, of my horror and disgust, when I came to realize, as I did, that his pursuit all this time was not of my father’s interests, but of my father’s unhappy child!”

Her fair head drooped, and she spoke in a lower voice.

“I will not dwell upon the details of my discovery, but will hasten to the conclusion. Unthwarted by my declared aversion, confident in my father’s sympathy, this man made no secret, after his first avowal and repulse, of his intention to possess me. My father was blind to my misery and deaf to my protestations. The other held him in complete moral subjugation. I was at this time grown to be a woman, and of an age to assert myself. I was forming some wild scheme of escape, when the blow fell that for a while deprived me of my reason. One day my father, having rashly climbed a cliff-side in pursuit of a specimen, slipped, and was hurled lifeless at my very feet. The shock threw me into a cataleptic trance, from which I did not recover for several weeks.

“That occurred in Switzerland, in the Zermatt valley, and when I awoke to my senses it was to find myself lying in a little hospice at St Niklaus which latterly we had been making our headquarters, and Mr Wyllie assuming the sole charge of my fortune and destinies.

“I cannot describe the feelings with which I realized my unhappy orphaned position, or the intensified horror with which I regarded this man, now justified in some measure in claiming my gratitude. He had devoted himself, while I lay insensible, to my affairs and my comfort, and might have expected some acknowledgment; but I looked upon him with an indescribable loathing, which, struggle as I would, I could make but a poor show of concealing. He was fully conscious of my attitude, of course, and, finding all efforts to conciliate me useless, brought matters very quickly to a crisis. One day he asked me abruptly what I proposed doing for a living, if I persisted in my refusal to join my fortunes with his. I stared at him in amazement; when he informed me, with the utmost sang-froid, that, by a lately executed will, my father had left him all his small fortune (including the material for the book) in trust for me, provided that I married him within a year of the testator’s death, and to him solely, in the event of my rejecting that condition. Furthermore he acquainted me with the facts that a considerable undischarged debt lay to my discredit at the hospice, that, so far as he knew, I was entirely without means, and that if he came forward to assist me, it must be on the express stipulation that I would give myself to him in pledge for that accommodation, when he would hope to convince me in time of the wisdom and policy of my subscribing to the terms of the will.

“Mr Balm, I seemed to see in a flash the whole black depravity of the man. More, I remembered then that he had been on the hill with my father on the day of the fatal accident, and, in a fit of ungovernable passion and horror, I denounced him to his face. I accused him of having coerced my father into making the will, and then, in order to secure the permanency of its provisions, of tempting my unhappy parent to his destruction.

“I thought for a moment he would have killed me; and then he answered. I wish never again to invite a scene so appalling in its revelation of the secret abysses of wickedness. Utterly unnerved and overcome, I stammered out some propitiatory phrases, and escaped to my room. My only thought, my only hope was flight. I had a sum of money in my possession—for of late years my father had committed to me the business of our expenditure—and with that, and my small stock of jewels, I stole out in the grey of the next dawn, and made my way to Visp. I need not trouble you with the details of my flight—its happy accidents and living apprehensions. It is enough to say that I succeeded eventually in reaching London in safety. The experience of my later life had taught me wisdom and caution, and I was fortunate in keeping my head and my wits in somewhat bewildering circumstances. I parted with my jewels for a fair sum, and then, wishing to remove myself as far as possible from the likely arena of my persecutor’s enquiries, decided to bury myself in some obscure district of the suburbs, where I could rally my small forces, and think out the means to procure myself a livelihood. My travels combined with my early studies had made me fairly proficient in several European languages, and my father had always carried about with him for his correspondence a portable typewriter, which I had soon learned to manipulate. Finally, accident established me here, where I have now lived, in doubt and agitation, for a little over a week.”

She ended, and for a full minute a profound silence succeeded her narration.

“Pardon me,” said Gilead, then: “there is something more.”

“The telegram?” she answered, with a broken, most pitiful sigh. “O! Mr Balm, I can only assume that, ambiguous as I had supposed my advertisement to be, he must have seen and profited by it to get upon my tracks. It reached me only shortly before your arrival, and upon its receipt I had a short return of the illness with whose first attack he had been so fatally associated. He may be even here now, close by, somewhere in the neighbourhood!”

She rose, with the word, in great agitation, and stood holding her hand to her bosom. Gilead rose also.

“I beg you to calm yourself,” he said. “What have you to fear from him?”

“Fear!” she whispered, with an awful significance. “Ah! you do not know him. He will break me to his will.”

“No, that must not be,” said the young man. “Has this creature no permanent address?”

“Indeed none that I know of,” she faltered.

“And the will was indisputable?”

“Quite, I fear.”

