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The Wharf by the Docks: A Novel

by Florence Warden · English · Gutenberg #16092 · 388,165 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Wharf by the Docks: A Novel

Author: Florence Warden


        
Release date: June 19, 2005 [eBook #16092]
                Most recently updated: April 9, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHARF BY THE DOCKS: A NOVEL ***

THE WHARF BY THE DOCKS

A Novel

by

FLORENCE WARDEN

Author of "The Mystery of the Inn by the Shore," etc.

1896







CHAPTER I.

SOMETHING AMISS.


Everybody knows Canterbury, with its Old-World charms and its
ostentatious air of being content to be rather behind the times, of
looking down upon the hurrying Americans who dash through its cathedral
and take snap-shots at its slums, and at all those busy moderns who
cannot afford to take life at its own jog-trot pace.

But everybody does not know the charming old halls and comfortable,
old-fashioned mansions which are dotted about the neighboring country,
either nestling in secluded nooks of the Kentish valleys or holding a
stately stand on the wooded hills.

Of this latter category was The Beeches, a pretty house of warm, red
brick, with a dignified Jacobean front, which stood upon the highest
ground of a prettily wooded park, and commanded one of those soft,
undulating, sleepy landscapes which are so characteristically English,
and of which grazing sheep and ruminating cows form so important a
feature. A little tame, perhaps, but very pleasant, very homely, very
sweet to look upon by the tired eyes that have seen enough of the
active, bustling world.

Mr. George Wedmore, of the firm of Wedmore, Parkinson and Bishop,
merchants of the city of London, had bought back the place, which had
formerly belonged to his family, from the Jews into whose hands it had
fallen, and had settled there to spend in retirement the latter end of
his life, surrounded by a family who were not too well pleased to
exchange busy Bayswater for what they were flippant enough to call a
wilderness.

Dinner was over; and Mr. Wedmore, in a snug easy-chair by the
dining-room fire, was waiting for Doctor Haselden, who often looked in
for a smoke and a game of chess with the owner of The Beeches.

A lean, fidgety man, with thin hair and grayish whiskers, Mr. Wedmore
looked less at home in the velveteen suit and gaiters which he persisted
in wearing even in the evening, less like the country gentleman it was
his ambition to be, than like the care-laden city merchant he at heart
still was.

On the other side of the table sat his better half, in whom it was easy
to see he must have found all the charm of contrast to his own
personality. A cheery, buxom woman, still handsome, full of life and
fun, she had held for the whole of her married life a sway over her lord
and master all the greater that neither of them was conscious of the
fact. A most devoted and submissive wife, a most indulgent and
affectionate mother, Mrs. Wedmore occupied the not unenviable position
of being half slave, half idol in her own household.

The clock struck eight, and the bell rang.

"There he is! There's the doctor!" cried Mrs. Wedmore, with a beaming
nod. Her husband sat up in his chair, and the troubled frown which he
had worn all the evening grew a little deeper.

"I should like you, my dear, to leave us together this evening," said
he.

Mrs. Wedmore jumped up at once, gathering her balls of wool and big
knitting-needles together with one quick sweep of the arm.

"All right, dear," said she, with another nod, giving him an anxious
look.

Mr. Wedmore perceived the look and smiled. He stretched out his hand to
lay it gently on his wife's arm as she passed him.

"Nothing about me. Nothing for you to be alarmed about," said he.

Mrs. Wedmore hesitated a moment. She had her suspicions, and she would
dearly have liked to know more. But she was the best trained of wives;
and after a moment's pause, seeing that she was to hear nothing further,
she said, good-humoredly: "All right, dear," and left the room, just in
time to shake hands with Doctor Haselden as she went out.

Now, while the host found it impossible to shake off the signs of his
old calling, the doctor was a man who had never been able to assume
them. From head to foot there was no trace of the doctor in his
appearance; he looked all over what at heart he was--the burly,
good-humored, home-loving, land-loving country gentleman, who looked
upon Great Datton, where his home was, as the pivot of the world.

However he was dressed, he always looked shabby, and he could never have
been mistaken for anything but an English gentleman.

He shook hands with Mr. Wedmore, with a smile. These poor Londoners,
trying to acclimatize themselves, amused him greatly. He looked upon
them much as the Londoner looks upon the Polish Jew immigrants--with
pity, a little jealousy, and no little scorn.

"Where's Carlo?" asked he.

"Oh, Carlo was a nuisance, so I've sent him to the stable," said Mr.
Wedmore, with the slightly colder manner which he instantly assumed if
any grievance of his, however small, was touched upon.

Carlo was a young retriever, which Mr. Wedmore, in the stern belief that
it was the proper thing in a country house, had encouraged about the
house until his habits of getting between everybody's legs and helping
himself to the contents of everybody's plate had so roused the ire of
the rest of the household that Mr. Wedmore had had to give way to the
universal prejudice against him.

The doctor shook his head. Lack of capacity for managing a dog was just
what one might have expected from these new-comers.

Mr. Wedmore turned his chair to face that of the doctor, and spoke in
the sharp, incisive tones of a man who has serious business on hand.

"I've been hoping you would drop in every night for the last fortnight,"
said he, "and as you didn't come, I was at last obliged to send for you.
I have a very important matter to consult you about. You've brought your
pipe?" The doctor produced it from his pocket. "Well, fill it, and
listen. It's about young Horne--Dudley Horne--that I want to speak to
you, to consult you, in fact."

The doctor nodded as he filled his pipe.

"The young barrister I've met here, who's engaged to your elder
daughter?"

"Well, she was all but engaged to him," admitted Mr. Wedmore, in a
grudging tone. "But I'm going to put a stop to it, and I'll tell you
why." Here he got up, as if unable to keep still in the state of
excitement into which he was falling, and stood with his hands behind
him and his back to the fire. "I have a strong suspicion that the young
man's not quite right here." And lowering his voice, Mr. Wedmore touched
his forehead.

"Good gracious! You surprise me!" cried the doctor. "He always seemed to
me such a clever young fellow. Indeed, you said so to me yourself."

"So he is. Very clever," said Mr. Wedmore, shortly. "I don't suppose
there are many young chaps of his age--for he's barely thirty--at the
Bar whose prospects are as good as his. But, for all that, I have a
strong suspicion that he's got a tile loose, and that's why I wanted to
speak to you. Now his father was in a lunatic asylum no less than three
times, and was in one when he died."

The doctor looked grave.

"That's a bad history, certainly. Do you know how the father's malady
started?"

"Why, yes. It was the effect of a wound in the head received when he was
a young man out in America, in the war with Mexico in '46."

"That isn't the sort of mania that is likely to come down from father to
son," said the doctor, "if his brain was perfectly sound before, and the
recurrent mania the result of an accident."

"Well, so I've understood. And the matter has never troubled me at all
until lately, when I have begun to detect certain morbid tendencies in
Dudley, and a general change which makes me hesitate to trust him with
the happiness of my daughter."

"Can you give me instances?" asked the doctor, although he began to feel
sure that whatever opinion he might express on the matter, Mr. Wedmore
would pay little attention to any but his own.

"Well, for you to understand the case, I must tell you a little more
about the lad's father. He and I were very old friends--chums from
boyhood, in fact. When he came back from America--where he went from a
lad's love of adventure--he made a good marriage from a monetary point
of view; married a wharf on the Thames, in fact, somewhere Limehouse
way, and settled down as a wharfinger. He was a steady fellow, and did
very well, until one fine morning he was found trying to cut his throat,
and had to be locked up. Well, he was soon out again that time, and
things went on straight enough for eight or nine years, by which time he
had done very well--made a lot of money by speculation--and was thinking
of retiring from business altogether. Then, perhaps it was the extra
pressure of his increased business, but, at any rate, he broke out
again, tried to murder his wife that time, and did, in fact, injure her
so much that she died shortly afterward. Of course, he had to be shut up
again; and a man named Edward Jacobs, a shrewd Jew, who was his
confidential clerk, carried on the business in his absence. Now, both
Horne and his wife had had the fullest confidence in this Jacobs, but he
turned out all wrong. As soon as he learned, at the end of about twelve
months, that Horne was coming out again, he decamped with everything he
could lay his hands on; and from the position of affairs you may guess
that he made a very good haul. Well, poor Horne found himself in a maze
of difficulties; in fact, his clerk's fraud ruined him. Everything that
could be sold or mortgaged had to go to the settlement, and when his
affairs had been finally put straight, there was only a little bit left,
that had been so settled upon his wife that no one could touch it. He
made a good fight of it for a little while, with the help of a few old
friends, but, in the end, he broke down again for the third time. But he
escaped out of the asylum and went abroad, without seeing his friends or
his child, and a few months afterward the announcement of his death in
an American asylum was sent by a correspondent out there. Happily there
were no difficulties about securing the mother's money for the son, and
it was enough to educate the boy and to give him a start; but, of
course, he had to begin the world as a poor man instead of a rich one.
Perhaps that was all the better for him--or so I thought until lately."

"And what are these signs of a morbid tendency that you spoke of?" asked
the doctor.

"Well, in the first place, after being almost extravagant in his
devotion to my daughter, Doreen, he now neglects her outrageously--comes
down very seldom, writes short letters or none. Now, my daughter is not
the sort of girl that a sane man would neglect," added Doctor Wedmore,
proudly.

"Certainly not," assented the doctor, inwardly thinking that it was much
less surprising than it would have been in the case of one of his own
girls.

"In the second place, he is always harping upon the subject of Jacobs
and his peculations--an old subject, which he might well let rest. And,
in the third place, he has become moody, morose and absent-minded; and
my son, Max, who often visits him at his chambers in Lincoln's Inn, has
noticed the change even more than I, who have fewer opportunities of
seeing him."

The doctor was puffing stolidly at his pipe and looking at the fire.

"It is very difficult to form an opinion upon report only," said he.
"Frankly, I can see nothing in what you have told me about the young man
which could not be explained in other and likelier ways. He may have got
entangled, for instance, with some woman in London."

Mr. Wedmore took fire at this suggestion.

"In that case, the sooner Doreen forgets all about him the better."

"Mind, I'm only suggesting!" put in the doctor, hastily. "There may be a
dozen more reasons--"

"I shall not wait to find them out," said Mr. Wedmore, decisively. "He
and Max are coming down together this evening. My wife would have them
to help in organizing some affair they're getting up for Christmas. I'll
send him to the right-about without any more nonsense."

"But surely that is hardly--"

"Hardly what?" snapped out Mr. Wedmore, as he poked the fire viciously.

"Well, hardly fair to either of the young people. Put a few questions to
him yourself, or better still, let your wife do it. It may be only a
storm in a teacup, after all. Remember, he is the son of your old
friend. And you wouldn't like to have it on your conscience that you had
treated him harshly."

The doctor's advice was sane and sound enough, but Mr. Wedmore was not
in the mood to listen to it. That notion of an entanglement with another
woman rankled in his proud mind, and made him still less inclined to be
patient and forbearing.

"I shall give Doreen warning of what I am going to do at once," said he,
"before Horne turns up."

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. He was obstinate himself.

Mr. Wedmore crossed the long room to the door, and opened it sharply.

The hall was full of people and of great bales of goods, which were
piled upon the center-table and heaped up all around it.

"Doreen!" he called, sharply.

Out of the crowd there rushed a girl--such a girl! One of those radiant
creatures who explain the cult of womanhood; who make it difficult even
for sober-minded, middle-aged men and matrons to realize that this is
nothing but flesh and blood like themselves; one of those beautiful
creatures who claim worship as a right and who repay it with kindness
and brightness and sweetness and laughter.

No house was ever dull that held Doreen Wedmore.

She was a tall girl, brown-haired, brown-eyed, made to laugh and to live
in the sunshine. Nobody could resist her, and nobody ever tried to.

She sprang across the hall to her father and whirled him back into the
dining-room, and put her back against it.

"Dudley's come!" said she. "He's in the hall--among the blankets!"

"Blankets!"

"Yes." She was crossing the room by this time to the doctor, whom she
had quickly perceived, and was holding out her hand to him. "You must
know, doctor, that we are up to our eyes in blankets just now, and in
bundles of red flannel, and in soup and coals. Papa has been reading up
Christmas in the country in the olden time, and he finds that to be
correct you must deluge the neighborhood with those articles. They are
not at all what the people want, as far as I can make out. But that
doesn't matter. It pleases papa to demoralize the neighborhood; so we're
doing it. And mamma helps him. She dates from the prehistoric period
when a wife _really_ swore to obey her husband; so she does it through
thick and thin. Of course, she knows better all the time. She could
always set papa right if she chose. Whatever happens, papa must be
obeyed. So when he wants to run his dear old head into a noose, she
dutifully holds it open for him, when all the time she knows how
uncomfortable he'll be till he gets out."

"You're a saucy puss, Miss!" cried her father, trying to frown, but
betraying his delight in his daughter's merry tongue by the twinkle in
his eyes.

"And that's the right sort of woman for a wife," said the old doctor,
enthusiastically. "I must say I think it's a bad sign when young girls
think they can improve upon their own mothers."

"She doesn't mean half she says," said her father, indulgently.

"Oh, yes, she does," retorted Doreen. "And she wants to know, please,
what it is you have to say to Dudley."

The doctor rose from his chair, and Mr. Wedmore frowned.

"And it's no use putting me off by telling me not to ask questions. I'm
not mamma, you know."

"I intend to ask him--something about you."

It was the girl's turn to frown now.

"Please don't, papa," said she, in a lower voice. "I know you're going
to worry him, and to put your hands behind your back and ask him
conundrums, and to make all sorts of mischief, under the impression that
you are putting things right. And if you only just wouldn't, everything
would soon be as right as possible. While if you persist--"

But Mr. Wedmore interrupted her, not harshly, as he would have done
anybody else, but with decision.

"You must trust me to know best, my dear. It is better for you both that
we should come to some understanding. Haselden, you'll excuse me for
half an hour, won't you? And you, Doreen," and he turned again to his
daughter, "stay with the doctor here, and try to talk sense till I come
back again."

And Mr. Wedmore went quickly out of the room, without giving the girl a
chance of saying anything more.




CHAPTER II.

MAX MAKES A DISCOVERY.


Doreen's bright face lost a little of its color and much of its gayety
as her father disappeared. The doctor felt sorry for her.

"Come, come; cheer up, my dear," he said. "If he loves you honestly, and
I don't know how he can fail to do so, a few words with your father will
put matters all right. There is nothing to look so sad about, I think."

But Doreen gave him one earnest, questioning look, and then her eyelids
fell again.

"You don't know," she said, in a low voice. "Papa doesn't understand
Dudley; but I think I do. He is very sensitive and rather reserved about
himself. If papa interferes now, he will offend him, and Dudley may very
likely go off at once, and perhaps never come near me again. He is
proud--very proud."

"But if he could behave like that," replied the doctor, quickly, "if he
could throw over such a nice girl as you for no reason worth speaking
of, I should call him a nasty-tempered fellow, whom you ought to be glad
to be rid of."

"Ah, but you would be wrong," retorted Doreen, with a little flush in
her face. "It is quite true that he has neglected me a little lately,
written short letters, and not been down to see me so often. But I am
sure there was some better reason for his conduct than papa thinks. And
if I feel so sure, and if I am ready to trust him, why shouldn't papa
be?"

The doctor smiled at her ingenuousness.

"Your father is right in claiming that he ought to be made acquainted
with the young man's reason for conduct which looks quite unwarrantable
on the face of it," said he.

But Doreen gave a little sigh.

"I don't think that a man has a right to turn inquisitor over another
man, just because the second man is ready to marry the first man's
daughter," said she. "And I'm sure papa wouldn't have stood it when
_he_ was young."

The doctor laughed.

"He ought to put up with any amount of questioning rather than lose the
girl of his choice," said he decisively. "And if he has the stuff of a
man in him he will do so."

"But he is unhappy. I know it," said Doreen.

"Unhappy!" cried the doctor, indignantly. "And what's he got to be
unhappy about, I should like to know? He ought to be thanking Heaven on
his knees all day long for getting such a nice girl to promise to marry
him. That's the attitude a young man used to take when I was young."

"Did you go down on your knees all day long when Mrs. Haselden promised
to marry you?" asked Doreen, recovering her sauciness at the notion.
"And why should he do it till he knows what sort of a wife I am going to
make? And why should he go down on his knees more than I on mine? When
there are more women in the world than men, too!"

The doctor shook his head.

"Ah, there is no arguing with you saucy girls," said he. "But I know
that I, for my part, don't know of a man in the whole world who is
worthy to marry one of my daughters."

As the doctor finished speaking, the door was opened quickly, and Mr.
Wedmore came in, looking white and worried.

Doreen ran to him with an anxious face.

"What have you done, papa, what have you done? Did you see him? What did
you say? What did you say?"

Mr. Wedmore put his arm around his daughter, and kissed her tenderly.

"Don't trouble your head about him any more, my dear child," said he in
a husky voice. "He isn't worth it. He isn't worthy of you."

Doreen drew away from her father, looking into his face with searching
eyes and with an expression full of fear.

"Papa, what do you mean? You have sent him away?"

Mr. Wedmore answered in a loud and angry voice; but it was clear enough
that the anger was not directed against his daughter.

"I did not send him away. He took himself off. I had hardly begun to
speak to him--and I began quite quietly, mind--when he made the excuse
of a letter which he found waiting for him, to go back to town. Without
any ceremony, he rushed out of the study into the hall, and snatched up
his hat and coat to go."

"And is he gone?" asked Doreen, in a low voice, as she staggered back a
step.

"Oh, yes, I suppose so. And a good riddance, too. There was no letter at
all for him, I suppose."

"Yes, there was a letter!" faltered Doreen.

She gave a glance round her; seemed to remember suddenly the presence of
a third person, for she blushed deeply on meeting the doctor's eyes;
then, without another word, she sprang across the room to the door.

"Where are you going?" cried her father, as he followed her into the
hall.

But she did not answer. The hall-door was closing with a loud clang.

Doreen was not the girl to lose her lover for want of a little energy.
She was fonder of Dudley than people imagined. There is always an
inclination in the general mind to consider that a person of lively
temperament is incapable of a deep feeling. And Mr. Wedmore had only
shown a common tendency in believing that his beautiful and brilliant
daughter would easily give up the lover whom he considered unworthy of
her. But he was wrong. Much too high-spirited and too happy in her
temperament and surroundings to brood over her lover's late negligence,
she was perhaps too vain to believe that she had lost her hold upon his
heart. At any rate, she liked him too well to give him up in this
off-hand fashion without making an effort to discover the reason of his
present mysterious conduct.

That letter which he had used as an excuse for his sudden departure had
arrived at The Beeches by the afternoon post. Doreen had seen it with
her own eyes; had noted with some natural curiosity that the direction
was ill-spelled, ill-written; that the chirography was that of an almost
illiterate female correspondent; and that the post-mark showed that it
came from the East End of London. Rather a strange letter for the smart
young barrister to receive, perhaps. And the thought of it made Doreen
pause when she had got outside the door on the broad drive between the
lawns.

Only for the moment. The next she was flying across the rougher grass
outside the garden among the oaks and the beeches of the park. She saw
no one in front of her, and for a few seconds her heart beat very fast.
She thought she had missed him.

There was no lodge at the park entrance; only a modest wooden gate in
the middle of the fence. Doreen was hesitating whether to go through or
to go back, when she saw the figure of Dudley Horne coming toward the
gate from the stables.

So she waited.

As he came nearer, she, hidden from his sight by the trunk of an old
oak-tree, grew uneasy and shy. Dark though it was, dimly as she could
see him, Doreen felt convinced, from the rapid, steady pace at which he
walked, that he was intent upon some set purpose, that he was not driven
by pique at her father's words.

He came quite close to her, so that she saw his face. A
dark-complexioned, strong face it was, clean-shaven, not handsome at
all. But, on the other hand, it was just such a face as women admire;
full of character, of ambition, of virility. Doreen had been debating
with herself whether she dared speak to him; but the moment she got a
full look at his face, her courage died away.

It was plain to her that, whatever might be the subject of the thoughts
which were agitating his mind, she had no share in them.

So she let him pass out, and then crept back, downcast, shocked,
ashamed, up the slope to the house.

She got in by the billiard-room, at the window of which she knocked.
Max, her brother, who was playing a game with Queenie, his younger
sister, let her in, and cried out at sight of her white face:

"Hello! Doreen, what's up? Had a row with Dudley? Or what?"

"I have had no 'row' with any one," answered the girl, very quietly.
"But--you must all know all about it presently, so you may as well hear
it at once--Dudley has gone away."

"What?"

Max stopped in the act of trying for a carom, and stared at his sister.

