THE GREAT SKENE
MYSTERY
BY
BERNARD CAPES
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
[COPYRIGHT.]
First Published in 1907
[DEDICATION.]
TO
A. J. RICE-OXLEY
IN TOKEN OF SOME DEVOTED KINDNESS
THIS STORY IS DEDICATED
BY HIS FRIEND AND CONNEXION
The Author
“Good is a good doctor”—Emerson
CONTENTS.
[PROLOGUE. MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN]
[II. I COME OF AGE AND TO A DETERMINATION]
[III. THE LODGE IN THE CADDLE]
[IV. A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING—PHASE ONE]
[V. A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING—PHASE TWO]
[VIII. THE WRITING ON THE WALL]
[XI. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL. THE FACE AT THE WINDOW]
[XIV. TWO INTERVIEWS AND A DISCOVERY]
[XVII. NURSE ELLEN’S “YOUNG MAN”]
[XIX. LADY SKENE KNEELS TO ME]
[XXII. A VISIT FROM MR DALSTON]
[XXIII. GEOLETTI TELLS HIS STORY]
[XXIV. I ACCEPT THE BURDEN OF PROOF]
[XXVI. I REVISIT MOTHER CAREY]
THE
GREAT SKENE MYSTERY
PROLOGUE.
EDITORIAL.
MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN
I
Forty-Five years ago, one February evening, the fog lay thick over Clapham suburb. Generated in the fat sink of Lambeth, it had come sweltering up by way of the Westminster Bridge and Kennington Roads; had poured, like smoke from a range, through the bars of the pike-gate by the church; had pressed on, rolling up the last levels of twilight in front of it, past the “Swan,” at Stockwell, and the “Bedford Arms” beyond—before each of which popular hostelries it had deployed, in order to post its pickets in a dozen of fuddled brains—and, thence shouldering its passage densely through the main channel of the High Street, had flowed out and camped itself sluggishly among the gorse bushes of the open common to the south.
Incidentally, amongst other obscene “flushings” by the way, it had entered and packed to the throat a certain White Square, which already, in that stronghold of Evangelicalism, was of sufficiently bad odour to need no reinforcement of supplementary brimstone to prove itself. Like the fisherman’s bottle, this White Square was entered by a narrow neck or gullet, through which the genie of viciousness could compress itself into an inadequate house room, or thence issue to expand into proportions which were a menace to its neighbourhood. Thieves, harlots, and low Irish rapparees formed the bulk of its population: costers, and a drunken washerwoman or two, were its élite. How Mother Carey, with at least her better traditions, had drifted into its fastnesses, let the recording angel note. It was sacred from the police.
Mother Carey was certainly White Square’s most respectable unit—a one-eyed queen among the blind. She rented an entire tenement, in place of the fraction with which the most of her compeers must be content; she enjoyed an “independence” (paid, quarterly, through a lawyer, for value received); she had descended, in a cloud, from the hallowed mysteries of the tu-tu and the dancing sandal. She was a superannuated coryphée, in fact, and, save for the redeeming grace of that allowance, had long since sunk into squalider depths than her present.
The fog made her eyes smart on this February evening, sootily exaggerating on their rims the work of the “make-up” pencil, which had not ceased to be a cherished equipment of her ignoble maturity. It imparted, moreover, a sort of livid iridescence to the pearl powder smearing her haggard cheeks, which suggested, in their unwholesome “fishiness,” the under parts of a dead and stale mackerel. Her “front” was false, her—— Sha! the horrible, sick old spectre of vanity!
But if a spectre, she was by no means dead to her own worldly interests. Those possessed her, in exact proportion as her watching and waiting at this moment were turned to the possession of the soul of another, the latest, and not the least difficult, subject of her ancient lures. Reversing the accepted ghostly procedure, she was intent on procuring, instead of revealing, a treasure. Her persistency, in matters of mean acquisition and blackmailing, was great for so frail a creature. It had triumphed over decay, infirmities, disenchantment in the past; yet, after all, she had withdrawn from public life at a late hour, with a competence which—to be properly in keeping with her long self-exposure—was only a bare one. That she resented, of course. Her days were all punctuated with petty resentments and malevolences, the fruits of a small, greedy vanity which had been pensioned to retire—through a conspiracy of jealousies, she would have told you. Wherefore she had since sought to augment her pittance by a vicious exploiting—at second-hand—of the arts which had procured it for her.
The rumble of distant omnibuses vibrated in her ears and in the walls, from which latter gloomed down, dingy and faded, old daguerreotypes of herself, smirking and ogling in the tights and kid boots and wreaths of a vanished era—rosy, immoral young life of twenty years past, of which this dry, stark immortelle was the spectre. As she sat waiting, she leaned her elbows on the table, and stared at the solitary candle alight before her, like an old, sharp-eyed hen half hypnotised by the glow. Yet, if she were asleep, she talked in her sleep, small and chuckling, as anyone, stooping his head, might have detected.
“Mark! Mark Dalston, O, Mark! O, my dear!” ran the thin strain. “Are you going to think well of it, Mark—think well of it, Mark Dalston? Have you started on your way to come and compound with Mother Carey, Mark, my love? You’ve answered Yes to her message, haven’t you?—but you aren’t always a gentleman of your word, you know, Mark. Best to be it in this case, O, my dear, my dear! I could get my teeth into you here, nicely, now—couldn’t I?”
Suddenly she came alert, pricking her ears to the sound of a quick, soft footstep outside.
II
Mr Mark Dalston, a young man of particular ambitions and passions, had also that hospitability of conscience which can welcome and reconcile the most antagonistic emotions. He never suffered material self-interests and moral scruples to fall at odds within himself, but was the tactful and charming host to all that came to be entertained within his breast. There one might see grossness and reason, sensualism and intellectuality, the virtuoso and the Vandal, all table couples at once, and at perfectly harmonious discourse. They met on the common ground of sociability, and forbore all destructive criticism of one another so long as Mark’s lights shone upon their differences. He was extraordinarily popular with quite a number of divergent familiars—a man without prejudices, and always ready to entertain a new emotion.
Mark was of that good nature, in short, that he could never say No to himself, however much the interests of other people might be affected by the partiality. His sympathies were wide, but their application was close. Like the centre of a venous system, he was all heart, and gave nothing but what he was sure to receive back at compound interest. Fortune having condemned him, for a brief period, to an ushership at a suburban grammar school, he had not repined over his lot, but had sought, quite naturally and amiably, an amelioration of its prosy conditions in the pursuit of such supernumerary pleasures and self-indulgences as its off hours could be made to yield. It was always his principle to eschew consequences until they were upon him, and insistent. And then he would set his fine wits and intellect at work to neutralise them.
The young master was well destined, and more than physically, for the success of his qualities. He was emphatically, according to the feminine standard of fitness, a “ladies’ man.” His self-assurance, his ready tongue (or tongues, for he commanded many), his easy subscription to the correct fashions in dress, assumed in defiance of the proverbial slovenliness of scholars, his whiskers, his quick intelligence and his soft impertinences, were all so many visés to the passport to woman’s favour of which his handsome face and person were the text. He might have wasted this text upon quite inconsiderable issues, if Fortune, jealous for his capacities, had not invited him to contests more worthy of his mettle. The post of travelling “coach” to a young gentleman of fortune timely offering itself, he had seized the opportunity to cut some connections, of which the one which turned upon the training of the young idea had come to figure as the least undesirable; and, at the present date, Clapham had not seen him for six months or more.
It is not the purpose of the moment to recount how, once abroad, Mr Dalston had lost his pupil and married “money”; nor even much to dwell upon how, returning home a man of substance and position, he had been brought, at once and sharply, to realise that “of our pleasant vices the gods make instruments to plague us.” But he was a man of swift comprehension, resource, and decision; and his brows had hardly drawn to a pucker over a difficulty suddenly confronting him, before a way out of it, and a very daring one, had occurred to him.
The message—Mother Carey’s—referring to this difficulty, had reached him at the house, his wife’s, in Eaton Square, whither he, it was understood, had, on business grounds, preceded his lady’s return from abroad by a few weeks. That was, actually, a mystification, a suppressio veri; for Mrs Dalston was at the moment installed in comfortable but obscure rooms at Kennington, where she was scarcely arrived before she was delivered, a little prematurely, of a male child. But so far was this fact from being allowed to interfere with the fiction of her absence, that particular pains had been taken by Mark to procure his wife’s confinement in the house of a doctor, a friend of his, who could be fee’d into any silence, or bought into any intrigue where irregular services were required. To all practical and moral intents, Mr Dalston was never so remote from his lately wedded bride as at the moment when he stepped from her bedside to do an infamous act upon her child. But even then there was enough sentiment in his gaze to make the fortune of a mid-Victorian picture.
The young mother’s reason had never fully returned to her since that poignant grapple, four nights ago, with the great and astonishing secret. She was sound, unhurt from the contest; but her faculties slept in a sort of exhausted abeyance. She was very white and still—incurious—not greatly troubled: so far things were fortunate. And here was the enwrapping fog for a final cloak, or pall.
As Mark stepped softly from the room, closing the door, a rather livid-faced, stale-smelling young man in a black frock coat and black peg-top trousers, revealing frowzy white socks beneath, accosted him whisperingly.
“Well, sir; all in train?”
Mark nodded, smiling.
“All in train, Blague. It’s really a providence, and your conscience may sleep sound to-night—as sound as she’s sleeping in there. Don’t wake her—don’t let her wake, rather—to a sense of her loss, you comprehend, till I return.”
“Quite so. The vis inertiæ—the vegetation of a sensitive plant, no more; we will see to it. The business shall not miscarry through us, sir, depend upon it.”
“That’s right. You sha’n’t lose by this little divagation in our plans, rest sure of that.”
He put his finger to his lips, and tiptoed down to the hall, where stood a pallid-faced young woman in a shawl and poke bonnet, gently rocking a bundle in her arms. She looked at the husband gravely, questioningly; but she was silent. The poor thing, in fact, was helpless under his dominion. Those dark eyes and ambrosial whiskers, with the cleft chin between, had, in a few days, brimmed the measure of her romance. Engaged for nurse to Mrs Dalston, she was fallen a slave to the lamp of a brighter magician than duty.
The two entered a “growler” of the ancient dimensions, and the fog lapped them up. Jogging its apathetic course through the smoke, as it seemed, of a vast glimmering conflagration, the squalid vehicle gained at length the Clapham Road, and drew near its destination. Then the pale little nurse spoke for the first time.
“Are we nearly there?”
“Nearly there, my child.”
“Your child!”
She raised the little bundle in her arms to her breast. The pressure seemed to convey abroad from it a waft of that warm, milky nidor inseparable from newly born infants. Mr Dalston’s white teeth glimmered through the fog.
“For the dozenth time,” he said softly, “I must assure you, little Ellen, that grave issues hang upon the preservation of the tiny life in your arms. That life is threatened only so long as I fail to convince a certain person of its actuality. You mustn’t ask me how or why. It embraces matters above your comprehension.”
“I can’t help it—I’m frightened,” was all she could find voice to whisper.
He put his arm confidently about her. She shivered, but let herself settle into it.
“Hush!” he said. “What is there to be frightened about? I shall do nothing but take it in, show it, and return with it to you.”
“Why do you want me at all?” she protested, half whimpering. “You might have brought it by yourself.”
“What!” he said, “and had Dr Blague questioning my sanity? Do fathers generally take their new-born babies for an airing in cabs? You are to witness, Ellen, if the necessity should ever arise—which, however, there is not the least probability of its doing—that I returned it to you sound as I had taken it.”
“Why should it arise? O, Mark, don’t mean me any evil!”
He sighed, shrugging his shoulders. The crawling cab drew up with a jerk.
“Now,” he said quickly, taking the girl’s burden from her, “stop here till I return with it. I shall be back before you can count a hundred.”
III
Mother Carey raised her bleary face with a start, and looked round. The owner of the name she had been apostrophising stood in the room beside her. She twisted an involuntary little shriek into a titter.
“Well, I’m sure,” she said, “to take me like that, in a moment, and anything possible! Was the door ajar?”
“Still ajar,” said Mark, with a smile—“and the trap still baited as of old, I suppose?”
“Always the same quick gentleman,” she chuckled venomously. “What has my lovey got in his arms there?”
“Something for your discounting, old mother,” he said. “I’ll show you in a minute.”
“My discounting!” she echoed. Her lips tightened on the word. She looked at him evilly—searchingly. “What do you mean? You got my message?”
“Yes; I got your message.”
“And you’ve come to answer it?”
“To answer it, yes.”
“That’s as well for you. You know what I want?”
“Do I?”
“And what I mean to have, or show you up, my gentleman?”
“Well, I can guess. I’m to be bled, I suppose?”
“Ah!” she gave a snapping laugh. “You never spoke a truer word.”
“Well,” he said, as cool as she was malevolent, “I’m here to be bled, but on hard and fast conditions. Understand that, you old Jezebel, or understand nothing.”
She made as if to claw him, but mumbled away her rage. Better than many worthier she could see into his terrific places.
“I’ll be fair to fair,” she said, cowed and scowling. “You’re married?”
“Yes,”
“A fine match?”
“Yes.”
“It would go hard with your honeymooning if I spoke out?”
“Harder with you, I think.”
“Ah, I’m salted, my man!”
“You’d need to be. Is she here?”
“Isn’t she!”
“Where?”
“In her bed.”
“Ill?”
“A touch of the fever. She’ll get over it.”
“Very well,” he said. “Now, attend. Look at this.”
She followed the motion of his hand, as, very gently, it lifted a corner of the wrappers on his arm.
“A living baby!”
“It looks like one.”
She discussed him sombrely a minute, then spoke in a shrewd whisper:
“You’ve got some dark game on here, my gentleman.”
He dropped the shawl again.
“A secret—and a proposal, old mother,” he said. “How much, or, rather, how little will you take for helping me to keep it?”
“Do you want me to commit murder? I’m an honest woman.”
“I know; that’s why I can depend on you.”
She fawned with her hands.
“Tell me what it all means, lovey dear.”
“I’m going to. Shut that door first.”
She did as she was told. The listening spirits of the fog were baffled. When the door opened again, Mark was standing in the entry, the burden still in his arms, while Mother Carey pleaded urgently behind him.
“A lump sum, deary. Come!”
“No,” he said; “a pension. A quarterly gag on your tongue, or nothing. You can take or leave.”
“I take!” she whispered shrilly—“I take! Be careful of that step, deary.”
He vanished into the fog. At the mouth of the passage the cab was drawn up by the kerb, watching for him like a squat, red-eyed dragon, and gulping him the moment he appeared.
Half way home the pale little nurse broke suddenly into hysterical panting and weeping.
“Why don’t you give it me back? Why do you always keep it in your own arms?”
“I’m afraid of you, Ellen,” he said quietly. “You look somehow as if you weren’t to be trusted.”
They were passing a lighted shop at the moment. With a quick, unsuspected action she snatched the veil from the baby’s face.
“Ah!” she screamed—“it’s dead! You’ve had it killed!”
For a single instant the naked soul of him looked out—obscene—murderous. But he drove it back.
“You little wild fool,” he said deeply. “Wasn’t I right? Your nerves are anyhow. You aren’t to be trusted, with your fancies.”
She hardly seemed to hear him. All of a sudden she was struggling with the door handle.
“Let me out! I’m fainting! I can bear no more. I will be good—I want to go home—I——”
Sore encumbered as he was, she proved too quick for him. In an instant she had jerked open the door and flung herself into the fog. Some heavy vehicle was lumbering past at the moment. A scream like the cry of a rusty axle broke from among its wheels. The cab rolled on, its driver unnoticing, or diplomatic, perhaps, over an accident which he connected, if at all, with other than his fare. Paralysed for an instant, the next, Mark had softly closed the swinging door.
“There’s no help for it,” he thought, momentarily death-white. “I must go on and play the game.”
He played it, for all that rebuff, so convincingly, that the issue left him full twenty years’ triumphant enjoyment of its fruits.
That same night his wife woke for the first time to her full reason, and looked intently into his eyes.
“Am I to be allowed to see it?” she said.
He bowed his head distressfully.
“By my full will, if not the will of a Greater,” he murmured.
“It is dead?”
He rose, and went and brought, and placing the little forlorn shape in her arms, left her with it a while. When he returned, it was put aside gently but indifferently.
“Bury my poor past,” she said. “It reproaches me with an altered face. Yet I can’t help myself—I think I never could. You wouldn’t wish it, you know; and what you wish or don’t wish comes to happen or to fail.”
He looked at her mildly, but with protesting eyes.
“Why are you so bitter?” he said. “Has not Fate after all been considerate with us? You can face the world again now, unsuspected, a spotless wife—no suspicion of our having loved not wisely but too well. Cannot you forgive me yet, Lucy? And after all I have done to safeguard your honour? Yet, if Providence had not thus mercifully intervened, I swear that I would have been a dutiful father to it—have acknowledged my own, and taken all the blame and burden of the sin. I can say no more.”
“Nor I,” she answered. “What does it matter now. The money—my money—that you’ve played to get—it’s all yours to use, and fling away if you like. Treat me as you will—I’m indifferent——” And she lay down resolutely, and composed herself to sleep.
As, chin in hand, he stands pondering her a little, curiously, fondly, cynically, we see the fog droop and engulf him, her, the bed, the room. Not for twenty years does it lift and roll itself up to the flies, to reveal the maturing of a drama of which this chapter is the prologue.
CHAPTER I.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
I suppose my days have been involved in as tragic circumstances as most. It is fair that the truth of them should be set down en grande tenue by the one whom, after all, it most concerns. Not that for my own sake I desire for them more publicity, God knows, than they have received; but there is the question of the moral heirloom. The sensational Skene claim before the Lords of Common Pleas will be in the memory of a generation now passing: it is for the benefit of the generation to come, and the many thence ensuing, that I clothe these legal bones in the nerves and flesh of living actualities. There is such necessary omission and distortion in all trials of equity, that the plainest of their stories is grown a “Russian Scandal” before the senior counsel who engineered it has gone to his long home on the Bench. And this was an intricate story, which it is now my purpose, for the sake of myself and my own, to detail in full.
As to that story, it will be recalled that a Mr Richard Gaskett was, legally, its protagonist. Very well: I am that person.
At the first and from the first I was something less than nobody. My mother, as I regarded her, was of obscure origin, but of manners naturally quiet and refined. A habit of self-guarding, indeed, which dated probably from her social promotion, had come to make of her even a cold, colourless, impenetrable woman. She was very pretty, with a sort of passionless severity in her face, and in her attitude a custom of what Miss Burney would have called “repulsiveness,” meaning, as we read it, “repelling.” No gleam of demonstrativeness on her part lights my memory of her; from my first lispings I always, by her desire, called her Lady Skene.
As habitually, my stepfather, Baron Skene of Evercreech, called me Gaskett. I was officially an “encumbrance” to the two, and not always spared the knowledge. Of the indifferent union which had produced me I neither was informed, nor thought to ask, anything. Curiosity was the last thing encouraged at Evercreech. That my stepfather had been a childless widower when he bestowed the lustre of his name on the obscure young widow “with an encumbrance,” was the most of my information, and, even as such, something less, probably, than the common one. The rakish reactionary (one-time famous judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, and ennobled for his services during the Salisbury administration of ’86) who, after the death of his only child and heir, young Charlie Skene, in an Alpine accident, had contracted a reckless mésalliance with the lady who now bore his name, was a figure revealed only to my later understanding.
Very early, I think, Lady Skene had “found religion,” as one may speak of “finding” the unpleasantly obvious. Ignorance, irreverence, and vulgarity build on every highway. There is a sort of evangelical butcher who deals with assurance in things of the flesh, and, on a simple knowledge of their parts, preaches the constitution of their spiritual anatomy. He is the purveyor of such theological joints as the vulgar understanding can recognise. Insight, imagination, erudition are strange beasts to the popular view.
I think, perhaps, that Lady Skene’s early influences were to account for her natural inclinations in these respects. When I say that her marriage had socially elevated her from the ground to the leaf, without her quite shaking off the dust of her origin, I may be understood to imply that her beauty, and no exceptional quality in addition, was her fine recommendation. She had had little education, I am sure, but the education of a precise observation, which is the most excellent tutor of mind and manners, though unpossessed of the exact secret of what constitutes the comme il faut. That may be said, broadly, to be the secret of making a grace of necessity in all things—the secret of a frank unself-consciousness. Self-suspicion spells restraint in intercourse, and leads to gusts of mutinous self-assertion in some wrong directions. Lady Skene at least made no affectation of adopting creeds which were caviare to her understanding. She was and remained a raw evangelical through all the spiritual evolutions of fashion.
There was an unseemly old heathen visited us once upon a time, who made himself very merry over Lord Skene’s “atonement,” as he called it. This was Sir Maurice Carnac, ex-governor of Madras, who had been an intimate friend of his lordship in the sixties, and who now, on his retirement, after twenty years’ service, came to renew the acquaintance. From him I learned, at discretion, not a few facts hitherto unknown to me: how, for instance, my stepfather, in the matter of his second marriage, had been “cast into a net by his own feet” in their very hope of going astray, which was to imply that he had been caught to matrimony in the act of trying to evade it; how Lady Skene had no sooner conquered him by her beauty, than she had used it to the subjugation of the old Adam she had entertained, by holding it the prize to his strict reformation; how, in short, she had made a tame and orderly spouse out of the most unpromising material possible.
Sir Maurice had no great delicacy, it is to be feared, though he could be mum on some points on which I sought enlightenment. Of Lady Skene’s social status before her marriage he would not speak; though I certainly gathered from him that it was inconsiderable.
“Take Fortune’s gifts, my lad,” he said, “and hold your silly tongue. It’s time to question her when she turns on you.”
“Scruples,” I began.
“Scruples be damned,” said he. “What has a ranker need of scruples? Ain’t you promoted for your mother’s son?”
That was the truth of it, and, to confess myself, the sorrow. I was not a loved child, conscious of rights or merits. I was an “encumbrance.” A dreamy, rather morbid temperament oppressed me with the weight of my own burden on the situation.