“We might contest it upon the grounds of undue influence? And in the meantime—”

She gazed at him with her wide haunted eyes. Certainly the flowery lepidopteral ways had produced a very comely nymph.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“You must come with me, please.”

“Mr Balm!” she exclaimed in astonishment. “Do you know what you say?”

“Perfectly,” he answered, quite self-possessed. “By your own showing you invite your ultimate ruin by staying here. The man is obviously a villain, and if we cannot expose, we can defy him. I will make it my business to discover his whereabouts, and to pay-off your debt to him. In the meanwhile a lady member of our staff will procure you suitable lodgings near the Agency, and any obligation you may owe to us it shall be in your power to discharge by way of services to our office. To-morrow, one of our agents shall visit here to make such arrangements with your landlord as are necessary for acquitting you of your agreement with him, and to dismiss your servant. You can trust to my absolute honour and sincerity in the whole matter. It is for such purposes that we exist. You will greatly oblige me by consenting.”

She appeared genuinely moved and perplexed. She could find no answer for some moments.

“I don’t know what to say,” she murmured at last.

“Say nothing,” he answered; “but, if I may venture to suggest, make a little bag of your immediate necessaries, and come straight away with me. The rest can follow.”

While she was gone from the room a thing or two relative to the unreasoned extravagances of women did occur to him. “Thus,” he thought, “they will, when in dire distress and within sight of absolute penury, rent a neat little furnished house and hire a servant, when cheap lodgings would have served all their purpose.” But he dismissed the reflection as bearing too hardly upon the small worldly-wisdom of one bred in comparative luxury, without experience, and very young in years—probably not much over twenty. And, for the rest, he contemplated with serene gratification his return from his first romantic quest in company with this visible beautiful earnest of its success.

CHAPTER III.
THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

Man wanted immediately to assist in practical refutation of calumny. Apply Judex: Raxe’s Private Hotel, Aldwych.

The above advertisement met Gilead’s eyes a day or two after his adventure with the beautiful lepidopterist. He fastened upon it at once.

“I shall follow this up,” he said to the secretary. “What can a ‘practical refutation’ mean?”

Nestle shook his head, with a smile.

“I really can’t guess, sir,” he said. “Unless it refers to the argumentum baculinum.”

Gilead mused a little.

“It says ‘immediately’,” he reflected. “I must go at once, then, or I shall be forestalled.”

He rose, and looked about him.

“Miss Halifax enters to-day, you understand,” he said, “upon her duties as my personal typewriter and amanuensis. You will see that she is made comfortable here in my absence.”

Perhaps the ghost of a smile twitched the soft-speaking secretary’s mouth, as he answered that his chief’s commands should be scrupulously obeyed.

Gilead took a cab to Raxe’s Hotel, and enquired at once for “Judex.” He seemed conscious of a twinkle in the right eye of the hall-porter who took his name, and of that of the boy who went off with it, as if some telegraphic levity had passed between them. But in a little the boy came back, with a perfectly sober face, and informed him that Mr Judex would see him. He was shown upstairs into a private sitting-room, where by a table sat a little old man, shrewd and withered, but of a very spruce appearance. His eyes were piercing black, his lips kept a perpetual chewing motion, like a crab’s, a few threads of white hair clung to the barren slopes of his scalp. But he was very neatly dressed in grey twill frock-coat and trousers, with a shepherd’s plaid bow at his neck.

“A LITTLE OLD MAN, SHREWD AND WITHERED.”

“Mr Judex?” said Gilead.

“My name, sir,” said the stranger. “You thought it a pseudonym, no doubt. Now, usher!”

The exclamation was addressed to the boy, who vanished.

“I called in answer to your advertisement,” said Gilead, not unprepared for surprises.

“Be seated,” said the stranger. The bright eyes bent upon him. “You are young, and a gentleman, I take note, Mr Balm,” he said. “A hard-up one—eh?”

“No, not hard-up.”

“What then?”

“A seeker after the truth,” said Gilead. “I pursue it day by day through the columns of the Daily Post. Money is no object to me.”

The little old man bent forward, and eagerly scanned his visitor.

“If that is so,” he said, “fortune could not have sent me a better coadjutor. You are dispassionate, disinterested, whole-hearted?”

“Entirely,” said Gilead.

The old man rubbed his palms gleefully together.

“It is a providence,” he said. “It is to demonstrate a truth, a momentous truth, that I advertised for an agent.”

“May I ask,” said Gilead, “what truth.”

“Hush-sh-sh!” said Mr Judex, putting a finger to his lips with exaggerated gravity. “It lies to prove in the wine-cellar of number forty-one, Belgrave Crescent—a very deep and dark cellar.”