"Why, he only came when I did, ten minutes ago!"

"He's gone, I tell you!" repeated Doreen, stamping her foot. "And--and
listen, Max, I'm frightened about him! He's got something on his mind.
When he went away, I saw him; I was standing by the gate; he looked
so--so _dreadful_ that I didn't dare to speak to him. _I!_ Think of
that!"

"Had papa been speaking to him?" put in the shrewd younger sister, who
was chalking her cue at the other end of the room.

The younger sister always sees most of the game.

"Ye--es, but--I don't know--I hardly think it was that," answered Doreen
quickly. "At any rate, Max, I want you to do this for me; I want you to
go up to town to-morrow and see him. I shan't rest until I know
he's--he's all right--after what I saw of his face and the look on it.
Now, you will do this, won't you, won't you? Without saying anything to
anybody, mind. Queenie, you can hold your tongue, too. Now, Max, there's
a dear, you'll do it, won't you?"

Max told her that she was "off her head," that he could do no good, and
so on. But he ended in giving way to the will of his handsome sister,
whom he adored.

Max Wedmore was a good-looking fellow of five-and-twenty, with a
reputation as a ne'er-do-weel, which, perhaps, he hardly deserved. His
father had a great idea of bringing the young man up to some useful
calling to keep him out of mischief. Not very terrible mischief, for the
most part: only the result of too much leisure and too much money in
inexperienced hands. The upshot of this difference of opinion between
father and son was that while Mr. Wedmore was always finding mercantile
situations for his son, Max was always taking care to be thrown out of
them after a few weeks, and taking a rest which was by no means well
earned.

This errand of his sister's was by no means unwelcome to him, since it
took him back to town, where he could amuse himself better than he could
in the country.

So, on the following morning, he found some sort of excuse to take him
up, and started on his journey with the blessings of Doreen, and with
very little opposition from his father, who was subdued and thankful to
have got rid of Dudley with so little trouble.

It was soon after three when Max arrived at Dudley Horne's chambers in
Lincoln's Inn. Of course, Dudley was out; so Max scribbled a note for
his friend and left it on the table while he went to the Law Courts to
look for him. Not finding him anywhere about, Max filled up the day in
his own fashion, and returned to Dudley's room at about seven o'clock,
when he supposed that his friend would either return to dinner or look
in on his way to dine elsewhere.

He waited an hour, then went away and filled up his time at a
music-hall, and returned once more at a quarter to eleven. Dudley, so he
was told by the old woman who gave him the information, had not, as far
as she knew, been in his rooms since the morning.

Max, who was a great friend of Dudley's, and could take any liberty he
pleased in his precincts, lit the gas and the sitting-room fire, and
installed himself in an arm-chair with a book. He could not read,
however, for he was oppressed by some of Doreen's own fears. He was well
acquainted with all his friend's ways, and he knew that for him to be
away both from his chambers and from the neighborhood of the Courts for
a whole day was most unusual with that particularly steady, plodding
young man. He began to worry himself with the remembrance that Dudley
had not been himself of late, that he had been moody, restless and
unsettled without apparent cause.

Finally, Max worked himself into such a state of anxiety about his
friend that when he at last heard the key turned in the lock of the
outer door, he jumped up excitedly and made a rush for the door.

Before he reached it, however, he heard footsteps in the adjoining
bedroom, the heavy tread of a man stumbling about in the dark, the
overthrowing of some of the furniture.

Surely that could not be Dudley!

Max stood still at the door, listening. He thought it might be a thief
who had got hold of the key of the chambers.

As he stood still, close by the wall, the door which led from the one
room to the other was thrown open from the bedroom, almost touching him
as it fell back; and there staggered into the sitting-room, into the
light thrown by the gas and the fire, a figure which Max could scarcely
recognize as Dudley Horne. His face was the grayish white of the dead;
his eyes were glassy; his lips were parted; while the grime of a London
fog had left its black marks round his mouth and eyes, giving him an
appearance altogether diabolical. He was shaking like a leaf as he
stumbled against a chair and suddenly wheeled round to the light.

Then, unbuttoning his overcoat quickly, he looked down at his clothes
underneath. He passed his hand over them and held it in the light, with
a shudder.

Max uttered a sharp cry.

The stain on Dudley's hand, the wet patches which glistened on his dark
clothes, were stains of blood.




CHAPTER III.

DUDLEY EXPLAINS.


As the cry of horror escaped the lips of Max, Dudley wheeled quickly
round and met his eyes.

For a moment the two men stood staring at each other without uttering a
word. It seemed to Max that his friend did not recognize him; that he
looked like a hunted man brought to bay by his pursuer, with the furtive
expression in his eyes of a creature trying to devise some means of
escape.

It was the most shocking experience that Max had ever known, and the
blood seemed to freeze in his veins as he stood by the table watching
his friend, trying to conjure back a smile to his own face and look of
welcome into his own eyes.

He found his voice at last.

"Why, Horne," cried he, and he was angry with himself as he noted that
his voice was hoarse and tremulous, and that he could not manage to
bring out his natural tones, "what have you been doing with yourself?
I--I've been backward and forward here all day long, and now I've been
waiting for you ever so long!"

There was a pause. Dudley was still staring at him, but there was
gradually coming over his face a change which showed recognition,
followed by annoyance. He drew himself up, and, after a pause, asked,
stiffly:

"What did you want with me?"

He spoke more naturally than Max had managed to do, and as the latter
replied, he took out his pocket-handkerchief very calmly and began to
wipe the stain off his right hand.

Max shuddered.

"Why, is it such a very unusual thing for me to drop in upon you and to
want to see you?" he asked, with another attempt at his ordinary manner,
which failed almost as completely as the first had done.

There was another short pause. Dudley, without looking again at his
friend, examined his hand, saw that it was now clean, and replaced the
soiled handkerchief in his pocket. He seemed by this time to be
thoroughly at his ease, but Max was not deceived.

"Of course not," said Dudley, quickly. "I only meant
that--considering"--he paused, and seemed to be trying to recollect
something--"considering what took place down at Datton yesterday and how
anxious your father seemed to be rid of me--"

"But what has my father got to do with me, as far as you are concerned,
Dudley, eh?" said Max.

There had come upon him suddenly such a strong impression that his
friend was in some awful difficulty, some scrape so terrible as to make
him lonely beyond the reach of help, that Max, who was a good-hearted
fellow and a stanch friend, spoke with something which might almost be
called tenderness:

"We've always been chums, now, haven't we? And a row between you and
Doreen, or between you and my father, wouldn't make any difference to
me. I--I suppose you don't mean to give me the cold shoulder for the
future, eh?"

Dudley had turned his back upon him, and was standing on the hearth-rug,
looking down at the fire, in an attitude which betrayed to his friend
the uneasiness from which he was suffering. It was an attitude of
constraint, as different as possible from any in which Max had ever seen
him.

Another pause. Dudley seemed unable on this occasion to give a simple
answer to a simple question without taking thought first. At last he
laughed awkwardly and half turned toward Max.

"Why, of course not," said he, but without heartiness. "Of course not.
Though it will be rather awkward, mind, for us to see much of each other
just at first, after my having got kicked out like that, won't it?"

The tone in which Max answered betrayed considerable surprise and
perplexity.

"Kicked out!" he exclaimed. "My father said he hardly got a word out
before you took yourself off in a huff."

Dudley turned round quickly and faced him this time, with a sullen look
of defiance on his dark face.

"Well, the wise man doesn't wait to be kicked out," said he. "He removes
himself upon the slightest hint that such a proceeding on his part would
be well received."

"You were a little too quick on this occasion," replied Max, dryly, "for
my father has got himself into hot water, and mother had a fit of
crying, while Doreen--"

Something made Max hesitate to tell his friend how Doreen had taken his
desertion. Max himself was ready to stand by his friend, whatever
difficulties the latter might be in. But Doreen, his lovely sister, must
have a lover without reproach.

At the mention of the girl's name there came a slight change over
Dudley's face--a change which struck the sensitive Max and touched him
deeply. Dudley took a step in the direction of his bedroom, and pulled
out his watch. As he did so a railroad ticket jerked out of his pocket
with the watch and fell to the ground.

Max saw it fall, but before he could pick it up or draw attention to it
his ideas were diverted by Dudley's next words:

"Well, you 'll excuse me, old chap. I've got to see a friend off by the
midnight train to Liverpool."

As he spoke Dudley turned, with his hand on the door, to cast a glance
at Max. He seemed to be asking himself what he should tell the other.
And then he took a step toward his friend and began an explanation,
which, as his shrewd eyes told him, Max required.

"The fact is that I got into the way of a beastly accident at Charing
Cross just now. Woman run over--badly hurt. Got myself covered with
blood. Ugh!"

Max was convinced that the shudder was genuine, although he had
doubts--of which he was ashamed--about the tale itself.

And how did that explain the proposed journey?

Dudley went on:

"I've only just got time to change my clothes and make myself decent.
See you in a day or two. Sorry I can't stay and have a pipe with you and
one of our 'hard-times' suppers."

He was on the point of disappearing into the inner room, when Max
stopped him.

"Oh, but you can," said he. "I have something particular to say to you,
and I can wait till you come back, if it's two o'clock, and I can bring
in the supper myself."

Dudley frowned impatiently, and again he cast at Max the horrible,
furtive look which had been his first greeting.

"That's impossible," said he, quickly. "I may have to go on to Liverpool
myself. Good-night."

And he shut himself into the bedroom.

Max felt cold all over. After a few minutes' hesitation, he went out of
the chambers, down the stairs and out of the house.

At the door a cab was waiting. The driver spoke to him the moment he
stepped out on the pavement. Evidently he took him for Dudley, his late
fare.

"The lady's got out an' gone off, sir. I hollered after her, but she
wouldn't wait. Oh, beg pardon, sir," and the man touched his hat,
perceiving his mistake; "I took you for the gentleman I brought here
with the lady."

"Oh, he'll be down in a minute or two," answered Max.

And then he thought he would wait and see what new developments the
disappearance of the lady would lead to. He was getting sick with alarm
about his friend. These instances of the blood-stained clothes, the
possible journey to Liverpool, and the flight of the mysterious lady,
were so suspicious, taken in conjunction with each other, that Max found
it impossible to rest until he knew more. He walked a little way along
the pavement, and then returned slowly in the middle of the road. He had
done this for the third time when Dudley dashed out of the house with
rapid steps, and had reached the step of the hansom before he discovered
that the vehicle was empty.

An exclamation of dismay escaped his lips, and to the cabman's statement
of the lady's disappearance he replied by asking sharply in which
direction she had gone. On receiving the information he wanted, he gave
the man his fare, and walked rapidly away in the direction the cabman
had indicated.

Max followed.

Every moment increased his belief that some appalling circumstance had
occurred by which Dudley's mind had for the time lost its balance. Every
word, look and movement on the part of his friend betrayed the fact. Now
he was evidently setting off in feverish haste in pursuit of this woman
whom he had left in the cab; and Max, who believed that his friend was
on the brink of an attack of the insanity which old Mr. Wedmore feared,
resolved to dog his footsteps, and not to let his friend go out of his
sight until the latter got safely back to his chambers.

Dudley went at a great pace into Holborn, and then he stopped. The
traffic had dwindled down to an occasional hansom and to a thin line of
foot-passengers on the pavements. He looked to right, to left, and then
he turned suddenly and came face to face with Max.

"Hello!" cried he. "Where are you going to? Where are you putting up?"

"At the Arundel," answered Max, taken aback, and stammering a little.

Dudley had recovered his usual tones.

"Come to my club," said he. "We can get some supper there and have that
pipe."

"But how about Liverpool and the friend you had to see off?" asked Max.

Dudley hesitated ever so slightly.

"Oh, he's given me the slip," he answered, in a tone which sounded
careless enough. "Gone off without waiting for me. So my conscience is
free on his score."

Max said nothing for a moment. Then he thought himself justified in
setting a trap for his friend.

"Who is he?" asked he. "Anybody I know?"

"No," replied Dudley. "A man I met in the country, who showed me a good
deal of kindness. From Yorkshire. Man named Browning. Very good fellow,
but erratic. Said he'd wait for me in the cab, and disappeared before I
could come down. Had an idea I should make him lose his train, I
suppose. Well, never mind him. Come along."

Max went with him in silence. Dudley had not only got back his usual
spirits, but seemed to be in a mood of loquacity and liveliness unusual
with him. When they got to the club, he ordered oysters and a bottle of
champagne, and drank much more freely than was his custom.

It was Max, the ne'er-do-weel, the extravagant one, who drank little and
did the listening. Dudley had cast off altogether the gravity and
taciturnity which sometimes got him looked upon as a bit of a prig, and
chatted and told his friend stories, with a tone and manner of
irresponsible gayety which became him ill.

And Max, who was usually the talker, listened as badly as the other told
his stories. For all the time he was weighed down with the fear, so
strong that it seemed to amount to absolute knowledge, of some horrible
danger hanging over his friend.

Abruptly, before he made the expected comment on the last of Dudley's
stories, Max rose from his chair and said he must go home.

"I'll see you as far as your diggings first," said he. "It's not much
out of way, you know."

At these words Dudley's high spirits suddenly left him, and the furtive
look came again into his face.

"Oh," said he, "oh, very well. And on the way I can tell you the whole
story of the accident that I saw at Charing Cross, this evening, just
before I met you."

So they went out together, and Dudley, as he had suggested, gave his
friend a long and extremely circumstantial account of the way in which
the wheel went over the woman, and of the difficulty he and the
policeman had experienced in getting her from between the wheels of the
van by which she had been crushed.

Max heard him in silence, but did not believe a word. Whatever had
reduced Dudley to the plight in which he had returned to his chambers,
Max was convinced that it differed in some important details from the
version of the affair which he chose to give.

"We won't talk any more about it," he went on, without seeming to remark
his friend's silence. "It's a thing I want to forget. It has quite upset
me for a time; you could see that yourself when you met me. I--I don't
know quite what to do to get the thing out of my mind. I think I shall
run down to Datton with you, and see what that will do. What do you
think?"

Now, although he had drunk more wine than usual, Dudley knew perfectly
well what he was saying, and Max stared at him in astonishment.

"What?" he exclaimed. "After what you told me? About my father?"

"Oh, yes, yes. But I can explain everything. I can, and I will,"
returned Dudley, quickly. "I have not been myself lately. I have had
certain business worries. But they are all settled now, and I feel more
like myself than I have done for weeks."

Max stopped short and stared at his friend by the light of a gas-lamp.

"Well, you don't look it," said he, shortly.

Dudley laughed loudly, but rather uneasily.

"Don't you think I could give an explanation which would satisfy your
father, if I wished?" he asked, with a sudden relapse into gravity.

"I'm hanged if I know," retorted Max, energetically. "You haven't given
any explanation which would satisfy _me_."

Dudley stared into his face for a few seconds inquiringly, and then
quietly hooked his arm and led him along the Strand.

"You don't want to be satisfied, old chap," said he, in a low voice.
"You know me."

Again Max was deeply touched. This was a sudden and unexpected peep
under the surface of deception into the real heart of his old chum. He
replied only by a slight twitching of the arm Dudley had taken.

They walked on at a quicker pace, and ran up the stairs to the door of
Dudley's rooms in silence.

Dudley went first into the sitting-room and turned up the gas. It did
not escape Max that he shot a hurried glance around the room, taking in
every corner, as he entered. Talking all the time about the cold and the
fog, Dudley went into the adjoining room, and Max saw him pull aside the
bed-curtains and look behind them.

Then Max, not wishing to play the spy on his friend, turned his back;
and as he did so he caught sight of the railway ticket which had fallen
to the floor from Dudley's pocket before they went out.

Max picked it up, and noted that it was the return half of a first-class
return ticket from Fenchurch Street to Limehouse, and that it was dated
that very day.

He had scarcely noted this, mechanically rather than with any set
purpose, when he was startled to find Dudley at his elbow.

Max turned round quickly, but Dudley's eyes were fixed upon the railway
ticket.

"You dropped this when you--" began Max, handing it to his friend.

It was not until then, when Dudley took the ticket from him and tossed
it into the fireplace with a careless nod, that it flashed into the mind
of Max that the incident had some significance.

What on earth had Dudley been doing at Limehouse? His parents had had
property there, certainly, many years ago. But not a square foot of the
grimy, slimy, auriferous Thames-side land, not a brick or a beam of the
warehouses and sheds which had been theirs in the old days, had
descended to Dudley. Owing to the fraudulent action of Edward Jacobs,
all had had to go.




CHAPTER IV.

A PARAGRAPH IN "THE STANDARD."


Max did not stay long with his friend, but made the excuse that he was
half asleep, after a few minutes' rather desultory conversation, to go
back to his hotel.

It was with the greatest reluctance that he left his friend alone; but
Dudley had given him intimations, in every look and tone and movement,
that he wished to be by himself; and this fact increased the heaviness
of heart with which Max, full of forebodings on his friend's account,
had gone reluctantly down the creaking stairs.

Again and again Max asked himself, during his short walk from Lincoln's
Inn to Arundel Street, why he had not had the courage to put a question
or two straightforwardly to Dudley. As a matter of fact, however, the
reason was simple enough. The relative positions of the two men had been
suddenly reversed, and neither of them, as yet, felt easy under the new
conditions.

Dudley, the hard-working student, the rising barrister, the abstemious,
thoughtful, rather silent man to whom Max had looked up with respect and
affection, had suddenly sunk, during the last few hours, by some
unaccountable and mysterious means, to far below Max's own modest level.
It was he, the careless fellow whom Dudley had formerly admonished, who
had that evening been the sober, the temperate, the taciturn one; it was
he who had watched the other, been solicitous for him, trembled for him.

Max could not understand. He lay awake worrying himself about his
friend, feeling Dudley's fall more acutely than he would have felt his
own, and did not fall asleep until it was nearly daylight.

In these circumstances he overslept himself, and it was eleven o'clock
before he found himself in the hotel coffee-room, waiting for his
breakfast.

He was in the act of pouring out his coffee, when his name, uttered
behind him in a familiar voice, made him start. The next moment Dudley
Horne stood by his side, and holding out his hand with a smile, seated
himself on the chair beside him.

"I--I--I overslept myself this morning," stammered Max.

He was in a state of absolute bewilderment. Not only had the new Dudley
of the previous night disappeared, with his alternate depression and
feverish high spirits, his furtive glances, his hoarse and altered
voice, but the old Dudley, who had returned, seemed happier and livelier
than usual.

"Town and its wicked ways don't agree with you, my boy, nor do they with
me. If I were in your shoes, I shouldn't tread the streets of Babylon
more than once a twelvemonth."

"You think that now," returned Max, "because you see more than enough of
town."

"Well, I'm not going to see much more of it at present," retorted
Dudley. "This afternoon I'm off again down to Datton, and I came to ask
whether you were coming down with me."

"I thought you had had a row, at least a misunderstanding of some sort,
with--with my father?"

"Why, yes, so I had," replied Dudley, serenely, as he took a newspaper
out of his pocket and folded it for reading. "But I've written to him
already this morning, explaining things, and telling him that I propose
to come down to The Beeches this evening. He'll get it before I turn up,
I should think, for I posted it at six o'clock this morning."

"Why, what were you doing at six o'clock in the morning?" said Max, in a
tone of bewilderment, as before. "Didn't you go to bed at all last
night?"

"No," answered Dudley, calmly. "I had some worrying things to think
about, and so I took the night to do it in."

A slight frown passed over his face as he spoke, but it disappeared
quickly, leaving him as placid as before.

"About one of the things I can consult you, Max. You know something
about it, I suppose. Do you think I have any chance with Doreen?"

Max stared at him again.

"You must be blind if you haven't seen that you have," he said, at last,
in a sort of muffled voice, grudgingly. He moved uneasily in his seat,
and added, in a hurried manner: "But, I say, you know, Dudley, after
last night, I--I want to ask you something myself. I'm Doreen's brother,
though I'm not much of a brother for such a nice girl as she is.
And--and--what on earth did you think of going to Liverpool for _with a
woman_? I've a right to ask that now, haven't I?"

Max blurted out these words in a dogged tone, not deterred from
finishing his sentence by the fact that Dudley's face had grown white
and hard, and that over his whole attitude there had come a rapid
change.

There was a pause when the younger man had finished. Dudley kept his
eyes down, and traced a pattern on the table-cloth with a fork, while
Max looked at him furtively. At last Dudley looked up quickly and asked,
in a tone which admitted of no prevarication in the answer he demanded:

"You have been playing the spy upon me, I see. Tell me just how much you
saw."

It was such a straightforward way of coming to the point that Max, taken
aback, but rather thankful that the ground was to be cleared a little,
answered at once without reserve:

"I did play the spy. It was enough to make me. I saw the hansom waiting
outside your door last night; the cabman mistook me for you, and told me
the lady had walked away. I couldn't help putting that together with
what you had told me about seeing a friend off to Liverpool, and,
perhaps, going there yourself. Now, who could have helped it?"

Dudley did not at once answer. He just glanced inquiringly at the face
of Max while he went on tracing the pattern on the cloth.

"You didn't see the lady," he said at last, not in a questioning tone,
but with conviction.

"No."

"Well, if you had seen her you would have been satisfied that it was not
her charms which were leading me astray," said he, with a faint smile.
"Are you satisfied now, or do you still consider," he went on with a
slight tone of mockery in his voice, "that my character requires further
investigation before you can accept me for a brother-in-law?"

Max moved uneasily again.

"What rot, Horne!" said he, impatiently. "You know very well I've always
wanted you to marry Doreen. I've said so, lots of times. I still say it
was natural I should want to understand your queer goings-on last night.
And now--and now--"

"And now that you don't understand them any better than before, you are
ready to take it for granted it's all right?" broke in Dudley, with the
same scoffing tone as before.

Max grew very red, began to speak, glanced at Dudley, and got up.

"Yes, I suppose that's about the size of it," said he, stiffly.

"And are you going down with me to-night? I can catch the seven o'clock
train."

"Oh, yes, I suppose so. I'll meet you at Charing Cross."

Max's enthusiasm on his friend's behalf had been much damped by his
behavior, and he gave him a nod, turned on his heel and left him without
another word. He gave up trying to understand the mystery which hung
about Dudley, and left it to Doreen and to his father to unravel.

The two young men did not meet again, therefore, until seven that
evening, when they took their seats in the same smoking-carriage. Max
felt quite glad that the presence of a couple of strangers prevented any
talk of a confidential sort between himself and Dudley, who on his side
seemed perfectly contented to puff at his pipe in silence.

Dudley's letter had evidently been received, and well received, for at
the station the two friends found the dog-cart waiting to take them the
mile and a half which lay between the station and The Beeches.

At the house itself, too, the front door flew open at their approach,
and Mr. Wedmore himself stood in the hall to welcome them.

Queenie was there. Mr. Wedmore was there. But there was never a glimpse
of Doreen.

"I got your letter, my dear boy," began Mr. Wedmore, holding out his
hand with so much heartiness that it was plain he was delighted to be
able to forgive his old friend's son, "and I am very glad, indeed, that
you have found your way back to us so soon. I am heartily glad to hear
that the worries which have been making you depressed lately are
over--heartily glad. And so, I am sure," added he, with a significant
smile, "Doreen will be."

"Thank you, sir," said Dudley. "You are very kind, very indulgent. I am
not ungrateful, I assure you."

Max, behind them, was listening with attentive ears. He did not feel so
sure as his father seemed to be that all was now well with Dudley.

"Where's Doreen?" he asked his younger sister.

"Don't know, I'm sure. She's taken herself off somewhere. Probably
somebody else will find her quicker than you will."

The younger sister was right. The younger sister always is on these
occasions.

Within five minutes of his arrival, Dudley found his way into the
breakfast room, where Doreen, a pug dog and a raven were sitting
together on the floor, surrounded by a frightful litter of paper and
shavings and string, wooden boxes, hampers, and odds and ends of cotton
wool.

She just looked up when Dudley came in, gave him a glance and a little
cool nod, and then, as he attempted to advance, uttered a shrill little
scream.

"One step farther, and my wax cupids will be ruined!"

"Wax cupids!" repeated Dudley, feebly.

"Yes, for my Christmas tree. It's to be the greatest success ever known
in these parts, or the greatest failure. Nothing between. That's what I
must always have--something sensational--something to make people howl
at me, or to make them want to light bonfires in my honor. That's
characteristic, isn't it?"

And Doreen, who was dressed in a black skirt, with a scarlet velvet
bodice which did justice to her brilliant complexion and soft, dark
hair, paused in the act of turning out a number of glittering glass
balls into her lap.

"Very," said Dudley, as he made his way carefully to the nearest chair
and sat down to look at her.

He was up to his knees in brown-paper parcels, over which barricade he
stretched out his hand.

Doreen affected not to see it. She began to tie bits of fancy string
into the little rings in the glass balls, cutting off the ends with a
pair of scissors.

"Aren't you going to shake hands with me?" asked Dudley, impatiently.

Doreen answered without looking tip.

"No. Not yet."

"What's the matter now?"

"Oh, I am offended."

"What have I done now?"

Doreen threw up her head.

"What have you _not_ done? We have all of us--I among the
others--had a good deal to put up with from you, lately, in the matter
of what I will call general neglect. And you put a climax to it the day
before yesterday by rushing out of the house without a word of good-bye
to anybody."

"There was a reason for it," interrupted Dudley, quickly.

"I suppose so. But I'm not going to take the reason on trust, Mr.
Horne."

"Not if you're satisfied that you will meet with no more neglect in the
future? That my conduct shall be in every respect what you--and the
others--can desire?"

"Not even then," replied Doreen decisively.

"But if your father is satisfied?"

"Then go and talk to my father."

There was a pause and their eyes met. Dudley, who had acknowledged to
himself the patience with which Doreen had put up with his recent
neglect, was astonished by the resolution which he saw in her eyes.

"What is it you want to know?" he asked, in a condescending and
indulgent tone.

"A great deal more than you will tell me," answered Doreen, promptly.

Whereat there was another pause. Dudley took up one of the brown-paper
parcels and turned it over in his hands. Perhaps it was to hide the fact
that an irrepressible tremor was running through his limbs.

If he had looked at her at that moment he would have seen in her eyes a
touching look of sympathy and distress. The girl knew that something had
been amiss with him--that something was amiss still. She cared for him.
She wanted his confidence, or at least so much of it as would allow her
to pour out upon him the tender sympathy with which her innocent heart
was overflowing. And he would have none of it. He wanted to treat her
like a beautiful doll, to be left in its cotton wool when his spirits
were too low for playthings, and to be taken out and admired when things
went better with him.

This was what Doreen mutinously thought and what her lips were on the
point of uttering, when the door was opened by Mr. Wedmore, who came
into the room with a copy of the _Evening Standard_ in his hand.

"Look here, Horne, did you see this?" said he, as he folded the paper
and handed it to Dudley. "Here's an odd thing. Of course it may be only
a coincidence. But doesn't it seem to refer to the rascal who ruined
your prospects--Edward Jacobs?"

"A middle-aged Jewish woman, who found some difficulty in making
herself understood, from an impediment in her speech, applied to
Mr. ----, of ---- Street Police Court, for advice in the following
circumstances: She and her husband had returned to England in
reduced circumstances, after a long residence abroad, and her
husband was in search of employment. He had received a letter from
Limehouse, offering him employment and giving him an appointment
for yesterday afternoon, which he started to keep. He had not
returned; she had been to Limehouse police station to make
inquiries, but could learn nothing of her husband. She seemed to be
under the impression that he had met with foul play, and made a
rambling statement to the effect that he had 'enemies.' It was only
after much persuasion, and the assurance that the press could not
help her without the knowledge, that she gave her name as Jacobs,
and her husband's first name as Edward. She described him as of the
middle height, thin, with gray hair and a short gray beard. The
magistrate said he had no doubt the press would do what they could
to help her, and the woman withdrew."

Dudley Horne read this account, and gave the paper back to Mr. Wedmore.

He tried to speak as he did so, but, though his mouth opened, the voice
refused to come.




CHAPTER V.

ONE MAN'S LOSS is ANOTHER MAN'S GAIN.


"Confound the Christmas tree!" grumbled Mr. Wedmore, as he stumbled over
a parcel of fluffy rabbits, whose heads screwed off to permit the
insertion of sweets.

"Oh, papa, you'll be saying 'Confound Christmas' next!"

And Doreen, with one watchful eye on Dudley all the time, made a lane
through her boxes and her hampers to admit the passage of her father to
a chair.

By this time Dudley had recovered himself a little, and was able to
answer the question Mr. Wedmore now put to him.

"What do you think of that, Horne?"

"I think, sir, that it must be more than a coincidence; that Mrs. Jacobs
must be the wife of the man who was my father's manager."

"Well, I think so, too. I know Jacobs's wife had an impediment in her
speech. The odd part of the business is that he should have disappeared
at Limehouse, the very place where one would have thought he would have
an objection to turning up at all, connected as it was with his old
peculations. I suppose he thought they were forgotten by this time."

"I suppose so."

Dudley still looked very white. He took up the paper again, as if to
re-read the paragraph. But Doreen, from her post of vantage on the
floor, saw that he held it before him with eyes fixed. Mr. Wedmore,
after a little hesitation, and after vainly trying to get another look
at the face of the younger man, went on again:

"I thought you would be struck by this; the subject turning up again in
this odd way, just when you've been interesting yourself so much in the
old story!"

Down went the paper, and Dudley looked into the face of Mr. Wedmore.

"Interesting myself in it! Have I? How do you mean?"

"Well, you've asked a good many questions about this Jacobs, and
wondered what had become of him. I fancy you have the answer in that
paragraph."

There was a pause, and Dudley seemed to recollect something. Then he
said:

"Oh, yes, I think I have. The man has fallen upon bad times, evidently.
I--I--I'm sorry for his wife."

"And the man himself--haven't you forgiven him yet?"

Dudley started, and glanced quickly round, as if the simple words had
been an accusation.

"Forgiven him? Oh, yes, long ago. At least--" He paused a moment, and
then added, inquiringly: "What had I to forgive?"

"Well, to tell the truth, Horne, that's just what I have often asked
myself, when you have insisted upon raking up all the details of poor
Jacobs's misdeeds! Why, your poor father, who was ruined by his
dishonesty, never showed half the animosity you do. I could have
understood it if you had suffered by his frauds. But have you? You have
been well educated; you have started well in life. And on the whole, no
man who has arrived at your age can honestly say that it would have been
better for him to start life with a fortune at his back, eh?"

"No."

Dudley got up from his chair. He seemed agitated and uneasy, and soon
took advantage of Mr. Wedmore's suggestion, somewhat dryly made, that he
was tired after his journey and would like to go to bed.

When he had left the room, Mr. Wedmore turned angrily to his daughter.

"Now, Doreen, I will have no more of this nonsense. Dudley is beginning
all the old tricks over again--absence of mind, indifference to you--did
he even look at you as he said good night?--and morbid interest in this
old, forgotten business of Jacobs and his misdoings. I won't have any
more of it, and I shall tell him plainly that we don't care to have him
down here until he can bring a livelier face and manner with him!"

Doreen had risen from her humble seat on the floor and had crawled on
her knees to the side of his chair, where she slid a coaxing, caressing
hand under his arm and put her pretty head gently down on his shoulder.

"No, you won't, papa dear. You won't do anything of the kind," she
whispered in his ear very softly, very humbly. "You would not do
anything to give pain to your old friend's son if you could help it, and
you would not do anything to hurt your own child, your little Doreen,
for a hundred thousand pounds, now would you?"

"Yes, I would, if it was for her good," replied Mr. Wedmore, in a very
loud and determined voice, which was supposed to have the effect of
frightening her into submission. "And it's all rubbish to think to get
around me by calling yourself 'little Doreen,' when you're a great, big,
overgrown lamp-post of a girl, who can take her own part against the
whole county."

Doreen laughed, but still clung persistently to the arm which he
pretended to try to release from her clutches.

"Well, I don't know about the county, but I think I can persuade my old
father into doing what I want," she purred into his ear with gentle
conviction. "You see, papa, it isn't as if Dudley and I were engaged.
We--"

"Why, what else have you been but engaged ever since last Christmas?"
said her father, irritably. "Everybody has looked upon it as an
engagement, and Dudley was devoted enough until a couple of months ago;
but now something has gone wrong with the lad, I'm certain, and it would
be much better for you both to make an end of this."

"Why, there's nothing to make an end of," pleaded Doreen. "Just 'let
things slide,' as Max says, and let Dudley come down or stay away as he
likes, and the matter will come quite right one way or the other, and
you will find there was really nothing for you to trouble your dear old
head about, after all."

There was really some excellence in the girl's suggestion; and her
father, after much grumbling, gave a half consent to it. He was forced
to admit to himself that there was some grounds for Dudley's agitation
on reading the paragraph concerning the disappearance of Edward Jacobs,
since he had been interesting himself of late in that person's history.
But it was the degree of the young man's agitation which had seemed
morbid. Mr. Wedmore found it difficult to understand why a mere
suggestion of the man's disappearance--if it were indeed _the_
man--should affect Dudley so deeply. And the idea of incipient insanity
in young Horne grew stronger than ever in Mr. Wedmore's mind.

Now, Doreen was by no means so sanguine as she pretended to be. She was
one of those high-spirited, lively girls who find it easy to hide from
others any troubles which may be gnawing at their heart. Such a nature
has an elasticity which enables it to throw off its cares for a time,
when in the society of others, only to brood over them in hours of
loneliness.

Nobody in the house knew--what, however, shrewd Queenie half guessed
that Doreen had many an anxious hour, many a secret fit of crying, on
account of the change in Dudley's manner toward her. The brilliant,
proud-hearted girl was more deeply attached to him than anybody
suspected. If any remark was made by outsiders as to the comparative
rarity of the young barrister's visits during the past two months, it
was always accompanied by the comment that Miss Wedmore would not be
long in consoling herself.

And everybody knew that the curate, the Rev. Lisle Lindsay, was
hungering to step into Dudley's shoes.

He was not quite to be despised as a rival, this "snowy-banded,
dilettant, delicate-handed priest." In the first place, he was a really
nice, honorable young fellow, with no much worse faults than a
pedantically correct pronunciation of the unaccented vowels; in the
second place, he was considerably taller than the race of curates
usually runs; and in the third place, he had a handsome allowance from
his mother, and "expectations" on a very grand scale indeed. Miss
Wedmore, if she were to decide in his favor, might well aspire to be the
wife of a bishop some day. And what could woman wish for more?

He was no laggard in love either. On the very morning after the arrival
of Max and Dudley, Mr. Lindsay called soon after breakfast to make
inquiries about the amount of holly and evergreens which would be
available for the decoration of the church, and was shown into the
morning-room, where most of the great work of preparation for Christmas
was taking place.

Mrs. Wedmore and all the young people were there, Max and Dudley having
been pressed into the service of filling cardboard drums with sweets for
what Max called "the everlasting tree." The tree itself stood in a
corner of the room, a colossal but lop-sided plant with a lamentable
tendency to straggle about the lower branches, and an inclination to run
to weedy and unnecessary length about the top.

Max was a hopeless failure as an assistant. He was always possessed with
a passionate desire to do something different from what he was asked to
do; and when they gave way and indulged his fancy, the fancy
disappeared, and he found that he wanted to do something else.

"It's always the way with a man!" was Queenie's scornful comment on her
brother's failing.

Queenie herself looked upon the whole business of the tree as a piece of
useless frivolity unworthy the time and attention of grown-up people.
And she went about the share in it which she had been persuaded to
undertake with a stolid and supercilious manner which went far to spoil
the enjoyment of the rest.

Dudley entered, into the affair with some zest, but it was noticeable
that he devoted himself to Queenie, and exchanged very few remarks with
Doreen. There was a certain barrier of constraint springing up between
him and Doreen which had risen to an uncomfortable height by the time
the curate entered.

Doreen, whose cheeks were much flushed and whose eyes were unusually
bright, was extremely gracious. She offered to take Mr. Lindsay into the
grounds to interview the gardener, so that they might come to an
understanding about the evergreens to be used. She glanced at Dudley as
she made this proposal. He glanced back at her; and in his black eyes
she fancied for a moment that she saw a mute protest, a plea.

For a moment she hesitated. Standing still in the middle of the room,
not far from where he was busy helping Queenie to tie up a particularly
limp and fragile box of chocolates, she seemed to wait for a single
word, or even for another look, to turn her from her purpose.

But Dudley turned away, and either did not see or did not choose to
notice the pause. Then the tears sprang to the girl's eyes, and she ran
quickly to the door.

"Come, Mr. Lindsay," said she, "we must make haste. At this stage of
things, every minute has to be weighed out like gold, I assure you."

She went quickly out into the large hall, and the curate followed with
alacrity. Max and his mother were engaged in a wrangle over some soup
and coal tickets which somebody had mislaid, and in the search for which
the whole room, with its parcels and bundles, had to be overturned.

Queenie, who was at work at the end of the room, near the window,
uttered a short laugh. Dudley, who was standing a little way off, drew
nearer, and asked what she was laughing at.

"Oh, that misguided youth who has just gone out!"

"Misguided?"

"Yes," said Queenie, shortly. "If he hadn't been misguided, he would
have devoted his attention to me, not to Doreen. By all the laws of
society, curates' wives should be plain. They should also be simple in
their dress, and devoted to good works. Doreen says so herself. Why,
then, didn't he see that I was the wife for him and not the beauty?"

"Don't you think she will have him, then?" asked Dudley, very stiffly,
after a short pause. "She seems to like him. There was no need, surely,
for her to have been in such a hurry to take him into the grounds, if
she had felt no particular pleasure in his society."

Queenie looked up rather slyly out of her little light eyes. She was
distressed on account of her sister's trouble about this apparently
vacillating lover, and irritated herself by his strange conduct. But at
the bottom of her heart she believed in him and in his affection for
Doreen, just as her sister herself did, and she would have given the
world to make things right between two people whom she chose to believe
intended by nature for each other.

"I think there are other people in the world whose society Doreen likes
better," she said at last, below her breath.

The wrangle at the other end of the room was still going on, and nobody
heard her but Dudley. He flushed slightly and looked as if he
understood. But he instantly turned the talk to another subject.

"Would you have liked that sleek curate yourself, really?"

"Sleek? What do you mean by sleek? You wouldn't have a minister of the
church go about with long hair and a velveteen coat and a pipe in his
mouth, would you?"

"Not for worlds, I assure you. He is a most beautiful creature, and I
admire him very much, though he is perhaps hardly the sort of man I
should have expected both you girls to rave about. And as for you, I
thought you were too good to rave about anybody! You are unlike yourself
this morning, and more like Doreen."

Queenie laughed again that satirical little laugh which made a man
wonder what her thoughts exactly were.

"You say that because you don't know anything about me. I don't talk
when Doreen is talking, because then nobody would listen to me. I could
talk, too, if anybody ever talked to me."

"But one sees so little of you," pleaded Dudley. "You are generally out
district-visiting, or busy for Mrs. Wedmore, so that one hasn't a chance
of knowing you well. And one has got an idea that you are too good to
waste your time in idle conversation with a mere man!"

"Good!" cried Queenie contemptuously. "There's nothing good about my
district-visiting. I like it, Doreen goes about telling people it is
good of me. But that's only because she wouldn't care about it herself.
I like fussing about and thinking I am making myself useful. It's like
mamma's knitting, which gets her the reputation of being very
industrious, while all the time she enjoys it very much."

"But you yourself said you were 'devoted to good works,' I quote your
very words."

"That was only in fun. It's what Doreen says of me. You must have heard
her. She is much better than I am--really much, more unselfish--much
more amiable. Only because she's always bright and full of fun, she
doesn't get the credit of any of her good qualities. People think she's
only indulging her own inclination when she keeps us all amused and
happy all day long. But they don't know that she can suffer just as much
as anybody else, and that it costs her an effort to be lively for our
sakes when she feels miserable."

Queenie spoke with a little feeling in her usually hard, dry voice.
Dudley was silent for a long time when she had finished speaking. At
last they looked up at the same moment and met each other's eyes. And
the reserved, harassed man felt his heart go out to the girl, with her
quiet shrewdness and undemonstrative affection for her brilliant sister.

"Your quiet eyes see a great deal more than one would think, Queenie,"
he said at last. "I suppose they have seen that there is
something--something wrong--with--"

He spoke very slowly, and finally he stopped without finishing the
sentence.

Queenie gravely took it up for him.

"Something wrong with you? Of course I have. Well?"

"I don't know why I am telling you this. I didn't mean to tell any one.
But--but--well, I've begun; I may as well finish. You're not a person
who would talk about anybody else's secrets more than about your own."

"A secret? Are you going to tell me a secret?"

Dudley smiled very faintly, and then his expression suddenly changed.
Something like a spasm of fear and of pain shot quickly across his face,
frightening her a little. Then he shook his head.

"No," said he. "I hardly think you will consider it a secret, after what
you have just told me. I am only going to tell you this: I have had a
great trouble, a great affliction, hanging over me for some time now.
Sometimes I have thought it was going to clear away and leave me as I
was before. Sometimes I have felt myself quite free from it, and able to
go on in the old way. But with this consciousness, this knowledge
hanging over me always, I have behaved in all sorts of strange ways,
have hurt the feelings of my friends, have not been myself at all. You
know that, Queenie."

Queenie slowly bowed her head. Mrs. Wedmore and Max, still occupied in
their search for the missing soup tickets, had now extended their
operations to the hall, and left the room in possession of the other
two. Dudley went on with his confession.

"And now something has happened which has cut me off from my old self,
as it were. I don't know how else to express what I mean. I came down
last night with the intention of speaking to--to Doreen for the last
time, of trying to explain myself, if not to--to justify myself to her.
You know what I mean, don't you?"

Again Queenie bowed her head. Her father's suspicions as to Dudley's
perfect sanity had, of course, reached her ears, and she felt so much
pity for the poor fellow whose confession she was then hearing that she
dared not even raise her eyes to his face again. He went on, hurrying
his words, as if anxious to get his confession over:

"But I thought it all over last night, and I decided to say nothing to
her, after all. I don't think I could, without making a fool of myself.
For you know--you know my feelings about her; everybody knows. I had
hoped--Oh, well, you know what I hoped--"

There was a pause. Dudley was afraid of breaking down.

"Oh, Dudley, is it really all over, then, between you? Oh, it is
dreadful! For, you know, she cares, too!"

"Not as I do. I hope and think that is impossible," said Dudley,
hoarsely.

There was another pause, a longer one. Then Queenie gave utterance to a
little sob. Dudley, who was sitting on the table at which she was at
work, got upon his feet with an impatient movement. His dark face looked
hard and angry. As he paced once or twice up and down the small space
available in the disordered room, the inward fight which was going on
between his passion and his sense of right convulsed his face, and
Queenie shuddered as, glancing at him, she fancied she could see in the
glare of his black eyes the haunting madness at which he seemed so
plainly to have hinted.

She rose in her turn.

"But, Dudley--" she began.

And then, unable to express what she felt, what she thought, any better
than he had done, she turned abruptly away and sat down again.

There was silence for a few moments, and then she heard the door close.
Looking round, she saw that he had left the room.




CHAPTER VI.

THE LITTLE STONE PASSAGE.


Queenie kept Dudley's half-confessed secret to herself for the whole of
that day. She was hoping against hope that he would change his mind
again and speak to Doreen himself. Since there must be a definite and
final breach, she thought it would be better for the principals
themselves to come to an understanding, without the intervention of
outsiders. She would have told him so, but she got no further
opportunity of speaking to him alone.

The day passed uncomfortably for everybody, although the only person who
gave vent to his feelings by open ill-temper was Mr. Wedmore, who was
waiting for the promised explanation which Dudley never attempted to
give. And before dinner-time that evening the young barrister returned
to town.

Mr. Wedmore, who had been out shooting with Doctor Haselden, was
furious, on returning home, to learn of Dudley's departure.

"He has left a note for you, papa, in the study," said Doreen, who was,
perhaps, a little paler than usual, but who gave no other outward sign
of her feelings.

Her father went into the study, after a glance at his daughter, and read
the letter. It was not a very long one. Following the lines of his
guarded confession to Queenie, Dudley expressed the sorrow he felt at
having to give up the hopes he had had of being something more than the
mere old friend he had been for so many years. He had thought it better,
at the last, to say this on paper instead of by word of mouth, and he
ended by expressing the deep gratitude he should always feel for the
kindness shown to him by Mr. Wedmore and all his family during the
happiest period of his life.

Mr. Wedmore read this letter with little astonishment. It was, in fact,
what he had been prepared to hear. He read it to his wife, who cried a
great deal, but acquiesced in her husband's desire that Dudley should
drop not only out of the ranks of their intimate friends, but even, as
much as possible, out of their conversation.

"Let us do our best," said he, "to make Doreen forget him."

Mr. Wedmore showed the letter also to Doctor Haselden, who, perhaps,
from pure love of contradiction, persisted in maintaining that the
letter confessed nothing, and that the cause of the young man's
withdrawal was, in all probability, quite different from what Mr.
Wedmore supposed. The two gentlemen had quite a wrangle over the matter,
at the end of which each was settled more firmly in his own opinion than
before.

When they went upstairs for the night, Doreen came to Queenie's room and
demanded to know what her younger sister and Dudley had been talking
about so earnestly in the breakfast-room that morning.

"What do you mean by talking earnestly?" said Queenie, in the calm, dry
manner which would have made any one but her sister think she was really
surprised.

"Max told me," said Doreen, "and I mean to stay here until I know."

It needed very little reflection to tell Queenie that it was better for
her sister to hear the truth at once. So she told her.

Doreen listened very quietly, and then got up and wished her sister good
night.

"Well," said Queenie, "you take it very quietly. What do you think about
it?"

"I'll tell you--when I know myself," answered Doreen, briefly, as she
left the room. The first result of the talks, however, was a
conversation, not with Queenie, but with her brother, Max. Doreen ran
after him next morning as he was on his way to the stables and made him
take a walk through the park with her instead of going for a ride.

"Max," she said, coaxingly, when they had gone out of sight of the
house, "you have been my confidant about this unhappy affair of
Dudley's--"

But her brother interrupted her, and tried to draw away the arm she had
taken.

"Look here, Doreen," said he earnestly, "you'd better not think any more
about him--much better not. I do really think the poor fellow's right in
what he hinted to my father, and that he's going off his head; or,
rather, I _know_ enough to be sure that he's not always perfectly
sane. Surely you must see that, in the circumstances, the less you think
about him the better."

"There I disagree with you altogether," said Doreen, firmly. "Max, papa
and mamma can't understand; they've forgotten how they felt when they
were first fond of each other. Queenie's not old enough, and she's too
good besides. Now, you do know, you do understand what it is to be head
over ears in love."

"Good heavens, Doreen, don't talk like that! You mustn't, you know!"

"Don't talk nonsense," interrupted his sister, sharply. "I tell you I
love Dudley, and ever so much more since I've found out he is in great
trouble; as any decent woman would do. Now I don't feel nearly so sure
as everybody else as to what his trouble is, but I want you to find out,
and to help me if you can."

"What, play detective--spy? Not me. It's ridiculous, unheard of. I've
done it once on your account, and I never felt such a sneak in my life.
I won't do it again, even for you, and that's flat."

And Max thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

"Won't you?" said Doreen, with a quiet smile. "Then I must, and I will."

Her brother started and stared at her.

"You! _You!_ What nonsense!"

"It's not nonsense, as you will find when you hear me get permission to
go up to town to stay with Aunt Betty."

Max grew sincerely alarmed.

"Look here, Doreen, be reasonable," said he. "You can do no good to
Dudley, believe me. He has got into some dreadful mess or other; but
it's nothing that you or I or any earthly creature can help him out of.
I confess I didn't tell you all I found out when I went up to town. I
couldn't. I can't now. But if you will persist, and if nothing else will
keep you quietly here, I--well, I promise to go up again. And I'll
warrant if I do I shall learn something which will convince even
_you_ that you must give up every thought of him."

"Will you promise," said Doreen, solemnly, "to tell me all you find
out?"

"No," replied Max, promptly, "I won't promise that. I can't. But I think
you can trust me to tell you as much as you ought to know."

With this promise Doreen was obliged to be content. And when, at
luncheon time, it was discovered that certain things were wanted from
town, and Max offered to go up for them, Doreen and her brother
exchanged a look from which she gathered that he would not forget her
errand.

Max had plenty of time, while he was being jolted from Datton to Cannon
Street, to decide on the best means of carrying out his promise. He
decided that a visit to Limehouse, to the neighborhood where the
property of the late Mr. Horne had been situated, would be better than
another visit to Dudley.

Plumtree Wharf was, he knew, the name of the most important part of the
property which had belonged to Dudley's father. Putting together the two
facts of the discovery of a ticket for Limehouse in Dudley's possession,
and of the disappearance of Edward Jacobs after a visit to that locality
on the same day, Max saw that there was something to be gleaned in that
neighborhood, if he should have the luck to light upon it.

It was late in the afternoon, and already dark, before he got out of the
train at Limehouse station, and began the exploration of the unsavory
district which fringes the docks.

Through street after street of dingy, squalid houses he passed; some
broken up by dirty little shops, some presenting the dull uniformity of
row after row of mean, stunted brick buildings, the broken windows of
many of which were mended with brown paper, or else not mended at all.
Here and there a grimy public house, each with its group of loafers
about the doors, made, with the lights in its windows, a spot of
comparative brightness.

Many of the streets were narrow and tortuous, roughly paved, and both
difficult and dangerous to traverse by the unaccustomed foot passenger,
who found himself now slipping on a piece of orange peel, the pale color
of which was disguised by mud, now risking the soundness of his ankles
among the uneven and slimy stones of the road.

Max had to ask his way more than once before he reached the Plumtree
Wharf, the entrance to which was through a door in a high wooden fence.
Rather to his surprise, he found the door unfastened and unguarded. And
when he had got through he looked round and asked himself what on earth
he had expected to find there.

There was nothing going on at this late hour, and Max was able to take
stock of the place and of the outlook generally. Piles of timber to the
right of him, the dead wall at the side of a warehouse on the left, gave
him but a narrow space in which to pursue his investigations. And these
only amounted to the discovery that the troubled waters of the Thames
looked very dark and very cold from this spot; that the opposite bank,
with little specks of light, offered a gloomy and depressing prospect,
and that the lapping of the water among the black barges which were
moored at his feet in a dense mass was the dreariest sound he had ever
heard. He turned away with a shudder, and walked quickly up the narrow
lane left by the timber, calling himself a fool for his journey.

And just as he was reaching the narrow street by which he had come he
was startled to find a girl's face peering down at him from the top of a
pile of timber.

Max stopped, with an exclamation. In an instant the girl withdrew the
head, which was all he had seen of her, and he heard her crawling back
quickly over the timber, out of his sight.

Although he had seen her for a moment only, Max had been chilled to the
bone by the expression of the girl's face. Ghastly white it had looked
in the feeble light of a solitary gas lamp some distance away, and
wearing an expression of fear and horror such as he had never seen on
any countenance before. He felt that he must find out where she had
gone, his first belief being that she was a lunatic. Else why should she
have disappeared in that stealthy manner, with the look of fear stamped
upon her face? There was nothing in the look or manner of Max himself to
alarm her; and if she had been in need of help, why had she not called
to him?

He got a footing upon the timber and looked over it. But he could see
nothing more of the girl. Beyond the stacks were some low-roofed
outbuildings and the back of a shut-up warehouse. Reluctantly he got
down, and passed into the narrow street. Not willing to leave at once a
neighborhood which he had come so far to investigate, he turned, after
going some dozen yards down the street, into a narrow passage on his
left hand which led back to the river.

The width between the high walls and the warehouses on either side was
only some five feet. It was flagged with stone, very dark. About ten
yards from the entrance there was a small warehouse, on the left hand,
on which hung an old board, announcing that the building was "To Let."
And next door to this was a dingy shop, with grimy and broken windows,
the door of which was boarded up. This shop, also, was "To Be Let," and
the board in this case had been up so long that the announcement had to
be divined rather than read.

Rather struck by the dilapidated appearance of these two buildings in a
place where he supposed land must be valuable, Max paused for an
instant. And as he did so, he became aware that there was some one by
his side.

Looking down quickly, he saw the young girl of whom he had caught a
glimpse a few minutes before.

He started.

She looked up at him, and, still with the same look of stereotyped
horror on her thin, white face, whispered, in a hoarse voice, as she
pointed to the boarded-up shop-door with a shaking forefinger:

"You daren't go in there, do you? There's a dead man in there!"




CHAPTER VII.

A QUESTIONABLE GUIDE.


Max started violently at the girl's voice.

"A dead man? In there? How do you know?"

In a hoarse voice the girl answered:

"How do I know? The best way possible. _I saw it done!_"

There was an awful silence. Max was so deeply impressed by the girl's
words, her looks, her manner, by the gloom of the cold, dark passage, by
the desolate appearance of the two deserted buildings before which they
stood, that his first impulse was an overpowering desire to run away.
Acting upon it he even took a couple of rapid steps in the direction of
the street he had left, passing the girl and getting clear of the
uncanny boarded-up front of the shop.

A moan from the girl made him stop and look around at her. Emboldened by
this, she came close to him again and whispered:

"You're a man; you ought to have more pluck than I've got. It's two days
since it happened--"

"Two days!" muttered Max, remembering that it was two days ago that he
had surprised Dudley with his blood-stained hands.

"And for those two days I've been outside here waiting for somebody to
come because I daren't go inside by myself. Two days! Two days!" she
repeated, her teeth chattering.

Max looked at her with mixed feelings of doubt, pity and astonishment.
It was too dark in the ill-lighted passage for him to see all the
details of her appearance. She was young, quite young; so much was
certain. She looked white and pinched and miserably cold. Her dress was
respectable, very plain, and bore marks of her climbing and crawling
over the timber on the wharf.

"Won't you go in with me?" she asked again, more eagerly, more
tremulously than before. "I can show you the road--round at the back.
You will have a little climbing to do, but you won't mind that."

"But what do you want me to do if I do get inside?" said Max. "It's the
police you ought to send for, if a man has died in there. Go to the
police station and give information."

The girl shook her head.

"I can't do that," she whispered. Then, after a shuddering pause, she
came a step nearer and said, in a lower whisper than ever: "He didn't
die--of his own accord. He was murdered."

Max grew hot, and cold. He heartily wished he had never come.

"All the more reason," he went on in a blustering voice, "why you should
inform the police. You had better lose no time about it."

"I can't do that," said the girl, "because he--the man who did it--was
kind to us--kind to Granny and me. If I tell the police, they will go
after him, and perhaps find him, and--and hang him. Oh, no," and she
shook her head again with decision, "I could not do that."

Max was silent for a few moments, looking at her for the first few
seconds with pity and then with suspicion.

"Why do you tell all this to me, then--a stranger--if you're so afraid
of the police finding out anything about it?"

The girl did not answer for a moment. She seemed puzzled to answer the
question. At last she said:

"I didn't mean to. When I saw you first, at the wharf, at the back
there, I just looked at you and hid myself again. And then I thought to
myself that as you were a gentleman perhaps I might dare to ask you what
I did."

Max, not unnaturally, grew more doubtful still. This apparently deserted
building, which he was asked to enter by the back way, might be a
thievish den of the worst possible character, and this girl, innocent as
she certainly looked, might be a thieves' decoy. Something in his face
or in his manner must have betrayed his thoughts to the shrewd Londoner;
for she suddenly drew back, uttering a little cry of horror. Without
another word she turned and slunk back along the passage and into the
street.

Now, if Max had been a little older, or a little more prudent, if he had
indeed been anything but a reckless young rascal with a taste for
exciting adventure, he would have taken this opportunity of getting away
from such a very questionable neighborhood. But, in the first place, he
was struck by the girl's story, which seemed to fit in only too well
with what he knew; and in the second place, he was interested in the
girl herself, the refinement of whose face and manner, in these dubious
surroundings, had impressed him as much as the expression of horror on
her face and the agony of cold which had caused her teeth to chatter and
her limbs to tremble.

Surely, he thought, the suspicions he had for a moment entertained about
her were incorrect. He began to feel that he could not go away without
making an effort to ascertain if there were any truth in her story.

He went along the passage and got back to the wharf by the same means as
before. Making his way round the pile of timber upon which he had first
seen the girl, he discovered a little lane, partly between and partly
over the planks, which he promptly followed in the hope of coming in
sight of her again.

And, crouching under the wall of a ruinous outhouse, in an attitude
expressive of the dejection of utter abandonment, was the white-faced
girl.

The discovery was enough for Max. All considerations of prudence, of
caution, crumbled away under the influence of the intense pity he felt
for the forlorn creature.

"Look here," said he, "I'll go in, if you like. Have you got a light?"

"No--o," answered the girl, in a voice which was thick with sobs. "But I
can show you where to get one when you get inside."

Max had by this time reached the ground, which was slimy and damp under
the eaves; and he pushed his way, with an air of recklessness which hid
some natural trepidation, into the outhouse, the door of which was not
even fastened.

"Why," said he, turning to the girl, who was close behind him, "you
could have got in yourself easily enough. At least you would have been
warmer in here than outside."

His suspicions were starting up again, and they grew stronger as he
perceived that she was paying little attention to him, that she seemed
to be listening for some expected sound. The place in which they now
stood was quite dark, and Max, impatient and somewhat alarmed by the
position in which he found himself, struck a match and looked round him.

"Now," said he, "find me a candle, if you can."

Even by the feeble light of the match he could see that he was in a sort
of a scullery, which bore traces of recent occupation. A bit of yellow
soap, some blacking and a couple of brooms in one corner, a pail and a
wooden chair in another, were evidently not "tenant's fixtures."

And then Max noted a strange circumstance--the two small windows were
boarded up on the inside.

By the time he had taken note of this, the girl had brought him a candle
in a tin candlestick, which she had taken from a shelf by the door.

"That's the way," she said, in a voice as low a before, pointing to an
inner door. "Through the back room, and into the front one. He lies in
there."

Max shuddered.

"I can't say that I particularly want to see him," said he, as he took
stock of her in the candle-light, and was struck by the peculiar beauty
of her large blue eyes.

He felt a strong reluctance to venturing farther into this very
questionable and mysterious dwelling; and he took care to stand where he
could see both doors, the one which led farther into the house and the
one by which he had entered.

The girl heaved a little sigh, of relief apparently. And she remained
standing before him in the same attitude of listening expectancy as he
had remarked in her already.

"What are you waiting for--listening for?" asked Max sharply.

"Nothing," she answered with a start. "I'm nervous, that's all. Wouldn't
you be, if you'd been waiting two days outside an empty house with a
dead man inside it?"

Her tone was sharp and querulous. Max looked at her in bewilderment.

"Empty house!" he repeated. "What were you doing in it, then?"

And he glanced round him, assuring himself afresh by this second
scrutiny of the fact that the brick floor and the bare walls of this
scullery had been kept scrupulously clean.

The girl's white face, pale with the curious opaque pallor of the
Londoner born and bred, flushed a very little. She dropped her eyelids
guiltily.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," she said, at last, rather
sulkily. "I was living here. Is that enough?"

It was not. And her visitor's looks told her so.

"I was living here with my grandmother," she went on hurriedly, as she
saw Max glance at the outer door and take a step toward it. "We're very
poor, and it's cheaper to live here in a house supposed to be empty than
to pay rent."

"But hardly fair to the landlord," suggested Max.

"Oh, Granny doesn't think much of landlords, and, besides, this is part
of the property which used to belong to her old master, Mr. Horne--"

"Ah!" ejaculated Max, with new interest.

The girl looked at him inquiringly.

"What do you know about him?" she asked, with eagerness.

"I have heard of him," said Max.

But the astute young Londoner was not to be put off so easily.

"You know something of the whole family, perhaps? Did you know the old
gentleman himself?"

"No."

"Do you know--his son?"

"Yes."

"Oh!" She assumed the attitude of an inquisitor immediately. "Perhaps it
was he who sent you here to-day?"

"No."

She looked long and scrutinizingly in his face, suspicious in her turn.
"Then what made you come?"

Max paused a moment, and then evaded her question very neatly.

"What made me come in here? Why, I came by the invitation of a young
lady, who told me she was afraid to go in alone."

The girl drew back a little.

"Yes, so I did. And I am very much obliged to you. I--I wanted to ask
you to go into that room, the front room, and to fetch some things of
mine--things I have left there. I daren't go in by myself."

Max hesitated. Beside his old suspicions, a new one had just started
into his mind.

"Did you," he asked, suddenly, "know of some letters which were written
to Mr. Dudley Horne?"

A change came over the girl's face; the expression of deadly terror
which he had first seen upon it seemed to be returning gradually. The
blue eyes seemed to grow wider, the lines in her cheek and mouth to
become deeper. After a short pause, during which he noticed that her
breath was coming in labored gasps, she whispered:

"Well, what if I do? Mind, I don't say that I do. But what if I do?"

Her manner had grown fiercely defiant by the time she came to the last
word. Max found the desire to escape becoming even stronger than his
curiosity. The half-guilty look with which his companion had made her
last admission caused a new light to flash into his mind. This "Granny"
of whom the girl spoke, and who was alleged to have disappeared, was a
woman who had known something of the Horne family. Either she or this
girl might have been the writer of the letter Dudley had received while
at The Beeches, which had summoned him so hastily back to town. What if
this old woman had accomplices--had attempted to rob Dudley? And what if
Dudley, in resisting their attempts, had, in self-defence, struck a blow
which had caused the death of one of his assailants? Dudley would
naturally have been silent on the subject of his visit to this
questionable haunt, especially to the brother of Doreen.

"I think," cried Max, as he strode quickly to the door by which he had
come in, "that the best thing you can do is to sacrifice your things,
whatever they are, and to get out of the place yourself as fast as you
can."

As he spoke he lifted the latch and tried to open the door. But although
the latch went up, the door remained shut.

Max pulled and shook it, and finally put his knee against the side-post
and gave the handle of the latch a terrific tug.

It broke in his hand, but the door remained closed.

He turned round quickly, and saw the girl, with one hand on her hip and
with the candle held in the other, leaning against the whitewashed wall,
with a smile of amusement on her thin face.

What a face it was! Expressive as no other face he had ever seen, and
wearing now a look of what seemed to Max diabolical intelligence and
malice. She nodded at him mockingly.

"I can't get out!" thundered he, threateningly, with another thump at
the door.

The girl answered in the low voice she always used; by contrast with his
menacing tones it seemed lower than ever:

"I don't mean you to--yet. I guessed you'd want to go pretty soon, so I
locked the door."




CHAPTER VIII.

FOREWARNED, BUT NOT FOREARMED.


"By Jove!" muttered Max. Then, with a sudden outburst of energy,
inspired by indignation at the trap in which he found himself, he dashed
across the floor to the zinc pail he had previously noticed, and
swinging it round his head, was about to make such an attack upon the
door as its old timbers could scarcely have resisted, when the girl
suddenly shot between him and the door, placing herself with her back to
it and her arms spread out, so quickly that he only missed by a hair's
breadth dealing her such a blow as would undoubtedly have split her
skull.

In the effort to avoid this, Max, checking himself, staggered and
slipped, falling on the brick floor, pail and all.

"Oh, I am sorry! So sorry!"

Again the oddly expressive face had changed completely. Her scarlet
lips--those vividly red lips which go with an opaque white skin--were
instantly parted with genuine terror. Her eyes looked soft and shining,
full of tender feminine kindness and sympathy. Down she went on her
knees beside him, asking anxiously:

"Are you hurt? Oh, I know your wrist is hurt!"

Max gave her a glance, the result of which was that he began to feel
more afraid of her than of the locked door. About this strange, almost
uncannily beautiful child of the riverside slum there was a fascination
which appealed to him more and more. The longer he looked at the wide,
light-blue eyes, listened to the hoarse but moving voice, the more
valiantly he had to struggle against the spell which he felt her to be
casting upon him.

"I've strained my wrist a little, I think. Nothing to matter," said he.

But as he moved he found that the wrist gave him pain. He got up from
the floor, and stood with his left hand clasping the injured right
wrist, not so eager as before to make his escape.

"Why don't you let me out?" he asked at last, sharply, with an effort.

The girl looked at him with yet a new expression on her mobile face--an
expression of desperation.

"Because I couldn't bear it any longer," she whispered. And as she spoke
her eyes wandered round the bare walls and rested for a moment on the
inner door. "Because when you've been all alone in the cold, without any
food, without any one to speak to for two days and two nights, you feel
you must speak to some one, whatever comes of it. If I'd had to wait out
there, listening, listening, for another night, I should have been mad,
raving mad in the morning."

"But I don't understand it at all," said Max, again inclining to belief
in the girl's story, impressed by her passionate earnestness. "Where has
your grandmother gone to? Why didn't she take you with her? Can't you
tell me the whole story?"

The girl looked at him curiously.

"Just now you only thought of getting away."

"I don't care to be detained by lock and key, certainly," said Max. "But
if you will unlock the door, I am quite ready to wait here until you
have unburdened your mind, if you want to do that."

She looked at him doubtfully.

"That's a promise, mind," said she at last. "And it's a promise you
wouldn't mind giving, I think, if you believed in half I've gone
through."

She took a key from her pocket, unlocked the outer door and set it ajar.

"Will that do for you?" asked she.

"Yes, that's all right."

She took up the candle, which she had put on a shelf while she knelt to
find out whether he was hurt, and crossing the brick floor with rapid,
rather stealthy steps, she put her fingers on the latch of the inner
door.

"Keep close!" whispered she.

Max obeyed. He kept so close that the girl's soft hair, which was of the
ash-fair color so common in English blondes who have been flaxen-headed
in their childhood, almost touched his face. She opened the door and
entered what was evidently the back room of the deserted shop.

A dark room it must have been, even in broadest daylight. Opposite to
the door by which they had entered was one which was glazed in the upper
half; this evidently led into the shop itself, although the old red
curtain which hung over the glass panes hid the view of what was beyond.
There was a little fireplace, in which were the burnt-out ashes of a
recent fire. There was a deal table in the middle of the room, and a
cloth of a common pattern of blue and red check lay in a heap on the
floor. A couple of plain Windsor chairs, and a third with arms and a
cushion, a hearth-rug, a fender and fire-irons, completed the furniture
of the room.

And the one window, a small one, which looked out upon the wharf, in a
corner formed by the outhouse on the one side and a shed on the other,
was carefully boarded up.

Grimly desolate the dark, bare room looked, small as it was; and a
couple of rats, which scurried over the floor as Max entered, added a
suggestion of other horrors to the deserted room. The girl had managed
to get behind Max, and he turned sharply with a suspicion that she meant
to shut him into the room by himself.

"It's all right--it's all right," whispered she, reassuringly. "He isn't
in here. But he's there."

And she pointed to the door with the red curtain.

Max stopped. The farther he advanced into this mysterious house the less
he liked the prospect presented to his view. And the girl herself seemed
to have forgotten her pretext of wanting something fetched out of that
mysterious third room. She remained leaning against the wall, close by
the door by which she and Max had entered, still holding the candlestick
and staring at the red curtain with eyes full of terror. Max found his
own eyes fascinated by the steady gaze, and he looked in the same
direction.

Staring intently at the bit of faded stuff, he was almost ready to
imagine, in the silence and gloom of the place, that he saw it move. His
breath came fast. Overcome by the uncanny influences of the dreary place
itself, of the hideous story he had heard, of the girl's white face, Max
began to feel as if the close, cold air of the unused room was like the
touch of clammy fingers on his face.

Even as this consciousness seized upon him, he heard a moan, a sliding
sound, a thud, and the light went suddenly out.

In the first impulse of horror at his position Max uttered a sharp
exclamation, but remained immovable. Indeed, in the darkness, in this
unknown place, to take a step in any direction was impossible. He stood
listening, waiting for some sound, some ray of light, to guide him.

All he heard was the scurrying of the rats as they ran, disturbed by the
noise, across the room and behind the wainscot in the darkness.

At last he turned and tried to find the door by which he had come in. He
found it, and had his hand upon the latch, when his right foot touched
something soft, yielding. He opened the door, which was not locked, as
he had feared, and was about to make his way as fast as he could into
the open air, when another moan, fainter than before, reached his ears.

No light came into the room through the open door; so he struck a wax
match. His nerves were not at their best, and it was some time before he
could get a light. When he did so, he discovered that the thing his foot
had touched was the body of the girl, lying in a heap on the floor close
to the wainscot.

Now Max was divided between his doubts and his pity; but it was not
possible that doubt should carry the day in the face of this discovery.
Whether she had fainted, or whether this was only a ruse on her part to
detain him, to interest him, he could not leave her lying there.

The tin candlestick had rolled away on the floor, and the candle had
fallen out of it. The first thing Max had to do was to replace the one
in the other, and to get a serviceable light. By the time he had done so
he saw a movement in the girl's body. She was lying with her head on the
floor. He put his arm under her head to raise it, when she started up,
so suddenly as to alarm him, leaned back against the wall, still in her
cramped, sitting position, and glared into his face.

"Look here," she said faintly, "I couldn't help it. You know--I
think--I'm almost--starving."

"Heavens! Why didn't I think of it! Poor child! Get up; let me help you.
Come to this chair. Wait here, only a few minutes. I'll get you
something to eat and drink."

He was helping her up; had got her on her feet, indeed, when she
suddenly swung round in his arms, clinging to his sleeve and staring
again with the fixed, almost vacant look which made him begin to doubt
whether her reason had not suffered.

"No, no, no," cried she, gasping for breath; "I can't stay here. I know,
I know you wouldn't come back. If you once got out, got outside in the
air, you would go back to your home, and I should be left
here--alone--with the rats--and--_that_!"

And again she pointed to the curtained door.

Max felt his teeth chattering as he tried to reassure her.

"Come, won't you trust me? I'll only be a minute. I want to get you some
brandy."

"Brandy? No. I dare not."

And she shook her head. But Max persisted.

"Nonsense--you must have it. There's a public-house at the corner, of
course. Come out on to the wharf, if you like and wait for me."

It was pitiful to see the expression of her eyes as she looked in his
face without a word. She was leaning back in the wooden arm-chair, one
hand lying in her lap, the other hanging limply over the side of the
chair. Her hair, which had been fastened in a coil at the back of her
head, had been loosened in the fall, and now drooped about her head and
face in disorder, which increased her pathetic beauty. And it was at
this point that Max noticed, with astonishment, that her hands, though
not specially beautiful or small or in any way remarkable, were not
those of a woman used to the roughest work.

She made an attempt to rise, apparently doubting his good faith and
afraid to lose sight of him, as he retreated toward the door. But she
fell back again, and only stared at him dumbly.

The mute appeal touched Max to the quick. He was always rather
susceptible, but it seemed to him that he had never felt, at the hands
of any girl, such a variety of emotions as this forlorn creature roused
in him with every movement, every look, every word.

He hesitated, came back a step and leaned over the table, looking at
her.

"I'll come back," said he, in a voice hardly above a whisper. "Of course
I'll come back. You don't think I'd leave you like this, do you?"

For a moment she stared at him with doubt in her eyes; then, as if
reassured, her lips parted in a very faint smile, and she made a slight
motion with her head which he was fain to take as a sign of her trust.

He had reached the door, when by a weak gesture she called him back
again.

"If--if you should meet anybody--I'm expecting Granny all the time--I'm
sure she wouldn't leave me altogether like this--you will come back all
the same, won't you?"

Her earnestness over this matter had given her back a little strength.
She leaned forward over one arm of the chair, impressing her words upon
him with a bend of the head.

"Oh, no, I shan't mind Granny," replied Max, confidently.

"Well, you wouldn't mind her if she was in a good humor," went on the
girl, doubtfully, "but when she's in a bad one, oh, well, then," in a
lowered voice of deep confidence, "_I'm afraid of her myself!_"

"That's all right. It would take more than an old woman to frighten me!
Tell me what she's like and what her name is, and I can present myself
to her as a morning caller."

The girl seemed to have recovered altogether from her attack of
faintness, since she was able to detain him thus from his proposed
errand on her behalf. She smiled again, less faintly than before, and
shook her head.

"I don't think there's much to describe about Granny. She was a
housekeeper at old Mr. Horne's house in the city, you know, and she
looks just as old housekeepers always look. Her name's Mrs. Higgs. But,"
and the girl looked frightened again, "don't tell her you've come to see
_me_. She's very particular. At least--I mean--"

A pretty confusion, a touch of hesitancy, the first sign of anything
girlish which Max had seen in this strange creature, made her stop and
turn her head away. And, the effort of speaking over, she drooped again.

"I won't be long."

And Max, puzzled himself by the feelings he had toward this strange
little white-bodied being, went through the outhouse into the open air.

Outside, he found himself staggering, he didn't know why--whether from
the emotions he had experienced or from the clammy, close hair of the
shut-up room; all he knew was that by the time he reached the
public-house, which he had correctly foreseen was to be found at the
corner, he felt quite as much in want of the brandy as his patient
herself.

It occurred to him, as he stood in the bar, swallowing some fiery liquid
of dubious origin which the landlord had sold to him as brandy, to make
a casual inquiry about Mrs. Higgs.

"Yes," said the landlord, "I do know a Mrs. Higgs. She comes in here
sometimes; she likes her glass. But they know more about her at The
Admiral's Arms, Commercial Road way," and he gave a nod of the head to
indicate the direction of that neighborhood.

"Do you know her address?" asked Max.

The landlord smiled.

"It 'ud take a clever head to keep the addresses of all the chance
customers as comes in here. For the matter of that, very few of 'em have
any addresses in particular; it's one court one week, and t'other the
next."

"But she's a very respectable woman, the Mrs. Higgs I mean," said Max,
tentatively.

"Oh, yes, sir; I've nothin' to say ag'inst her," and the landlord, with
a look which showed that he objected to be "pumped," turned to another
customer.

Max took the brandy he had bought for the girl and hurried back to the
place where he had left her. As he went, an instinct of curiosity,
natural enough, considering his recently acquired knowledge, made him go
down the passage and try to look in through the grim, dusty window of
the shop. But this also was boarded up on the inner side, so that no
view could be obtained of what was within.

It seemed to Max, however, as he stood there, with his eyes fixed on the
planks, trying to discover an aperture, that between the cracks of the
boards there glimmered a faint light. It seemed to flicker, then it died
out.

Surely, he thought, the girl has not summoned enough courage to go into
the room by herself?

He hurried back down the passage, and made his way as before to the
wharf. Stumbling round the piles of timber, he found the lane by which
he had entered and left the house. It seemed to him, though he told
himself it must be only fancy, that some of the loose planks had been
disturbed since his last journey over them. Reaching the door of
outhouse, which he had left ajar, he found it shut.

He was now sure that some one had gone in, or come out, since he left;
and for a moment the circumstance seemed to him sufficiently suspicious
to make him pause. The next moment, however, the remembrance of the
girl's white face, of the pleading blue eyes, returned to him vividly,
calling to him, drawing him back by an irresistible spell. He pushed
open the door boldly, crossed the brick floor and reentered the inner
room. The candle was still burning on the table, but the girl was not
there.

Max looked round the room. He was puzzled, suspicious. As he stood by
the table staring at the wall opposite the fireplace, wondering whether
to go out or to explore further, he found his eyes attracted to a spot
in the wall-paper where, in the feeble light, something like two
glittering beads shone out uncannily in the middle of the pattern. With
a curious sensation down his spine, Max took a hasty step back to the
door, and the beads moved slowly.

It was a pair of eyes watching him as he moved.




CHAPTER IX.

THE MAN WHO HESITATES.


Max had become accustomed, in the course of this adventurous visit, to
surprises and alarms. Every step in the enterprise he had undertaken had
brought a fresh excitement, a fresh horror. But nothing that he had so
far heard or seen had given him such a sick feeling of indefinable
terror as the sight of these two eyes, turning to watch his every
movement. For a moment he watched them, then he made a bold dash for the
place where he had seen them, and aimed a blow with his fist at the
wall.

He heard the loose plaster rattle down; but when he looked for the
result of his blow, he saw nothing but the old-fashioned, dirty paper on
the wall, apparently without a hole or tear in it.

The discovery made him feel sick.

He turned to make his escape from the house, to which he felt that he
was a fool to have returned at all, when the door by which he had
entered opened slowly, and the girl came in.

A little flash, as of pleased surprise, passed over her white face. Then
she said, under her breath:

"So you have come back. I didn't think you would. I--I am sorry you
did."

Max looked rather blank. The girl's attraction for him had increased
during the short period he had been absent from her. He had had time to
think over his feelings, to find his interest stimulated by the process.
Imagination, which does so much for a woman with a man, and for a man
with a woman, had begun to have play. He had come back determined to
find out more about the girl, to probe to the bottom of the mystery in
which, perhaps, consisted so much of the charm she had for him.

Even now, upon her entrance, the first sight of her face had made his
heart leap up.

There was a pause when she finished speaking. Max, who was usually
fluent enough with her sex, hesitated, stammered and at last said:

"You are sorry I came back? Yet you seemed anxious enough to make me
promise to come back!"

He observed that a great change had come over her. Instead of being
nerveless and lifeless, as he had left her, with dull eyes and weak,
helpless limbs, she was now agitated, excited; she glanced nervously
about her while he spoke, and tapped the finger-tips of one hand
restlessly with those of the other as she listened.

"I know," she replied, rapidly, "I know I was. But--Granny has come
back. She came in while you were gone."

Max glanced at the wall, where he had fancied he saw the pair of
watching eyes.

"Oh," said he, "that explains what I saw, perhaps. Where is your
grandmother?"

"She has gone upstairs to her room under the roof."

"Ah! Are you sure she is upstairs? That she is not in the next room, for
instance, watching me through some secret peep-hole of hers?"

The girl stared at him in silence as he pointed to the wall, and as he
ran his hand over its surface.

"I saw a pair of eyes watching me just now," he went on, "from the
middle of this wall. I could swear to it!"

The girl looked incredulous, and passed her hand over the wall in her
turn. Then she shook her head.

"I can feel nothing," said she. "It must be your fancy. There is no room
there. It is the ground-floor of an old warehouse next door which has
been to let for years and years--longer than this."

He still looked doubtful, and she added, sharply:

"You can see for yourself if you like."

As she spoke, she was turning to go back into the outhouse, with a sign
to him to follow her. But even as she did so, another thought must have
struck her, for she shut the door and turned back again.

"No," she said, decisively, "of course you don't want to see anything so
much as the outside of this gloomy old house. Don't think me ungrateful;
I am not, but"--she came a little nearer to Max, so that she could
whisper very close to his ear--"if Granny knew that I'd let a stranger
into the place while she was away, I should never hear the last of it;
and--and--when she's angry I'm afraid of her."

Max felt a pang of compassion for the girl.

"If you are afraid of her being angry," said he, "you had better let her
see me and hear my explanation. I can make things right with her. I have
great powers of persuasion--with old ladies--I assure you; and you don't
look as if you were equal to a strife of tongues with her or with
anybody just now; and I'd forgotten; I've brought something for you."

Max took from the pocket of his overcoat the little flat bottle filled
with brandy with which he had provided himself; but the girl pushed it
away with alarm.

"Don't let Granny see it!" she whispered.

"All right. But I want you to taste it; it will do you good."

She shook her head astutely.

"I am not ill," she said, shortly, "and I don't know that I should take
it if I were. I see too much of those things not to be afraid of them.
And, now, sir, will you go?" After a short pause she added, in an
ominous tone--"while you have the chance."

Max still lingered. He had forgotten his curiosity, he had almost
forgotten what had brought him to the house in the first instance. He
did not want to leave this girl, with the great, light-blue eyes and the
scarlet lips, the modest manner and the moving voice.

When the silence which followed her words had lasted some seconds, she
turned from him impatiently, and leaving him by the door, crossed the
little room quickly, opened one of the two wooden doors which stood one
on each side of the fireplace, revealing a cupboard with rows of
shelves, and took from the bottom a few chips of dry wood, evidently
gleaned from the wharf outside, a box of matches and part of a
newspaper, and dropping down on her knees on the hearth, began briskly
to rake out the ashes and to prepare a fire.

Max stood watching her, divided between prudence, which urged him to go,
and inclination, which prompted him to stay.

She went on with her work steadily for some minutes, without so much as
a look behind. Yet Max felt that she was aware of his presence, and he
knew also, without being sure how the knowledge came to him, that the
girl's feeling toward himself had changed now that she was no longer
alone in the house with him. The constraint which might have been
expected toward a person of the opposite sex in the strange
circumstances, which had been so entirely absent from her manner on
their first meeting, had now stolen into her attitude toward him.

Yet, although the former absence of this constraint had been a most
effective part of her attraction for him, Max began to think that the
new and slight self-consciousness which caused her to affect to ignore
him was a fresh charm. Before, while she implored him to come into the
house with her, it was to a fellow-creature only that the frightened
girl had made her appeal. Now that her grandmother had returned, and she
was lonely and unprotected no longer, she remembered that he was a man.

This change in her attitude toward him was strikingly exemplified when,
having lit the fire, she rose from her knees, and taking a kettle from
the hob, turned toward the door.

"You haven't gone then?" said she.

"No!"

She came forward, taking the lid off the kettle as she walked.

"You won't be advised?"

She was passing him swiftly, with the manner of a busy housewife, when
Max, encouraged by her new reserve, and a demure side-look, which was
not without coquetry, seized the hand which held the kettle, and asked
her if he was to get no thanks for coming to her assistance as he had
done.

"I did thank you," said she, not attempting to withdrew her hand, but
standing, grave and with downcast eyes, between him and the door.

"Well, in a way, you did. But you didn't thank me enough. You yourself
admit it was a bold thing for a stranger to do!"

The girl looked suddenly up into his face, and again he saw in her
expressive eyes a look which was altogether new. Like flashes of
lightning the changes passed over her small, mobile features, to which
the absence of even a tinge of healthy pink color gave, perhaps, an
added power of portraying the emotions which might be agitating her.
There was now something like defiance in her eyes.

"What was your boldness compared to mine?" said she. "You are a man; you
have strong arms, at any rate, I suppose. I am only a girl, and you are
a gentleman, and gentlemen are not chivalrous. Who dared the most then,
you or I?"

"So gentlemen are not chivalrous?" said Max, ignoring the last part of
her speech. "All gentlemen are not, I suppose you mean? Or rather, all
the men who ought to be gentlemen?"

"No," answered the girl, stubbornly. "I mean what I said. You with the
rest. You'd act rightly toward a man, I suppose, as a matter of course.
You can't act rightly toward a woman, a girl, without expecting to be
paid for it."

Max was taken aback. Here was a change, indeed, from the poor, clinging,
pleading, imploring creature of twenty minutes before. He reddened a
little and let her hand slip from his grasp.

"I believe you are right," he said, at last, "though you are rather
severe. But let me tell you that the word 'chivalry' is misleading
altogether. It is applied to those middle-aged Johnnies--no, I mean
those Johnnies of the Middle Ages--who were supposed to go about
rescuing damsels in distress, isn't it? Well, you don't know what
happened after the rescue was effected; but I like to suppose, myself,
that the girl didn't just say 'Thanks--awfully' and cut him dead forever
afterward."

"You think the knight expected payment, just as you do, for his
services?"

"I think so. A very small payment, but one which he would appreciate
highly."

The girl leaned against the wall by the door and looked at him with
something like contempt for a moment. Then she smiled, not
encouragingly, but with mockery in her eyes.

"You have a tariff, I suppose," said she, cuttingly, "a regular scale of
charges, as, perhaps, you will say the knights had. Pray, what is your
charge in the present instance? A kiss, perhaps, or two?"

Now, Max had, indeed, indulged the hope that she would bestow upon him
this small mark of gratitude. It came upon him with a shock of surprise
that a girl who had been so bold as to summon him should make so much
fuss about the reward he had certainly earned. He had expected to get it
with a laugh and a blush, as a matter of course. For his modest
suggestion to be taken so seriously was a disconcerting occurrence. He
drew himself up a little.

"I don't pretend I should have been generous enough to refuse such a
payment if you had shown the slightest willingness to make it," said he.
"But as it's the sort of coin that has no value unless given
voluntarily, we will consider the debt settled without it."

He made a pretense of leaving her at this point, without the slightest
intention of persisting in it. This curious conference had all the zest
of a most novel kind of flirtation, which was none the less piquant for
the girl's haughty airs.

There are feminine eyes which allure as much while they seem to repel as
they do when they consciously attract; and the light-blue ones which
shone in the white face of this East End enchantress were of the number.

Max opened the door and slowly stepped into the outhouse. At the moment
of glancing back--an inevitable thing--he saw that she looked sorry,
dismayed. He took his gloves out of his pocket and began to draw them
on, to fill up the time. By the time the second finger of the first
glove was in its place, for he was deliberate, the girl had come into
the outhouse, passed him, and was drawing water from the tap into her
kettle. He watched her. She knew it, but pretended not to notice. The
circumstance of the water flowing freely in the house which was supposed
to be deserted made an excuse for another remark, and a safe one.

"I thought they cut the water off from empty houses; that is, houses
supposed to be empty."

She turned round with so much alacrity as to suggest that she was glad
of the pretext for reopening communications. And this time there was a
bright look of arch amusement on her face instead of her former
expression of outraged dignity.

"So they do. But--the people who know how to live without paying rent
know a few other things, too."

Max laughed a little, but he was rather shocked. This pretty and in some
respects fastidiously correct young person ought not surely to find
amusement in defrauding even a water company.

The fact reminded him of that which the intoxication caused by a pretty
face had made him forget--that he was in a house of dubious character,
from which he would be wise in escaping without further delay. But then,
again, it was the very oddness of the contrast between the character of
the house and the behavior of the girl which made the piquancy of the
situation.

"Oh, yes; of course; I'd forgotten that," assented Max, limply.

And then he fell into silence, and the girl stood quietly by the tap,
which ran slowly, till the kettle was full.

And then it began to run over.

Now this incident was a provocation. Max was artful enough to know that
no girl who ever fills a kettle lets it run over unless she is much
preoccupied. He chose to think she was preoccupied with him. So he
laughed, and she looked quickly round and blushed, and turned her back
upon him with ferocity.

He came boldly up to her.

"I'm so sorry," said he, in a coaxing, confidential, persuasive tone,
such as she had given him no proper encouragement to use, "that we've
had a sort of quarrel just at the last, and spoiled the impression of
you I wanted to carry away."

He was evidently in no hurry to carry anything away, though he went on
with the glove-buttoning with much energy.

She listened, with her eyes down, making, kettle and all, the prettiest
picture possible. There was no light in the outhouse except that which
came from a little four-penny brass hand-lamp, which the girl must have
lit just before her last entrance into the inner room. It was behind
her, on a shelf against the wall; and the light shone through the loose
threads of her fair hair, making an aureole round the side view of her
little head.

She was bewitching like that, so the susceptible Max thought, while he
debated with himself whether he now dared to try again for that small
reward. And he reluctantly decided that he did not dare. And again there
was something piquant in the fact of his not daring.

The girl, after a short pause, looked up; perhaps, though not so
susceptible as he, she was not insensible to the fact that Max was young
and handsome, well dressed, a little in love with her, and altogether
different from the types of male humanity most common to Limehouse.

"If," she suggested at last, with some hesitation, "you really think it
better to see my grandmother, she will be down very soon. I'm going to
make some tea; and you could wait, if you liked, in the next room."

"I should be delighted," said Max.

Off came the gloves; and as the girl tripped quickly into the adjoining
room, he followed with alacrity.

"Mind," cried she suddenly, as she turned from the fireplace and stood
by the table in an attitude of warning, "it is at your own risk, you
know, that you stay. You can guess that the people who belong to a
hole-and-corner place like this are not the sort you're accustomed to
meet at West-End dinner tables, nor yet at an archbishop's garden-party.
But as you've stayed so long, it will be better for me if you stay till
you have seen Granny, as she must have heard me talking to you by this
time."

Now Max, in the interest of his conversation with the girl, had
forgotten all about less pleasant subjects. Now that they were suddenly
recalled to his mind, he felt uneasy at the idea of the unseen but
ever-watchful "Granny," who might be listening to every word he uttered,
noting every glance he threw at the girl.

And then the natural suspicion flashed into his mind: Was there a
"Granny" after all? or was the invisible one some person more to be
dreaded than any old woman?

Another glance at the girl, and the fascinated, bewildered Max resolved
to risk everything for a little more of her society.




CHAPTER X.

GRANNY.


There was some constraint upon them both at first; and Max had had time
to feel a momentary regret that he had been foolish enough to stay, when
he was surprised to find the girl's eyes staring fixedly at a small
parcel which he had taken from his coat-tail pocket and placed upon the
table.

It was a paper of biscuits which he had brought from the public-house.
He had forgotten them till that moment.

"I brought these for you--" he began.

And then, before he could add more, he was shocked by the avidity with
which she almost snatched them from his hand.

"I--I'd forgotten!" stammered he.

It was an awful sight. The girl was hungry, ravenously hungry, and he
had been chatting to her and talking about kisses when she was starving!

There was again a faint spot of color in her cheeks, as she turned her
back to him and crouched on the hearth with the food.

"Don't look at me," she said, half laughing, half ashamed. "I suppose
you've never been without food for two days!"

Max could not at first answer. He sat in one of the wooden chairs, with
his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, calling himself,
mentally, all sorts of things for his idiotic forgetfulness.

"And to think," said he, at last, in a hoarse and not over-steady-voice,
"that I dared to compare myself to a knight-errant!"

The biscuits were disappearing rapidly. Presently she turned and let him
see her face again.

"Perhaps," suggested she, still with her mouth full, "as you say, one
didn't hear quite all about those gentlemen. Perhaps they forgot things
sometimes. And perhaps," she added, with a most gracious change to
gratitude and kindness, "they weren't half so sorry when they forgot as
you are."

Max listened in fresh amazement. Where on earth had this child of the
slums, in the cheap-stuff frock and clumsy shoes, got her education, her
refinement? Her talk was not so very different from that of the West-End
dinner-tables she had laughed at. What did it mean?

"Do you really feel so grateful for the little I have done?" he asked
suddenly.

The girl drew a long breath.

"I don't dare to tell you _how_ grateful."

"Well, then, will you tell me all about yourself? I'm getting more
puzzled every moment. I hope it isn't rude to say so, but--you and this
place don't _fit_."

For a moment the girl did not answer. Then she put the paper which had
held the biscuits carefully into the cupboard by the fireplace, and as
she did so he saw her raise her shoulders with an involuntary and
expressive shrug.

"I suppose it is rather surprising," she said at last, as she folded her
hands in her lap and kept her eyes fixed upon the red heart of the fire.
"It surprises me sometimes."

There was a pause, but Max would not interrupt her, for he thought from
her manner that an explanation of some sort was coming. At last she went
on, raising her head a little, but without looking at him:

"And very likely it will astonish you still more to hear that in coming
to this place I made a change for the better."

Max was too much surprised to make any comment.

"If you want to know my name, date of birth, parentage and the rest of
it," went on the girl, in a tone of half-playful recklessness, "why, I
have no details to give you. I don't know anything about myself, and
nobody I know seems to know any more. Granny says she does, but I don't
believe her."

She paused.

"Why, surely," began Max, "your own grandmother--"

"But I don't even know that she is my own grandmother," interrupted the
girl, sharply. "If she were, wouldn't she know my name?"

"That seems probable, certainly."

"Well, she doesn't, or she says she doesn't. She pretends she has
forgotten, or puts me off when I ask questions, though any one can
understand my asking them."

This was puzzling, certainly. Max had no satisfactory explanation to
offer, so he shook his head and tried to look wise. As long as she would
go on talking, and about herself, too, he didn't care what she said.

"What does she call you?" asked he, after a silence.

"Carrie--Carrie Rivers. But the 'Rivers' is not my name, I know. It was
given me by Miss Aldridge, who brought me up, and she told me it wasn't
my real name, but that she gave it to me because it was 'proper to have
one.' So how can I believe Granny when she says that it is not my name?
Or at least that she has forgotten whether I had any other? If she had
really forgotten all that, wouldn't she have forgotten my existence
altogether, and not have taken the trouble to hunt me out, and to take
me away from the place where she found me?"

"Where was that?" asked Max.

The girl hung her head, and answered in a lower voice, as if her reply
were a distasteful, discreditable admission:

"I was bookkeeper at a hotel--a wretched place, where I was miserable,
very miserable."

Max was more puzzled than ever.

Every fresh detail about herself and her life made him wonder the more
why she was refined, educated. Presently she looked up, and caught the
expression on his face.

"That was after Miss Aldridge died," she said, with a sigh. "I had lived
with her ever since I was a little girl. I can hardly remember anything
before that--except--some things, little things, which I would rather
forget." And her face clouded again. "She was a very old lady, who had
been rich once, and poor after that. She had kept a school before she
had me; and after that, I was the school. I had to do all the learning
of a schoolful. Do you see?"

"Ah," said Max, "_now_ I understand! And didn't she ever let you know
who placed you with her?"

"She said it was my grandmother," answered Carrie, doubtfully.

"This grandmother? The one you call Granny?"

"I don't know. You see, Mrs. Higgs never turned up till about ten months
ago, long after Miss Aldridge had died. She died the Christmas before
last."

"And how did you get to the hotel?"

"I had to do something. Miss Aldridge had only her annuity. I had done
everything for her, except the very hardest work, that she wouldn't let
me do; and when she died, suddenly, I had to find some way of living.
And somebody knew of the hotel. So I went."

"Where was it?"

"Oh, not so very far from here. It was a dreadful place. They treated me
fairly well because I am quick at accounts, so I was useful. But, oh, it
wasn't a place for a girl at all."

"But why didn't you get a better one? Anything would have been better,
surely, than coming here, to live like this!"

Max was earnest, impassioned even. The girl smiled mournfully as she
just caught his eyes for a moment, and then looked at the fire again.

"You don't understand," she said, simply. "How should you? I should have
had no reference to give if I had wanted another situation. The name of
the place where I had been living would have been worse than none."

"But there are lots of places where you could have gone, religious and
philanthropic institutions I think they call themselves, where they
would have listened to what you had to say, and done their best to help
you."

Carrie looked dubious.

"Are there?" said she. "Well, there may be, of course. But I think not.
Plenty of institutions of one sort and another there are, of course. But
those for women are generally for one class--a class I don't belong to."

Max shuddered. This matter-of-fact tone jarred upon him. It was not
immodest, but it revealed a mind accustomed to view the facts of life,
not one nourished on pretty fancies, like those of his sisters.

"And even if," she went on, "there were a home, an institution, a girl
like me could go to and obtain employment, it wouldn't be a life one
would care for; it would be a sort of workhouse at the best, wouldn't
it?"

"Wouldn't it be better than--this?"

"I don't even know that. Granny's fond of me in her way. That's the one
thing no sort of institution can give you, the feeling that you belong
to some one, that you're not just a number."

"Well, but you're well educated--and--"

He was going to say "pretty," but her look stopped him.

It was almost a look of reproach.

"Do you think I'm the only fairly-educated girl in London who doesn't
know how to get a living? Haven't you ever found, in poor, wretched
little shops, girls who speak well, look different from the others?
Don't you know that there are lots of girls like me who are provided
for, well provided for at the outset, and then forgotten, or neglected,
and left to starve, to drift, to get on the best way they can? Oh,
surely you must know that! Only people like you don't care to think
about these things. And you are quite right, quite right. Why should
you?"

Suddenly the girl sprang up and made a gesture with her hands as if to
dismiss the subject. Max, watching her with eager interest, saw pass
quickly over her face a look which set him wondering on whose
countenance he had seen it before. In an instant it was gone, leaving a
look of weariness behind. But it set him wondering. Who was she? Who
were the mysterious parents of whom she knew nothing?

Carrie glanced at the door which led into the outhouse. The tapping of a
stick on the stone-flagged floor announced the approach of "Granny" at
last. The girl ran to open the door.

Max had sprung up from his chair, full of curiosity to see the old lady
of whom Carrie seemed to be somewhat in awe.

He was rather disappointed. There was nothing at all formidable or
dignified about Mrs. Higgs, who was a round-shouldered, infirm old woman
in a brown dress, a black-and-white check shawl, and a rusty black
bonnet.

She stopped short on seeing Max, and proceeded, still standing in the
doorway, to scrutinize with candid interest every detail of his
appearance. When she had satisfied herself, she waved her stick as an
intimation to him that he could sit down again, and, leaning on the arm
of the young girl, crossed the room, still without a word, and took her
seat in the one arm-chair.

As Carrie had said, there was nothing singular or marked about her face
or figure by which one could have distinguished her from the general run
of old women of her modest but apparently respectable class. A little
thin, whitish hair, parted in the middle, showed under her bonnet; her
eyes, of the faded no-color of the old, stared unintelligently out of
her hard, wrinkled face; her long, straight, hairy chin, rather hooked
nose and thin-lipped mouth made an _ensemble_ which suggested a
harmless, tedious old lady who could "nag" when she was not pleased.

Conversation was not her strong point, evidently, or, perhaps, the
presence of a stranger made her shy. For, to all Carrie's remarks and
inquiries, she vouchsafed only nods in reply, or the shortest of answers
in a gruff voice and an ungracious tone.

"Who is he?" she asked at last, when she had begun to sip her cup of
tea.

She did not even condescend to look at Max as she made the inquiry.

"A gentleman, Granny--the gentleman I told you of, who came in with me
because I was afraid to come in by myself."

"But what's he doing here now? You're not by yourself now."

Max himself could hardly help laughing at this question and comment.

"I thought I ought to explain to you my appearance here," said he,
modestly.

"Very well, then; you can go as soon as you like."

"Granny!" protested the girl in a whisper; "don't be rude to him,
Granny. He's been very kind."

"Kind! I dare say!"

Max thought it was time to go, and he rose and stood ready to make a
little speech. At that moment there was a noise in the outhouse, and
both Mrs. Higgs and Carrie seemed suddenly to lose their interest in
him, and to direct their attention to the door.

Then Mrs. Higgs made a sign to Carrie, who went out of the room and into
the outhouse. As Max turned to watch her, the light went out.

By this time Carrie had shut the door behind her, and Max was, as he
supposed, alone with the old woman. He was startled, and he made an
attempt to find the door leading into the outhouse and to follow the
girl; but this was not so easy.

While he was fumbling for the door, he found himself suddenly seized in
a strong grip, and, taken unawares, he was unable to cope with an
assailant so dexterous, so rapid in his movements, that, before Max had
time to do more than realize that he was attacked, he was forced through
an open doorway and flung violently to the ground.

Then a door was slammed, and there was silence.

As Max scrambled to his feet his hand, touched something clammy and
cold.

It was a hand--a dead hand.

Max uttered a cry of horror. He remembered all that he had forgotten. He
knew now that the girl's story was true, and that he was shut in the
front room with the body of the murdered man.




CHAPTER XI.

A TRAP.


Max tried to find the door by which he had been thrown into the room.
The upper portion was of glass, he supposed, remembering the red curtain
which hung on the other side of it. But although he felt with his hands
in the place where he supposed the door to be, he found nothing but
wooden shelves, such as are usually found lining the walls of shops, and
planks of rough wood.

He paused, looked around him, hoping that when his eyes got used to the
darkness some faint ray of light coming either through the boarded-up
front or through the glass upper half of the door, would enable him to
take his bearings, or, at any rate, to help him avoid that uncanny
"something" in the middle of the floor.

But the blackness was absolute. Strain his eyes as he might, there was
no glimmer of light in any direction to guide him, and he had used up
his last match. So he went to work again with his hands. These rough
planks were placed perpendicularly against the wall to a width of about
three feet--the width of the door. Passing his fingers slowly all round
them, he ascertained that they reached to the floor, and to a height of
about seven feet above it. Evidently, thought he, it was the door itself
which opened into the shop which had been carefully boarded up. As soon
as he felt sure of this, he dealt at the planks a tremendous blow with
his fist. He hurt his hand, but did no apparent injury to the door,
which scarcely shook. Then he tried to tear one of the boards away from
the framework to which it was attached, but without result. The nails
which had been used to fasten it were of the strongest make, and had
been well driven in.

Foiled in his attempt to get out of the room by the way he had come, Max
moved slowly to the left, and at the distance of only a couple of feet
from the door found the angle of the wall, and began to creep along,
still feeling with hands and feet most carefully, in the direction of
the front of the shop.

This side of the room presented no obstacles. The wall-paper was torn
here and there; the plaster fell down in some places at his touch. A
board shook a little under his tread when he had taken a few paces, but
at the next step he made the floor seemed firm enough.

On turning the next angle in the wall he came to the shop door--the one
leading into the stone passage outside. Here he made another attempt to
force an exit, but it was boarded up as securely as the inner one, and
the window, which was beside it, was in the same condition.

It by no means increased the confidence of Max as to his own safety to
observe what elaborate precautions had been used by the occupants of the
house to secure themselves from observation. He could no longer doubt
that he was in a house which was the resort of persons of the worst
possible character, and in a position of the gravest danger.

While opposite the window, he listened eagerly for some sound in the
passage outside. If a foot-passenger should pass, he would risk
everything and shout for help with all the force of his lungs.

Even while he indulged this hope, he felt that it was a vain one. It was
now late; traffic on the river had almost ceased; there was no
attraction for idlers on the landing-stage in the cold and the darkness.

He continued his investigations.

At the next angle in the wall he came to more shelves, decayed, broken,
left by the last tenant as not worth carrying away. And presently his
feet came upon something harder, colder than the boards; it was a
hearthstone, and it marked the place where, before the room was turned
into a shop, there had been a small fireplace. And on the other side of
this, near the wall, was a collection of rubbish, over the musty items
of which Max stumbled as he went. Old boxes, bits of carpet, broken
bricks; every sort of worthless lumber.

And so, without accident, without incident, without hearing a sound but
the faint noise of his own movements, Max got back to the point where he
had started.

Then he paused and listened at the inner door.

In spite of everything, he refused to yield to the suggestion that
Carrie had anything to do with his incarceration. Would she not, on
finding that he had disappeared, make an effort to get him out?

While he was standing between doubt and hope, on the alert for any sound
on the other side which should suggest the presence of the girl herself
and give him the cue to knock at the door again, his attention was
attracted by a slight noise which thrilled him to the marrow; for it
came, not from outside, but from some part of the room itself, in which
he had supposed himself to be alone with the dead body of a man.

Instantly he put his back to the door and prepared to stand on the
defensive against the expected attack of an invisible assailant.

That was the awful part of it, that he could not see. For a moment he
thought of creeping back to the rubbish heap in the corner and trying to
find, amongst the odds and ends lying there, some sort of weapon of
defense. But a moment's reflection told him that the act of stooping, of
searching, would put him more at the mercy of an assailant than ever.
There was absolutely nothing to do but to wait and to listen.

And the noise he heard was like the drawing of a log of wood slowly
along the floor. This was followed by a dull sound, like the falling of
a log to the earth.

And then there followed two sounds which made his flesh creep: The first
was the creaking, and cracking of wooden boards, and the second was a
slow, sliding noise, which lasted, intermittently for what seemed an
hour.

When the latter noise ceased something fell heavily to the ground. That
was a sound there was no mistaking, and then the creaking went on for
what seemed a long time, and ceased suddenly in its turn.

And then, again, there was dead silence, dead stillness.

By this time Max was as cold as ice, and wet from head to foot with the
sweat of a sick terror. What the sounds meant, whence they proceeded, he
could not tell, but the horror they produced in him was unspeakable,
never to be forgotten.

He did not move for a long time after the sounds had ceased. He wanted
to shout, to batter with his fists on the doors, the window. But a
hideous paralysis of fear seemed to have taken possession of him and
benumbed his limbs and his tongue.

Max was no coward. He was a daring rider, handy with his fists, a young
man full of spirit and courage to the verge of recklessness, as this
adventure had proved. But courage must have something to attack, or at
least to resist, before it can make itself manifest; and in this
sickening waiting, listening, watching, without the use of one's eyes,
there was something which smacked of the supernatural, something to damp
the spirits of the bravest man.

There was nothing to be gained, there was, perhaps, much to be risked,
by a movement, a step. So Max felt, showing thereby that he possessed an
instinct of sane prudence which was, in the circumstances, better than
bravery.

And presently he discerned a little patch of faint light on the floor,
which gradually increased in size until he was able to make out that it
was thrown from above, and from the corner above the rubbish heap.

Max kept quite still. The relief he felt was exquisite. If once he could
have a chance of seeing the man who was in the room with him, and who he
could not doubt was the person who had thrown him in, Max felt he should
be all right. In a tussle with another man he knew that he could hold
his own, and a sight of the ruffian would enable him to judge whether
bribery or force would be the better weapon with him.

In the meantime he watched the light with anxious eyes, determined not
to move and risk its extinction until he had been able to examine every
corner of the little shop.

And as he looked, his eyes grew round, and his breath came fast.

There was no counter left, no furniture at all behind which a man could
hide. And the room, except for the rubbish in the corner, a small,
straggling heap, was absolutely bare.

There was no other creature in it, dead or alive, but himself.




CHAPTER XII.

ESCAPE.


An exclamation, impossible to repress, burst from the lips of Max.

At the same moment he made a spring to the left, which brought him under
the spot in the floor above through which the light was streaming.

And he saw through a raised trap-door in the flooring above the shrewish
face of old Mrs. Higgs, and the very same candle in the very same tin
candlestick that he had seen in use in the adjoining room.

The old woman and the young man stared at each other for a moment in
silence. It seemed to Max that there was genuine surprise on her face as
she looked at him.

"Well, I never!" exclaimed she, as she lowered the candle through the
hole, and looked, not only at him, but into every corner of the shop.
"Well, I never! How did you get in there, eh?"

Max was angry and sullen. How could he doubt that she knew more about it
than he did! On the other hand, he was not in a position to be as rude
as he felt inclined to be.

"You know all about that, I expect," said he, shortly.

"I? How should I know anything about it? I only know that I lost sight
of you very quickly, and couldn't make out where you'd got to."

"Well, you know now," said Max, shortly, "and perhaps you'll be kind
enough to let me out."

In spite of himself his voice shook. As the old woman still hesitated,
he measured with his eye the distance between the floor where he stood
and the open trap-door above. It was too far for a spring. Mrs. Higgs
seemed to divine his thoughts, and she laughed grimly.

"All right," said she. "All right. I'll come down. I wonder who can have
put you in there now! It's one of those young rascals from over the way,
I expect. They are always up to something. Don't you worry yourself; I'm
coming!"

Her tone had become so reassuring that Max began to wonder whether the
old woman might not be more innocent of the trick which had been played
upon him than he had supposed. This impression increased when Mrs. Higgs
went on:

"Why didn't you holloa out when you found yourself inside?"

"It wouldn't have been of much use," retorted Max. "I thumped on the
door and made noise enough to wake the city."

"Well, I thought I heard a knock, some time ago," said Mrs. Higgs, who
seemed still in no hurry to fulfill her promise of coming down. "But I
thought it was nothing of any consequence, as I didn't hear it again."

"Where were you then?" To himself he added: "You old fool!"

"Eh?" said Mrs. Higgs.

Max repeated the question.

"Well, first I was downstairs, and then I came up here."

At last Max saw in the old woman's lackluster eyes a spark of malice.

"You're coming to open the door now?" asked he.

"All right," said she.

Down went the trap-door, and the light and the old woman disappeared
together. Max wished he had asked for a candle, although he doubted
whether his request would have been complied with.

And at the end of another five minutes, which seemed like hours, he
began to have other and graver doubts. He had gone back to his former
place near the door, and he stood waiting, with more and more eagerness,
more and more anxiety, for the promised appearance of Mrs. Higgs.

Surely, slow as her steps might be, she could have got down by this
time.

He grew restless, uneasy. The old suspicions--which her appearance and
the artful simplicity of her manner had allayed--rose up in his mind
with fresh vigor. And, to add to his anxiety, he suddenly remembered the
pretext Carrie had given to try to get him into the front room.

She had told him there were things of hers in there which she wanted. He
had believed her, at least, implicitly. But now he knew that her pretext
was a lie. She also, therefore, had been an accomplice in the plot to
get him into this room.

As this thought came into his mind, he heard again the creaking of the
boards, and this time it was accompanied by another sound, faint,
intermittent, but unmistakable--the sound of the splashing of water
close to his feet.

Turning quickly to the door, he raised his fist and brought it upon the
boards with a sounding crash; at the same time he shouted for "Help!"
with all the strength of his lungs. He repeated the blow, the cry.

Again he heard, when he paused to listen, the faint splashing of the
water, the creaking of the boards behind him. Then, just as he raised
his hand for one more blow on the door, he felt it open a very little,
pushing him back.

And at the same moment a voice whispered:

"Sh-sh!"

Very gradually the door was opened a little farther. A hand caught the
sleeve of his coat. It was quite dark outside the door--as dark as in
the front room.

"Sh-sh!" was whispered again in his ear, as he felt himself drawn
through the narrow aperture.

He made no attempt to resist, for he knew, he felt, that the hand was
Carrie's, and that this was rescue.

When he had passed into the second room, Max was stopped by a warning
pressure of the hand upon his arm, and then he felt the touch of
Carrie's lips upon his ear, so close did she come before she uttered
these words:

"Don't make a sound. Come slowly, very quietly, very carefully. You're
all right."

He heard her close the door through which he had just come, and then he
let her lead him, in silence and in the darkness, until they reached
another door. This she opened with the same caution, and Max, passing
through with her, found himself, as he knew by the little step down onto
the brick floor, in the outhouse.

"Who's that?" said a man's voice, startling Max, and confirming in an
instant the suspicions he had had that the outrage to which he had been
subjected was the work of a gang.

"It's me--Carrie," said the girl.

And opening the outer door, she drove Max out with a gentle push, and
closed it between herself and him.

"Thank God!" was his first muttered exclamation, as he felt the welcome
rush of cold night air and felt himself free again.

But the very next moment he turned back instinctively to the door and
attempted to push it open. The latch was gone; he had broken it himself.
But the door was now locked against him.

Of course, this circumstance greatly increased the desire he had for one
more interview, however short, with Carrie. He wanted to understand her
position. Too much interested in the girl to wish to doubt her, grateful
to her for contriving his escape, Max yet found it difficult to
reconcile her actions with the honesty her words had caused him to
believe in.

However, finding that the door was inexorably closed upon him, he saw
that there was nothing for it but to take himself off into safer if less
interesting regions as quickly as possible. So he got out on the wharf,
through and over the timber, and was on the point of crossing to the
door in the fence, when he saw a man come quickly through, lock the door
behind him and make his way through the piles of timber with the easy,
stealthy step of a man accustomed to do this sort of thing, and to do it
at night.

Before the man got near him, Max, who had stepped back a little under
the wall of one of the outhouses, was sure that the newcomer was of
doubtful character. When the latter got out into the light thrown by the
street-lamp outside the wharf, this impression was confirmed.

A little man, young, of slight and active build, with a fair mustache,
blue eyes and curly, light hair, he was undoubtedly good-looking,
although there was something mean and sinister about the expression of
his face. Max could scarcely see all these details; but, as it was, he
made out enough for him to experience an idiotic pang of something like
jealousy, as he made up his mind on the instant that the object of the
young man's visit was to see Carrie.

The visitor wore a light overcoat, and had a certain look of being well
off, or, at least, well dressed.

And, suspicion getting the upper hand again, the thought darted through
the mind of Max that it was strange to find so many persons--this was
the third of whom he had knowledge--hovering about the shut-up house,
when Carrie had represented herself to have been alone for two whole
days.

Against his better judgment, Max followed the newcomer, step by step, at
a safe distance, and raised himself on the timber in such a way as to be
able to watch what followed.

The man in the light coat made his way with surprising neatness and
celerity over the timber to the door of the outhouse, at which he gave
two short knocks, a pause, and then two more.

After waiting for a few moments, the man repeated this signal, more
loudly than before.

And then the door opened, and Max heard the voice of Carrie, though it
was too dark for him to see her at that distance.

"You, Dick? Come in."

And the young man, without answering, availed himself of the invitation;
and the door was shut.

Max stared down at the closed door in perplexity and dismay. In spite of
all his adventures in that very doubtful house, or, perhaps, because of
them, his interest in Carrie, of the blue eyes and the wonderful voice,
was as strong as ever. Hovering between trust and mistrust, he told
himself at this point that she was nothing in the world but the thieves'
decoy he had at first suspected. But in that case, why had he himself
not been robbed? He wore a valuable watch; he had gold and notes in his
purse. And no attempt had been made to relieve him of either the one or
the other.

And the foolish fellow began to consider and to weigh one thing with the
other, and to become more and more eager to see the girl again if it
were only to upbraid her for her deceit, until he ended by slipping down
to the ground, going boldly to the door of the outhouse, and giving two
knocks, a pause, and two knocks more.

As he had expected, Carrie herself, after an interval of only a few
seconds, opened the door.

There was a little light in the outhouse, and none outside; and Max,
having taken a couple of steps to the left, she at first saw nobody. So
she made a step forward. Max instantly put himself between her and the
door.

On recognizing him, Carrie started, but uttered no sound, no word.

"I want to speak to you," said Max, in a low voice.

But all her boldness of their first interview, her coquetry of the
second, her quiet caution of the third had disappeared. She was now
frightened, shy, anxious to get away.

"Oh, why did you come back? Why did you come back? Go away at once and
never come here again. Haven't you got a lesson?"

Her voice broke; her anxiety was visible. Max was touched, more
interested than ever.

"I can't go away," he whispered back, "until I have spoken to you about
something which is very serious. Can't you come out on the wharf,
somewhere where we can talk without anybody over-hearing?"

"Oh, no, oh, no. I must go in. And you must go. Are you a _fool_,"
and she stamped her foot with sudden impatience, "to be so persistent?"

"A fool?" echoed Max, half to himself. "By Jove, I think I am. Look
here," and he bent down so that he might whisper very close to her ear;
"I must set the police on this place, you know; but I want you to get
away out of it first."

She listened in silence. She waited for him to say more. But he was
waiting on his side for the protests he expected. At last she laughed to
herself derisively.

"All right," said she. "Set the police on us by all means. Oh, do--do!
But--just mention first to your friend, Mr. Horne, that that's what
you're going to do. Just mention it to him, and see the thanks you'll
get for your trouble!"

These words came upon Max with a great shock. In the excitement of his
own adventures in this place, he had quite forgotten his friend, Dudley
Horne, and the errand which had first brought him into the neighborhood.
He had forgotten, also, what he had from the first only half
believed--the girl's words connecting Dudley with a murder committed
within those walls.

Now that the remembrance was thus abruptly brought back to him, he felt
as if he wanted to gasp for breath. Carrie watched him, and presently
made a sign to him to follow her. Scrambling out to the open space on
the wharf, she made for the spot close to the water where Max had stood
to watch the man whom Carrie had called "Dick."

When Max came up to her, the girl was standing close under the eaves of
the outhouse on the bank, leaning against the wall. He could scarcely
see anything of her face in the darkness, but he was struck by something
strangely moving in the tones of her voice as she broke the silence.

"Look here," she said, "I want you to make me a promise. Come, it ought
not to be difficult; for I got you out of a nice mess; remember that.
You've got to give me your word that you will say nothing about your
adventures to-day, either to the police or to anybody else."

"I can't promise that. And why on earth do you want me to do so? Surely
you can have no real sympathy with the people who do the things that are
done in there--"

Carrie interrupted him, breaking in upon him abruptly:

"What things?"

"Murders, and--"

"The murder was done by your friend, not by us."

"'Us?' Surely you don't identify yourself with these people?"

"I do. They are my friends--the only friends I have."

"But they are thieves, blackmailers!" said Max, saying not what he knew
but what he guessed.

"What have they stolen from you? What harm have they done to you or
anybody that you know of? All this is because my Granny didn't approve
of my having a stranger in, and had you shut into a dark room to give
you a fright."

"But you forget you said just now you had got me out of a nice mess."

"I--I meant that you were frightened."

"And with good reason. After what I saw and heard in that room, I should
be worse than a criminal myself if I didn't inform the police about the
existence of the place. I believe it's one of the vilest dens in
London."

Carrie was silent. She did not attempt to ask him what it was that he
had heard and seen while in that room. And Max felt his heart sink
within him. He would have had her question, protest, deny. And instead
she seemed tacitly to take the truth of all his accusations for granted.

"Don't you see," he presently went on, almost in a coaxing tone, "that
it's for your own good that you should have to go away? I won't
believe--I can't--that you like this underground, hole-and-corner
existence, this life that is dishonest all through. Come, now, confess
that you don't like it--that you only live like this because you can't
help it, or because you think you can't help it--and I'll forgive you."

There was a long pause. Then he heard a little, hard, cynical laugh. He
tried hard to see her face; but although he caught now and then a gleam
of the great eyes, the wonderful eyes that had fascinated him, he could
not distinguish the expression, hardly even the outline of her features.

When she at last spoke, it was in a reckless, willful tone.

"Forgive me! What have you to forgive, except that I was fool enough to
ask you into the house? And if you've suffered for that, it seems I
shall have to, too, in the long run; and I'm not going to say I don't
like the life, for I like it better than any I've lived before."

"What!"

"Yes, yes, I tell you. I'm not a heroine, ready to drudge away my life
in any round of dull work that'll keep body and soul together. I'd
rather have the excitement of living what you call a hole-and-corner
life than spend my days stitch--stitch--stitching--dust--dust--dusting,
as I used to have to do with Miss Aldridge, as I should have to do if I
went away from here."

"Well, but there are other things you could do," pleaded Max, with vague
thoughts of setting his own sisters to work to find this erratic child
of the riverside some more seemly mode of life than her present one.

"What other things?"

"Why, you could--you could teach in a school or in a family."

"No, I couldn't. I don't know enough. And I wouldn't like it, either.
And I should have to leave Granny, who wants me, and is fond of me--"

"And Dick!" burst out Max, spitefully. "You would have to give up the
society of Dick."

It was possible, even in the darkness, to perceive that this remark
startled Carrie. She said, in astonishment which she could not hide:

"And what do you know about Dick?"

"I know that you wouldn't care for a life that is repugnant to every
notion of decency, if it were not for Dick," retorted Max, with rash
warmth.

Carrie laughed again.

"I'm afraid you got your information from the wrong quarter," said she,
quietly. "Not from Dick himself, that's certain."

There was some relief to Max in this confident assertion, but not much.
Judging Dick by his own feelings, he was sure that person had not
reached the stage of intimacy at which Carrie called him by his
Christian name without hankering after further marks of her favor.

"He is fond of you, of course!" said Max, feeling that he had no right
to say this, but justifying into himself on the ground of his wish to
help her out of her wretched position.

"Well, I suppose he is."

"Are you--of course I've no right to ask--but are you fond of him?"

Carrie shook her head with indifference.

"I like him in my way," said she. "Not in his way. There's a great
difference."

"And do you like any man--in his way?"

The girl replied with a significant gesture of disgust, which had in it
nothing of coquetry, nothing of affectation.

"No," said she, shortly.

"Why do you answer like that?"

"Why? Oh, well, if you knew all that I've seen, you wouldn't wonder, you
wouldn't want to ask."

"You won't always feel like that. You won't, when you have got away from
this hole, and are living among decent people."

"The 'decent people' are those who leave me alone," said Carrie,
shortly, "as they do here."

"As who do here? Who are the people who live in that shut-up house,
besides you and your Granny, as you call her?"

"I--mustn't tell you. They don't belong to any county families. Is that
enough?"

"Why are you so different now from what you were when we were sitting by
the fire in there? You are not like the same girl! Are you the same
girl?"

And Max affected to feel, or, perhaps, really felt, a doubt which
necessitated his coming a little closer to Carrie, without, however,
being able to see much more of her face than before.

"I'm the same girl," replied Carrie, shortly, "whom you threatened with
the police."

"Come, is that fair? Did I threaten _you_ with the police?"

"You threatened _us_. It's the same thing. Well, it doesn't matter.
They won't find out anything more than we choose!"

She said this defiantly, ostentatiously throwing in her lot with the
dubious characters from whom Max would fain have dissociated her.

"Do you forget," he asked, suddenly, "that these precious friends of
yours left you, forgot you, for two whole days--left you to the company
of a dead man, to a chance stranger? Is that what you call
kindness--friendship--affection?"

She made no answer.

A moment later a voice was heard calling softly: "Carrie?"

The girl came out of the shelter of the eaves, and Max at last caught
sight of her face. It was sad, pale, altogether different from what the
reckless, defiant, rather hard tones of her latest words would have led
him to expect. A haunting face, Max thought.

"I must go," said she. "Good-bye."

"Carrie!" repeated the voice, calling again, impatiently.

Max knew, although he could not see the owner of the voice, that it was
"Dick." It was, he thought, a coarse voice, full of intimations of the
swaggering self-assertion of the low-class Londoner, who thinks himself
the whole world's superior.

Carrie called out:

"All right; I'm coming!" And then she turned to Max. "You are to forget
this place, and me," said she, in a whisper.

The next moment Max found himself alone.




CHAPTER XIII.

THE SEQUEL TO A TRAGEDY.


It was on the evening after that of his expedition to Limehouse that Max
Wedmore found himself back again at the modest iron gate of the park at
The Beeches. He had not sent word what time he should arrive, preferring
not to have to meet Doreen by herself, with her inevitable questions,
sooner than he could help.

As he shut the gate behind him, and hurried up the drive toward the
house, he felt a new significance in the words "Home, Sweet Home," and
shuddered at the recollection that he had, in the thirty odd hours since
he left it, given up the hope of ever seeing it again.

It was a little difficult, though, on this prosaic home-coming, to
realize all he had passed through since he last saw the red house, with
its long, dignified front, its triangular pediment rising up against the
dark-blue night sky, and the group of rambling outbuildings, stables,
laundries, barns, all built with a magnificent disregard of the value of
space, which straggled away indefinitely to the right, in a grove of big
trees and a tangle of brush-wood.

Lines of bright light streaming between drawn window curtains showed
bright patches on the lawn and the shrubs near the house. As Max passed
through the iron gate which shut in the garden from the park, a group of
men and boys, shouting, encouraging one another with uncouth cries,
rushed out from the stable yard toward the front of the house.

"What's the matter?" asked Max of a stable boy, whom he seized by the
shoulders and stopped in the act of uttering a wild whoop.

"It's the log, sir," replied the lad, sobered by the sudden appearance
of the young master, who seemed in no hilarious mood.

"The log! What log?"

"Master has ordered one for Christmas, sir, the biggest as could be
got," answered the boy, who then escaped, to rush back and join the
shouting throng.

And Max remembered that his father, in his passionate determination to
have a real old English Christmas, with everything done in the proper
manner, had given this order to the head gardener a few days before.

By this time the group had become a crowd. A swarm of men and boys,
conspicuous among whom were all the idlers and vagabonds of the
neighborhood, came along through the yard in one great, overwhelming
wave, hooting, yelling, trampling down the flower-beds with, their
winter covering of cocoanut fiber, breaking down the shrubs, tearing
away the ivy, and spreading devastation as they went.

Poor Mr. Wedmore had instructed his servants not to prevent the
villagers from joining in the procession. There was something
reminiscent of feudal times, a pleasant suggestion of the cordial
relation between the lord of the manor of the Middle Ages and his
tenants and dependents, in this procession of the Yule log up to the
great house. And Mr. Wedmore, full of his fancy for the grand old
medieval Christmas festivities, hugged to his heart the thought of
holding such revels as should make Christmas at The Beeches an
institution in the countryside.

But, alas! the London merchant had become a country gentleman too late
in life to appreciate the great gulf which lies between the
sixteenth-century peasant (of the modern imagination) and the
nineteenth-century villager of actual fact. His own small army from the
stable and the garden were powerless to cope with the disorderly mob
they had been encouraged to invite in this interesting celebration. And
those most mischievous and conspicuous roughs whom the coachman had
driven off with the whip on the way up, revenged themselves for this
drastic treatment by coming in through the front gate of the park,
breaking down the fence between park and garden, and every obstacle to
their barbaric progress.

It was "Poaching Wilson" who pulled the bell, after some difficulty in
finding the handle, owing to the liberality with which he had "treated
himself" as a preparation for the journey.

Max, alarmed at the invasion, had made his way round to the
billiard-room door at the back, bolted it on the inside, and hastened to
give directions to the servants to lock all the other doors, and to
secure the ground-floor windows.

Then he rushed into the hall, just as his father had come out from the
dining-room, serviette in hand, to learn the cause of the noise outside.

"Hello, Max! Is it you back again? And have you brought down half the
population of London with you?"

"No, sir, they didn't come with me. They are guests of yours, I
understand. And they expect to be treated to unlimited beer, so I gather
from their remarks. They've brought some firewood, I believe."

At this moment the clanging of the front-door bell resounded through the
house for the second time. The frightened butler, who was a young man
and rather nervous, stood by the door, not daring to open it. The ladies
of the household had by this time come out of the dining-room; Mrs.
Wedmore looked flush and frightened; the girls were tittering. Smothered
explosions of laughter came from time to time to the ears of the master
of the house, from the closed door which led to the servants' hall.

"Shall--shall I see who it is, sir?" asked the butler, who could hear
the epithets applied to him on the other side of the door.

"No, no!" cried Doreen. "Not on any account! Tell them to put the thing
down and go away."

There was a pause, during which the bell rang again, and there was a
violent lunge at the door.

"They won't--they won't go away, Miss, without they get something
first," said the butler, who was as white as a sheet.

"Tell them," began Mr. Wedmore, in a loud tone of easy confidence, "to
take it round to the back door, and--and to send a--deputation to me in
the morning; when--er--they shall be properly rewarded for their
trouble."

"They ought to reward us for _our_ trouble, papa, don't you think?"
suggested Doreen.

"There! They've begun to reward themselves," said Queenie, as a stone
came through one of the windows.

Mr. Wedmore was furious. He saw the mistake he had made, but he would
not own it. Putting strong constraint upon himself, he assumed a gay
geniality of manner which his looks belied, and boldly advanced to the
door. But Mrs. Wedmore flung her arms round her husband in a capacious
embrace, dragging him backward with an energy there was no use
resisting.

"No, no, no, George! I won't have you expose yourself to those horrid
roughs! Don't open the door, Bartram! Put up the bolt!"

"Nonsense! Nonsense, my dear!" retorted Mr. Wedmore, who was, perhaps,
not so unwilling to be saved from the howling mob as he wished to
appear. "It's only good-humored fun--of a rough sort, perhaps, but quite
harmless. It's some mischievous boy who threw the stone. But, of course,
they must go round to the back."

"Cook won't dare to open the door to 'em, sir," said the butler.

The situation was becoming serious. There was no denying that the house
was besieged. Mrs. Wedmore began to feel like a châtelaine of the
Cavalier party, with the Roundhead army at the doors clamoring for her
husband's blood. The cries of the villagers were becoming more derisive.

As a happy thought, Mrs. Wedmore suggested haranguing the mob from an
upper window. This course seemed rather ignominious, but prudence
decided in its favor.

There was a rush upstairs, and Mr. Wedmore, followed by all the ladies,
flung himself into the bathroom and threw up the window.

It was not at all the sort of thing that merry squire of the olden times
might have been expected to do. In fact, as Doreen remarked, there were
no bathrooms in the olden time to harangue a mob from. But Mr. Wedmore's
medieval ardor being damped, he submitted to circumstances with
fortitude.

"Yah! There 'e is at last!" "'Ow are you, old un?" "Don't put your nose
out too fur this cold night!"

These and similar ribald remarks greeted Mr. Wedmore as he appeared at
the window, telling him only too plainly that the merry days of old were
gone, never to be restored, and that the feudal feeling which bound (or
is supposed to have bound) rich and poor, gentle and simple, in one
great tie of brotherhood had disappeared forever.

Doreen and Queenie were secretly enjoying the fun, though they had the
sense to be very quiet; but Mrs. Wedmore was in an agony of sympathy
with her husband, and of fear for the results of his enterprise. He
began a speech of thanks, but the noise below was too great for him to
be heard. Indeed, it was his own servants who did the most toward
drowning his voice by their well-meant endeavors to shout down the
interrupting cries.

"They're most of them tipsy, I think," whispered Doreen to her mother,
who said, "Sh-sh!" in shocked remonstrance, but secretly agreed with her
daughter's verdict.

"Throw them some coppers, papa," suggested the sage and practical
Queenie.

Mr. Wedmore turned out his pockets, taking care to disperse his largesse
as widely as possible. The girls helped him, hunting high and low for
coins, among which, urged by the crowd in no subdued voice to "come down
handsome," sixpences and shillings presently made their welcome
appearance.

"Oh, the hollies!" whispered Doreen to her sister.

"Thank goodness, the look of the garden to-morrow morning will be an
object-lesson to papa!"

For the invaders, well aware of the value of such wares at Christmas
time, filled out the pauses by slashing at the berry-bearing trees with
their pocket-knives, secure in the safety of numbers.

By the time the shower of money ceased the crowd had begun to thin;
those members of it who had been lucky enough to secure silver coins had
made off in the direction of the nearest public-house, and those who had
cut down the holly had taken themselves off with their booty.

There remained in front of the door, when this clearance had been
effected, the Yule log itself, the laborers who had drawn it along and a
group of manageable size.

Max, who had been watching the proceedings from the study, after turning
out the light, judged that the moment had come for negotiations to
commence. So he told the butler to throw open the front door, and he
himself invited the unwelcome guests to enter. He had taken the
precaution to have all portable articles removed from the hall and all
the doors locked except that which led to the servants' hall and the
staircases.

In they came, a little subdued, and with their first disastrous energy
sufficiently exhausted for them to be able to listen and to do as they
were told.

The oaken center-table had been pushed on one side, and there was a
clear space, wide, carpetless, from the front door to the big stone
fireplace opposite.

"This way with the log! Now, boys, pull with a will!" cried Max, not
insensible to the novelty and picturesqueness of the situation, as a
motley crowd, some in smock-frocks, some in corduroy and some in gaiters
and great-coats, pressed into the great hall dragging the log after them
with many a "Whoop!" and shout and cry.

Mr. and Mrs. Wedmore and the two girls hurried downstairs on hearing the
door open, and stood by the fireplace, with a little glow of
satisfaction and pleasure at the turn affairs had taken.

It _was_ a log! Or, rather, it was more than a log; for it was half
a tree. Slowly the huge thing came in, scraping the nicely polished
floor, rolling a little from side to side, and threatening all those
within a yard of it. And then, when its appearance had spread
consternation through the household, the inevitable question came: What
was to be done with it?

The fire-basket had been taken out of the hearth on purpose for its
reception, but it was evident that, even after this careful preparation,
to think of burning it whole was out of the question. There was nothing
for it but to send for a saw and to reduce the log then and there to a
manageable size.

This was done, amid considerable noise and excitement, drinking of the
health of the family by villagers who had been drinking too much
already, and much scraping of the polished floor by muddy, hob-nailed
boots.

Finally the deputation was got rid of, and the interrupted dinner was
allowed to proceed, much to the comfort of Max, who had eaten nothing
since breakfast, and much to the dismay of Mrs. Wedmore, who was then
able to ascertain the extent of the damage done by the invaders.

It was lucky for Max that he had arrived at such an opportune moment.
His father had been grumbling at the number of visits he had made to
town lately, and the young man would have found him in no very good
humor if he had not discovered to his hand the opportunity of making
himself conspicuously useful.

It is scarcely necessary to say that Max did not tell anyone about the
adventures he had met with. He knew that he should have to go through
the ordeal of an interview with his sister, Doreen, who would want to
know a great deal more than he was willing to tell her; but he was
tired, and he made up his mind that he would not be interrogated that
evening. So he gave her no opportunity for the confidential talk she was
dying to have with him, but spent the remainder of the evening in
dutiful attendance upon his mother.

The following day was Christmas Eve. Max came down late to breakfast,
and he had scarcely entered the morning-room when his father handed him
the _Standard_, pointing to a certain paragraph without any comment
but a glance at the girls, as a hint to his son not to make any remark
which would recall Dudley and his affairs to their minds.

The paragraph was as follows:

"SHOCKING DISCOVERY!

"The body of a man was found floating in the river close to
Limehouse Pier late yesterday evening. Medical evidence points to
death by violence, and the police are making inquiries. It is
thought that the description of the body, which is that of a man of
a Jewish type of countenance, rather under than over the middle
height, aged between fifty and fifty-five, gray hair and short,
gray beard, tallies with that given a few days ago by a woman who
applied at the ---- Street Police Court, alleging that her husband
had disappeared in the above neighborhood. The police are extremely
reticent, but at the present they have no clue to the authors of
the outrage. The body awaits identification at the mortuary, and an
inquest will be held to-day."

"I wonder whether Dudley will see that?" said Mr. Wedmore, in a low
voice, as soon as his daughters were engaged in talk together. "It looks
like the sequel to the other paragraph which upset him so the other
evening, doesn't it? I shall watch the papers for the result of the
inquest. It seems to me pretty certain that it was Edward Jacobs.
Curious affair, isn't it, that he should be murdered in a slum, after
making a fortune at other people's expense? Retribution--just
retribution! Curious, isn't it!"

To Max it was so much more than merely "curious," knowing what he did,
that he felt sick with horror. Surely this body, found floating near
Limehouse Pier, was the one he had touched in the dark!




CHAPTER XIV.

IS IT BLACKMAIL?


Mr. Wedmore repeated his comment: "Curious, isn't it?" before Max could
reply. At last he nodded, and handed back the paper to his father. Then
he turned his chair toward the fire, and stared at the blazing coals. He
had lost his appetite; he felt cold, miserable.

His father could not help noticing that something was wrong with him;
and, after watching him furtively for a few minutes, he said, with an
abruptness which made Max start:

"Did you see anything of Dudley when you were in town?"

Max changed color, and glanced apprehensively at his father, as if
fearing some suspicion in the unexpected question.

"No, sir," he answered, after a moment's hesitation. "I called at his
chambers; but they told me he had gone away for the holidays and had
left no address. All letters were to be kept for him till his return."

Both question and answer had been uttered very softly, but Max saw, by
the look on Doreen's face, as she glanced over from the other side of
the table, that she guessed what they were talking about, if she had not
heard their words.

"Aren't you going to have any breakfast, Max?" asked she, as she came
round to him. "We've kept everything about for you, and we want the
table."

"Well, you can have it," said he, jumping up, quickly, and making for
the door. "I don't want any breakfast this morning."

"Nonsense. You will not be allowed to leave the room until you have had
some," retorted his sister, as she sprang at him and attempted to pinion
his arms. "We allow no ill-temper on Christmas Eve, especially as we've
got a surprise for you--a beautiful, real surprise. Guess who is coming
this morning to stay till New Year!"

Queenie had come up by this time, and the two girls between them brought
their brother back to the table, where the younger sister began to pour
out his coffee.

But Max refused to show the slightest interest in the coming guest, and
would not attempt to guess who it was. So they had to tell him.

"It was all on your account that we asked her," said Doreen, hurt by his
indifference. "You took such a fancy to her, and she to you, apparently,
at the Hutchinsons' dance, that we thought you'd be delighted.
_Now_, don't you know who it is?"

To their great disappointment, both girls saw that he didn't. Mr.
Wedmore, from the other end of the room, was observing this little
incident with considerable annoyance. The young lady in question, Miss
Mildred Appleby, was very pretty, and would be well dowered, and Mr.
Wedmore had entered heartily into the plan of inviting her to spend
Christmas with them, in the hope that Max would propose, be accepted,
and that he would then make up his mind to settle.

"Why, it's Mildred Appleby," said Doreen, impatiently, when her
brother's blank look had given her the wrong answer. "Surely, you don't
mean to say you've forgotten all about her?"

"Oh, no, I remember her," answered Max, indifferently. "Tall girl with a
fashion-plate face, waltzes pretty well and can't talk. Yes, I remember
her, of course."

"Is that all you have to say about her?" cried Doreen, betraying her
disappointment. "Why, a month ago she was the nicest and the jolliest
and the everythingest girl you had ever met."

"He's seen somebody else since then," remarked the observant Queenie, in
her dry, little voice. "When he was in town yesterday, perhaps."

Max looked at his sister with a curious expression. Was she right? Had
he, in that adventurous thirty-six hours in London, seen somebody who
took the color out of all the other girls he had ever met? He asked
himself this question when Queenie's shrewd eyes met his, and he
remembered the strange sensation he had felt at the touch of Carrie's
hand, at the sound of her voice.

Before he could answer his sister, Mr. Wedmore spoke impatiently:

"Rubbish!" cried he, testily. "Every young man thinks it the proper
thing to talk like that, as if no girl was good enough for him. Miss
Appleby is a charming girl, and she will find plenty of admirers without
waiting for Max's valuable adoration."

He had much better not have spoken, blundering old papa that he was. And
both daughters thought so, as they saw Max raise his eyebrows and gather
in all the details of the little plot in one sweeping glance at the
faces around him. He drank his coffee, but he could not eat. Doreen sat
watching him, ready to spring upon him at the first possible moment, and
to carry him off for the _tête-à-tête_ he was so anxious to put off.

What should he tell his sister of that adventure of his in the slums of
the East End? Would she be satisfied if he told a white lie, if he said
he had found out nothing?

Max felt that Doreen would not be satisfied if he got himself out of the
difficulty like that. In the first place, she would not believe him. He
saw that her quick eyes had been watching him since his return, and he
felt that he had been unable to hide the fact that something of greater
significance had occurred during that brief stay in town. What then
should he tell her? Perfect frankness, perfect confidence was out of the
question. To look back now, in the handsome, spacious house of his
parents, from the snug depths of an easy-chair, on the time he had
passed on and about the wharf by the docks, was so strange that Max
could hardly believe in his own experiences.

Who would believe the story of his adventures, if he himself could
scarcely do so? Would Doreen, would anybody give credence to the story
of the dead body that he touched, but never saw, the eyes that looked at
him from an unbroken wall, the girl who lured him into the shut-up
house, and then let him out again with an air of secrecy and mystery?

The transition had been so abrupt from the gloomy wharf, with its
suspicious surroundings and the heavy, fog-laden air of the riverside,
back to the warmth and light and brightness of home, that already his
adventures had receded into a sort of dreamland, and he began to ask
himself whether Carrie, with her fair hair and moving blue eyes, her
vibrating voice and changeful expression, were not a creature of his
imagination only.

He was still under the influence of the feelings roused by this dreamy
remembrance, when he snatched the opportunity afforded by Doreen's being
called away by Mrs. Wedmore, to go out into the grounds, on his way to
the stables. A ride through the lanes in the frosty air would, he
thought, be the best preparation for the trying ordeal of that
inevitable talk with Doreen, whose wistful eyes haunted him as she
waited for a chance of speaking to him alone.

In the garden a scene of desolation met his eye.

The lawns were torn up and trodden down; the gravel path from the
stables looked like a freshly plowed field; every tree and every bush
bore the marks of the marauder.

The head gardener was in a condition of unapproachable ferocity, and it
was generally understood that he had given notice to leave. The
under-gardeners kept out of the way, but could be heard at intervals
checking outbursts of derisive laughter behind the shrubberies. The
story of the Yule log and its adventures was the best joke the country
had had for a long time, and it was bound to lose nothing as it passed
from mouth to mouth. And poor Mr. Wedmore began to dread the ordeal of
congratulations he would have to go through when he next went to church.

Max felt sorry for his father. As he entered the stable-yard, which was
a wide expanse of flagged ground at the back of the house, round which
were many outbuildings, he came upon a group of snickering servants, all
enjoying the story of the master's freak.

The group broke up guiltily on the appearance of Max, the laundry-maids
taking flight in one direction, while the stablemen became suddenly busy
with yard-broom and leather.

Max put a question or two to the groom who saddled his horse for him.

"There was no great harm done last night, was there, except in the
garden? You have not heard of anything being stolen, eh?"

"Well, no, sir. But it brought a lot of people up as had no business
here. There was a person come up as we couldn't get rid of, asking
questions about the family, sir; and about Mr. Horne, too, sir. She
wouldn't believe as he wasn't here, an' she frightened some of the
women, I believe, sir. They didn't know where she'd got to, an' nobody
saw her go out of the place, so they've got an idea she's hiding about.
A fortune-telling tramp, most likely, sir," added the man, who wished he
had held his tongue about the intruder when he saw how strongly the
young master was affected by this story.

The fact was that Max instantly connected this apparition of a woman
"who asked questions about Mr. Horne" with the ugly story told him at
the house by the wharf, and he was glad that Dudley was not spending
Christmas at The Beeches.

He was oppressed during the whole of his ride by this suggestion that
the questionable characters of the wharfside were pursuing Dudley; it
gave color to Carrie's statement that it was Dudley who killed the man
whom Max believed to have been Edward Jacobs; and it looked as if the
object of the woman's visit was to levy blackmail.

Or was it--could it be that the woman was Carrie, and that her object
was to warn Dudley? To associate Carrie herself with the levying of
blackmail was not possible to the susceptible Max in the present state
of his feelings toward her.

And, just as he was meditating upon this mystery, all unprepared for a
meeting with his sister, Doreen waylaid him. He was entering the house
by the back way, muddy from his ride, when she sprang upon him from an
ambush on the stairs.

"I've been waiting all the morning to catch you alone," said she, as she
ran out from behind the tall clock and seized his arm. "You've been
trying to avoid me. Don't deny it. I say you have. As if it was any use!
No, you shall not go upstairs and take off your boots first. You will
just come into the study, mud and all, and tell me--tell me what you
_know_, not what you have been making up, mind! I'm going to have
the truth."

"Well, you can't," returned her brother, shortly, as he allowed himself
to be dragged across the hall, which looked cheerless enough without a
fire, and with the great, clumsy, hideous, maimed old Yule log filling
up the fireplace and reminding everybody of all that it had cost.

Doreen pushed him into the study and shut the door.

"Why can't I know the truth?" asked she, eying him steadily. "Do you
mean that you have found out Dudley doesn't care for me."

Max glanced at his sister's face, and then looked away. He had not known
till that moment, when he caught the tender look of anxiety in her big
brown eyes, how strong her love of Dudley was. An impulse of anger
against the man seized him, and he frowned.

"Why, surely you know already that he doesn't care for you, in the way
he ought to care, or he would never have neglected you, never have given
you up!" said he, ferociously.

"I'm not so sure about that. At any rate I want to know what you found
out. Don't think I'm not strong enough to bear it, whatever it is!"

"Well, then, I'll tell you. He _is_ off his head. He has got mixed
up in some way with a set of people no sane man would trust himself with
for half an hour, and--and--and--well, they say--the people say he's done
something that would hang him. There! Is that enough for you?"

He felt that he was a brute to tell her, but he could see no other way
out of the difficulty in which her own persistency had placed him. She
stared at him for a few seconds with blanched cheeks, clasping her
hands. Then she said in a whisper:

"You don't 

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