Not that I was ever treated unkindly; but there is an endurance that is harder than neglect. It might be thought that Lady Skene would have wished to exalt her own, especially as she bore her husband no family. She was indifferent to me, however, and so I could not but be to her. We were not kindred spirits, and were antipathetic to one another. Her soul inhabited a chapel; mine the woods and mountains of a roaming fancy. I never felt “at home” with her; and I think she had writ me down early for one of the unelect. Predestination is a comfortable creed for those who would eschew parental responsibilities. It is vain carving a brand that is destined for the burning.
I suppose Lord Skene was of the chosen. His lady, at least, took infinite pains to preserve him to her pattern of respectability. From my first conscious recollection of him he was the slave to her soft, monotonous rule. Yet I came early to wonder how much or how little of his bondage was due to her physical fascination; for he was not naturally, I felt sure, susceptible to moral influences, or possessed of a bump of reverence that a threepenny-bit could not have hidden. In pose, in feature, in colouring, her ladyship was near flawless—an angel, whose ichor was drawn from the peaches of Paradise. Strange, I thought, that so ethereal a tabernacle should contain so unimaginative a pyx. I was not the first to marvel over a common incongruity, or to overlook the fact that a satin skin often means a thick one. However that may be, Lord Skene was devoted to his wife, and, I think, not a little afraid of her. She had lived to convince him that he had taken her, encumbrance and all, on something better than her merits.
At the period with which this record is mainly concerned she was rising forty, and he, perhaps, sixty-five years of age. I had passed my school career, and had alighted on no other. Those vanished terms of absence from home had been my dearest ones. I have nothing to relate of them but what is pleasant in the retrospect—one thing in especial, my friendship with Johnny Dando, which is infinitely comfortable. At the end Johnny went to a university, and I returned to Evercreech. I was then nineteen, and already the predestined protagonist in a drama, the full intricacies of which Fate was to need but a year or two to unfold. My life, during the interval from boy to manhood, has no concern in this matter; and therefore I shall say nothing of it but what is essential to the context. Childhood is a thing apart and sacred. To come of age is to join posterity and the detectives.
CHAPTER II.
I COME OF AGE AND TO A DETERMINATION
Lord Skene was, as things go, a poor man—poor for an ex-judge, and poor for a nobleman. His estate was much embarrassed at the time when his lady started a resolution to nurse it. It was reduced then to the mansion and demesne of Evercreech, a fair enough property in its way, but largely neglected, and, in places, fallen to waste. I think that even her ladyship’s management could do little more than preserve it to the succession—a vain economy, it seemed; but the seed of woman is hope. Much before her time the house in Berkeley Square had been let away on a lengthy lease; and a family hotel must serve her and my lord on their periodic visits to town.
Evercreech had to serve me, summer and winter, the year round; and in those young, untroubled days it was enough. There was a plenitude of beauty, and romance, and antique quietude for my utmost needs. I never realised what I was, or what I signified, to the couple most concerned in my existence. I think it would have puzzled them as much to define me—whether for son, or servant, or ward. Perhaps my position nearest approached that of a donzel in feudal times, attached to the service of some high relation as his apprentice in arms and chivalry, and broke to self-reliance by a discipline of self-help. Certainly I read of spoiling and mothers’ anxious love; but I never knew them out of books, which were from the first my joy and solace.
Save during my schooldays, I led a curiously solitary life. I was neither invited nor expected to take a part with his lordship in the daily interests of his condition. I did not dine at his table, nor ride with him with the hounds, nor shoot his sparse coverts, nor whip his unprofitable streams. He was very tolerant of me, and made me even a generous allowance, the most of which I hoarded indifferently, having no use of it but for books. I know that at this pregnant period of which I write I was the possessor of some hundreds of pounds, a veritable little treasure chest of gold, which had accumulated to me during the years of growth. May all my savings return such an account of interest as did these.
I had my meals with the steward, one Comely, a fellow as excellent as his name, but comically guarded in his attitude towards me, whether for respect or familiarity. I had liberty to take my piece from the gun-room, and spend any whole day, if I chose, in blazing away amongst the small game of the unpreserves. The stables, the library, the whole “run,” in short, of Evercreech were free to me on the queer unspoken condition of “sufferance.” I was always like a “poor relation” let to holiday in a great mansion during the absence of its owners.
Nor was I ever invited to a more familiar conduct by Lady Skene herself. Somehow, whatever the reason, I was alien to her trust and affections. I could have thought she looked upon me as an encumbrance indeed—even, from the date of the betterment of her fortunes, as a veritable changeling, who had no inherent right to her motherly consideration. Well, perhaps I had not.
Evercreech lay back from the highroad between Footover and Market Grazing in north-west Hampshire—a wild and haunted country, sharing itself between dense woods and lonely downs. There were enough of both contained within the estate to serve a young solitary spirit for its ample wilderness—for day-long wanderings, and fantastic chancings by stream and thicket, and pretty pastorals won out of high folds on hillsides, and all the sting and honey of romance. There one might walk or ride, a squire of the Grael, and taste a county’s venture in an acre. From farm to ruined byre, from box-hedged garden to the infinite wild tangle of hedgerows, from stately culture to nature in her poignant naked savagery, one might pass and play one’s fancy, quite secure from the banter of the prosaic. There were family legends, too, each one enough to make a transatlantic reputation. The two that most occur to me illustrate the terror and the sweetness of such old-time traditions. The first had its locale in Hags Lane, a lonely, deep-sunk furrow in the pastures, but after all libelled in its name; for hag or aggart in Hampshire means nothing less fragrant than hawthorn. But the figure associated with it was of odour to make spectral amends, being that of a man astride a great dark horse, which leapt the hedge in ghastly gloamings before the eyes of any chance pedestrian, and went tearing up the road on soundless hoofs. Story connected this apparition with a past lord of Skene, who, riding to wreak vengeance on a faithless spouse and her paramour, had manœuvred the guilty couple to their death over the edge of a chalk quarry, and thereafter had taken the disillusioned Sultan Schahriar for his model, though with the limited despotism that his more civilised age enjoined upon him, since the moral ruin of his victims must content him without their throttling. He was rather a rotten pippin on a tree of comfortable fruit; for the Skenes altogether had been an easy roguish race, hot-tongued but affectionate, and, when caught stumbling on a betrayal of virtue, generally ready to make the amende honorable. Accordingly, perhaps, they had shown a tendency to mésalliances, which had procured them, nevertheless, such a succession of vigorous heirs, as to extend their main line unbroken from times prehistoric. Yet, it seemed, at last, that Fate was to intervene for a diversion. But of that in a moment.
If that first legend smacks of midnight and hellebore, the second is to my mind a very dirge of rose petals. It relates how a sensitive little fellow of the race once lost his mother’s wedding-ring, and died of grief to witness her distress. Thereafter, then, his little ghost came haunting a particular bed in the garden—a flower-face caught fitfully among the leaves, or dropping, when one bent to pluck it, in a shower of creamy petals, like a white peony’s. So that the mother, weeping and pitiful, was moved at last to sow love-in-a-mist in the bed, as it were a net to catch that forlorn small ghost for its kissing and reassurance, and for the speaking to it in flower language of how mother did not mind her loss a bit. When lo! upon a shoot of the plant that sprung the following April was found, lifted from the soil wherein it had been lost, the ring, and the flower spectre haunted its pretty parterre no more. The fantastic superstition accorded well, I think, with the traditions of a house which had been notable as much for its rich maternity as for its fruits of over-kindness; and the “Baby’s garden”—as the mossy little pleasance, sacred to the long-vanished phantom, was called—spoke and speaks to me always of qualities better than wisdom.
Wise, excepting in the one instance of my stepfather the judge, the Skenes were not; but they never were lacking, I aver, in the essential poetry of humanity. It neutralised in them, even, the vulgarity of quite commonplace exteriors.
Time alone has the face which is an index to its nature. The best of men’s is but a mask. Round, florid, beaming, my stepfather’s was the face of a vintner. He might have drawn his pedigree from a beer engine, and advertised it, foaming froth, on a sign. None might have guessed from its features its age-long inheritance of gentle breeding.
He was a small man, dapper and a trifle horsey in his dress, but after an older fashion of collar and harness. He wore, typically, a shepherd’s-plaid tie, and his hat at an imperceptible angle. He always smelt fresh, and, somehow, of a genial shrewdness; and his manner towards me was a manner of kindly condescension. It was not until my school time was well over, and my days drifted into the purposelessness of an unattached loafer, that I became first conscious of an alteration in his attitude towards me. And the occasion which produced it was productive of a yet colder alienation from me on the part of Lady Skene, which was as significant of her nature as was his increased consideration for me of his.
One morning his lordship called me into his study. I stood before him, as I had often done before, vaguely on my guard between submission and independence, and he smiled on me, a little nervous and excited.
“How old are you, Gaskett—let’s see?” he said.
I answered: “I have come of age, sir.”
“Any plans for your future?”
“None.”
“Nothing thought of—no direction?”
“What could give them a direction here, sir?”
He looked at me a little, speculating.
“Perhaps we’ve let the question drift too long. Think it over and think it out. We must find a way to independence for you.”
“Thank you, sir. You could do me no greater kindness.”
“What d’ye mean?”
He glanced at me curiously.
“I know I’m here on sufferance, sir,” I said. “I know my presence is an open sore to Lady Skene. I’ve long been wanting to ask you something. I think I could find myself sooner, perhaps, if I were given elbow room. With all your liberality, I feel constrained in Evercreech. Let me have the lodge in the Caddle to fit up for myself and live in for the present, and until I’ve come to some decision.”
He stared a bit and laughed, and set to scraping his chin, his pale blue eyes measuring me.
“You shall have it certainly,” he said suddenly, “for your den, or hermitage, or what the devil you like. But it won’t do to cut the house connection, my boy. You must dine and bed at home. What makes you think you are not welcome here?”
“Not my stepfather, sir,” I said.
He turned to his papers, and dismissed me quickly; but called me back as I reached the door.
“After all,” he said, “perhaps you’re better out of the way just now.” His expression was extraordinarily complex. “Its coming to be the era of pap and flapdoodle—ridiculous, ain’t it, at this date—but——”
“Is that so, sir? I congratulate you.”
“Thank’ee, my boy. Don’t forget I’ve always liked you; and if circumstances—deuced aggravating things——” He broke off, humming, and, kicking up his dapper feet, looked at his boot tips.
“I’ll put some fellows in,” he said hurriedly, “and have the place made fit for you.”
“You’ve always been kind to me, sir,” I said gratefully. “I hope I sha’n’t trouble you much longer.”
I was going, but he stopped me again.
“Trouble be cursed!” he said. “You must understand that your happiness and welfare are my aim. You’re welcome to the lodge for ever, or so long as you’re convinced that they centre in that bogeyish hole. Only don’t let your fancy run on bitterness. Evercreech is your home.”
I was conscious of an expression in his face, between joy and mystification, as I left him. It was easy, I thought, to interpret it. Here, after all this interval, was an heir to Evercreech expected, and his lady’s long remissness atoned. The thoroughbred was stretching his neck for home; the encumbrance must clear himself from the course. “Sufferance,” having made the pace for “Welcome,” must withdraw in proper pride of his humble share in the event, and be content to eat his oats in abstraction. Double-distilled nonsense, of course; but a mother’s slight is poison, and that venom was in my blood. Not all the investigations of anatomists can connect the heart with the reason.
CHAPTER III.
THE LODGE IN THE CADDLE
Once, when I was a boy of twelve or so, there had come to stay at Evercreech a little lady whom I hated with all my heart. This was Miss Ira Christmas; but very remote from the charity and goodwill which her name suggested, she had always appeared to me. She was a ward in Chancery, as I understood, and as such committed to the custody of her nearest kinsman, my stepfather. Her mother’s hand, as I came to learn, had once been coveted by him for his son Charlie; but the lady had decided to bestow her fortune elsewhere; and, by the very irony of fate, the residue of her perversity, so to speak, was all that reverted to him from that abortive scheme. Both she and her husband died young, in short, and the orphan Christmas, heiress to an intestate estate, was consigned to his charge for her education and upbringing.
She was with us for only a few months before her transportation to France and elsewhere for her finishing education; but the little interlude of her presence at Evercreech awoke in me such a sense of shame and mutiny as I had never suffered before. I knew nothing of her parents but what might be gathered negatively from their reflection in this detestable child. I call her so with every sense of my responsibility to the present. She had all the instincts of an infantile parvenue, and all the hypocrisy of an embryo Pharisee. Her precocious sharpness was early in discovering the disfavour with which Lady Skene regarded me, and in affecting a sympathy with the reasons for that dislike. I was bad, sullen, one of the unelect on her little tripping red tongue. I had no gratitude for the gifts of Providence in so raising me from the mire to a position which was none of my deserts, and which had come to be mine purely through the instrumentality of an evangelical mother. I should be thankful, on the contrary, for every crumb of condescension vouchsafed me—a feast, if I could only come to realise in it a sense of my own insignificance. She was always poking that in my teeth, viciously and by innuendo. I wondered even that Lady Skene could stand it, since it reflected upon herself; but she had truly no snobbism, and valued her creed above all earthly aggrandisements. The abominable child played up to this weakness, or strength, in her, and so secured her own position as prime favourite with the real head of the establishment.
As to Lord Skene, I think, in his equitable old heart, he disliked his ward as much as I loathed her. But there were other considerations to influence him. She was at least the daughter of her mother, and might have been so different had his plans not miscarried. His dead boy, his shattered hope, for ever figured in the perspective of his past life. That also, perhaps, might have been so different—might have come to record no lapse upon ancient rogueries, had his hope duly taken shape and maturity. But the son had disappeared, and the father was left derelict. How it had all happened was a topic quite taboo in these days. A portrait of the boy hung in his room—a fresh, saucy young face, bright with a wholesome determination to live enjoyably, but wilful and a little imperious. I used to love to look at it, when I dared to steal in unobserved. It conveyed a sort of challenge and help to me in one. And he had been dead—how long? Years piled on years now; and no one knew where his bones lay. He had been climbing in the Italian Alps with his tutor, a travelling comrade, and, it was supposed, had fallen into a crevasse, or down a precipice while exploring the heights alone, and thereafter had never been seen. Mr Delane, the tutor, had given evidence of his parting with him on such and such a day, and there was an end of the matter. Charlie Skene had been wiped out, and with him all the elaborately compiled record of his father’s schemes and ambitions for him.
“He was near twenty-one,” said Miss Christmas—“I know: and Lord Skene wanted him to marry my mother. And where would you have been then, you little low boy?”
“Where would you have been?” I retorted.
“Here, of course,” she said, “and the daughter of a lord. And my lord wouldn’t have wanted to marry again then; and I’m sure I shouldn’t have wanted you.”
“You wouldn’t have got me if you had,” I said. “I hate you?”
“O!” she cried, affectedly aghast, and ran off to Lady Skene to complain of the dreadful language I had used.
She wore her hair in a bag-net, and I have always detested the fashion. She might have been called pretty, I suppose, by those who find a charm in pertness franked by large eyes, and a wicked dimple in a smooth cheek. But childhood can see no beauty in what it dislikes. Instinctive sympathy with itself, with its moods and difficulties, is its criterion of loveliness.
This girl, and a certain Pugsley, were my morbid aversions of those days. The reverend Mr Pugsley had been translated—through the instrumentality of Lord Skene and the influence of his lady—from a suburban cure to the living of St Luke’s, Market Grazing. He had belonged, I believe, to the “Clapham Sect,” or what, in his time, constituted the remnants of that dour and depressing body. Its spirit, indeed, still so dwelt in him, morally and physically—in his narrow convictions, as in his dismal dyspeptic face, sloping shoulders, and general joyless aspect—that a question as to his well-being might at any time have been answered by him in the words of the notorious Dr Jekyll, “I am very low, Utterson; very low.” Very low a churchman he was, in fact; so low that he crawled, symbolically, in the dust, and called himself a worm. I never disputed that half so much as his calling me one. But his professional terminology gathered no inspiration with the years, and its eternal limitations were, it seemed, satisfying to Lady Skene, who was his main prop and patroness. It began with wrath and the blood of lambs, and foundered in mud among worms and serpents. The principle of pre-election is very comforting to one’s sense of moral responsibility. It narrows it to the consideration of that small body, which, after all, it need not consider, since it is booked for Paradise. It seems a cruelty of supererogation to taunt the unelect with their doom. But Mr Pugsley gave me little hope. I was a worm, a brand; “baptised in fire that I might inherit ever-lasting fire.” I suppose that very early I showed a scorn of his nonsense; and that put his spiritual back up. Moreover I parodied him; and no man, though a priest, likes to be laughed at for his convictions. Sir Maurice Carnac, before mentioned, happened to alight on the stuff without my knowledge; and he made a huge spluttering joke of it. Here it is, founded on a Pugsleyite hymn:
“When with the heavenly hosts I sit down
Sure of my dinner and decked with my crown,
O what a blessing and O what a grace
To think that my faith has reserved me this place!
Though enough is as good as a feast,
Having conquered the gluttonous beast,
As elect I may stuff on more than enough,
And not be disturbed in the least.
“When I am safe on the infinite shore,
Free to do naught, if I like, but adore,
O what a blessing and O what a good
To think I may temper the praise to the mood!
For enough is as good as a feast,
In this limited transit at least;
And I feel more and more that the thing that’s a bore
In the West, might be so in the East.
“To sleep or to venture, to feast or to fast;
No excess possible, boredom, nor caste—
O what a blessing and O what a bliss
If Faith at discretion should bring me to this!
No enough that’s as good as a feast,
Nor nausea rising like yeast;
But, free as the air to praise or to pair,
Quit of the doctor and priest!”
I am remotest from wishing to excuse the doggerel, or to defend its profanity. But, if not inspired, it was wrung from an intolerable sense of injury, and its effect was at least to make me feel that I had won my spiritual attainder at last. Little Miss Christmas came to hear of it, and was very cross because it had been destroyed. She wanted substantial proof of my wickedness, and the verbal means to retort upon my abuse of her dear Mr Pugsley, whom she adored, the odious little humbug. But, as for me, I gloried in my unregeneracy, and wrote more verses, which I came to be wise enough to burn.
The little wretch, as I say, came and went; but Mr Pugsley went on for ever. I grew apart from him, however; and at this day it is a wonder to me that his memory affects me with anything but a sense of humour. He spoke what he believed, after all, and I only mention him as an indifferent detail in the context of great events.
I come now to the time when I retired upon my hermitage in the Caddle woods.
Evercreech—the house, that is to say—stands on pretty high ground, which on all sides falls away into dense thickets. It is a fine old Tudor building, gabled, and with mullioned windows; but the different or indifferent fancies of generations have loaded it with incongruous excrescences. Time, however, has assimilated these to a reposeful uniformity of stain and line, and ivy has welded the mass. It was a compact beautiful pile in my earliest knowledge of it, fitting crown to its own verdant slopes.
Nowhere are its surrounding thickets denser than to the north, where the Caddle, or wildered, woods press up against the high road to Footover, turning a steep, naked shoulder of turf to the view of passers-by. Here had once run the main drive to the house, now, in the time of which I write, long abandoned in favour of a shorter approach southernward, and primeval tangle had utterly reclaimed the spot to Nature. But the ancient iron gates, moss-eaten and corroded, yet hung purposeless in the hedgerow, and gave some direction to the trend of the green track which passed under the tree branches within. A little wicket, for private coming and going, had been set thereby, high on the bank above the road, to which grassy steps descended; and at a short stone’s throw from the wicket stood the old lodge.
It was so embedded in foliage as to be hardly discernible from the gate—a little square stone building, and stone-tiled. There had never been a time when I was not familiar with it—its cold chimneys, its abandoned little rooms, the growth, and development, and flight, and renewal of the myriad insect life with which it swarmed. The dank brooding little place had always had a curious attraction for me; and now it was my own, my retreat, whose stagnant solitudes I could use to whatever processes of thought and reflection they might inspire. They surged formlessly in me the first time I stood to claim and regard my acquisition. The place had been cleaned, ordered, furnished, of course. All my scant belongings lay heaped within disorderly. But, beyond necessary clearances, I had insisted that its green surroundings should be respected. No ruthless loppings had disgraced my advent. The lodge remained the undesecrated shrine to this haunt of leaf-loving spirits—an old, old moss-grown temple to the eternal antiquity of Nature.
The fantastic note which speaks in me here I felt throbbing in my veins, soft but enchaining, from my first possession of the place. It was to speak strange things to me before it was done. Already it was a call, but at first far and faint, to a green resolution of independence. At the outset I had no thought but to spend my days here, as a good Catholic goes into retreat, and to return dutifully to the house at night, like any other homing cattle. But that purpose came early to dissolve. The arrival of the little stranger—which happened in the second week of my self-exile—banished all thought and consideration of me from the central ménage. I came to my resolve instantly, procured a camp bedstead, food, drink, and cooking utensils from Footover, and settled permanently into my hermitage. No one observed or protested. My heart was justified of its utmost bitterness, my will of its emancipation. Henceforth I would possess myself—no profitable acquirement for one in my then condition of mind.
Yet, on the whole, these days were the happiest I had known since I left school, though what termination I proposed to them did not figure in my wild philosophy. That, I am afraid, was not sound, for it harped on grievance. It was nourished on the sense of a hundred wrongs, fruit of lovelessness. I was moved for the first time to marshal these resolutely before my mind’s eye. I did not believe in original sin, Some babies were saints and some demons at a month old. I was conscious of no inherent baseness in myself, nor of a necessity to apologise for my own existence. Yet the impression enforced upon me, the atmosphere in which I had grown, had always seemed weighted with the necessity of that self-consciousness. I had been tolerated, and made to feel the fact; and lack of servile acknowledgment on my part had been counted to a graceless disposition. Yet was I not my mother’s son? And what manner of mother was this who would not have her child share in her exaltation, but was perpetually reminding him by implication of the baseness of that beginning which he owed to her? And I could have been slave to her loveliness; her patient catechumen, even, in the vulgar pietistic creed which sufficed her soul, had she ever once spoken a word of affection, played a mother’s part to me. But when I suffered, her eye was as cold as Cleopatra’s. She neither read me, nor could, perhaps, nor wanted to. I thought myself the perpetual hateful reminder to her of something she would forget; and I would not cringe, nor be mean, nor play the self-obliterating part expected of me, except in so far as my love of nature and solitude kept me aloof. But as I grew up strong—even wonderfully strong, I think—and tall and brown and passable in the face, with no hypocritical sense of shortcomings, but a feeling that at least I might be held to do a parent no discredit, I believed I should come to hate where I was hated; and, if so, I would shrink from using no part of the strength, mental and physical, with which Nature had endowed me. I wonder Lady Skene never saw the danger of her system; but her perceptives were narrow to a degree.
Now I did not know who she had been, nor how married before made a widow, nor what had been my father’s character or business. But all at once these things began to exercise my mind, when, in the first days of my complete separation from the house, I seemed to realise myself as something cut away from the main stem, a runner pinned down and then severed, and responsible for its own future development. In fact, I began to think on my own account, as was my engagement with Lord Skene; only, at the outset, I am afraid, with little concern for a possible vocation. Choice of that, I considered, whether for brain or hand, might follow on a certain knowledge of my origin; and whoever my father had been, I had no intention to insult his memory by a pretence to better dues than his. On the contrary, I rather hoped, in my savage misanthropy, to discover how my origin justified me in digging for my living.
But in truth, for all my mood I spent my time as much in dreaming as in brooding. I was at the romantic age, the soft shadows of life on one side, its infinite heights on the other. The repinings of misunderstood youth appeal, I think, much more sentimentally to the kind observer than they deserve. A thousand compensations of wonder and expectation are always at the service of the most oppressed young manhood. I found plenty for myself in that strange solitary life—the knowledge of woods at dawn; the intimacy of venturesome birds; the cosy lamp-lit room, my own, and shelves of glistening books. I owed most of the last to the good-natured kindness of Lord Skene, who had sent me down a small library of volumes at the latter end of my furnishing. These were generally tied into bundles of a dozen or so, and had been bought years before, as he told me when I went to thank him for his gift, at a sale following the decease of a young neighbour of his. They had never, for the most part, been opened since, and it was my pleasure to untie the dusty strings which restored their treasures to the light. They have their part in the development of the strange story, whose opening chapter was now to date itself from the date of my entrance into the lodge in the Caddle.
I shall never forget the weird experience of my first night there—the intense humid darkness; the awful emphasis the dead silence received from the fitful creeping and falling sounds incidental to a wooded solitude. I hardly slept at all. The echo of a rare footfall in the highroad beyond was always first a solace and then a terror. I would listen for its coming, mark its passing, and when that, owing to the muffling foliage, was seemingly halted or delayed, my heart thickened to a panic of expectation that the thread would be taken up close by—stealthy shufflings about the walls; a scratch on a window-pane. Yet, after all, nothing visited me but ghosts, and with those I was familiar. They came out of dusky nooks and corners, taunting me with my inefficiency, my loneliness, speaking unutterable things of my despicable position, and the neglect which had devoted me to it. Faint glimmering vistas into the past they showed me—glimpses of memory, which flickered only to close. Had I, indeed, always been thus, a burden, an intruder? I knew nothing of it all. My mother, in all my conscious memory of her, had never been my mother but in name. And was there nothing behind her—no shadow, even, of a father’s brief devotion? Sometimes a strange old face, evil and curious, would seem to bend down over me; but it always dissolved before it could be secured. I did not like to think I owed my life to that. And when I slept, I fought and sobbed and struggled in bewildering mists; and the cry was for ever in my heart: “Who am I? Who was my father? Why does she hate me so—on his account or my own?”
Well, enough of these moods. I am not built of the stuff which harps on self-grievances to win sympathy. Soon, and very soon, I was to become “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,” and from the first moment of my command, I never voluntarily relinquished it.
The baby, a poor peakish little male fellow, was born, I say; and I was forgotten. When at last I was remembered, development of nerve and character had so fastened me to my position, that there was no question of ousting me from it against my will. Nor was there much attempt. Lady Skene ignored me; her husband, fatuous father now, laughingly acquiesced in my wilfulness.
“Go your own way, Gaskett,” he said. “You’ll come to me when you want me, no doubt.”
No doubt at all; but not in the way he foresaw. In the meantime I led the life of a free-forester, and was more genially content than I had been for long. And then one day came the first of the change.
It was October, and the baby had been born in March. I had seen him once or twice at a distance, and that was all. There was a path running through that slope of the thickets which led up towards the house, and this path ended in the pleasant bosky sward known as the “Baby’s Garden” before mentioned. It was a lovely quiet spot, and thither the honourable Master Skene was often carried by his nurse for air and exercise. I could easily at will command a view of them without being seen myself. The life of the wild man had taught me many a trick of cunning concealment, and I never scrupled to practise an espionage which was, after all, only a necessary habit of savage precaution. There was an old dead ash, bordering on the thin fringe of the woods, into whose hollow I could slip from above, and thence observe through a spy-hole in the trunk. It was so close and unregarded in that silent chamber of green, that every word spoken from the latter was audible to me in my eyrie.
One morning I was watching thence (for I had a morbid attraction to my successor), when he and his nurse appeared before me. She was singing to him, as she walked in a sort of rhythmical march. An odd pang of jealousy, as always, seized me in their nearness, Was I not his mother’s son, too? I felt a thickness in my throat, and swallowed it down fiercely. Presently the nurse, carrying her charge, went away at the farther end; and I came out of my hiding and stood at the foot of the tree, my eyes bent on the place of their going, though, indeed, my eyes saw little. A feeling of shame and melancholy dimmed them; even obscured their vision so far that it was not for a moment or two I realised that the pair had come back, and that I was discovered. I started, and bent my brow in a fury; and then I saw to my wonder that it was not the nurse who carried the child, but a young woman—a young lady, in fact; a vision of frills, and golden hair, and heliotrope raiment. She had evidently met the nurse on her way out, and taken the baby from her, and returned with it to the garden, the other following.
Now all of a sudden she saw me, and came towards me at once, holding out her burden. Her eyes were mirthful and conciliatory; a smile quivered on her lips.
“Won’t you kiss your brother?” she said.
My brother! I had never yet realised the relationship. My heart drummed thickly. All of a sudden I caught her eyes fixed on mine.
“Yes, I am Ira,” she said, “educated, and repentant, and come back to be punished.”
Without a word, I turned on my heel and went away through the woods.
CHAPTER IV.
A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING—PHASE ONE
That afternoon I was sitting glum and glowering in my lodge, while the water for my tea was boiling on the fire, when I heard a light step in the passage; and the next moment she stood before me. I had the will and the opportunity now to regard her, here in secure possession of my own. She, not I, was the intruder. But my steady inquisition failed to abash her. She was too confident of her own charms, I suppose.
“Pray forgive me, Mr Gaskett,” she said, with a twinkling civility. “I wanted to see the hermit with my own eyes.”
“And not with Lady Skene’s or Mr Pugsley’s?” I asked.
She laughed.
“You bear a grudge long.”
“I have so little else to bear out of the past,” I said.
Her eyes became serious.
“Well, I was a beast,” she said. “And now I’m a young lady.”
“Excuse me. The distinction may be without a difference.”
“And wasn’t I right then,” she cried, with a flush, “to question your gentle origin!”
“I daresay,” I said. “But I owe you no consideration for the question. It was none of your business; and I haven’t forgiven you for it, and never shall.”
She seemed to breathe a little quickly, as if distressed. Then she sat down in a chair, and crossed her legs, and bent forward to scrutinise me.
“Richard,” she said, “what a brown strong man you have grown into; and rather taking-looking, too! I was an odious little pig—there! but girls grow up, you know. I don’t remember my little past self with pleasure, I can tell you. Won’t you forgive me and be friends?”
“What have you come home for? To be married?”
“O! What a question!”
“The sooner the better, for me.”
She bit her underlip. I could have thought it was a swollen red enough little affair already.
“Why for you?” she asked.
“You can’t expect me to welcome your reappearance,” I said.
“Can’t I?” she answered. “Well, looks ought to count for something with you by now. Don’t they?”
“I mature slowly, Miss Christmas.”
“Call me Ira.”
“Certainly I sha’n’t. It would be presumption.”
“I don’t know that it would. My father’s father was a chemist. I have found that out. He kept a shop and invented a pill and made a fortune over it. People would take it. It became a sort of infection. A royal princess caught it, and then it was all over with him. He bought a pedigree, in Wardour Street, and imposed it on the world. It would swallow anything from him.”
“Well, my father’s father never invented anything that I know—not even a family. I date from yesterday; and, as to pills, the pillmaker’s granddaughter was the bitterest I ever had to swallow.”
She was not offended, it seemed.
“That’s right,” she said. “I told you to punish me. I have deserved it, I know. But tell me if I’m pretty.”
I looked at her calmly. It was certainly wonderful how the petite drôlesse in her had developed, amplified into something bewitching; but it was the adolescence of a witch, I thought. Her hair was umber gold, with pale green lights in it, and drawn back in loose wings from her forehead, and tied into a club at the nape of a very white neck. Her cheeks were a little lean, but pitted with the old dimples at pleasure; and the whole contour of her face was frankly girlish—soft and kind but for the eyes. Or at least I thought so. There seemed a knowledge in their artless honesty, born of depths below the blue. Blue, I say! I don’t know to this day if they are blue or green. It depends upon their point of view, whether it be sky or verdure.
She was slender and smooth-limbed; a fragrant enough creature but for the odour of memory. I answered her deliberately.
“Not to me. I have had no finishing education. I am still governed by childish prejudices. I daresay you will be a success elsewhere.”
She sighed a little, and got to her feet.
“It is a shame,” she said, and very handsomely. “You have been neglected shamefully, I know. But I’ve no right to speak. I wish you thought me pretty.”
“Well, so do I,” I said. “But, what does it matter? You are an heiress.”
She stood regarding me seriously for a little. Then all of a sudden, to my amazement, her eyes blinked with tears. I stared at her, speechless.
“Yes, I know,” she said; “it’s very silly. But you’ve no idea how you’ve been on my mind. It was at Dinan, first, and then in London, where I began to get things into their proper proportions—my own insignificance among the number. You were somehow always in the background of my thoughts—wasn’t that funny? You know, you were a very good-looking child, Richard; or perhaps you don’t know. I was horribly jealous of you, anyhow.”
“Well, well,” I said. “And how about Lady Skene, Miss Christmas? Are you still in favour with her and Mr Pugsley?”
“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,” she answered, laughing with a little twinkle through her tears. “She is a very beautiful woman, and therefore what she thinks must be right. I wish you would show me your poem after Mr Pugsley.”
“What poem? But all that stuff is over. I have burnt everything I ever wrote.”
“What a misanthrope you have become. But I don’t wonder. Am I to go now?”
“You are keeping me from my tea.”
“Won’t you let me serve it for you?”
“I serve myself; and I intend to for the future.”
“There is a story—did you ever read it?—of a shepherd who plucked a flower in a field, and brought it home and put it in water; and every night the flower turned into a beautiful girl, who swept and dusted his room for him, and set his meal, and was a flower again by the time he came down. But one night he caught her, and after that she had to remain a woman and serve him.”
“Thank you. But I don’t see the point, for I haven’t plucked you, and I don’t think you beautiful. You had better go. What would Lady Skene say?”
“I am my own mistress. Lady Skene can say what she likes. Do let me wait on you.”
A sudden mutiny of retaliation seized upon me. What did it matter? I felt quite hard and cold to the girl. “Very well,” I said, and sat down.
She busied herself at once; poured the hot water; made the tea; stood behind me while I ate and drank. I took pains to do both imperturbably and at length. She never spoke the while. At the end I got up, and pushed the fragments together.
“Now,” I said, “you can have your tea on the scraps, if you like. I am going out.”
I left her seated quietly at the table.
CHAPTER V.
A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING—PHASE TWO
She came to the lodge often after that, and amused herself putting the place in order, sometimes while I was present, but more often during my absence. I knew nothing of what was in her mind; but I confess it came, just at first, to give me a sort of gloating satisfaction thus to accept without comment these ministrations of what was intended, I suppose, for imperious beauty’s atonement to the poor beast whom she had wounded herself by insulting. She did not speak much, going about her duties with a young elastic confidence; but a consciousness of unuttered protest over my indifference, of wistful glances and deprecations of my blindness, began soon to grow irksome. She wanted to put herself right with herself, I supposed, rather than with me. I was ready enough to tell her so, yet somehow could never find the words.
One day, on entering my den, I was surprised to encounter the figure of Lord Skene seated therein.
“Where’s Ira?” he asked at once.
“How should I know, sir?” I answered. “She isn’t here.”
“But she comes here at times?” he said.
“That’s her affair. She’s her own mistress, and has told me so. I can’t command even the lodge, it seems.”
“Don’t be bitter, my boy,” he replied. “Only, if I were you, I wouldn’t encourage these visitations.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s right. You see, she’s a great catch—rather a unique young party with her looks and her fortune.”
“I quite understand. I assure you, sir, I shall be only too glad if you’ll keep her away.”
“What a misogynist it is!”
He looked up at me suddenly, seemed to catch his breath, and put his hand to his forehead.
“What is it, sir?” I exclaimed.
“Eh!” he said vaguely. “Nothing—O, nothing!”
He appeared to make an effort to recall himself, and was presently smiling genially, though his loose old underlip trembled.
“What a great fellow you have grown, to be sure,” he said—“a fine personable fellow and a credit to us, too.”
“You’re very good, sir. I wish I could think the same.”
“Ah!” he said nervously. “I fancy I know what you mean. It’s that that I came about, Gaskett. You mustn’t go on brooding by yourself for ever in this infernal swamp. It reflects upon me, my boy, and upon Lady Skene. Besides, you’ve got a—a brother up there, you know” (he uttered the word with an obvious effort); “and it won’t do to have scandals started about the proverbial step-relations. You come up to the house, if you want to keep the young lady from coming down here. Its the wise alternative. Let her feed her wilfulness in company—eh?”
“What do you want me to do, sir?”
“Why, take your seat at my table, like a gentleman and a man of sense. We sha’n’t poison you.”
“Forgive my asking, sir. Didn’t she suggest this to you?”
“Who? My wife?”
“O no! Miss Christmas.”
“Why, now I come to think of it, she did mention it—a well-merited reproof, perhaps.”
“I’m beholden to her, of course.”
“You ought to count yourself beholden to me, I think. I don’t know that I’ve ever given you cause, Gaskett, to doubt my friendship.”
“No, sir. I’ll do what you wish, of course.”
“That’s right. Shoo! the place smells like a well. We must get you out of it.”
So I donned a dress suit, and played the dutiful respectable, and took my place at my lord’s table—an odd new experience for me. I felt some natural awkwardness about it at first, and bungled a little over taking wine with my stepfather, for he held to the old-fashioned customs; but his cellar was good enough to be an education in itself; and, for the rest, the ladies did not embarrass me with their notice or attentions. Indeed, from the date of this my first step towards a social reformation, Miss Christmas ignored me entirely, and took pains to impress me with the fact. I was duly impressed—and amused. I supposed, quite correctly, no doubt, that his lordship had given her a hint as to the inadvisability of her visits to me, backed by a pretty literal quotation of my own expressed wishes in the matter, and that the insult by deputy had instantly effected what the insult direct had failed to do. Women, I fancy, have no objection to being bullied in an exclusive and complimentary sort of way; but the passion of brutality loses all its charms with them when it takes an agent into its confidence. Miss Christmas was deeply offended, and let me know by implication the raptures I had forgone. She literally sparkled o’ nights, frolicking like a will-o’-the-wisp before my hopelessly unravished eyes. Her dress, her jewels, her manner, her imperious caprices, all expressed, and were designed to express, the spoilt and whimsical child of fortune—leagues overhead a nameless pensioner on that same partial goddess’s bounty. She sang—not so badly on the accidental strength of a pure little contralto voice, which of all sorts finds it easiest to keep in tune; she displayed, in the childish abandonment of her caressings of dogs and cats, the passion of thin white arms, lures wickedly unattainable to my supposed swooning senses; she talked, sweetly serious, with Lady Skene, on the subject of the divine goodness in damning three-fourths of the world for the sake of the other quarter, and dropped texts from her lips as daintily as cherry stones. If it was all designed as a sharp lesson to me, it was all signally successful. “The girl is mother to the woman,” I thought. She is a humbug here as she was a humbug in my lodge. It is nothing but her puckish instinct to play a part to desire.
I never came to the house but of nights to dine, conforming only, in its strictly literal sense, with Lord Skene’s expressed wish; and then I would dawdle out an impatient hour in the drawing-room, and the moment the clock struck ten be off to my woods again. Lady Skene had accepted my reappearance with no comment but the briefest greeting; but I thought her manner to me was more chilling than ever. She seemed resolved upon disallowing my last claim to her consideration. As a child it had always been as if, coldly and softly, she had disengaged my fingers one by one from her skirts to which they clung. Now we were utterly dissevered; but I cried out still that I might not hate her. She did not hate me, I am sure. She only looked upon me as a brand, a thing foredoomed, whom it were useless to shape for a destiny which could never be his. Perhaps in her deepest heart there may have lurked a terror of herself, were she once to permit herself to think of me—a fear that after all, in some quick frenzy, she might be moved to disown the pietist for the mother. I will believe it. Such inhumanity as hers seems incomprehensible without.
As I held to my wild habits by day, playing only in the evenings up to polite convention, I was certain to encounter Miss Christmas about the grounds, and as a matter of fact I did, many times. On such occasions she would always pass me with a warble and a stare, or a cock to her kittenish nose, as if I were an odorous stable-boy, which as regularly tickled me, until one day I felt tired of it. I had run upon her at the head of the thicket path which opened into the “Baby’s Garden,” and I suddenly barred her way, so that she could not get round me right or left.
“Were you going down there?” I asked, signifying the lodge.
Fury flew into her eyes.
“How dare you—how dare you suggest it!” she cried.
“Why, it wouldn’t be for the first time, you know,” I said.
She looked in helpless anger about her a moment; then faced me like a young harpy.
“I thought, perhaps, in spite of all—of all the misfortune at your birth—you might be a gentleman at heart. But I was mistaken, and you are the very farthest from it; and I see now that it’s impossible ever to hope to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
“Thank you, for my father. My mother can answer for herself. The pillmaker’s granddaughter is the best judge, of course.”
“Let me pass, please.”
“Not just for a minute. What did you mean by the misfortune at my birth?”
She was still white with fury.
“Don’t you know? Don’t you know that you’ve no right to a name at all? You might have guessed, I think.”
“How do you know?”
“I know well enough. I once heard Mr Pugsley say so to Lady Skene, when they were discussing what to do with you, and didn’t guess that I was hidden behind the curtains. I have never forgotten it, you may be sure.”
“I am quite sure. You listened behind curtains like a born lady. Do you wonder that I have always instinctively detested you?”
“No; I have shown you I don’t.”
The storm in her had subsided in a moment. I wondered, but was not in the least mollified.
“You have shown me nothing,” I said, “but the way to right myself at last with my relations. Now you can go.”
She did not move, however, but turned as pale as her frock.
“Richard!—O, Richard!” she implored. “Don’t hit me like that. You are so strong; and I am only a girl. I had no right to say it; it might have meant nothing; and Lady Skene has always been so good to me.”
“What reason have you—or has she, for that matter—to expect any consideration from me? I will know the truth.”
“Richard, make some allowance. You had insulted me too, you know.”
“I had not.”
“You had. You asked Lord Skene to stop me from going to you.”
“I didn’t. He came and asked me himself. He told me to remember you were an heiress, and I answered that you didn’t visit me by my wish. You!”
“It was detestable. I didn’t know. Do, for pity’s sake, forgive and forget.”
“No; I have forgotten too long. I want to remember.”
“Richard! O! O!—Richard, I hate pills—I’m not a lady—won’t anything soften you!”
And at that moment the nurse, carrying the child, came round a bend of the garden. She stared and rocked, singing something tuneless; but Miss Christmas, darting past me, seized the infant from her arms, and carried it to the path.
“Richard!” she whispered, “for his sake—your little brother’s!”
My brother again. Never had anyone but this girl voluntarily assumed the natural relationship. I wavered for the first time. She saw it, with her sex’s quick intuition, and held out the warm soft bundle.
“Have you never taken him in your arms?” she said. “He’s so small and weak. There, hold him, and let him plead for me.”
“Miss Christmas!” cried the nurse.
Her tone, all the immeasurable menial warning it conveyed, stiffened me instantly. I held out my arms and received the burden.
I could have laughed at its insignificance. The apparent proportions of it had made me expect something staggering. It lay on me like a doll. Before I knew myself, I was smiling into the little red puffy face.
There followed a sharp exclamation, and on the instant Lady Skene had snatched my brother from my hands. She had come upon us unobserved. Her face was alight with an expression I had never seen there before. The statue had blazed into momentary life. She was a woman, and a cruel woman confessed for the first time in my knowledge of her.
“Not yours,” she said, deep and resentful. “He has no part or concern with you. Don’t dare to touch him or contaminate him again!”
I stood facing her without a word. In that moment my utter hate and vindictiveness were born. As she had dealt with me, so would I deal with her. The first card was in my hand. I turned quietly and left them.
CHAPTER VI.
MY FIRST ENLIGHTENMENT
Mr Pugsley sat in the study of his vicarage at Market Grazing. He was composing a sermon—no doubt on the eternal lines of pre-election and the divine partiality. He never gathered how his principles made a comfortable sinecure of his living; but a sinecure it was—a sort of well-furnished limbo, his complete enjoyment of which was only marred by a chronic dyspepsia. He looked up, as I entered, and greeted me with a frown.
“Gaskett!” he exclaimed. “I was somehow thinking of you, and here you are.”
I acknowledged the compliment promptly.
“Yes, I’m the devil, sir,” I said; “and for once in your life you’ve got to answer to me.”
He started, and turned a little yellower.
“This is a strange beginning,” he wondered. “For what, boy, do you hold me answerable to you?”
“For concealment, sir, amongst other things. Mr Pugsley, will you please to tell me if I am my mother’s son?”
He shifted a paper or two on his desk. I could see he was staggered, and thrown for the moment off his balance. I had no object in hurrying him. After all, if he had the elective licence, he had not the instinct to tell a lie.
“Answer at your leisure, sir,” I said. My tone, I quite felt it, took command. This narrow mind had no longer any terrors for me. I had come, in a day, of a very stern and sorrowful intellectual age. He turned to me presently, almost propitiatory.
“What a very curious question, Gaskett! Lady Skene has surely always done her duty by you?”
“That wasn’t what I asked. I asked if I were her son.”
“How can you doubt it?”
“I can’t, sir, to my grief.”
“To your grief? O, this is sad!”
He fidgeted with the lamp—it was evening—and tried to meet my eyes again, but avoided them.
“It is very sad,” I said. “But why should you deplore it, when from the first you have fostered and encouraged in her that spirit which is responsible for all the sadness?”
“I, Gaskett?”
“Have you not? Have you not always, sir, accounted me a child of sin?”
“Which you are, in the fullest sense.”
The admission seemed to slip out of him, in his agitation, unintentionally. Having made it, he stooped, and hurriedly took a nerve pill. He always carried a box of them about with him.
“It is what I understand,” I said quietly. “Of whose sin, in the first instance? Mr Pugsley, who was my father?”
He was very much upset. His hands on the paper shook like leaves.
“What has happened?” he said. “Why are you asking me these questions?”
“Let it be enough, sir, that I am asking them.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Think again, sir.”
“Do you doubt my honour, young man? I tell you I don’t know.”
“Where did it happen? You hail from Clapham, I believe. Was it there?”
“Yes, if you will ask.”
“Where is Clapham?”
“It is a suburb of London.”
“And she came under your administrations there—officially, I suppose.”
He rallied a little, struggling to assert himself.
“Do you bear in mind, Gaskett, of whom you speak—who it is whose errors—whose long-repented errors—you are probing?”
“The repentance came too late for me, sir; and, in any case, if it is religion, it is not reason to make me its scapegoat.”
“You were a child of wrath—a pledge of sinfulness foregone.”
“I see—a sort of whipping-boy to Grace. But I have ceased to be a boy—there’s the devil of it, Mr Pugsley. If you don’t know who my father was, does Lord Skene know?”
He shook his head, with an odd little gasp. I saw him making for the pill-box again.
“What!” cried I. “Did he, too, accept me as a pledge?”
Something in his face enlightened me. The man was too shallow to hide a guilty self-consciousness.
“Did he?” I said sharply; “or was he never told perhaps that there was any question of sinfulness?”
I could see him hesitate, and it decided me.
“Was Lord Skene told?” I said, and took a step towards him. “Was he told?” I read the answer in his perturbed eyes. “Is this how you reconcile your conscience with your interests?” I cried scornfully.
Having yielded, like a weak creature, to resolution, he took refuge, like a woman, in personal grievance. He rose, quivering all over.
“How dare you come and bully me like this!” he cried. “What instigated you to it, I say?”
“A desire for the truth, sir. I understood parsons made a speciality of it.”
“Not at all,” he retorted angrily—“at least there are truths and truths. To withhold some for a worthy purpose is not to lie.”
“Yes,” I said. “I have read about that; but I never knew till now it was a principle of Evangelicism.”
He looked at me balefully.
“And, in any case, what was the worthy purpose here?” I asked.
“You cannot be expected to appreciate it,” he said. “Your mother was a vessel potential for holiness. As you have the indelicacy to question of her past sorrows, you shall be given the truth in full. Better that than the half measure, which would only instigate your base spirit, I fear, to distortion and exaggeration. She had been ensnared by a villain whom she had lent herself to reclaim. It was the usual case of a promise given and forsworn. I never asked or learned his name. In the eyes of Heaven she was a wife; and any confession of the truth would, with such a man as Lord Skene, have been held merely to justify him in his attempts to claim her to ungodliness. As a fact, he was greatly infatuated—accepted the assumption that you were born in wedlock—engaged tacitly to ask no questions, but to accept on its merits the blessing which had been vouchsafed him.”
“Then, at least, in the eyes of Heaven, which you represent, Lady Skene is a bigamist.”
He seemed, to my surprise, to accept this casuistry with a certain relief.
“Put it that way if you like,” he said. “She was distinctly, from the moral point of view, a wife already, though legally unbound.”
“Then why, from the moral point of view, am I a child of sin?”
He began to stammer hopelessly.
“I will tell you,” I said. “It is because of the wrong she has done me, and would visit, like a woman, upon the innocent head of her disgrace. And you hate me because she does, and because you have made her interests your own. I think you have played your cards very well, Mr Pugsley.”
He bristled through all his yellow skin.
“Leave my house,” he said.
“I will leave it,” I answered, “but I will ask you another question first. What was my mother’s position, occupation, when she married?”
“Not another word,” he cried. “I have said too much already. O!”—he shook a wild finger at me—“why would she never accept my advice, given long ago, to place you out in some respectable family! I always foresaw that the time would come when you would begin to quarrel with your bread and butter—to bite the hand that fed you—to——”
“To put myself right with my stepfather,” I said.
“If you attempt it,” he cried—“if you dare—the wrath of the Almighty will fall upon your presumptuous head!”
I laughed.
“Well, I will think it over,” I said, and turned and left him.
CHAPTER VII.
MORGIANA
Near all that night I sat out in my den, wakeful and deeply meditative. Was I glad or sorry to have wormed out thus much of the truth? And of what potential profit to me was my new knowledge? As to the former, noblesse oblige: better be an unchristened vagabond than the legitimate hope of Mr Snooks, roturier. Nameless, I could make a name of my own; not be condemned all my days to the task of redeeming a vulgar one bequeathed me. Therein was signified, I thought, the true moral of all nomenclature. Why, for instance, should the son of Mr Rottengoose be handicapped from his birth with that imposed label and libel; be forced to carry throughout his blameless life that unasked and unmerited stigma of an ancestor’s villainous sobriquet; have to steel himself to the torture of the titter pursuing him over the edge of the dancing-card on which he had just impressed his awful identity; be obliged, perhaps, to advertise his ignominy on a brass plate, to stultify his fondest ideals, his most romantic passions, over the sign-manual of a decayed fowl—a name bestowed, probably, in the first instance on a village idiot; finally, be called upon to cheapen the nobility of his Last Will and Testament in the terms that “I, Robert Rottengoose, being of sound mind and in full hope of the resurrection, etc.”?
Resurrection of whom, forsooth! Why, of Robert Rottengoose. “Do hereby bequeath my curse,” I would add, “to a system which imposes honour or ridicule, either undeserved, on a new-born child. Let a man be christened into his surname, such as he shall make or choose it, only when he comes of age. Amen!”
Well, I was Richard Gaskett—not so bad on the whole; but why was I? I wondered if Lord Skene would tell me; I wondered if it were Lady Skene’s maiden name—yet hardly that; for would not the admission have betrayed her to her noble suitor? Perhaps it was my father’s, since, “from the moral point of view,” she was his wife. Yet, somehow, morality did not seem to me to be much in question in the matter; and on the whole I was inclined to think that my name was as illegitimate as my birth. The fact disturbed me only in so far as it afforded me, probably, no clue to my father’s identity; for it was to that that my thoughts were now turning with a very resolute purpose. I would discover it by hook or crook; learn to whom I was indebted for my disgrace; gain into my own hand the knowledge which could make this cruel puppet of a mother move to my will. I possessed already the germ of the truth: I was base, and my stepfather did not know it. Proof, clinching and double-wrought, would come with that further discovery, could I alight on it. I would hold it over her head, bowing that under an eternal horror of exposure. As she had been an unnatural mother to me, so would I be an unnatural son to her.
And all of a sudden the tears were crowding into my eyes. I could not tell why; and I rose quickly and went to the door. It was a lovely quiet night, with a moon somewhere behind the trees, and all the sky marbled with dove-grey clouds. And I held out my arms to them; neither did I know why; but, like a child, I wanted something or somebody to comfort me.
“It is no good,” I muttered, and dropped my chin heavily on my breast, and returned to my brooding, but this time over a pipe and a glass of toddy. They helped me to brighter, if no less defiant, thoughts. Would Mr Pugsley whisper awfully to his patroness of my visit, and put his head to hers in some design to bridle me? I cared nothing. I felt strong as Atlas to bear the world my new emancipation had opened out to me; my head rang with a hundred purposes of do and dare; I was my own utter master, by virtue of that discovery, and free. Let those who had ridden me look to their own harness.
Early on the following morning, coming home from a brisk stroll in the November woodlands, I found Miss Christmas in my room. She had a brown fur boa round her neck, and a little fur cap on her head like a Zouave’s busby in miniature, with a pert plume. Under the boa was a glimpse of scarlet handkerchief, which contrasted rather pleasantly with the gold of her hair, and her cheeks were pink with walking. She greeted me with a troubled look, as she noticed how I paused and my face darkened seeing her there.
“Am I so horribly de trop,” she said, “when you have nothing but your own thoughts to live with?”
“That’s the reason,” I answered grimly.
“You don’t make it easy for me,” she said. “And I had come to beg your pardon, Richard.”
“Why should I help you out in anything, unless it were the door?”
She flushed; she bit her lip; it was as much as her temper would allow her, I could see, to stand and listen.
“You are really horribly rude,” she said.
“I daresay I am. As a cultivated young lady of family, you should have more prescriptive tact than to provoke the natural boor in me.”
“I don’t believe it is natural. I believe, in your bitterness, you are resolved to make yourself out much worse than you are.”
“That is very generous of you. And you have come, moreover, to beg my pardon—for what?”
Her mouth opened a little. She seemed to deprecate my expression very entreatingly. Her eyebrows took a pained arch, her eyes a speaking wistfulness.
“Richard,” she said—“don’t be so angry, so unforgiving with me!”
“Why do you think me either? I ask you again, what have you come to beg my pardon for?”
Her lips quivered as she looked up at me. She seemed unable to speak for a moment.
“It was cruel,” she whispered at last—“so cruel and ungenerous, that I could only wish at the moment that I wasn’t bound to her by so many ties of affection. But I am, and I will be loyal.”
“Are you apologising for Lady Skene?”
“No; I am asking pardon for myself, because I was the unwilling cause of it all. Won’t you forgive me, Richard?”
“If I thought,” I said, “of calculating up all you have to answer to me for! I don’t feel very kind to you.”
“Be unkind, then,” she said. “Only forgive me.”
I struggled with myself a little.
“I can’t,” I said at last. “I’m afraid I’m very vindictive, and must have my pound of flesh first.”
“Take it of me,” she said at once, “in whatever way you like.”
I laughed.
“Fine heroic words! Would you submit to the process? I’m in the way to humble some folks.”
“Richard,” she said, “remember who she is. Spare your mother. I’m ready to take the blame and the punishment for both.”
She was certainly a young slight thing; prettyish in a fancy way; easy to bend or break.
“You speak rashly,” I said. “I remember your story about the shepherd. Your petals would be pretty well rubbed by the time I’d done with you.”
“Very well,” she said. “I’ll take the risk. I believe I know you better than you do yourself.”
“Do you? I’ve half a mind, you little flower of fortune, to put you to the test.”
“I’m waiting.”
A stubborn devil was awake in me.
“Are you offering yourself my slave, or what, Miss Morgiana?”
“Your slave, if you like.”
“Very well. The floor wants scrubbing, and there’s a well outside. Get some water and scrub it.”
I thought she would fling away at once; but, instead, she took off her hat and jacket, found somewhere a pail and brush, and went outside very meekly. I listened wickedly. The windlass, I knew, would be a task for her chicken arms; and, indeed, I heard her plainly enough panting and struggling with it. But, for all that, she appeared presently, staggering, with her pail brimful; and I made no offer to relieve her of it.
“Now,” I said, “I won’t be witness to your awkwardness. I’m going for a walk, and to think over more important difficulties than yours. But, when I come back, I shall expect to find the place cleaned and tidied, and you gone.”
And I did. I gave her a couple of hours, before I returned whistling. The floor was white, the table laid for lunch, two eggs put in a cold saucepan by the grate, the fire piled up to smoulder, and a nosegay of red leaves and berries placed in a tumbler on the windowsill. The place looked neater and homelier than I had ever succeeded in making it, and Morgiana was gone. Of the eternal instinct are Eve’s daughters; and this one, it appeared, had no difficulty in “throwing back” from silks to homespun.
That night came a very strange experience to me.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
On entering the dining-room at Evercreech, I found company assembled. I had not been warned, and I was not introduced. I came in late, and took my seat at the table quietly, being placed between Mr Pugsley and a lady whom I did not know. I learned, however, in due course, that she was a Mrs Dalston, who, with her husband, also present, was a new-comer in the neighbourhood. The two had taken the Lone Farm, a decent but rather decayed property situated on the outskirts of Market Grazing, and foolishly reputed to be haunted. But it was inexpensive—perhaps because of its reputation—and fully adequate to the needs of a childless couple. The only other guest was, to my pleasure, Sir Maurice Carnac, who had earlier shown me friendship, and who was down somewhere in Hampshire for the shooting. But he looked little capable of shouldering a gun, and was altogether sadly altered from my memory of him, having but lately, as I learned, recovered from a paralytic stroke, whose passing had left him much debilitated. He lay sunk in his chair, like a heap of human ashes, and with all the old fire of roguery smouldering low in him. But he seemed to awaken suddenly on my entrance, and looking across at me as I sat down, treated me to a leer and wink.
“Hillo, Charlie, my boy!” he chuckled. “What sport with the girls, hey!”
Consternation sat on every face. My lord, looking much perturbed, bent to the old rascal, and enlightened him.
“Gaskett, Carnac; Gaskett!” he said. “You remember Richard Gaskett?”
“Hey!” The old man sat up. What link of memory had slipped in him, obliterating a whole score of years? “Richard, hey?” he said, immensely sly. “I know, I know. The lovely one’s pledge—earnest of widowed respectability. But mum, mum, my boy—I know. What days, hey!”
The soup engaged and silenced him—at least in everything but its absorption. It was some moments before the talk could find itself an embarrassed vent. But Sir Maurice brightened as he fed. Good fare was the natural aliment to that impoverished soil. He had only wandered and lost himself when hungry. In a little he had forgotten all about his balourdise, and was paying senile compliments along the table to his hostess.
In the moment of its delivery, however, the strange lady next me had turned quickly and looked me in the face. She appeared to me an utterly colourless person, fade, thin, dowdy, with hardly a sign of spirit or expression—a condemned ghost of womanhood. I wondered presently at the fond attentions with which her husband treated her, at his efforts to win a smile from her unresponsive face, and his patience when habitually baffled, since he himself was a fine bold figure of a man, white-teethed, black-whiskered, for all his forty-five or so years. And I wondered still when I came to learn how persistently she had disappointed his hopes of an heir, the few children she had born to him having died one by one on the very threshold of their existence. But perhaps all those fruitless pangs were accountable as much for his manly devotion as for her insensibility. She might have held him responsible for that seed of death which had stultified all the rich Woman in her. In any case, that he was more attached to her than she to him was obvious.
She spoke little—nothing to me; and, I noticed, ate little, but crumbled her bread all dinner-time. I was not concerned, inasmuch as it gave me the opportunity to observe elsewhere, which I had the inclination, and the provocation now, moreover, to do. Though the object of the old ex-governor’s misbegotten attention, and the immediate brief cynosure of all eyes, I was the only one, I think, not momentarily confounded. A curious self-possession, a sort of conceit of masterfulness, had come to claim me of late. A kind of cold and scrutinising philosophy had found me out of the old dependence. Having had long the will to counter my allotted destiny, a very little of the means had encouraged me to something like effrontery. I felt already a sense of power; a truculence in the face of the least supposed imposition on me of superiority.
While, therefore, they were all looking at me, I was coolly intent on Lady Skene. One hurried glance my way she gave; and then her eyes were lowered to the cloth, as she drew off her gloves and addressed some commonplace remark to Mr Dalston, who sat on her right. Her voice, I have not yet observed, was marked by a slight Cockney intonation—hardly to be gathered from its softness—just a twang from Cheapside, like the faintest distant whine of Bow Bells. But it was enough to imply her origin.
Looking away from her, my eyes travelled to Mr Pugsley beside me. He was obviously flustered and annoyed—shifted his shoulders, pinched his nose, defied, self-conscious, my stare, and failed utterly to stand up to it. Then he cleared his throat with violence, and affected, ostentatiously, to prefer the menu card to my company.
I laughed to myself, speculating on the idyllic guilt-consciousness which must be flowing between these two. The baronet’s malapropism had followed curiously pat on my recent enlightenment. I recalled the stories of his ancient intimacy with Lord Skene, of his reputed co-partnership with that nobleman in a rollicking adventure or two. Were they, my lady and her pious accomplice, hearing, in their hearts, the first creaking of the wheels of retribution? Poor panic-struck conspirators!
Yet I was sorry that Fate had imposed on Lady Skene so vulgar a confederate; for I could not but think the man vulgar, ordained priest as he was, and quite sincere, I believe, in his evangelicism. But, apart from him, and her subscription to his ugly phraseologic cant, she was so lovelily one of those presences whom age cannot wither (the rest of the quotation hardly applied to her); so perpetual a provocation—and aggravation—to the worshipper of beauty; so serene a thing, so coldly tantalising, so refinedly a figure for the sweet altitudes of romance! Ah, that she would make me her knight indeed—champion of a mother’s fame, dearer even than a wife’s! No need, then, to dread the consequences of an infamy atoned through love. I would have struck for—not against her. But she had preferred the inhuman part. So be it.
I ended my scrutiny with an inward sigh, and turned it elsewhere. I had plentiful opportunity. No one addressed, or appeared even to consider me. Right opposite, Miss Christmas, who sat between Sir Maurice and Mr Dalston, was engaged in rallying her either neighbour charmingly. She was quite at her ease with both, confident of herself as the most attractive of social siderites—a star of unquestionable magnitude. And they responded, of course—men of the world, and quick in persiflage. They laughed at her butterfly sallies, and humoured them because she was pretty and an heiress They were patently captivated. “Ah!” I thought: “if you knew how this very morning she has been scrubbing my floor for me!”
No one would have thought it possible. She was gay as a fairy; flower-complexioned; her hair like a misty aureole. A string of pearls was round her throat, and pearls were in her ears—“wicked little shells for recording scandal, and answering to it with pearls of price, too,” said Sir Maurice, after she had retorted upon some society calumny of his.
“O!” she cried; “to compare my poor ears to oysters!”
“Natives!” said Mr Dalston. “There are no oysters and no ears in all the world like our English breed.”
She asked him seriously how he knew—if he had travelled much?
“Far and wide,” he said, “and in all countries except Italy, I believe.”
I wondered why he made, or had made, the reservation.
“A sentiment,” he said, as if I had put the question to him. “I lost a dear friend there once.”
Actually I found his eyes fixed on mine. They were a dark penetrating feature in his face, set under strong brows, and somehow quite at variance with the smiling good humour of his mouth. His hair, though almost white, was full and wavy as a boy’s, and contrasted strangely with his jet-black mutton-chop whiskers, and those again with the strong white line of his teeth. He was tall and excellently compact, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, and had altogether the appearance of a man entirely at his ease with himself and the world.
“Do you know it—Italy?” he asked of me.
“I have never been from here but to school,” I answered.
“Ah!” he said: “what visions! what a prospect! That emancipation from tutelage, and all the world to follow!”
He was interrupted by a quick shrill exclamation from his wife:
“Look! What has happened? What is the matter with him?”
She was on her feet, we were all on our feet, in an instant. Sir Maurice Carnac was fallen heaped back into his chair, his shapeless old face all wryed as if in an exhaustion of horrible laughter, incoherent sounds coming from his lips.
“Carnac!” cried Lord Skene.
For to-morrow we die!
“This is my business,” said Mr Pugsley, in an agitated voice. All honour to his creed so far, for he was terribly unnerved.
The stricken man was carried upstairs by the servants, followed by the minister and his lordship. We all waited, huddled into a silence unbroken but for the whimpering of the women. Only Mrs Dalston remained quite passionless and unmoved. Once I saw her husband quietly offer to take her hand in his, and I saw her as quietly repulse him. His, according to the feminine persuasion, was an irresistible personality, all black and white and pink, and inevitably suggestive of past triumphs. She was the only one, I dare swear, who had ever been able to keep him at arm’s length; and that, perhaps, was the secret of her hold over him.
Presently Lord Skene came down. His hand was shaking and his lips, as he spilt out a glass of wine and swallowed it.
“Pugsley asked him if he was saved,” he stuttered, “and he answered that he’d be damned if he wasn’t. There was no refuting that. Poor old Maurice!”
Presently he recollected himself, and begged his company to stand not upon the order of their going, but to acquit him of any suspicion that such an awful calamity had been imminent.
It was Mr Dalston who reassured and commiserated him in terms of the readiest and most delicate sympathy.
Sir Maurice Carnac died that night.
CHAPTER IX.
I VISIT CLAPHAM
On the second morning after its seizure, the body of the old ex-governor was carried away in a hearse to Footover Station, thence to be conveyed to its London home. I had avoided the house in the interval, being jealous of the least suggestion of intrusion; but I hung about the drive on the day of the removal, and threw a little spray of thyme upon the hearse as it passed. So much for a beggar’s remembrance! He had always accepted me fairly, old prosperous worldling as he was, on equal terms. Then I put him resolutely out of my thoughts, and went back to my hermitage, there to mature a little scheme of adventure which I had had in my mind ever since that moment when Mr Pugsley had confessed to me the theatre (presumptive) of a certain event in which I was interested.
An American humourist relates somewhere of a prisoner who had been confined for thirty years in a loathsome dungeon, when a bright idea struck him—he opened the window and got out. Now some such inspiration had seized me all in an instant. Why, in the name of perversity, was I eating my heart out in an aggrieved solitude, when simply at will I might be a traveller—a tentative explorer, at least—and be learning to ride my own destinies instead of being ridden by them? I had not yet sat, like the mythological gentleman, so long upon a rock that I had grown to it. I had means, and certainly at least a definite object in breaking into them. I would wing my test flight for that Clapham suburb which Pugsley had mentioned, and examine the ground there, at least, for subsequent exploiting.
A tingle of adventure was in this as well as a vengeful resolution. It would be something, after all, to breathe a novel air into my stagnant lungs. I had lived so long remote and self-contained, that the prospect of even a Cockney suburb was a prospect potential of romance to me. No one would note my absence, and, if anyone did, how would it concern me? I was free, and my own master.
And so, the very next morning, valise in hand, I strode away, walking determinedly, with no effort at concealment. I went out by the wicket, and took the road to Footover, and thence a train to Waterloo. I was young, green, gullible, no doubt; but a certain hardness of muscle and disposition was always at my service and that of others. Few minor mishaps of the way have befallen me through life, and I was early in expanding to the practical knowledge which overrides difficulties. I mention this merely to explain the ease with which my inexperience resolved these first small problems of self-dependence—my introduction to the roaring traffics of existence, to the wiles and hypocrisies of men. I spent that night at an hotel in the Waterloo Bridge Road; and my initiation into its ways profited me.
Early on the following day I walked through the seethe of the streets to the Victoria Station, and so, by the local service, reached Clapham Road. I will not say that I greeted this goal to my adventure, shapeless as that was, without a certain excitement and hurrying of the blood. Here, somehow and somewhere, had been enacted the prologue to my young unprofitable life. This same busy street, going up southward through a dull avenue of bricks and windows, had housed, perhaps, the germ of that secret, which, dark and poignant a one as it appeared to me, was nevertheless of the commonest breed of secrets all the world over. And, indeed, its setting here seemed prosy enough—monotonous, respectable, unlovely—houses built for the most part in the sober chocolate hue of a century earlier; staid rows of shops; moderate traffic of omnibuses passing back and forth—everything betokening a condition of decent prosperity.
But, coming presently into a sort of little open place or circus, where the single road split out into a fan of three, I was refreshingly struck by some more definite suggestion there of an atmosphere which had already thinly appealed to me. This atmosphere was faintly redolent of past coaching days. It breathed from the tavern doors of the old “Plough Inn,” about which were congregated a half dozen or so of the very legitimate descendants of Tony Veller, but fallen, alas! upon degenerate times. The omnibuses, which they drove in these, stood ranked, yellow and green and red, by the kerb. When any one of the loiterers, detaching himself rubicundly from his fellows, would mount a box, and gather the greasy ribbons into his gloved hands, a whiff of Henry Alken, of his coachmen and stable-tubs and ostlers, would seem irresistibly borne into one’s senses. So, too, the rows of white posts and rails, skirting that side of the common which made for Tooting (Tooting! What suggestion in the very word of windy horns and galloping mails!), seemed to carry one into far perspectives of dead and past adventure. It was this way—though I did not know it then—streamed the enormous traffic of the Derby week, a page snatched out of the Regency eld, and still keeping the gay characteristics of that reckless hard-drinking era. But now the road appeared peaceful enough—a sunny road skirting a great sunny common, where lazy gipsy men, of the true Romany Chal type, kept a paddock of donkeys for hire, and little rookeries of crazy tenements marked at intervals the camping-grounds of dead and gone squatters.
Perhaps it was the result of my reading, or of a purposeless sentiment, or of Fate—let it be what you will; but I was moved to take that road, in an easy sauntering mood. Its freedom, its inviting openness appealed to me. I am no believer in the divinity which hedges kings or exacts its wages of sin; but I am a believer in Luck. Luck is the only power, so it seems to me, who can reconcile the discordant claims of the creeds. Some men—most, one may say—pray to him in vain. I have an idea that he was the nameless, the unknown God of the Greeks.
And, no doubt, of his nature, it is fruitless to appeal to Luck. Perversity is his rule of Godhead—his rules prove the exception. He smiles not on his votaries, nor frowns on his maligners. Incuriousness about him is the only way—but by no means the inevitable one—to attract his notice. Whereby, I really think I became his casual protégé. In all these days my creed was never other than a creed of indifferent and independent fatalism—if to fatalism can be applied such a term of belief. In any case it was near enough to aggravate Luck into seeking to win me to his worship instead. He made a first tentative bid for my suffrage on the present occasion.
I had sauntered a half mile, perhaps, up this pleasant old coaching way, the open common, with its ponds and trees and gorse thickets, to my right hand, to my left a long rank of houses, comfortable, mellow, prosperous, having for the great part bushy gardens in front, when my eye was caught by vision of a cosy tavern, standing across the way in a copse of elm-trees, and bearing in its every appointment and circumstance the tokens of a vanished era. The little paddock of turf in front, planted with the sign of the “Windmill,” and having its own private posts and rails, round which the drive swept; the wooden horse trough; the brown of the walls and the gold and grass-green canvas hung up on them, inviting irresistibly to somebody’s “Entire”—here was the right Regency travellers’ rest-and-be-thankful. It was mild bright weather, and a water cart went by sprinkling up an aromatic scent of dust. I thought of beer, beer in a glass, amber and sparkling, with a kiss of foam at the lip, and I crossed the road to the tavern. And there, over its door, stuck up before my eyes, was the legend “Richard Gaskett, licensed dealer in beer, tobacco and spirits.”
A sort of catalepsy seized me, as I looked and gaped. The coincidence, of course, might be just a coincidence. Yet Gaskett was not what one might call an everyday name—and then Richard Gaskett, and to occur in this place of all places!
Suddenly the thought rushed into me, as if a plug had been taken out of my brain: “Gaskett! Was it, perhaps, after all, my mother’s maiden name, and my dishonoured grandfather a publican?”
Here, indeed, would be discovery, though not the most flattering possible to myself. I came out of my trance with a little gasp and giggle. “Noblesse oblige,” I thought again. “Very likely I am suited above all things to be a potman. But in any case I must set this at rest.”
I drove open the door of the private bar and entered. There was no one there but, behind the counter, a plump short man of the conventional Boniface type. He was a bleary, rather unctuous-looking fellow, with a mole near his mouth like a faded patch, an obvious wig (both suggesting anachronisms on an earlier date), and a snow-white apron bent about his portly form. He, also, it appeared, was in right succession from the Regency, though he might not have been more than sixty or so. I looked at him with a fearful speculation, as he lifted a pot or two to wipe the counter underneath. Was there a family likeness here? Who could say? Lady Skene was a teetotaller.
“Richard Gaskett,” I murmured, hardly articulate.
“That’s me,” he said, going on with his work.
“That’s me, too,” I said, snatching at resolution.
He glanced up a moment.
“O!” he said. “Then that makes three of us.”
“Three?”
“My name, your name—and the other chap’s,” said he. “I shouldn’t a’ thought it in reason, and all to happen here. But it seems it is. Now, sir?”
The last was an invitation to me to order something. He drew me my beer from an engine whose handle was worn from his oozy grip.
“Who is the other chap?” I asked him. “Do you mind telling me?”
“Why not?” he said, and crossed his legs and leaned one elbow on the counter, like a pottle-bodied Leicester Square Shakespeare.
“Leastways,” he continued, “I will and I won’t, and I can and I can’t, seeing as how he was christened, if he were, a matter of what—why it must be twenty year ago.”
“Who was christened?” I asked.
“The other one,” he answered. “Let me think now.”
He crossed and tapped together ruminative the fat forefinger of each hand, as if he were numbering up a score of notches in his memory.
“I misremember the exact date,” he said suddenly: “but the old lady she stands as clear as a Pepper’s Ghost in my mind. Mother Carey they called her; and she lived in White Square down there; and every morning, reg’lar as the postman, she’d come in here at eleven o’clock for her gill of gin and peppermint, like a very particler old duchess. She’d been on the stage in her time, I understood, and wasn’t to be put off with anything lower than the genuine London Old Tom. God bless me! How she comes back!”
He basked a little, in a glow of memory, before he continued luminously:
“I recollect the very day she bought it of me—just as plain I do as if it was print.”
“Bought what?” I ventured.
“My name, sir,” he said. “She come in here, as excited as Punch; and we got talking together. ‘Mr Gaskett,’ she says, ‘I want a name.’ ‘Well,’ I answers, ‘there’s plenty agoing for choice. What do you want it for?’ ‘For a babby,’ she says, ‘as hasn’t got one of his own.’ ‘O-ho!’ I says: ‘that’s the game is it? Well, shall I sell you mine for a pint?’ ‘Done,’ she says; and done it was. She’d a superstition, she said, about giving him one that wasn’t his by right of birth or purchase, and that settled the matter. I don’t know if he was christened that way. If he was, you’re the third; and that makes it funny.”
Not so odd, nevertheless, I thought, by two-thirds of its oddity, if the tremendous suspicion sprung suddenly into my mind were justified. But anyhow it was a certain relief to find that this beery Amphitryon was not my grandfather.
“And you—you never saw your godson, so to call him?” I asked.
“Not I,” said Mr Gaskett stoutly. “But, whoever he was, he might ha’ been worse called—that I will say. I never see the old lady again neither, and that fixes it in me. Now you yourself, sir. I suppose you was called after your father?”
I detected a sudden insolent curiosity in his eye. To be sure, what with my age and inquisitiveness, there seemed a certain coincidence here. But I kept my nerve, and put his question aside with another.
“Where is this White Square?”
“Down yonder,” he said coolly—“off the High Street. But she won’t be living there now.”
“Won’t she?” I answered, as coolly for my part. “But I don’t know that it matters to me whether she is or isn’t.”
“Nor to me,” said the landlord, moving away with a sudden repudiation of me and all my concerns. I had offended him, and was not sorry to have done so. He scowled at me balefully as I finished my beer and left the bar.
Once outside, I retraced my steps, with a very sombre mind. I had an overpowering suspicion that there was only one legitimate Richard Gaskett after all. The other two had been resolved into one, and he with nothing but a “pint-pot” claim to the title. Well, so far so good, at least, for romance. Luck had brought me something.
I strolled down again by way of the posts and the rails and the busy old-air circus. Going for a short distance down the High Street beyond, I encountered a policeman and questioned him.
“White Square?” said he; and wheeling stolidly, signified the very passage by which he was standing.
I looked down the gully curiously. It went, on a basis of trampled filth, into an open space a hundred yards beyond, whence came a sound of quarrelling women and squalling children.
“O!” I said. “Do you happen to know if a Mrs Carey lives there?”
He conned me a moment, as if speculating on my possible purpose in asking; then hailed authoritatively an ancient inhabitant who was at that moment shuffling up the lane.
“You, Mullins! Anybody of the name of Carey living in the Square?”
Mr Mullins leered up, fondling his hands obsequiously. The privileges of this Alsatia, it was evident, ended at the passage mouth. He was an obscene-looking old rascal, with a face like a half-blind sheep, and the gaunt framework of once powerful shoulders.
“Carey is it, sir?” said he—“Carey, your honour? I remimber a lady of the name. Mither Carey we’d be afther callin’ her; but she’s gone long sin.”
“When gone?” demanded the officer.
“It’ll be a matther of twinty year, maybe,” said the old man. “My mimiry’s bad.”
“That’s it,” I put in hurriedly, seeing the law about to protest. “It’s of her I want to know.”
Mr Mullins considered me astutely from under his lids. Honour amongst thieves, sure enough; but wasn’t there such a thing as a statute of limitations to the duties one owed? Besides, a reward might be in the air. I pride myself so far on my worldly precocity, that I tipped him, moderately, on the spot. The act refreshed his memory wonderfully.
“I recall she came into money, did the ould lady,” he said; “and tuk herself away. There was a daughter she’d be owning; a fine handsome girl, that had her throuble and married a lord despite. He saw her on the stage, twas said, a young jule of a thing, and lost his heart to her. But there was a parson in them days up at the tin chapel yander—Pugsley was his name, the heretic—and he made her religious—Musha! the scoundrel—and brought her ould lord to terms, and married them.”
He stopped, and covertly bit the coin I had given him to test it.
“And what became of the mother?” I asked, seeing that he proffered no more.
“She tuk herself arrf, your honour,” said he.
“You don’t know where?”
“No, by the powers, I don’t; and that’s the thruth,” he said; and indeed there could be no purpose in his lying.
Then I had only one other question to ask, and out it came:
“Do you remember who was her partner in that—that little trouble you mentioned?”
Mr Mullins leered horribly.
“There was quare tales,” he said—“I recollect that same. One would call him here, and another there; and a third would be whispering of a master in the Grammar School beyant. But that was just talking. Mother Carey could be close, when she wanted.”
“What was his name—the master’s?”
“It’s clane gone from me,” said Mr Mullins, blankly.
“One might trace it out at the school itself, perhaps?”
I turned to the policeman.
“Gone, too,” he said. “It was all closed before my time. There’s shops there now.”
So I was temporarily baffled; but, as, having invented something plausible to the men to account to them for my curiosity, I went on my way, I was taking a fierce oath in my heart that not stone nor briar, nor water nor fire should turn me now from a pursuit to which accident, or Luck if you like, had already hallooed me so promisingly. If this Mother Carey lived, she was my quarry. But where and how to find her!
CHAPTER X.
EDITORIAL
The mention of stone and quarry by Mr Richard Gaskett fits significantly enough here into the context of sinister events. They are to be found nowhere in more suggestive juxtaposition than in the island of Portland, where the great prison is.
One fair November morning the gates of this terrific stronghold were opened to discharge a time-expired convict. The man walked plump out of Hades into Elysium. Like many another expurgatus, he bore the scars of his cleansing indelibly printed on him. The governor of Hades, it must be remembered, fathered the Furies, and the business of the Furies is to lash, lash, irrespective of any consideration of moral deserts.
This prisoner had, for full twenty years, been persistently clamorous of his innocence—at first in Italian; later in Italian English; finally in a dialect hybrid of English and despair. He had forgotten his tongue, his personality, his meaning in the world: only the sense of a gigantic wrong remained with him.
For some time prior to his discharge he had been permitted to resume himself, to grow his hair and beard, so that he might never protest that he had been restored to existence a marked man. His hair and beard came white where they had been black; his face was the drawn grey face of an old man; he could resume nothing of his past whatever, not even that deadly conviction of injury, for that indeed had dwelt with him throughout. Save for it, he walked out of the gates reborn to age, not youth.
They had been glad enough to get rid of him. Even prison officialdom grows weary of kicking back into its kennel the caged and struggling wolf, so helplessly barred from his natural diet, and so naturally seeking an escape to it. This Antonio Geoletti had made more than one such attempt, and been ruinously flogged for it. He had suffered darkness, famine, solitary confinement, more than reason, his own or others, could comfortably consider; yet what was to be done with a man who could not be induced to accept an error of the law—if such, indeed, had been committed—with an accommodating philosophy? As a convict—which was solely how officialdom was called upon to regard him—he had been unspeakable—a very bad egg indeed. His good marks were nil; his livery of disgrace, when he was summoned to doff it, was still of the most conspicuous colour—the bright yellow which betokens the irreclaimable standard; it had been to the official discomfiture, no less than to his own, that his conduct had obliged the law to exact of him his full term of punishment. And in the end, the only profit was his: he crept out of Hades an unticketed man, free to pursue, unwatched, the solitary purpose that survived to him—vengeance on the authors of his unheard-of sufferings.
The question remained, were those beings still in being? Antonio never even put that question to himself. Vengeance is timeless. For all those twenty years of elsewise obliteration, the lust for it was as red in him at this day as when he had heard himself convicted on false evidence of a heinous offence, and had vainly striven, a foreigner and incoherent, to explain to the Court the real purport of a villain’s traducing. He could not believe for an instant that the God of his superstition had let the work of his legitimate hands be anticipated by another. No; the men remained to him somewhere. Only to find them!
I do not ask your sympathy for this Antonio Geoletti. If he had been convicted unjustly, he had been purposing a crime at the moment which merited a just conviction. He may have got his deserts indirectly; though, to be sure, there was no automatic standard for apportioning its exact term of punishment to either offence. The measures of the law are not even comparative measures, and many men all over the land are suffering under widely different sentences for a like crime. Only, self-consciousness of one evil-doing does not reconcile one to punishment for an imaginary other. That is human nature; and for all the moral purposes of this record, Antonio felt himself the divinely commissioned, though long wickedly withheld, minister of retribution. But at last his time was come.
It was the sense, the indelible haunting of this obligation which upheld him through all the terrific experience of his first re-emergence into the arena of living things. The pale November sunlight smote upon his eyes like the blast from a sudden-opened furnace; the speech of free people struck him as almost a sacrilege, being uttered unconcerned in this boundless temple of God’s own liberty; he blinked and staggered like a disentombed miner.
The prison frowned behind him; the island with its quarries smiled before. How often had he cursed those indurate blocks, symbols of the system to which he appealed in vain—thrown down his ringing tools upon them in a monstrous rage of helplessness, and turned to find a warder’s gun barrel at his head! Now they lay in the mist as soft as fairy bales, all their sinister weight drawn out of them, objects potentially suggestive of the noble fabrics in which each was to have its place. He heard a robin singing, and his eyes came wet with tears. Sobbing, God help him, like a woman, and always, and never changing, with that dream of blood in his heart, he crept out into the world.
How beautiful a thing it was, apart from its people! He had forgotten how soft the sunlight lay on it, how green the grass could grow, how fathomless was the blue of heaven. Limit and close obstruction were all he had known for so long. Even the daily tramp to the quarries had entailed a guard on speech and sight. Now he was free to gaze to drunkenness; to sing, if he would.
Yet it was a world no newer to him relatively than when he had last left it a double decade ago. He had not awakened like Rip Van Winkle to the repossession of his own. It was England the strange island which, in those far-distant days, he had scarcely crossed the Channel to see, and exploit, before he had been caught into the toils of its inexplicable laws, and put away to rage out his heart in an age-long confinement for a crime which he had never committed. Once, he recalled, he had been an astute Piedmontese rascal, a guide and porter at an hotel in the High Alps, who had suddenly, in bad times, elected to travel, with the purpose to sell to a certain person a certain secret, of which Fortune had made him the possessor. That was all done with; only the sense of the blood-lust, of the inherent vendetta, existed to identify him with that old Antonio Geoletti.
For the rest, he had seen so little of this England, that a twenty years’ hiatus in its history made no difference to him whatever. It was no stranger to him now than it had been then. He had found useful compatriots in it; he would find them, or others like them, again. One or two he had encountered in the course of his long punishment. He had their approximate addresses, and the addresses of a score of English “pals”—scoundrels, whose sympathies had naturally gravitated towards one who had not only been imprisoned for breaking the law, but who had broken over and over again the laws of imprisonment.
But he did not need these at present. One and all he dismissed them from his mind. To seek any out would be, he knew, to attract the attention of the police to himself. And he desired only to steal away and be forgotten—to pursue, unobserved and unsuspected, the single deadly purpose which haunted his soul. White, haggard, unmanned in all else but this, he might, as he stole on his way, have passed for the very personification of an inhuman Nemesis.
In his hugging and caressing of his monomania, it occurred to him presently that Fate had at least vouchsafed to him one compensation for his sufferings. They had disguised him effectively from recognition by his enemies. Who would think to identify this grizzled time-worn beast with the vigorous rogue who had been haled from the dock to a living death? He wondered sometimes that his enemies had never foreseen this crisis to their villainy—late, but inevitable in its arrival. Yet perhaps they had foreseen it, and calculated contemptuously upon the thousand possible accidents of time, or at least upon the taming influence of penal servitude. If that were so, that were well. He would not for all the world have his purpose suspected or provided against. Craft—a patient, unsleeping, unobtrusive craft—must guide all his footsteps henceforth.
He had some money in his pocket, hardly earned, but still in human justice not withheld. The last thing they wanted was to see him back at Portland. He would nurse every penny of it as if it were a jewel. Beyond this he had his railway ticket to London. It was there he wanted to go, he had said, and thither they had sent him. But not to Soho: no more of Soho for him!
* * * * * * * *
One wintry afternoon, a certain doctor came striding back from his rounds to his house in Doddington Grove, Kennington. It was a highly respectable street, with substantial dwellings on either side, and a double plantation of lime-trees on the pavement in front to justify to the world its title. The doctor was of a brisk, impatient manner, and he opened his door with a latch-key as if the second the act lost him were a second made unprofitable. Once inside, he turned up the gas in the hall—it was foggy twilight without—and hurriedly examined a slate, for engagements made during his absence. While he was reading, hat on head, his housemaid appeared.
“There’s a man waiting in the consulting-room, sir,” she said.
The doctor nodded, pondered a case or two, put the slate down, and went to his visitor.
“Hey!” he barked. “What’s your name?”
The man, who had risen on his’ entrance, stood motionless before him, his left hand pressed heavily upon his right, which, thickly bandaged, it seemed, he held against his chest. The fingers of the exposed hand were scarred and stunted; the face of the man was grey and rigid as a corpse’s—showing a grin of teeth, too; only the eyes in the face were piercingly alive like a crouching cat’s. He muttered something inaudible.
“What!” snapped the doctor. “Speak out. I can’t hear you.”
Again the stranger murmured.
“Hey!” said the doctor testily. “Can’t you speak louder? What is it? An accident—something the matter with your hand?”
He was of a quick nervous temperament, and harassed with much business. The figure before him was decent and respectable enough, but quite uneloquent of any sumptuary promise. And time with him meant money. He was opening his lips to speak again, and pretty summarily, to finish, when something in the stranger’s aspect, or attitude, arrested him. In an instant he had leapt, and, after a brief vicious struggle, had wrenched a knife from the man’s right hand. The apparent bandage on that had merely covered, it seemed, a deadly purpose. Geoletti, disarmed, stood quivering slightly, but otherwise impassive.
“I see,” said the doctor softly—“I see.” Watchful of the other, he glanced at the blade he had secured. It was a waspish sting of a thing, keen-tempered, folding into a handle which, when needed, became a hilt.
“Meant for me?” he inquired, lifting his brows. When bearded by a patient, he became frost and whipcord.
“No, no—not.” The words were spoken low, but distinct enough at last.
“For whom, then?”
The tip of Geoletti’s tongue travelled between his lips. He was evidently trying to master the reaction from a tremendous strain, and at the same time to find speech to lay the suspicion of any.
“For no one—no, that is the truth,” he whispered out at length.
The doctor tapped the blade in his hand peremptorily.
“A lie! Have you ever seen me before?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been to this house before?”
He dismissed the coming denial with a flick of his hand. His sharp merciless penetrativeness had its instant effect. The Italian responded to it automatic, like a close echo to the tap of a drum.
“Have you?”
“Yes.”
“When? How long ago?”
“Twenty year.”
The doctor was always one of those lucky downright people, who, quite scornful of the laws of defamation when they find a man meriting their chastisement, go through life speaking their minds with impunity.
“That was when my predecessor lived here,” he said shortly. “He was a drunken blackguard and worse—a disgrace to his calling. It has taken me fifteen years to build up a practice on the ruins of his infamy. His name was Blague. Was it him you knew?”
“Yes.”
“And meant to knife?”
“Yes.”
“I daresay. What had he done to you?”
The stranger’s eyes seemed suddenly to roll in his head. He clasped his hands convulsively to his breast. Words come from him in a broken stream:
“It was in this ver’ room—yes. I arrive by appointiment to meet wonn ozer—a zhentleman, yes, that I want to see—ver’ much I want to see him. I have a little word I wish to spik to him; and he send me message to com’ here, and he will follow to me. He not arrive when I arrive—no. I told to wait for him in zis room; and still it is a long time, and he not come. Zen presently there enter a yong woman, a paziente of Blague, and he shut us in togezer; and all quite sudden she begin to scream and tear herself. Then Blague he rush in, and I am accuse; and the coppar he com’ and drag me to the stazione, and I am accuse; and again before the judge I am accuse. And I try to spik the truth of what I com’ to Blague’s house for, and I am told it nozzing—no bearing on the case whatever, except it show me bad character. And the yong woman she swear against me—lies, lies, all; and I sent to prison for twen-ty year—for twen-ty year I sent. Zen I know zat Blague and ze zhentleman make zis op togezer, so to get rid of me; and I swear vengeance on zem. For twen-ty year though I wait, it sall com’ at last.”
The doctor was shutting up the dagger-knife very coolly as he listened.
“Not to one of them, at least, my friend,” he said. “Blague’s been dead of the horrors this ten years, and a good riddance to him.”
“Dead!”
The word seemed to stun the man.
“Yes, dead.”
“And ze ozer?”
“I know nothing of him, and don’t want to know.”
“His name——”
“I don’t wish to hear it. That’ll do. Here, take back your knife.”
Geoletti received the weapon in silence.
“You no help me?” he said presently in a slow voice.
“Certainly not. I become no party to this business. Besides, what were you here for?—blackmail it smells like. I daresay you got your deserts. Now be off with you.”
He made a rapid step, opened the door, and imperiously beckoned the man out. Geoletti, after a moment’s hesitation, stole softly into the hall, and disappeared thence into the fog.
“H’m,” thought the doctor, returning: “victim or not, there’s been black work there. I shouldn’t grudge that knife, I think, in the ribs of one of Blague’s confederates. Like as not he’ll get it; but I’ve neither business nor inclination to interfere. So far as I’m concerned, the matter’s ended.”
* * * * * * * * *
There was a board “To Let” up before a certain house in Eaton Square. Both the board, and the house which it advertised, appeared particularly decayed and out of repair. There were even windows broken in the latter; and what with its dingy walls, and flaking stucco, and the vision of a wrecked venetian blind or two dropping forlorn slats across the inner obscurity, the house looked actually frowsy for such a neighbourhood. Thither one morning came Geoletti and stealthily examined the legend painted on the board. “Apply to Foot & Liddel, Poultry,” he read with difficulty; and straightway, or as direct as persistent inquiry and answer could help him, betook himself to the house agent’s offices in the city. He was about to enter, when his hand on the varnished door caught his attention. After an instants thought, he withdrew, bought and donned a pair of cheap woollen gloves from a shop hard by, and returned to the swing doors.
A clerk at the broad counter within accepted him with an encouraging courtesy. It was the rule at Foot & Liddels. On the principle that dirt may hold much gold in solution, unexpected affluence was often found in the most unpromising-looking customers. Grubbiness, in consequence, was no bar to the firm’s affability. The youngest employé could quote of his knowledge the instance of a would-be client, who had shed fleas on the order-book all the time he was cheapening a marble mansion in Park Lane. He had had a nose like a tapir’s, and might have been held for a first example of gold dust in deposit, if he had exhibited any sign whatever of its ever having been washed out of him.
Geoletti asked if he might have an order to view the house in Eaton Square, and was answered, “Certainly,” by the polite young gentleman whom he accosted. Here, probably enough to the auctioneering view, was one of those self-made contadini, who, like the Brothers Gatti, had turned, in the profitable processes of time, a little ice-cream shop into a gilded and bemarbled saloon. Moreover the house in Eaton Square had for long, and for some inexplicable reason, remained a drug in the market. It would be a good stroke of business to let it to an Italian parvenu.
Geoletti, being asked for his name and address, gave both glibly, without a hint of premeditation. He was Antonio Geoletti of Portland; a quarry master, he said. Not the shadow of a chuckle in himself answered to this espièglerie as he received his ticket. He looked across steadily at the young gentleman.
“Who own ze house? Who it belong to?” he asked.
“There is no tenant there at present,” said the clerk. “A Mr Dalston is the landlord.”
“Yes, yes,” said the Italian, a trifle too eagerly. “Can I see him—ze landlord—personally?”
The clerk became a little cold.
“We act for him, sir. You can approach him through us.”
“Ah! Zen he live—som’wheres near?”
“I am not at liberty to give his address. We are in a confidential position in these matters. If you like to write, we will forward your letter with pleasure.”
Again baffled!
Geoletti considered gloomily: then shook his head.
“Wait, while I see ze house,” he said; and walked off with his order. It directed him, for the key, to a caretaker on the opposite side of the Square. The woman offered to come with him; but he insisted on being alone. It was with a queer fury of the blood that he mounted the unwashed steps, and prepared to enter the deserted house.
The door, stuck to its lintel from disuse, snapped open with a dusty jar. Turning as he closed it, Geoletti saw an addressed letter lying among a litter of circulars and advertisements on the floor. He took it up, and read its superscription—M. Dalston, Esq., Eaton Square, London. Was there a possible way here to the knowledge he desired? Pondering a few moments, he suddenly woke to action, left the house, closing the door behind him, and, with the letter, found his way to the nearest post office.
“I find zis behind ze door—zere,” said he, pointing to the address on the envelope.
The clerk, who received the letter from him, glanced from it to him and back again suspiciously.
“Don’t understand,” he said. “Where did you find it?”
“Zere,” said Antonio. “I go, wiz an order, to view an empty ’ouse, and zis have fall through the letter-box.”
The clerk whispered with another, nodded understandingly, and threw the letter on a shelf.
“All right” he said. “Should have been readdressed,” and prepared to go on with his work. That, one might say, was the post-office servant all over.
Antonio, patient and unoffended, essayed a hopeless question.
“Should be readdress?” he asked. “To where, zen?”
The clerk sniggered aloud to his next companion, a young lady, one of the newly emancipated sisterhood with a nose already above her station.
“That’s not your business,” said she. “We’ll see to it,” and the two ignored him ostentatiously.
Baffled again, and yet again!
Geoletti went back to the house. This time he made a thorough examination of it. It appeared just a repository for old dust and echoes. The only living things that inhabited there were mice and spiders; and what they thrived upon the Lord knew. The nozzles of the scullery taps were thick with brassy scum; the edges of the broken window-panes were yellow and blunted with the weather; there was an acrid deserted smell about everything. It was a large house, a property suggestive of handsome returns to its landlord; yet the atmosphere of it seemed costive with uninhabitableness. There are many such places in London, which, having every apparent advantage of position and accommodation, fail and fail to find a tenant. Certain ghosts, perhaps, are their bodiless caretakers; and these may resent the intrusion of their possible ousters. They do not want the scent of their hauntings crossed by lovelier and more desirable spirits.
Antonio went wandering, with a dull half aimlessness, up and down. Presently, in a small ground-floor room to the rear, his foot kicked against some paper. He wrenched up the rusty bar of the shutters, and let in a flood of squalid light.
The thing he had encountered was a torn catalogue. He stooped and secured it. It was a thickish quarto of flimsy paper, a long dictionary of houses, many illustrated with plates, advertised for sale or lease by the firm of Foot & Liddel.
A hope gripped him. Rapidly and hungrily, moistening his right-hand second finger, he swept over the pages. Suddenly, a mark arrested his eager review of them. It was pencilled against an entry, describing a property, the Lone Farm, situated in the neighbourhood of Market Grazing, Hampshire. The place was described as desirable, and cheap. Geoletti looked all round the room, noted its time-stained paper and ragged skirting, and came back to the catalogue. Then, very carefully and comprehensively, he went through the whole book page by page, and convinced himself that there was no other marked entry whatever.
Very jealously, then, he extracted the page containing this solitary clue, folded, and put it into the pocket which contained his folded knife. Two secret things, potential, possibly, of retribution. There was at least the hope.
He went quietly about the house, effacing every sign of his examination; then passed out into the street, crossed the Square, and returned the key to its custodian.
Thenceforth he was seen no more in London.
CHAPTER XI.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
When I got back to my woodland hermitage—which I regained, as I had foreseen I should, without my absence from the house having excited any comment—I put up, in a little frenzy of mockery, an altar to the God of Luck. I drew a picture of a clergyman (Mr Pugsley it was meant for) christening a baby out of a pint pot, and turning to demand of a villainous old pew-opener (my imaginary presentment of Mother Carey), who stood beside, the infant’s proposed title. The question, within a scroll, issued from his lips, and the answer—“Richard Gaskett, godson of the publican of that name”—from hers. I had bought in Footover, on my way back, a bottle of gin and one of peppermint essence; and these I clasped round with a single label bearing the motto “In vino veritas,” and stood them on a little table underneath the drawing, which I nailed to the wall. No one but Miss Christmas—barring my stepfather on a rare occasion—had ever invaded, or was like to invade, my snuggery; and, if anyone did, I was reckless about consequences. Then I sat down to consider, over a pipe, my present position and gains.
These amounted to something at least. The discovery that my mother, and my mother’s mother (I could hardly bring myself to acknowledge the old bibulous harpy for my grandmother) had both been on the stage; the discovery that their name was Carey; the discovery that the elder had “come into money”—been pensioned off, belike, by Lord Skene—and that the younger had “found religion” at the hands of Mr Pugsley of the tin tabernacle—all these little enlightenments and confirmations made a certain definite “grounding,” on which I might hope to embroider that web which should catch Lady Skene’s feet tripping. True, the main object of my venture was not realised. Yet even there Luck was shaping me out a promise. An usher at the Grammar School!—that villain who had taken base advantage of a poor ingénue’s warmth over his reformation! It was as much in reason as anything else. That a pedagogue could be something less than immaculate, quote Eugene Aram, not to speak of the Stockwell schoolmaster who chopped up his wife and put her in a box. But, whether it were a pedagogue or his pupil, a learned Theban or a scented puppy, I was confident that time, served by cunning and caution, would betray him to me soon or late. I had learned much already; and knowledge is always an investment which pays itself automatically at compound interest.
Nor were my discoveries the only profit I had brought back from my journey. A firmer confidence in myself; a more obdurate determination; a certain newly realised sense of humour—these were to be included in the gains. I felt a reinvigorated sense of mastery, a larger grasp of the world; I felt an insolent sense of security in Luck’s favouritism; I felt somehow like a weasel that watches a rickyard from cover. How I could make the rats squeal and run if once I elected to show myself in the open! I was in a very detestable humour, that is the truth.
On the morning after my return I took a long stroll round about the skirts of the estate, beginning with the “bare ruined choirs” of the woodlands, and coming round by Hags Lane, where the hawthorns had been stripped stark by the wrecking winds. Winter, with all its moan and mystery, shivered upon the air; the sheep on the pastures seemed to crop, with haunted ears pricked to it; there was a stiffness as of dread expectation over all the land.
To the many figures which danced and crowded into my mind throughout that lonely tramp, the figure of the girl whom I had hated and scorned would sometimes, my scorn despite, add itself. It even became, all at once, a persistent demon, thrusting itself forward, pleading for a monopoly of my attention. An impudent, outrageous claim. What was the creature to me, or I to her, in this play of “leading parts”? My concern was with the real actors and actresses—not with the skipping figurante, who came to fill the interludes of scene-shifting. This Ira, good Lord, of the Hebraic name! Was she a “watcher,” as her name implied? Perhaps she was; perhaps—all in an instant the thought struck me: what if she were Lady Skene’s spy—the agent of a guilty conscience, deputed to discover the reasons for my withdrawal from its control?
The thought was so sudden, so ineffable, that it made me gasp. She had been down to my lodge during my absence, that I knew. The signs of her woman’s handiwork there were unmistakable. I will even admit that my instant recognition of them had given me an odd little thrill, compound of triumph and something like pity. That she should have continued true to her principles of expiation, though I was not there to witness, had gone some little way towards forcing from me a grudging belief in her sincerity. But now!—if there was all the time a method in her humility!
On the thought, the memory of my altar came into my mind. Had I been already fool enough, in my boasted emancipation, to give my case away to a spy? I hurried, with all speed, back to my den—and there was the girl standing before the picture.
She had on a blue-sprigged apron with a tucker. A broom was in her hand, and her furs and jacket were thrown upon a chair. She turned round instantly upon hearing me, and her face flew pink with some sudden emotion.
“Richard!” she said, pointing to the caricature. “What on earth is the meaning of that?”
“Go on with your work,” I answered savagely. “I shouldn’t have come back if I’d known you were here.”
She bit her underlip, but obeyed at once. I sat down, watching her morosely from under my lids as she swept, and dusted, and laid the cloth for lunch—all silently. Then I called her to me.
“Come here.”
She left the table and stood before me.
“Kneel down.”
She knelt at my feet, looking up, and panting a little. I took her soft chin in my hand; and she did not move; and I kept her so, glaring into her young eyes.
“You are very loyal to Lady Skene, are you not?” I said. “You told me so, you know.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Were you instructed by her to take this means to come and spy on me?”
“No. How could you think it!”
“If you cry, I shall turn you out at once. You aren’t watching me, then, to find out what I’m up to?”
“No, indeed.”
“Why do you come here?”
“I’m so sorry for you.”
“Is that all?”
“And so anxious to earn your pardon.”
“You needn’t worry yourself about that. I don’t take the tricks of such midges as you into my philosophy.”
“But you haven’t forgiven me.”
“I don’t consider you at all. Are you offering to cry again?”
“No, I’m not—I’m not really.”
“Well, what did you make of that picture?”
“Nothing whatever.”
“Its a picture of my christening—the christening of Richard Gaskett. I got my name out of a pint pot. That old woman’s my grandmother. She’s fond of gin and peppermint; that’s why I put the bottles underneath. You know I’ve been away?”
“Yes.”
“Well, my journey was useful to me. I found out things. Would you like to go and tell Lady Skene about the picture, or do I come first in your loyalty?”
“You do.”
Her answer took me like a sting, sweet and piercing. I don’t know what madness, what revolt was in my blood; but I bent down suddenly and kissed her lips. And then, having done it, the instant revulsion came, and I thrust her rudely from me. She sank back, sitting on her heels, and hid her face in her hands.
“There, go!” I cried, jumping to my feet. “I took that, not for myself, but—damn it! don’t you know that Lord Skene disapproves of your coming here? I told him you came by your own will, not mine; and if your will isn’t his, he can just look after his own. But you take the risk of any consequences if you come. I warn you, I’m master here, and I kiss or ill treat whom I choose. Do you understand? You’re a ‘unique young party’ according to him, and you’ve been kissed by the grandson of that old pottle-pot yonder. How do you like the thought? You’ve bound yourself slave to something worse than you expected, haven’t you! But I’ll manumit you. Take your furs and go, before you find out how dangerous I can be! Do you hear? Go, while there’s time!”
I was half beside myself with rage and scorn for my act. I had never in all my life kissed woman before, and this first fierce contact smote me like a blasphemy against my clean youth. Nor had I had in my mind at the moment a thought of all that rage of justification for my deed which had afterwards suggested itself. It had been just the leap of a mad impulse, born of the girl’s soft and emotional submission. And, having torn that unresisting flower, I was ashamed.
I went and leaned against the mantelshelf and turned my eyes from her. She did not rise at once; but presently I heard her go and take her things from the chair. Then, somehow, I hoped that she would dwell just the little minute necessary for putting them on. I suppose the bully’s instinct is always to keep by him the thing he has just injured, perhaps in the sneaking hope that it will justify in some way his brutality to himself. He hates the frightened thing for trying to escape from him, silently and tremblingly after the deed.
But Miss Christmas did not linger that minute. She swept up her jacket and furs, as I knew by the sound, and ran with them out into the cold. A wild impulse to stride and stop her surged up in me. I even followed her footsteps into the passage; but there I checked myself, and flung to the open door with a resounding slam that must have caught her heart for a moment. Then I went back to my room, biting a savage curse between my teeth.
I was furious with myself; furious with the girl; furious with the means I had seized to misrepresent my feelings towards her. Why had she put herself in my way, just to awaken the beast in me? She had no proper pride of womanhood; and, if for that only, was beneath my notice. And yet I had kissed her—why? because I despised her; and all the time the fragrance of that contact hung on my lips like a sweet poison.
I could eat no lunch, I was so angry and disturbed. And all the afternoon I sat idly with a book, affecting to read, but seeing nothing on the page. Dusk came on, and with it sharp squalls of wind and sleet that brought the dead leaves whirling about my windows. My fire had gone out, and I sat and shivered, not finding the energy to relight it. It grew uncanny sitting there in the white gloom, not a living soul within a half mile of me, the deep and sodden woodland all around. The storm, with its loaded flakes, rushed upon the glass in swoops and charges; and, when it fell back, I always seemed to hear a small and urgent whisper rallying it. Sometimes, I felt tinglingly, it would burst in, and then—what would come with it! And at that very instant, glancing up, I saw a face pressed against the glass.
It had risen, swiftly and silently, like death in the night—a horrible sinister face, I thought it, in the first shock of discovery. The eyes were searchingly alive; the upper lip was lifted, showing the teeth; the mist of its breath shrank and dilated on the pane as the wind took it. I held my own, staring in a sort of awful trance. The eyes in the motionless head whipped to and fro, as if hurrying to penetrate and devour the substance of the room’s every shadow. Fortunately the one in which I sat was too dense for their resolving. I congratulated myself on my dead hearth, though, for whatever reason, I was shivering all through. But over and over again the eyes passed me by, and I knew that I was not yet discovered.
And then suddenly they were gone, and I heard stealthy steps coming round by the door; and I rose quietly, with a shamefaced oath for my cowardice, and waited to see what would happen. Reassurance as to the human nature of the apparition had broken all the spell; and now I feared nothing but to be balked of recognition in my turn.
The man tried the door, gently but unavailingly, for I had bolted it, and then in a moment I heard him going away through the woodland. At that I stole upstairs, and, peering warily from my bedroom window, made out his figure pressing up the path towards the “Baby’s Garden.” And even in that first glance I recognised him. It was the man Dalston, who had been of the company on the night of old Carnac’s seizure.
I stuck there a little, smitten with astonishment. What on earth was the fellow doing here, prying, and using the place as if it were his own? Then, too, I had not on that one occasion read into his face any such suggestion of evil—naked and incontinent—as it had seemed to convey to me through the window. On the contrary, it had appeared a fine and handsome face, bold, if bold at all, with the natural self-reliance of a favoured worldling. But, no doubt, my overwrought fancy was to account for the present impression.
It could not account, however, for his presence here—or could it? An idea, half whimsical, half stunning, seized me. I had heard of plausible rogues imposing themselves on quiet neighbourhoods, insinuating themselves into the leading society, and then, their plans having matured, disappearing with the plate and family jewels of Lord this or Sir thingummy that. Was it possible that Mr Dalston was such an impostor? His quiet arrival in the district; his renting of that remote uncanny farm; his strange silent wife—or accomplice; finally the vision of him here, stealing up through the woods—for what? All these things smote me with a double edge of suspicion. Possibly he was even now on his way to examine the house with a view to its burglarious entry. Whatever the extravagant thought was worth, it decided me. In another instant I was down and on his heels. The wind and the flying sleet, no less than my long experience of the way, served me well. He had no suspicion, I felt sure, of the shadow creeping in his wake, slipping from tree to tree, taking advantage of every shriller whine of the squall to decrease the distance between itself and its quarry.
He went up unhesitating towards the “Baby’s Garden,” though often having to battle his way with his head down; and having reached there, came to a halt, leaning against a tree. And in the same moment I had slipped undetected into my eyrie of espial in the withered ash.
He was then so close to me that I could hear him panting from his hard ascent. But even with our arrival the squall had passed, and the little close pleasance was full of nothing but cold dripping sounds. That was my Luck again. It had muffled me in wind and rain while I needed privacy, and withdrawn them only when I needed nothing but clear hearing and clear vision.
Now I had leisure to wonder how, if secret watching were his business, this Mr Dalston made no nearer approach to the house, which, indeed, stood nowhere within the range of this part of the garden. But he showed no intention of moving farther, and, for all the wet crust of snow under his feet, established himself serenely where he stood, flicking his boot with his cane, and breathing softly into the air a little sentimental ditty about moons and lagoons. And then, all of a sudden, the figure of a woman had appeared on the opposite side of the garden, and, after a moment’s hesitation, was coming hurrying towards him.
Now, at that, I was not, at the first, so shocked as amused, because, it seemed, I had been stalking for a burglary what appeared to be just a vulgar tryst. But what was my astonishment upon discovering, on its nearer approach, that the figure was that of Lady Skene.
The man did not move at all until she was close upon him; and then he only detached himself a step or two from his support, and laughed gently as he gave his boot a harder switch.
“Well answered, Georgie!” he said in his soft voice.
She shrank back from him, clutching her fingers into the shawl which she held over her face and bosom. I could see that she was deathly white.
“Not that—no!” she whispered, as if half choking. “What right have you?”
“I should really be the last to insist on it,” he said. “You know my easy good nature, I congratulate you on your position with all my heart; and should never think of crossing your legitimate title to it, unless——”
“Unless what?” she said with difficulty, seeing he prolonged the pause wickedly.
“Unless you oblige me to, that’s all,” he said.
Now though she had been, as I considered, an inhuman mother to me, to see her, so obviously and so amazingly, held at the mercy of this man, filled me with a rage of fury. Not he, nor anyone but myself, I thought, should have the right or the power to exact retribution of her. If I hated her, I already hated him with a tenfold violence. What title had he to come between me and my vengeance?
“Why,” she cried, with one little broken note of protest, which she instantly subdued, as if knowing its uselessness, “have you come into my life again?”
“I am really sorry,” he said. “It became necessary, that’s all. I wouldn’t otherwise for the world have disturbed this dream of evangelical and aristocratic peace in which your soul has so long found its security from troublesome memories. But the plain truth is I had to look you up. It’s a vulgar confession; but I want money.”
“I thought—I heard—you married it.”
“My charmer, I did. But love, though a perpetual investment in itself, is far from guaranteeing the immaculateness of its brokers. From one of Mrs Dalston’s we suffered shattering losses. Nothing throughout our married life, in fact, has prospered with us. The heir I longed for has been persistently denied me” (a momentary emotion seemed to shake his voice; but he gripped and stilled it); “our house in London, heavily mortgaged as it is, refuses for some inexplicable reason to let; we have come down, down, down. Why this should be so, in the designs of a just but inscrutable Providence, I cannot pretend to explain. Our deserts have not been less than most men’s; our sins like others may be called the natural fruit of circumstance. At this moment, I am ashamed to say, I have not positively the wherewithal to meet a bill, which, dishonoured within the week, will ruin me. I speak most, of course, of the moral wreck which will result. To you, knowing you as I do, that will serve for my paramount appeal.”
“How much do you want?”
He seemed to ignore her question for the moment intentionally. It was his policy to specify at its fullest value his claim on her. That must amount inevitably, as I foresaw, to his possession of the very secret which I had made, as I thought, my own. He knew somehow that she had been no widow when she had married Lord Skene; and, indeed, his next words proved the justice of my surmise.
“Compare our positions,” said he. “Here am I—as I have described. Here are you—started from exactly similar premises—the mistress of all, or nearly all, that your heart could desire—a fortune, a title, an unsullied reputation; the respect of a noble husband, the love of a beautiful child—born in wedlock, too, that holy institution, and destined in the future to regard his mother as the pure fount of honour.”
She gave a sudden little cry.
“Why won’t you say? What do you want of me?”
But still he would drive the anguish home.
“And to think,” he went on steadily, “that one little word from me could shatter at a blow all this elaborate fabric of respectability! It must necessarily have a value, that word—a high value, if the truth must be spoken.”
“I have nothing of my own. You know it.”
“I know it, my dear girl, as surely as I know that you are wedded to a man who has always been as lavish a spouse as he promises to be an infatuated father. He would not question, I think, for his own and his heir’s sake, the morality of your keeping his eyes sealed.”
“You will not speak it. We are not as rich as you think.”
“Well suggested, Georgie—I really beg your pardon. But we are quite remote here. That’s why I ventured to suggest the place for a rendezvous, after your husband, on the afternoon I called here, had shown me over his estate. A very pretty legend, and a very pretty setting for it—the ‘Baby’s Garden’! and very aptly named for our interview.”
She fell back a little, holding her hand to her forehead terribly; seeming to speak to herself.
“After all, it is only your word against mine.”
“Well, not quite,” he said—“not quite. Aren’t you forgetting Mother Carey?”
She stared at him, gulping once or twice.
“I never lose sight,” he said, “of possible witnesses to my interests. It’s not been to those to lay that dear old ghost of our past, though you would seem to have thought it to yours. A bad policy, child. Do you even know if she is living or dead? You should, if you were wise. But I can see you don’t. An undutiful daughter, to be sure. But she’s living, Georgie—I don’t even mind telling you where. She’s living down in Lambeth—in Old Paradise Street, bless her appropriate quarters—and always ready to testify, at her reasonable price. She’s degenerated into something of a miser, too, I understand, and hoards her ill-gotten gains. How do I know? Why, through some lawyers, my dear, friends of mine, who happen to pay her one of her little quarterly stipends of hush-money. (You, I believe, compromised with her for a lump sum—again a poor policy.) O, you may take my word for it! and do what you like with the information. Lady Skene, I think, will hardly rush to establish her claim to that connection. And, even if she did, I’ve means of controlling Mother Carey. What if I say three hundred pounds?”
“You shall have it.”
“So I supposed. Then we’ll say five hundred.”
“Ruin me, if you will.”
“Hush, my dear! What an inference! To esteem me capable of such a blind villainy! You’re still a very beautiful woman, Georgie.”
“Will you leave me now?”
“It would be safer, perhaps. God bless you, Georgie!”
He was going, when she ran to him and touched him for the first time. I could see her little shoes, frail and delicate, sopped by the frozen slush.
“Your wife!” she said hoarsely. “Is she your accomplice?”
He started and turned round; and, on the instant, his face was like a devil’s.
“Leave her out of this,” he said low and fierce, “if you value your soul. She’s innocent—as innocent as heaven, I tell you. If——”
He broke off—seemed to make a menacing gesture, and again was going. And again she stopped him.
“Not that way!”
He was himself directly.
“Why not? It’s private. It’s the way I came.”
“The way!” she said, choking. “Do you know who lives down there?”
He laughed.
“I make it my business to know everything. Perhaps you don’t know that he’s away for the moment—gone to take a trip on his own account. Boys will grow up. Rest satisfied, I made sure of his not being there as I came by the lodge.”
Then she stepped back, and I heard him going lightly down the path into the Caddle. And presently she turned, and, pulling her shawl about her face, moved towards the house, but suddenly stumbled and stood swaying.
My heart beat as if it would break. “Mother, mother!” I whispered in an agony, “why don’t you ask for me—trust me—love me!”
But in a moment she recovered herself, cold, self-willed spirit as she was, and went off quietly through the trees.
CHAPTER XII.
AN ODD RECOGNITION
I was so stunned, so amazed by this sudden and utterly unexpected turn of events, that, for a time, only a monstrous sense of indignation could make room for its consideration in my brain. That another should be found to have a title equal with mine, and a knowledge obviously greater, to claim those preserves of retribution which I had considered my exclusive property, was sufficiently disturbing; that I should be brought to realise how, to all the intents and purposes of this inquisition, I was suddenly confessed the confederate, the mean subordinate even, of a common blackmailer, was infinitely, sickeningly worse. For the first time I was awake to a healthy scorn of myself for ever having condescended to a habit of espionage. That it should have reduced me to something the level of this fellow!—no outright, hard-fisted burglar, as, to his better credit, I had assumed him to be, but just an obscene Jerry Sneak! It had been awful to me to see that cold exclusive beauty writhing in the grip of such a scoundrel. I felt fouled, humiliated, ashamed. There and then I swore an oath that I would let Lady Skene understand, on the first reasonable opportunity, the nature of my claim on her—not to bleed her pocket but her heart.
And, in the meanwhile, how to engineer my discovery? Should I use it to my more crushing indictment of a guilty woman—a bludgeon in my already loaded hand? A gentle son! a human merciful spirit! To admit myself one in purpose with this vulgar conspirator? Never, never! To convince her, rather, of her insensibility to the means for reprisal, for defence, at least, which lay ready to her hand. What was her sin to me, if only she would once expiate it in a word, a look of remorse?
I asked for no more. Yet, lacking it, she must lack a faithful Paladin. I had thought I hated her; and it had needed only this menace from another quarter to reawaken all my maddest cravings. She was my mother, and in direful peril. The pity and the sorrow of it quite blinded me for the moment to all subordinate issues.
Yet Luck again had served me well for these. I remembered, when the passing of my moody grief left room for other thoughts, how it had put into my hands the one and very clue I needed. I knew at length where to find the old creature—godmother, grandmother, what you will—who alone, it seemed to me, could be induced, or bought, to make the revelation which I desired. Well, even so, that secret were safer in my keeping than solely in a villain’s. Though shared by another, or others, its possession by me could hardly weaken my position as a threatened mother’s champion. For all my wild pity, I was inexorably resolved to take an early opportunity of putting that discovery to the test.
And so I fell upon harder reflections. Who was this plausible dog, with his soft voice, his sentimental gaze, his compelling personality? Who was this astute villain—yet none so clever, nevertheless, but that Luck, my Luck, had been able easily to hoodwink him? His hold on Lady Skene must be a substantial one—one so potential of profit, it would appear, that, after all this lapse of years, it was still worth his while to take a house—a gambling office, one might call it—in the neighbourhood, for the sole purpose of exploiting her. How and where had he acquired an incriminating knowledge of her so damning? Alas! had I not learned enough already of her “maiden meditations” to be sceptical of their singleness? She had been an actress—on the stage, at least—and presumably a true child of her traditions. I could not forget Sir Maurice Carnac’s roguish innuendoes—his allusions to my stepfather’s feet “netted” to matrimony in their intended frolic over a wilder course; his sly maudlin reference to me as a pledge of “widowed respectability.” Likely enough he too had known, or guessed, the truth. Likely enough Lord Skene himself had not been so blind to it as the pious throwers of dust in his eyes had once assumed. Nor did I feel convinced that the question of it would much have affected his lordship in those days of his relapse from virtue, so long as its pretensions appeared to justify, in the worldly view, his marriage with the beautiful creature who had ravished his heart. Grant all that, and it made no difference in the present situation—offered Lady Skene no less a bait to vile persecution. If her husband had not been blind, she had been blind to his shrewd seeing. If he knew, she did not know he knew, and her ignorance of that inference of his, did it actually exist, constituted her real accessibility by scoundrelism. She never thought, one must conclude, but that she possessed a secret which, if revealed, would spell her social and domestic ruin; and, so long as she could be kept in that belief, the bloodsuckers might have their way with her. Had she not the traditions of eighteen or so years of a spotless and dignified wifehood to vindicate? It was for the very reason that she had justified her exaltation so nobly, that she figured such a helpless victim to the beasts of prey. She was a woman of position—a fact of which her religious world took strict account; and she had come to pledge herself to that world, and to be quoted for its local light. It was there, I knew, and she knew probably, that her downfall would be criticised most ruinously. Her husband, it was conceivable, she might win over to her sin’s condonement; that narrow world never. There, in any question of her victimising by a blackguard, was confessed her main vulnerable point—or it had been. For, indeed, at the last there had come to expose itself one more infinitely sensitive. She had borne a son, heir to his mother’s fame or infamy.
I declare that my heart bled for her, as I reviewed her present position, or such as I presumed it to be. What was it to me that she had been a sinner—even a reckless sinner? Circumstance makes evil, as it makes virtue. Let the righteous plume themselves on circumstance. If I were a child of sin, I would be loyal to the maternity which suffered for me. Only I wanted time to think and plan.
I dreaded more than I can describe the ordeal of the dinner hour that night. Yet I was resolved to put in an appearance at the table. As likely as not Miss Christmas had spoken of my return; and what reflections would that induce in Lady Skene! and, if I kept away, how would she regard my absence—with what suspicion, what fearful apprehensions for her secret’s safety! For had she not believed me far removed from the scene of her recent humiliation? I must face the music, at once and boldly.
I faced it; and with what immediate result? As I entered the dining-room, she was standing by her chair before taking her seat, and, as I passed her by, going to my own, withdrew her skirts from my contact. It was the instinctive act of a moment, and regretted, I think, as soon as done; but it hurt me so cruelly, that my devil, for an instant, returned uppermost. “Very well,” I thought, “if you will have me your Nemesis!”
Lord Skene greeted me kindly but abstractedly. He made no comment on my late absence, except to ask me where I had been gone these three or four days.
“To Clapham, sir,” I said, perfectly self-possessed. “It occurred to me to explore the field of Mr Pugsley’s early ministrations. I am thinking of writing his life.”
He grinned first; then looked a little startled, glancing across uneasily at his wife. She had suddenly put down her spoon, I observed, leaving her soup unfinished.
“What!” said his lordship. “Are you thinking of turning author?”
“No, sir,” I answered. “Only of studying truth and godliness at first hand.”
“Well,” he said, “you might occupy yourself worse.”
He was fairly puzzled, I could see, and, to protect himself, turned the talk in other directions, leaving me to my own cogitations. Miss Christmas, sitting opposite me, seized the opportunity to engage him to herself—no great task, for the old man was genuinely attached to her.
“What do you think of my frock, dear?” she said. “I want your opinion, because you are a judge, you know.”
But he accepted her banter seriously. He was in an oddly sober mood.
“I think,” he said, “that, like charity, it covers a multitude of sins.”
“O!” she cried, “how terribly severe! I am only a whited sepulchre after all. In the midst of life we are in death.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” I said. “It sounds like one of Mr Pugsley’s original reflections. But of course we are. Don’t you feel it, my lady?”
I don’t know what demon was urging me. Lord Skene suddenly exclaimed: “Georgina! is anything the matter?”
She was leaning back in her chair, looking white and faint; but she rallied immediately.
“Nothing whatever,” she said. “What makes you think so? Go on with your dinner—please do.”
He obeyed uneasily. I saw Miss Christmas steal her hand under the cloth, and “poor” her hostess’s with a little lovely look of sympathy. It meant nothing, of course, but sex. What could she know of the other’s real indisposition? But a sudden unaccountable pang of jealousy shot through me witnessing the act.
I had put the girl utterly out of my mind. She had become nothing, and less than nothing, in the tragic sequence of events. Now, all in a moment, I was moved to reconsider her—wonderingly, even. I thought her face was pale—white, with a sort of pathetic sickness which follows after much crying; and I was sorry for her, sorry, with a sudden strange turmoil of the heart, which spoke most, I think, of sorrow for myself. What was she to me? Nothing. I had taken brutal pains, indeed, to convince her of the fact; and she must surely feel convinced at last, and hold herself acquitted of any further obligations to me. Yet, is it not human nature to view with jealousy another’s fond appreciation of the thing we have held too cheap for our own use? The value of it, it may be, has never struck us until we have lost it. I don’t mean to say that I had arrived, already and at once, at that extravagant pitch of regret; but I was certainly awake, and suddenly, to points of attraction about the girl which had never appealed to me before. Her hair grew very prettily on her forehead, dividing from it in wings of the softest fawn. There was an unspoiled frankness in her face, for all its temptation to chartered coquetry, and her eyes had grown honest. She had developed into a little being quite remote from my early conception of her. Her complexion was of an unsoiled purity, just the natural maturing of pink-skinned babydom, when its cheeks have ripened to a contour and moulded themselves to a meaning. Her lips were always as red as if a Cupid had just left kissing them, and there was an attractive robin note in her voice, whether it spoke or laughed.
Now, noting all this, a quick sharp feeling as of loss, as of an utter loneliness never until this moment fully realised, smote into me. What possible sympathy, in all this turmoil of my hates and loves and grievances, had I willingly foregone! But it was of no use: I had rejected it, and I must take the consequences. She was even at this moment ostentatiously ignoring me, and I saw that my hold on her was gone.
What did I care? Why should I? Yet, I confess, to see these gentle feminine spirits leagued together in revolt against my brutality wounded me smartly. I had thought myself their master, and I was master of nothing but their fear. Bill Sikes could better me there. Something gained from that consciousness—call it what you will—was promising to educate me finely.
Not once during the dinner did either of the ladies speak to me. I chose bitterly to put their neglect down to the presumption of a “by-blow” in assuming a claim on their notice. I was glad, though with an impotent rage of jealousy, when they rose and left me alone with my stepfather.
There was a gravity that night about Lord Skene which was new in him. The sudden death of his old comrade, taken with the glass of joy at his lips, as it were, would seem to have had a curiously sobering effect on him. No doubt the mood was fleeting; but it had all the force of a reformation while it lasted. He questioned me more seriously than he had ever done yet as to my prospects and intentions; dwelling, even, upon the necessity of prayer as a medium for exhorting from the Deity the truth as to one’s vocation. Once or twice, as I noticed, he put out his hand to the decanter, and withdrew it empty. And presently he fell into a fit of musing, in which I did not venture to disturb him. Then suddenly he looked up.
“I haven’t seen you since that night, Gaskett,” he said. “What a shocking experience! And to risk damnation with a joke on his lips! But that was Maurice all over. Do you remember how he greeted you, my boy? It ought to have warned us, perhaps, and——”
I was smiling at him, as I leaned, playing with a knife, on the table. He broke off quickly, rose, not altogether steadily, to his feet, and stood staring at me.
“By the Lord, Gaskett!” he said, “what was in your mother’s mind when she pupped you?”
I was so taken aback that I could not utter a word in reply. And the next instant he had recovered himself, and was forcing an embarrassed laugh.
“I think since that night my brain’s full of ghosts,” he said. “Come along now to the drawing-room.”
CHAPTER XIII.
JOHNNY DANDO
As if Fate were moved to introduce some “comic relief” into a drama grown almost intolerably serious, there re-entered astonishingly upon the stage of my affairs at this pass my old chum and schoolfellow, Johnny Dando.
I call him Johnny, and Johnny he was, and so would remain to the end of things. There are Jocks and Jacks and Jackos innumerable in the world. The Johnnies (not the inane breed) form a race apart, and are not to be confounded with any other. They are artless, beaming little men, who never, from cradle to grave, qualify in world-wisdom; but who, at sixty as at six, use the terms of childhood in their dealings with mankind. They are everywhere and at all times simple, modest, and impregnably loyal in their attachments.
My Johnny, as I recovered him, wore mittens on his dumpy hands, and on his head an odd fur bonnet with flaps to cover his rosy ears. He was wadded all over, and suggested to one a little fat Esquimau. As he swam, like a full moon, into my ken, he might have taken but one step across the years from “Baxter’s” to Evercreech. He had no more hair on his face than when I had last parted from him; no less an appearance in it of a perpetual suppressed laughter. What amused, or appeared to amuse him so inextinguishably, no one had ever been able to discover. He had a manner as of some secret understanding with himself which was based on the eternal hilarity of things. When he shook hands with you, you had a feeling that it was only by gripping hard hold of that support that he could stop himself from exploding in your face. And there he would stand, seemingly fighting down his risibility, until he could emit a “How-de-do?” or “How are you?” with the air of asking a social conundrum while he chuckled inwardly over your inability to answer it. He appeared, somehow, to be always swelling with communicativeness, on which, strain as he would, he could not get a start. It was this consciousness of his conversational disability, perhaps, which made him wont to passing utterances of a fearful and cryptic nature—utterances which had no known bearing on anything that had happened, or was happening, or was ever likely to happen. Thus, it might be, as he passed one fielding at cricket, he would swoop into one’s ear with, “How much for a chirp, Plummer? Hoots!” and pass on his darkling way, leaving one prostrate. Or his head, perhaps, would come round a door, utter the inquiry “Which way to the steamers?” and vanish. Although I was, without doubt, his closest friend, I had never succeeded in fathoming the exact source of any of these recondite inspirations. To question him as to them, was to subdue his expression into one of patient tolerance over your inaccessibility to esoteric suggestion.
It was a chill morning, a day or two after my last recorded experiences, when he was returned upon my hands, like the most surprising of boomerangs or india-rubber balls. I was sitting cowering and glowering over my fire, when I heard his voice at the door, and I started amazed, and “Johnny!” I cried: “that must be Johnny Dando!” And Johnny it was.
He came in smiling, and seized my hand without a word. His eyes dilated; his cheeks, like shining polished apples, seemed to stretch to cracking.
“Johnny,” I cried; “take care!”
His face split at the mouth, easing the pressure.
“Hullo!” he said. “How much for ‘Grafto’?”
We pumped out our salutations, hand in hand, grinning and speechless like a couple of veritable Britons.
“Where have you come from?” I cried at length. “How did you find me out?”
“A young lady brought me down from the house,” he said, and could say no more. “Hullo, Dick!” he added presently, and immediately turned, tiptoed to the door, looked out, and came back.
“She’s gone away,” he said—“such a beauty, Dick! She told me you’d taken to living in a hermitage, and offered to show me the way.”
“O!” I said. “It was Miss Christmas, I suppose. She’s a ward of Lord Skene’s. But don’t bother about her. Come and tell me about yourself.”
I got him to the fire, filled him a pipe, and put a light to it for him. As he pulled, letting it out every two minutes, he kept chuckling, like one immensely tickled over something.
“O, I’m nothing!” he said, bursting suddenly into a laugh, and snuggling his head into his shoulders and his hands between his knees. “I’m only ‘Grafto,’ you know—how much for the hair of the dog that bit you, eh, Dick? It’s just delightful to see you again; and you’re not a bit altered either, only for that scrub of yellow on your lip! Rub-a-dub-dub, eh?” The joy in his face moderated an instant. “I can’t grow one,” he said. “It all comes out in perspiration.”
“Never mind, Johnny,” I said. “You’ve got other compensations, haven’t you?”
“Well,” he answered, “I’ve got money enough to ‘corner’ all the moustaches in London, if that’s what you mean. But what’s the good, when I can’t grow one of my own?”
He squeaked over the admission; then relit his pipe joyously.
“And what have you been doing with yourself all this time?” he said.
“We’ll come to that,” I answered. “I want to hear about you first.”
“About me!” he said, surprised. “O! there’s nothing to tell. Daddy made it all right for me, you know. He was ‘Grafto’—you remember that? What a man he was, to be sure—old daddy! His ‘Grafto’ would put a hair-spring into a watch, they used to say. He was a Government analyst when he invented it; and afterwards he became a person. I never knew, Dick, until he died, that he’d worn a wig himself for years.” He looked at me tragically. “Wasn’t that awful? And I inherited ‘Grafto’!”
“How did you like Oxford?” I said.
“O, bully!” he answered. “But I wasn’t there long. There was the estate to take up, you see; and mamma wanted me. She’s the only woman who ever did.”
“O! I can’t believe that.”
“Can’t you? I don’t know what keeps me laughing so. O, the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells! Hullo, Dick! I say, ain’t you fond of poetry?”
“Just.”
“So am I; especially Christmas carols, they’re so comforting. Look here, why did you never answer any of my letters?”
“What letters? I’ve never had a line from you that I know!”
“Not? Good Lord! I remember now we had a beastly Swiss courier, a rascal who tapped our correspondence, and put us to no end of shifts. It must have been he.”
“Very likely. So you called for me at the house?”
“Yes. And the young lady—Miss Christmas did you say it was?—told me that you had taken to living down here like an anchorite, and offered to show me the way. What’s happened to you, Dick? You used to be such a free and open chap.”
I looked into his honest glowing face. The craving for comradeship, the craving to pour out my heart of sorrow and difficulty to a friend, tried, sympathetic and attached as I knew this one to be, rose suddenly in me with an irresistible force. I had dwelt so long, corroding, perishing, in my own fateful atmosphere. In confessing to this dear fellow, I knew that I should only be halving my own burden of secrecy, not imperilling it. I hardly gave a thought to its unfair imposition on shoulders so generous and so undeserving. He would not have wished that I should. In a quick impulse of passion, I told him everything—the whole story of my life with its shames and discoveries and humiliations—all the barrenness and impotence of the thing—since I had last parted with him. And when he had listened to me, silently, wonderingly, lovingly, at the end he only thanked me for my beautiful confidence in himself.
He was all immediately that I could have wished and expected him to be—all, and more—unfortunately a good deal more. His head was not built for plots and counter-plots. A sense of his magnified importance in the world, being chosen the trusted accessory of such a man and in such a secret, puffed him out magnificently. He was eager to be at once not only my confidant but my coadjutor—to work for me, spy for me, be my humble auxiliary and comrade in this work of righting a wrong and forcing retribution on the guilty.
“I’ll watch this Pugsley,” he said, to my astonishment. “I’ll bring him to his knees, and make him confess what he’s up to. If I ain’t got much cleverness myself, I’ve the means to buy up a whole Scotland Yard of it.”
“No, no,” I cried hurriedly. “That would never do, Johnny. I’m playing this off my own bat, you understand. The dodging of open scandal is to be our first consideration.”
I seemed to realise in a moment, the danger of the confidence to which I had committed myself. The thought of Johnny as amateur detective was impossible. It would be necessary, I foresaw, to divert his enthusiasm into some harmless channel.
He was greatly gratified, I could see, by my pluralsing of the personal adjective.
“Of course,” he said. “We’ll keep it all between ourselves, Dick.”
“Yes, indeed,” I said; “we must”—and, on the word, pricked up my ears, hearing a footstep.
But it was only a man come down with a message from Lord Skene, requesting the favour of Mr Dando’s company to lunch.
Johnny, in his severe position of ally, looked across at me doubtingly.
“Of course,” I said. “Thank his lordship from Mr Dando, Williams, and say he will have much pleasure.”
“For it ought to be as great a pleasure as it’s an honour to you, you know, Johnny,” I said reproachfully, when the man was gone; “seeing how it’s meant to imply the just claim of any friend of mine on his lordship’s hospitality.”
Johnny blushed.
“I didn’t mean that, Dick,” he said—“not to question his lordship’s condescension. Only——”
“You see, Johnny,” I pursued, twinkling, “you mustn’t begin by tarring them all with the same brush. I owe Lord Skene very much, if I owe his lady very little. He’s been a good second father to me, if she’s been an indifferent first mother. All I want to find out is why she has been. I want to know why, Johnny; and I want to know who my first father was, and how this man Dalston knows what I don’t know, and why he is able to make such crushing use of his knowledge. That’s all it comes to at present; and you mustn’t be looking for reasons in their company, but behave just like an ordinary polite little Johnny as you are. There’ll be time enough to discuss our campaign by-and-by.”
He was obviously relieved, and not in the least offended.
“I can assure you, my dear fellow,” he said, “that I shall be only too glad to put it all out of my mind for the moment. It would be jolly unpleasant sitting there and acting the spy—and with Miss Christmas in the room, too. By-the-by, will she be there, Dick?”
“O yes! I expect so,” I said, with a snigger. “But I don’t often turn up to lunch, myself; and am rather out in the young lady’s customs.”
“You don’t seem to like her much?” he said.
“No,” I answered. “I don’t know that I do——” At which he gave an unaccountable sigh, as of a burden discharged.
Lord Skene accepted my friend genially, as I had expected; but not as I had expected was Lady Skene’s reception of him. If not actually warm, it was gracious and attentive. She made him sit at her right hand, and she placed me opposite on her left. There was no drawing away of her skirts this time. She even asked me if I would mind sitting there, calling me, nervously, and with a heightened spot of colour come to her cheeks, by my name. It was not so frequent on her lips but that the novelty could give me an actual little physical shock. There was a shadow of pathetic propitiation in her manner towards me, I could have thought. No doubt, what between Pugsley’s awed confidences and my own newly encountered and most significant spirit of mutiny, she was beginning to realise the Nemesis her neglect had cast away to flourish of itself. I was like the little weed thrown carelessly into a river; and, lo! when the thrower returned to pursue her course upon the water, there was only a vast hideous tangle of growth where had been an easy stream.
I looked at her boldly, and her eyes fell before me, Good God! how beautiful she was! She might have been no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight—girlhood at its full flood. It hurt me, in the very face of that remorseless thing I had set myself to do, to see her so afraid of me. What she must be suffering under that cold and lovely mask! What horror of the black abyss torn suddenly across her path! And for him she had borne to be adding his wild voice to the jangle of the chase—helping to drive her over the brink into that night!
Though she had deserved it; though she had lied to procure her promotion to a noble position; though she had sinned her sin, and condemned the innocent pledge of it to bear the penance, I could not think of her so haunted and so helpless, and endure the thought. The vision of that tiny life upstairs quite upset me. If I wanted justification for my relenting, where could I find a sweeter one or a more opportune? For God and my brother be my banderole’s motto. One only proof more—or at least the bid for one—and I would speak, and end this terror of her shadows—that I swore.
She asked Johnny some questions about his school days, deprecating her own ignorance of his great friendship for “Richard”; but attributing it to “Richard’s” silence on the subject. She took the dear boy quite captive. He answered: “Of course, what could I have had interesting to say about him?”; and he set to expatiating on my virtues instead. I didn’t even attempt to stop him. It was such an amusing novelty to me to hear my existence so much as admitted, much less absurdly flattered. I laughed out aloud once or twice; but he would not be stopped until he had given me his whole salute of twenty-one guns.
He was all during lunch completely under the spell of loveliness. His hostess awed and subdued him, like the rich glooms of a cathedral; but to Miss Christmas he turned as if to the sunshine without its doors.
The girl was in a mischievous mood—I could see that, though she studiously ignored me throughout the meal. She would angle with great eyes for my friend, and, when he caught the bait, would look down with a start as if confused.
“What did they call you at school, Mr Dando?” she asked once. “All schoolboys have nicknames, haven’t they?”
“Don’t tell her, Johnny!” I cried.
He blushed furiously.
“Yes, I will” he said. “They called me Dandruff, Miss Christmas.”
“Hey! Dandruff? What the deuce did that mean?” demanded his lordship.
“My father invented ‘Grafto,’ sir,” said Johnny; “the—the hair-wash, you know. And he—his name was Dando, you see.”
Lord Skene stared bewildered, but Miss Christmas clasped her hands tragically.
“‘Grafto’!” she exclaimed. “Are you really the son of ‘Grafto’—the ‘Grafto’ that has crowned more heads than Warwick the Kingmaker?”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “That was one of the advertisements. There are lots of others as good or better.”
“Ask her what she owes to advertisements, Johnny?” I said rudely; but her mockery of him annoyed me.
He looked all agape.
“Everything, Mr Dando,” said the girl sweetly. “My grandfather made all his money out of a pill. What benefactors to the human race we both come of.”
His lordship picked up a late clue.
“Pills, pills!” said he; “and a hair-wash! Tell me the man in the world who wouldn’t rather have a crop of hair on his head than a crop of wisdom in it, and hold a pill that settled his liver a better thing than salvation.”
He stopped, and looked across at his wife, with a sudden comical tongue in his cheek. That was a bit of the old Adam slipped out. But Lady Skene did not appear to have heard him.
“I hold old Jack Christmas amongst the archangels,” said his lordship.
“You hear, Miss Christmas?” I said. “There’s a pedigree for you!”
She did not take the least notice of me.
As I walked down with Johnny to the lodge by-and-by, the little man seemed depressed—or, at least, alternately depressed and elated, with the balance running to the down mood. I could see how it went with him. He was in love. It was veni, vidi, victus sum, with a vengeance. It had become hard for him, and all in an unexpected moment, to reconcile his attraction to the Evercreech ménage with his loyal duty to me. He could not guess, of course, how I rather welcomed the difficulty. It tied him in a manner by the leg, and narrowed the issues of his friendly ardour.
I knocked him up a bed somehow later on, for I had insisted on his being my guest for the night—and we sat and talked into the small hours. I had to go a journey on the morrow—that was inevitable; but I refrained from even hinting its direction to him. Let sleeping Johnnies lie, I thought. It was arranged that we should walk into Footover together, and there part for the time being, I to go to London, he to remain in the neighbourhood, and “keep an eye on my interests.” I trusted to that compromise for safety. “My interests,” I had a shrewd idea, would be found to gravitate largely about the person of Miss Christmas; and why should I grudge him that fiction? The two would make a very good match.
He had sat silent for a long time, when he suddenly looked up with a sigh.
“O! it’s hard, Dick, it’s hard,” he said, “to be born to ‘Grafto’ and an unromantic figger!”
For the first time in my knowledge of him, I noticed that the perennial smile had withered from his face.
CHAPTER XIV.
TWO INTERVIEWS AND A DISCOVERY
It was with a feeling of intense suppressed excitement that I came down into the courts surrounding the inner tabernacle of that mystery which my heart was set and my nerves were strung upon resolving. I had had no difficulty in finding the place. Luck, the old spoiler, was in the way to smooth every present obstacle from my path. The ridiculous ease with which I had hit my goal, left me no lack of self-confidence in the question of successfully exploiting it. But there, it will be seen, I reckoned without my host; and in the meanwhile there were some surprises in store for me.
It was a most bitter morning. A north-east wind slashed at Old Paradise Street like the sword of the archangel. The flood moving beyond its outlet—the river of the land of gold—was as unlike Pison as one might conceive. Thick and resistless, it went by with a gloating sound, a sewer rather than a stream. The old palace on its embankment looked numb with cold. There was more life in the fried-fish shop round the corner than in all its historic stones.
I had inquired at this shop for Mother Carey’s number in the street. A slipshod girl, who was sweeping up the floor, gave it me, but with a reservation.
“Do you mean the old miser lady, ai?”
She was a dirty girl, but insolent with life—a reassurance in that deadly climate of Paradise.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Very likely. I only know that her name’s Carey, and that she lives in this street.”
She came to the door, broom in hand, and pointed me out the house. It was not far beyond—a dirty-faced little tenement, between a frowzy barber’s and a frowzy cobbler’s, but having a door and parlour windows of its own instead of a shop front.
“There’ll be what you want,” said the girl—“number six: but you won’t get in.”
“Why not?”
“Nobody does. She lives private and takes her beer on the chain.”
Her beer! Lady Skene’s mother! the parent of that cold and stately apparition—the stem from which that lovely rose had flowered!
Here was a startling beginning! But there was worse to come.
“Well,” I said stoutly, “there’ll be nothing lost by my trying, anyhow.”
The venture ran abroad somehow, for all the uninviting weather, and by the time I reached number six there were heads poking out of windows to canvas my repulse. I knocked at the door, and waited. After a quite reasonable interval a shuffling footstep sounded within, bolts were withdrawn, and the door opened a few inches, and grated on an iron tether.
“Who’s there?” said a querulous thin voice.
“I want to see Mother Carey,” I answered.
“She’s not in; she sees no one; she isn’t fit to be seen; go away!” said the voice, and the door came to sharply; but I had my foot ready.
“She’ll see Richard Gaskett, I’m sure,” I whispered through the crevice.
“Richard!”
An old, old snuffy beak, shining eyes, and a withered mouth agape showed in the crack; and there they dwelt for a full minute.
“What do you want of me?” she muttered at last.
“I want to ask you some things,” I said. “It might pay you to answer them.”
She lingered still a little; then I heard the chain grate stealthily in its socket, a lean talon shot out, and the next moment I was clawed into the passage, and the door slammed to behind me. A faint shout of laughter pursued me into the fastness.
It was close twilight within, filthy, noxious, indescribable. The narrow hall was bare of everything but stench and decay; the room into which the old horror motioned me was similarly furnished, but with first causes more in evidence. When, very cautiously, she had unbarred the window-shutters and let in a grudging thread of light, I was made conscious of the fact. There were a table here and a tattered chair or two, the stuffing of the latter rank from the contact of unclean generations. There were also piles of refuse, in the corners, under the rusty grate, dropping from a disembowelled cupboard, burst with its own noisome surfeit. The walls, hung with old daguerreotypes, old tinted lithographs, old records of a faded past—all in mouldering frames, and all, it appeared, illustrative of the one-time graces of a single simpering personality—were the cleanest places to be seen. Bugs were the élite of Number six Old Paradise Street.
I felt utterly stupefied—bowled over by the shock of my surroundings. For the moment I could only gasp and suffer, until a violent fit of sneezing came to my relief. The old woman, standing before me, softly pawed at my waistcoat during the paroxysm, peering up into my face. Water and she were long strangers; a mildewed cap she wore, tied under her chin, seemed to have grown on her like a fungus on a tree stump; her dress was of the complexion and savour of tobacco rag. She was a mignonne small-boned creature, and might even once—the Lord forgive me—have been pretty. Even now, old thread of fustiness as she was, there was an indescribable trick of jauntiness in her conduct of her creaking old body; and the frisky shuffle of her feet, in their mouldering slippers, seemed sometimes suggestive of a sort of St Vitus’s ballet dance.
She was taken with a rending fit of coughing while she held me. It seemed to rattle in her like the plaster inside crumbling walls where the rats are busy.
“So you’re Richard Gaskett, O the devil,” she said, when she could gasp out a word at length. “And you’ve come to look up your old grandma, eh?”
I had not regarded it in that light, and I was fain to tell her so. I had come to visit Mother Carey. She started on the word, and a sudden terror flew to her eyes.
“Who’s your mammy?” she cried shrilly, stepping back. “Tell me—quick, now.”
“Lady Skene is my mother,” I said.
“Ah!”
Her self-confidence returned. It had struck her, “all of a heap,” how she might have been beguiled into admitting some villain with a design on her hoardings. She approached me again, curiously.
“Eh!” she wondered. “So this is my Georgie’s child, is it, the deuce? And how does your mammy treat you, my pretty?”
“Lady Skene has got another son now,” I said. “Didn’t you know it?”
“I hear nothing, and I know nothing in these days, dovey the devil,” she answered. “So long as I’m given my little provision as her mother, Georgie’s welcome to make out her own life as she pleases for me. We usen’t to get on very well together, not always, her and me. She’d come to me in her troubles, she would, like her father’s own gal; but most times we lived apart.”
“She came to you when she was in trouble about me, I suppose?” I said.
She conned me a little, unanswering. The wintry pupils of her eyes seemed to sharpen like a cat’s.
“Not she—a married woman,” she protested cunningly.
“She was not married before she married Lord Skene,” I said. “I was born to her out of wedlock, and he was not allowed to know it.”
Again she was silent, panting a little; and suddenly she was seized with a second paroxysm of coughing.
“O dear! O dear!” she gasped, when she could speak. “O, the deuce and all! O, my lungs are like emery paper, and the joints of my bones gone scroopy. O, get me a chair, ducky, get me a chair! I’m all wore out with pain, I am, and I sha’n’t trouble anyone much longer. There, I shall be better in a minute—I can feel it passing. O the deuce and the devil!”
I helped her to seat herself, and stood over her while she recovered. When she did at length, she went on ejaculating, “O, the deuce and the devil!” in spasmodic whispers, until her speech found breath for further irrelevancies:
“Welcome to live as she likes for me O, the deuce and all!—in her fine castle, my pretty—so long as I’m left undisturbed in my little ’ouse—in my little O the devil ducky!”
I waited for the stream to run out, and then spoke again.
“Lord Skene was not allowed to know it, I say.”
She answered me, without looking up.
“I was no party to that, my dovey the deuce. I swear I wasn’t O, the devil! It was all Pugsley’s doing, the deuce and the devil take him!”
“Was it he, too,” I said, “who christened me out of a pint pot? You see I’ve found out something, old mother.”
She rocked to and fro—in a sort of obscene secret laughter, I could have fancied. It was as much as I could do to keep my wits steadily to the point at issue. In all the sure success of my pursuit, I had never foreseen any end to it like this, or even approaching it.
“Just like him,” she muttered. “He always called me that, a deuced providence.”
“Who called you?” I demanded sternly. “Who are you talking about?”
She wiped, or rather smeared her eyes with her sleeve. The old life in her, I believed, was foundering between craft and senility; but the ancient habit still predominated. Once more she spoke, and again away from the point.
“A proud creatur’ was my gal—Georgie was always proud above her station. She held herself aloof from the common sort, she did. Not that such beauties oughtn’t to command the best. But she made her mistake—there, I’ll own to it. It was all from her turning religious and trying to reform people, the deuce take her. And she’d have been left to suffer the consequences to this day if it hadn’t a’ been for me—a good mother though I say it, the devil and the deuce.”
“Old mother,” I said quietly, seeing that for some reason she hailed the term, “who was it helped her to that mistake? Tell me his name, and I’ll give you money.”
She paused suddenly in her sibilations. Her old face leered up at me with infinite acrimony.
“How much?” she snapped. “But, there—I dursen’t—it’s no bid.”
Something, some chord of ancient memory in me, tightened and quivered.
“My God!” I cried. “I remember now. It was you that had the care of me when I was a baby!”
“Ah!” she piped. “It was me, was it, Richard? And to think you should have growed to this, and all the understanding in you!”
“Wasn’t it you, I say?”
“You may say it with truth, dovey,” she answered. “She wanted me to adopt you altogether, did my daughter; but I just struck when I found I wasn’t to be included in her ladyship’s promotion. But I made her pay for it, I did—more than if I’d kept you; and then she and Pugsley had to put their deuced heads together, and account for you to his lordship in their own way.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”
“You know it?” She lowered her frowzy noddle, mumbling to herself; then looked up fulsomely.
“Tell old Mother Carey, my pretty,” she coaxed, “just exactly how much you do know.”
“That you were on the stage——” I began.
“Ah!” she leered across at the photographs on the wall; her horrible old feet drummed on the floor. “The stage, to be sure! My daughter could never come anigh me as a dancer—no, nor in looks, for that matter. There’s nothing criminal in being on the stage, ducky dear; and Georgie herself was born in wedlock.”
“That Lady Skene was taken from the boards by her husband,” I went on; but she interrupted me:
“There you’re wrong. It was Pugsley rescued her, as he called it, when she’d returned to them after your little affair, and who trimmed her up and made her meat for his lordship.”
“That you bought me my name of a publican—his name—for a pint of beer,” I continued.
She admitted that frankly, with a giggle.
“You had to have one, you know, deary. And to give you your mother’s might have let out things. And hasn’t this fine lordship, now, ever shown any curiosity about who was your father?”
“No,” I said. “The curiosity is all mine. Who was he?”
“I don’t know,” she proclaimed blankly, and at once.
“You do,” I said sternly.
“No, I don’t,” she answered, suddenly truculent. “Why should I, now? The gal came to her mother in her trouble—that was all it mattered to me. She wouldn’t confess to the author of her shame, not she. She was always one of the silent sort. Ask the old deuce of a doctor, now—old Patterson, drat him—if he could ever get a word out of her.”
“I believe you are lying. I’ll pay you, I say.”
She skipped to her feet, with a little blasphemous screech.
“The deuce and the devil! O you” (sanguine) “spark! I don’t want your money. I believe you’re after mine. O I’ll rouse the neighbourhood if you don’t get out of this! A pretty gentleman, on my sinful word, to think to come and bleed his poor old grandmother to pay for his pop-lollies and opera-boxes! O burst my lungs if I don’t have the police on you! O the deuce get out!”
She was whipping herself to a frenzy, real or diplomatic. My efforts to quiet her were only so much oil on her old smouldering fire. She began to scream pipingly, and to drive me outward with vicious feeble blows. In the end, baffled and disappointed, I had to make an ignominious exit. The door slammed and the chain grated behind me.
The Street was awaiting my reappearance with interest. It greeted my expulsion with a howl of laughter, and pursued my retreat with a dropping fire of chaff. As I went on my way, I had leisure to reflect that I had extracted from Mother Carey everything that was of the least importance either to herself or me—just so much and no more. I had established the fact of her unsavoury existence, and that was the bare fruit of my enterprise.
But I had still one forlorn hope to follow; one last nearly blank little card to play. And, as Luck would have it, that card was to prove the fateful one. What a trumpery pip, to be sure, looks an ace—a one-shotted gun. Yet the fortress capitulates to it, the knaves shiver before it, whole rows of arrogant royalties go down to its bang.
Something that Mother Carey had let out (inadvertently, even fatuously, I could not but think) stuck in my mind. Impelled by a faint hope of promise in it, I made my way by the Albert Embankment and the South Lambeth Road to Stockwell, whence, from the Swan Tavern, I took a tram for Clapham. My purpose was to inquire about a certain problematic Dr Patterson, and it was my good fortune (pace Luck) to learn not only that that respected practitioner was an existent actuality, but that he was still, after all these years, active in promoting the birth rate of his native suburb. I was even lucky enough to find him at home, in a very comfortable semi-detached house, of an old-time complexion, which faced the common on its south side. He had moved into this many years before, from a much smaller dwelling in Park Road down by the “Plough,” his practice having risen high in the interval on a modest foundation. So my informant—one of those garrulous terrors who will volunteer more than they are asked to answer—confided to me.
I found the doctor a very complacent brisk little man, having spectacles, black side-whiskers supported by an ample collar, and a head as shiny and almost as bald as a gas globe.
“Now, sir, what can I do for you?” he said, having hurried into the room and made his bow.
I apologised, with some embarrassment, for my venturing to claim even a fraction of his precious time to a matter which, to put it brusquely, was unconnected with professional emoluments. Naturally enough, perhaps, he requested me thereupon to state my business with a reasonable brevity.
“It touches, sir,” I said, “upon the birth of a child some twenty or more years ago; at which birth, I believe, you assisted.”
“Wait,” he said. “A police case, is it?”