Gilead’s eyes opened a little; but he sat calm and collected. He thought he perceived that he had to do here with an eccentric, not to say a daft old gentleman. But, if the quest was to bear fruit, he must betray nothing of his feelings. The other stretched out, and put a soft impressive hand upon his arm.

“Have you a clean conscience?” he said.

“I believe I may claim one,” answered the young man, smiling.

“No sense of guilt anywhere within?”

“Nothing to trouble me.”

“Exactly. You are not afraid of being alone with your thoughts?”

“O! no.”

“Even in the dark?”

“Even in the dark.”

“If you were conscience-stricken, on the other hand, you might dread your own company unspeakably?”

“It is very likely, I think.”

“Especially in the dark?”

“I daresay.”

“So much so as to be urged to any means to escape it, perhaps?”

“Indeed,” said Gilead, “I could not answer for myself under the circumstances.”

Mr Judex threw himself back in his chair with galvanic quickness and a beaming face.

“Nothing could be happier,” he said delightedly. “It lies in your power to exonerate me from a very gross and cruel accusation.”

“So far as my conscious probity is concerned,” said Gilead, “I am at your service.”

The old man bent forward again, and patted him three times on the knee.

“Meet me,” he said, “at nine o’clock—this evening—outside number forty-one—Belgrave Crescent.”

For one moment Gilead hesitated. The oddity of the request, the lateness of the hour named, the suggestion of something sinister and uncanny connected with that abysmal crypt so darkly alluded to, impressed him with a sense of some unseemliness in prospect which it would be wiser in him to leave unexplored. What could possibly bear upon the refutation of a calumny in those obscure depths? An aspersed bin (he reflected, with concern, that he had no palate for “bouquets”)? A deceased butler? An immured traducer, like him in the terrific Mr Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado!”? Nothing, he hoped, to do with buried corpses or concealed “swag.” But in the end the spirit of the Romantic Quest decided him.

“I will be punctual to the appointment,” he said, and rose from his chair.

He returned to the Bureau to find Miss Halifax already installed in his private office. She struck him as looking a supremely attractive amanuensis, and he congratulated himself on the good fortune which had attended his first personal venture. If she should prove as sympathetic to his aims as she was grateful to his vision, he would come to hold, he told himself, having the perfect feminine on one side of him and the perfect male on the other, the most admirable balance between reason and emotion. In fact he informed her so, quite frankly and quietly, and she blushed as she made a very pretty and modest acknowledgment of his kindness, and of her determination to win his good opinion.

“Mr Winsom Wyllie is first down among my mental notes,” he told her. “I shall not forget him.”

He went, indeed, that very afternoon to Somerset House in order to ascertain if the Will had as yet been proved, but was unsuccessful in his search. “Never mind,” he thought. “Such a rapacious scoundrel will not be long in realizing his ill-gotten gains, and in a very short time, I fancy, we shall be possessed of a clue.”

He was as little inclined to effusive confidences as to senseless reticence; but for some reason he told Miss Halifax about his forthcoming venture. To his surprise she received his story with some signs of emotion.

“I don’t think it sounds nice,” she said. “I wish you would let one of the others go instead.”

He looked at her kindly.

“What do you doubt?” he answered; “my proficiency, or my discretion, or my savoir-faire?”

“None of these,” she said—“or your courage or generosity. Forgive me and my presumption in offering advice so soon.”

“I should have thought,” said he, smiling, “that the success of my first essay would have inclined you to a greater confidence in my judgment.”

She seemed to hang her head a little, biting her full lower lip.

“I have no right whatever to speak,” she murmured. “Only please, please be on your guard.”

“Trust me,” he said. “But timidity, you must remember, Miss Halifax, never won to a vision of the Grail.”

She raised her head, and looked at him a moment with shining eyes; then returned to her work.

The evening closed in dark and sinister, bringing with it black rushes of wind and sudden avalanches of rain. Gilead despatched a simple but recherché dinner at a choice restaurant, and, at twenty minutes to nine, betook himself on foot to the rendezvous. It was part of his principle to avoid every show of ostentation in his adventures. He wished to decide them on their own exclusive merits, and any confession of his resources would have tended to confuse the issues. Exactly at the hour appointed, he stood, battling with his umbrella, outside number forty-one Belgrave Crescent.

The street, in this stately district, was almost entirely deserted at this mid-prandial hour. The dark garden which contained one side of it stood not more lifeless in suggestion than the black house-fronts opposite. Here and there a gas-lamp winked in the driven tumult; here and there a thread of light under a blind gleamed like a gold stitch in the curtain of night. Far up a solitary motor-car throbbed against the kerb; the thunder of remote traffic spoke like a distant surge; other token of human contiguity there was none.

In such a universal eclipse of things there was little to differentiate one respectable building from another; wherefore the watcher was unable to draw any exclusively portentous suggestion from the gloom and silence of the house he faced. It appeared like any other of its neighbours in the essentials of brown brick and closed shutters, and the rain that plashed off its sills into the deep area was burdened with no exceptional sound of omen or melancholy. The brass knocker was hospitably bright, the antique extinguishers on the rail-posts of the steps were even suggestive of home, and an asylum gained at last from obscure wanderings in the streets. Gilead moved closer to examine one of them.

“Faithful Achates!” said a small voice at his elbow. He started and turned about.

He had come up and upon him without a sound, a little weird blown figure, hopping under an umbrella like some odd-winged night-fowl. His eyes gleamed like drops of ink; he pinched Gilead’s arm in a shrewd ecstasy, while that young man, momentarily paralysed, stood speechless. In truth the apparition had taken him from an unexpected quarter; he had looked to Mr Judex, for some reason, to emerge from the house itself.

As they dwelt thus an instant, a clap of wind took the little figure, and seemed to blow it clean up the steps.

“Quick!” he whispered from that eyrie, closing his umbrella. “I am pressed for time in all things these days—quick!”

A little reluctantly Gilead joined him.

“Pressed for time,” repeated the other, bending and fumbling; “and my movements must be swift and secret. This is excellently fine of you. Your reward shall consist in the vindication of a calumniated soul. Quick! We will make straight for the cellar.”

He was busy with a labelled latchkey as he spoke, fitting it into the lock.

“Procured from the house agents,” he murmured. “My own key and my own house; but they weren’t to know that.”

The door fell open with the word, revealing a cavern of chill blackness. Involuntarily Gilead shrunk a little. The other noticed and protested.

“There is nothing to apprehend—neither goblins nor conspirators,” he said. “You were quite confident as to the dark, you know.”

With a blush of shame, Gilead entered; and instantly the little man shut the door softly upon them both, and producing an electric lamp from his breast-pocket, switched on a spark, whose tiny brilliancy hung in the gloom like a fen-candle, obscurely peopling its thickness. But it was enough to reveal a desert of bare walls, carpetless floors and lightless ceilings. Gilead, after one look around, addressed his companion firmly:—

“This is your house, you say?”

“Unquestionably.”

“It is empty—unoccupied.”

“But it is my house, all the same.”

The young man considered. A deserted building, a conceivably demented owner, and the rest of the circumstances! What was he to conclude? He seemed to be on the verge of some disturbing discovery. But it was his duty, to himself and his Bureau, to proceed. Certain diffident tremors in him had of late weakened of their force. He had enjoyed his incredible possessions long enough to evolve that sixth sense of omnipotence which is peculiar to plutocracy. All risks appeared easily negotiable to him, endowed with that Fortunatus’s purse. Luckily for the world, as it happened, the chances that tempted him were all on the side of chivalry and justice.

“Will you come?” said Mr Judex.

He went before, treading softly, and holding his lamp high overhead. Gilead followed as quietly, through the empty hall, to the head of the basement stairs, and down them into a vortex of reeling night. Domestic catacombs, rows of cobwebby bells, disconnected gas-meters, a remote gurgle of drain-water, horrible, secret, suggestive of blood-choked lungs labouring somewhere in the darkness, a clammy smell of distempered walls and icy flags—all these things, glimpsed or divined in passing, were spectrally impressed upon his consciousness as he pursued the tiny jack-o’-lantern dancing before him into foundering glooms. And then suddenly, turning off into a deep alcove, they had brought up before a door, strong and solid, standing slightly ajar, with a great key in its lock. “The wine-cellar!” whispered his guide; and he gingerly swung open the door, and backed to the wall.

“I await your solution of the problem, sir,” he said. “Will you oblige me by pronouncing upon it?” With a curious tingling in his nerves, Gilead entered.

“At the other end, if you will favour me,” said Mr Judex.

Thrilling in the prospect of some unconscionable discovery, Gilead advanced an uncertain step or two. On the instant the light went out, and a heavy slam and snap at his back told him that the door had been shut and locked upon him.

He stood for some moments absolutely still and incredulous; then turned in a labouring way, and saw the intense darkness split low down with a faintest edge of light. He stumbled towards it, and found the door.

“Mr Judex!” he cried—“Mr Judex!”

A tiny chuckling laugh reached him from without.

“How can I resolve the problem without light?” he pleaded, conscious of a sudden moisture breaking out over his face and chest.

Again the small laugh came to him, followed by a voice.

GILEAD BALMKNIGHT ERRANT

[COPYRIGHT]

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

GILEAD BALM

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I.THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

CHAPTER II.THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (continued)

CHAPTER III.THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

GILEAD BALM
KNIGHT ERRANT

CHAPTER I.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

CHAPTER II.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (continued)

CHAPTER III.
THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE