The Crime and the Criminal
by Richard Marsh · English · Gutenberg #40348 · 592,117 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Crime and the Criminal
Author: Richard Marsh
Illustrator: Harold Piffard
Release date: July 27, 2012 [eBook #40348]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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[Illustration: "She had fallen backwards through the open carriage
door." _Frontispiece_]
THE
Crime and the Criminal
BY
RICHARD MARSH
AUTHOR OF
"THE BEETLE," "THE MYSTERY OF PHILIP BENNION'S DEATH," ETC., ETC.
* * * * *
WITH TWO FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
BY HAROLD PIFFARD
* * * * *
NEW YORK
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY
1899
CONTENTS.
* * *
BOOK I.--THE CRIME.
CHAPTER I.
THE OPEN DOOR.
CHAPTER II.
THE MAN WITH THE SILK HANDKERCHIEF.
CHAPTER III.
THE NAME ON THE SCRAP OF PAPER.
CHAPTER IV.
BLACKMAIL.
CHAPTER V.
THE FACE IN THE DARKNESS.
CHAPTER VI.
A CONFESSION.
CHAPTER VII.
A VISITOR.
CHAPTER VIII.
MORE THAN HIS MATCH.
CHAPTER IX.
FOR THE SECOND TIME.
BOOK II.--THE CLUB.
CHAPTER X.
THE HONOUR OF THE CLUB.
CHAPTER XI.
WHAT MR. TENNANT HAD WRITTEN.
CHAPTER XII.
SIR HASELTON JARDINE.
CHAPTER XIII.
AN AFTERNOON CALL.
CHAPTER XIV.
SELLING BOOMJOPFS.
CHAPTER XV.
THE CLUB.
CHAPTER XVI.
DRAWING THE LOT.
CHAPTER XVII.
A LITTLE GAME.
CHAPTER XVIII.
DAMON AND PYTHIAS: A MODERN INSTANCE.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE PROMISE.
CHAPTER XX.
THE NEWS FROM TOWN.
BOOK III.--THE WOMAN.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE ADVENTURES OF A NIGHT.
CHAPTER XXII.
LOUISE O'DONNEL'S FATHER.
CHAPTER XXIII.
MR. TOWNSEND COMES TO TEA.
CHAPTER XXIV.
WHAT MRS. CARRUTH SAW.
CHAPTER XXV.
MR. TOWNSEND'S DOUBLE.
CHAPTER XXVI.
ANNOUNCED!
CHAPTER XXVII.
MR. TOWNSEND IS MADE TO UNDERSTAND.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE PRISONER COMES INTO COURT.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE TRIAL BEGINS.
CHAPTER XXX.
MR. TAUNTON'S EVIDENCE.
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE CASE FOR THE CROWN CONCLUDES.
CHAPTER XXXII.
MRS. CARRUTH REMOVES HER VEIL.
BOOK IV.--THE CRIMINAL.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
MR. TENNANT SPEAKS.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
MR. HOLMAN AT HOME.
CHAPTER XXXV.
THE WOMAN OF THE PORTRAIT.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE VARIOUS MOODS OF A GENTLEMAN OF FASHION.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
"CALL ME DORA."
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
ON THE THRESHOLD.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE LAST MEETING OF THE CLUB.
CHAPTER XL.
MR. TOWNSEND REACHES HOME.
CHAPTER XLI.
TAKING LEAVE.
CHAPTER XLII.
HAND IN HAND.
THE CRIME AND THE CRIMINAL.
BOOK I.-THE CRIME.
(_The Story according to Mr. Thomas Tennant_.)
CHAPTER I.
THE OPEN DOOR.
I ran down to Brighton for the Sunday. My wife's cousin, George
Baxendale, was stopping there, with the Coopers. The wife and I were
both to have gone. But our little Minna was very queer--feverish cold,
or something--and Lucy did not like to leave her with the nurse. So I
went down alone.
It was a fine day, for November. We drove over to Bramber--Jack Cooper
and his wife, Baxendale, and I. When we got back to Regency Square it
was pretty late. I was to go back by the 8.40. When we had dined I had
to make quite a rush to catch the train. Jack and George both came up
to see me off. As the Pullman carriages all seemed full, I got into the
compartment of an ordinary first-class carriage.
"You'll be better in there," said Jack. "You'll have it to yourself."
I did, till just as the train was off. When the train had actually
started, a woman came hurrying up the platform. A porter threw open the
door of my carriage, and she got in. I let her have the seat by the
door through which she had entered. I went to the other end of the
compartment. I did not feel too much obliged to the porter who had
shown her in. Although it was not a smoking carriage, as I had expected
to have had it to myself, I had intended to smoke all the way to town.
In fact, I was smoking at that moment. I hardly knew what to do. The
train did not stop till it reached Victoria. There would be no
opportunity of changing carriages. I did not relish the idea of not
smoking, while I scarcely knew if I might venture to ask permission to
smoke of the new-comer.
I made up my mind that I would. I had only just lighted a cigar. I had
not looked at her as she came up the platform, to notice what kind of
person she was. I had been too much engaged with Jack and George. I
turned to her, raising my hat as I did so.
"May I ask if you object to----"
I had got so far; but I got no farther. She looked at me, and, as she
did so, and I saw her face clearly, and met her eyes, my blood went
cold in my veins.
The woman at the other end of the carriage was either Nelly, or Nelly's
ghost. If she was her ghost, then she was the most substantial ghost I
had ever heard of. And yet I had to stare at her for some moments in
stupefied silence before I could believe that she was not a ghost.
Before I could believe that she was genuine flesh and blood.
She struck me as being as much surprised at seeing me as I was at
seeing her--and, at first at any rate, not much better pleased. We
stared at each other as if we were moonstruck. She was the first to
find her voice--she always was quicker, in every sense of the word,
than I am.
"Tom!" she said. Then gave a sort of gasp.
"Nelly!" It was all I could do to get her name to pass my lips.
I am not going to enter into details as to what I said to her, and as
to what she said to me. Nothing pleasant was said on either side. When
a man meets a woman, even after a separation of seven years and more,
who has wronged him as Ellen Howth, as she was named when I first knew
her, had wronged me, he is not likely to greet her with sugared
phrases, especially when he has had every reason to suppose that his
prayers have been answered, and that she is dead. When I saw that she
had tricked me, for the thousand-and-first time, and that she was not
dead, as I have written, my blood went cold. When it warmed, it was not
with love for her.
We quarrelled, as we had done many and many a time before. She had been
drinking. She was always bad enough when sober; when not sober she was
infinitely worse. Every moment I expected her to assail me with
personal violence. She threatened to, over and over again. I feared
that there would be some outrageous scene in the railway carriage.
Fearing this, and the scandal which such a thing would necessarily
entail, I formed a wild resolution. I determined that, even while the
train continued to fly through the air, I would leave the compartment
in which she was, and at any and every risk seek refuge in an adjoining
one.
The resolution was no sooner formed than I proceeded to put it into
execution. There was no necessity to lower the window; the handle was
inside the carriage. Turning the handle, I rose from my seat. Whether
she mistook or designed to frustrate my purpose, I cannot say. No
sooner did I rise, than she came rushing at me. The violence of her
assault took me by surprise. The handle escaping from my grasp, the
door swung back upon its hinges. She had me by the shoulders. I
endeavoured to wrest myself free. There was a struggle. In the
struggle, unconsciously certainly to me, we must have reversed our
positions, because, suddenly loosing her grasp of me, before I had the
faintest suspicion of what was about to happen, she had fallen
backwards through the open carriage door, out into the night, and the
train was going at express speed to town.
It was some moments before I realised what had actually occurred. When
I did do so, I sat down on the seat in a sort of stupor. I was roused
from it by the banging of the carriage door. It was being swung
backwards and forwards by the momentum of the train. I shut it, almost
mechanically; as I did so I noticed that the glass was shattered. It
might have been broken by the banging of the door, or she might have
broken it by striking it in her frantic efforts to clutch at something.
What was I to do? My eyes wandered to the alarm-bell. Should I ring it
and stop the train? To what purpose? She might not be dead. Indeed, the
probabilities were that she was, at least, not quite dead. In such a
case I knew her well enough to be aware that nothing was more likely
than that she would at once denounce me as her attempted murderer. Then
in what a plight I should be! To the best of my knowledge and belief
she had brought her fate upon herself. I had nothing to do with it.
Undoubtedly, I had not opened the door to hurl her through. It is easy
enough after the event to say that at all hazards I ought at once to
have stopped the train, and explained what had occurred. I should have
done so had I been able to foresee the events which followed. I should
have been willing to have given a great deal to have saved myself from
bearing what I actually have borne. But, at the moment, I foresaw
nothing. My wits were woolgathering. I was confronted by the thought
that, in face of her allegations of my guilt, my protestations of
innocence might avail but little. I had suffered too much on her
account already to have any desire to suffer more.
As I sat there thinking, something struck me a severe blow in the face.
It was a piece of glass from the broken window which had been loosened,
and which had been forced out of its place by the pressure of the wind.
I lowered the window, lest the remaining fragments should also be
driven from their places. The sharp edge of the piece of glass had come
into contact with my cheek. It had cut me to the bone. I put up my
handkerchief to stop the bleeding. As I did so I noticed that my
overcoat seemed to have been torn open in the struggle; the top button
appeared to be missing.
The blood flowed freely from the open wound. The piece of glass seemed
to have cut me like a knife. My handkerchief was quite inadequate to
stop the flow. It was becoming soaked with blood. While I was wondering
what I should do if the bleeding did not shortly cease, the train drew
up at Victoria.
The distance between Brighton and town had never before seemed to me to
be so short.
CHAPTER II.
THE MAN WITH THE SILK HANDKERCHIEF.
Now that I had reached Victoria I did not know what to do. I continued
to sit in a sort of bewilderment, wondering. Should I speak to the
guard, or should I not? Should I walk out of the station as if nothing
had happened? I was, or it seemed to me that I was, between the devil
and the deep sea. Whichever path I took was the path, not of safety but
of danger.
While I sat hesitating and apparently incapable of anything but
hesitation, the carriage door was opened. I supposed that, seeing me, a
porter had opened it for me to alight. But it was not a porter who
stood there looking in--looking in, as it struck me, with eager
curiosity. It was an individual in a top hat and an overcoat ornamented
with fur cuffs and collar. Even in my state of confusion, and in that
imperfect light, I was at once struck by the fact that both hat and
overcoat were the worse for wear. The face under the hat was also the
worse for wear. The cheeks were ruddy, with a ruddiness which suggested
alcohol. The moustache and whiskers were too black for nature. The
eyes, which were at once both impudent and shifty, in colour almost
matched the whiskers. There was something about the man which reminded
me of some one I had seen before. Who it was, at the moment, I could
not think.
He addressed me with what he probably intended for an ingratiating
smile, "This is Victoria." I told him I was aware of it. "All get out
here." I added that I was also aware of that.
His eyes, which had been travelling round and round the carriage in an
eager, searching fashion, which, for some reason, made me curiously
uneasy, finally rested on my face. He at once noticed the blood-stained
handkerchief which I still was holding to my cheek.
"Nose bleeding?"
"No; I've cut my cheek."
I don't know why I sat there speaking to the man as I did.
"Permit me to offer you my handkerchief; yours seems soaked with
blood."
Taking out a red silk handkerchief, the corner of which had been
protruding from the outside pocket of his overcoat, he held it out to
me. I was reluctant to take it. One is reluctant to accept the loan of
a silk handkerchief from a perfect stranger, more especially, perhaps,
from the sort of stranger he appeared to be. But what was I to do? I
was in want of a handkerchief. My own was worse than useless. It was
reeking wet. Great gouts of blood were commencing to drop from it. My
cheek was bleeding as profusely as ever. I was beginning to wonder if a
blood-vessel had been severed. One cannot buy handkerchiefs on a Sunday
night. I should have to borrow from some one. So I borrowed from him.
Unwillingly enough, I admit. As I applied his handkerchief to my cheek,
turning, I threw my own through the open window at my side.
He rushed forward, as if to stay my arm. He was too late. The
handkerchief had gone. "Good God!" he exclaimed, "what have you done?"
He seemed unnecessarily excited, considering that, in any case, the
handkerchief was mine.
"I've thrown it away. You don't suppose that, in that condition, I
could carry it home." He looked at me with his eager eyes.
"Was your name upon it?"
"I believe so; why?"
Leaning over, he laid his hand upon my shoulder. He spoke in a tone of
voice which, in spite of myself, sent a thrill all over me.
"Man, supposing they find it? It may be a question of life or death.
Let's get out of this--come!"
It was time that we left the carriage. I had noticed a porter staring
in, as if wondering why we remained its occupants. But that was no
reason why the stranger, thrusting his arm through mine, should have
almost dragged me out on to the platform. As he continued to cling to
me when we were on the platform, I remonstrated--"Be so good as to
release my arm."
Paying no attention to my request, he made as if to hurry me on.
"Come to a little place I know near here. I am a bit of a doctor. I'll
soon make that cut of yours all right."
I did not budge. I repeated my request--
"Be so good as to release my arm. I am obliged to you for your
suggestion. I, however, prefer to go straight home."
"Quite right; there is no place like home. Let's go and find a cab."
Not at all nonplussed, he again made as if to hasten on. I still
declined to budge.
"Thank you. I can perform that office for myself. If you will give me
your address, I will forward you your handkerchief. Or, if you prefer
it, I will deposit with you its value."
"Sir, I am a gentleman." He drew himself up with an assumption of
dignity which was so overdone as to be ludicrous. The two last words he
repeated--"A gentleman!"
"I do not doubt it. It is I who may not be a gentleman."
"I, sir, can tell a gentleman when I see one." He laid a stress upon
the personal pronoun, as if he wished me to infer that such clearness
of vision might be a personal peculiarity. "I will give you my address
in the cab."
Willing to humour him, I suffered him to stroll up the platform at my
side. I held out my hand to him when we reached a hansom.
"Your address?"
"I said I would give you my address in the cab." Leaning towards me, he
spoke in that curious tone which had impressed me so unpleasantly in
the railway carriage. "Get into the cab, man; I travelled from Brighton
in the next compartment to yours."
I was foolish. I ought, even at the eleventh hour, to have addressed
myself to an official, to have made a clean breast of it, to have told
him of the accident, the unavoidable accident, which had happened on
the line. I know that now too well. I knew it, dimly, then. But, at the
moment, I was weak. The fellow's manner increased my state of mental
confusion. In a sense, his words overwhelmed me. I yielded to him. I
got into the cab. He placed himself at my side.
"Where shall I tell the man to drive?" he asked.
"Anywhere."
"Piccadilly Circus!" he shouted. The cab was off.
We sat in silence, I in a state of mind which I should find some
difficulty in making plain. I will not attempt it. I will only say that
I should have dearly liked to have taken my friend, the stranger, by
the scuff of his neck and to have thrown him out into the street. I did
not dare.
When we were clear of the traffic I asked him, in a voice which I
scarcely knew to be my own, it was so husky and dry--
"What did you mean by saying that you travelled from Brighton in the
next compartment to mine?"
"Mean? My dear sir, I meant what I said. It was a coincidence--nothing
more." He spoke lightly; impudently even. I felt incapable of pressing
him for a more precise explanation. He added, as a sort of
afterthought, "I'm a detective."
I turned to him with a start. "A detective?"
He pretended to be surprised by my surprise.
"What's the matter, my dear sir?" He paused. Then, with a sneer, "I'm
not that sort. I'm the respectable sort. I'm a private detective, sir.
I make delicate inquiries for persons of position and of means." He
emphasised "means." "Have you a cigar?"
"I gave him one; he proceeded to light it. I was conscious that, since
I had admitted him to a share of the cab, a change had taken place in
his bearing. It was not only familiar, it was positively brutal. Yet,
strange though it may appear--and I would point out that nothing is so
common as that sort of wisdom which enables us to point out the folly
of each other's behaviour--I found myself unable to resent it.
"I've been down to Brighton on business; to make inquiries about a
woman."
"A woman?"
"A woman who is missing--women are missing now and then--Louise
O'Donnel. I suppose you never happen to have heard the name?"
"Louise O'Donnel?" I wondered what he meant; there was meaning in his
tone. Indeed, every word he uttered, every gesture he made, seemed
pregnant with meaning. The more I saw of him, the more uncomfortable I
became. "I do not remember to have heard the name Louise O'Donnel."
"Yes, Louise O'Donnel. You're quite sure you never heard it?"
"So far as I remember, never."
"Perhaps your memory is at fault; one never knows." He puffed at his
cigar--or, rather, he puffed at my cigar. "I don't think I'll give you
my address. I'll call for the handkerchief at yours. What is your
address?"
I hesitated. I was quite aware that to give him my address would be to
commit a further act of folly. But, at the same time, I did not see how
I could avoid giving it him without a row or worse.
"My office is in Austin Friars?"
"Austin Friars? You don't happen to have a card about you?"
I did happen to have one of my business cards in my letter-case. Taking
it out, I gave it to him. He looked at it askance, reading the name on
it out loud.
"Thomas Tennant. Rather an alliterative kind of name. Almost like a
pseudonym." I sat in silence. "However, there may be some one about
with such a name." He slipped the card into his waistcoat pocket. "I
shall have pleasure, Mr. Tennant, in calling on you, for my silk
handkerchief, in Austin Friars; possibly to-morrow, possibly next week,
or the week after--but that I shall call for it, sooner or later, you
may rest assured." He looked at me with a grin. "Now that we have
transacted that little piece of business, I don't think there is any
necessity for me to inflict my company upon you any longer. I may as
well get out."
I was thankful for the prospect of a prompt deliverance. But I was not
to be rid of him so easily, as his next words showed. He was drumming
with his finger-tips on the front of the cab.
"By the way, you were good enough to mention something about a deposit
for my handkerchief. I think that, after all, I will trouble you for
one."
I advanced my hand towards my pocket.
"With pleasure. If you have no objection, I will buy the handkerchief
right out at a liberal price?"
His reply was a sneer.
"Thank you; I am obliged; the handkerchief is not for sale. I prize it
too greatly--as a present from my late lamented greatgrandmother. But
something on deposit I don't mind."
"How much shall we say?"
"Say--we'll say ten pounds."
"Ten pounds!" I stared at him. The fellow's impudence was increasing.
"You are jesting."
He turned on me quite savagely--his black eyes glared.
"Jesting? What do you mean by saying I am jesting?"
"I shall certainly deposit with you no sum approaching ten pounds."
He continued to regard me as if he were taking my measure. I met his
glance unflinchingly. I wished him to understand that I was not quite
the simpleton he seemed to take me for. I think he grasped something of
my meaning. His tone became sullen.
"Make it five pounds, then."
"I am more likely to make it five shillings. However, under the
peculiar circumstances, as I don't know what I should have done without
your handkerchief, I don't mind going as far as half a sovereign, which
is about four times its value."
His reply, though scarcely a direct answer to my words, still was
sufficiently plain.
"You and I, Mr. Tennant, will spend the night together."
"Again, I ask you, what do you mean by that?"
The fellow smoothed his clean-shaven chin and grinned.
"I mean, Mr. Tennant, that I am beginning to suspect that it may be my
painful duty to thrust myself on your society until I have ascertained
what became of the woman who got into your compartment at Brighton, but
who was not in it when we reached Victoria."
A creepy, crawly feeling went all over me. This came of not having told
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, directly the
accident had happened. Already I was suspected of the worst. And by
such a fellow! Already, to a certain extent, I was in his power.
I did not give him the five pounds he asked. I did not make quite such
an idiot of myself as that. But I gave him much more than his ancient
rag was worth. He rattled the coins, gold coins, together in the palms
of his hands; he chuckled at the sound of them; he called out to the
cabman, "Stop!" Standing on the pavement, he took off his hat to me
with a sweeping flourish, saying, with a laugh--
"The handkerchief itself--that priceless relic of my late lamented
greatgrandmother!--I will call for at your office in Austin Friars."
CHAPTER III.
THE NAME ON THE SCRAP OF PAPER.
I was quite conscious, as I drove home the rest of the way alone, that
I had made of myself, doubly and trebly, a fool. But, if possible,
still worse remained behind.
How the African gentleman, of whom I read the other day, manages with
999 wives, I, for one, am at a loss to understand. When a man is on
good terms with one wife--and I had rather be on good terms with one
wife than on bad terms with 999--occasions do arise on which he
experiences little difficulties. For instance, I had been in the habit
of telling my wife everything--or, perhaps, it would be more correct to
write, practically everything. It would have been well for me if there
had been no reservations. As a matter of fact, I had said nothing about
two or three little incidents of my pre-nuptial existence. Notably, I
had said nothing about Ellen Howth--though that, perhaps, was rather
more than an incident.
The result was that when I reached home I was in something of a
quandary. The wife plied me with the usual questions, to which I was
unable to supply the accustomed copious and satisfactory answers. She
wished to know how my face came to be cut in that terrible fashion. I
rigged up some cock-and-bull story about a broken window--a window had
been broken, but not altogether in the manner I led her to infer. Then
she found that a button was missing from my overcoat. Another
cock-and-bull story had to be manufactured to account for that. It did
not require a woman's keen eyes to discover that there was something
amiss about my general demeanour--that I "wore a worried look." In
endeavouring to satisfactorily account for that I blundered fearfully.
We went to bed with a shade of coolness perceptible on either side. I
felt that I had been ill-used generally, and Lucy felt that I had
ill-used her.
The wife had bound up my face with a sticking-plaster. In the morning
the sticking-plaster was much in evidence. I had not had a good night's
rest. I should like to know who would have done, after my adventures of
the evening! I got up, not so much in a bad temper as oppressed with
gloom. Lucy, as a matter of course, plied me with her questions all
over again. We had a fencing match while dressing. The match was
continued at breakfast, till the buttons almost came off the foils. I
had resolved, in the small hours of the morning, to screw my courage to
the sticking point, and to make a clean breast of it to some one. I
told myself that the first plunge would be the worst, when I had taken
that all would be well. But, by the time I started for the City, I had
become so aggrieved with Lucy that my resolution, as it were, had
assumed a different hue. It was irresolution again.
I bought all the papers. I searched them to learn if anything or any
one had been found upon the Brighton line. I did not see very well how
there could have been, in time for the fact to have been printed in the
morning papers. But a morbid anxiety constrained me to the search.
Pilbeam, who always travels with me to town, displayed almost as much
interest in the papers as I did. He wanted to know why I had bought
them. He became facetious in his way--which is his way, and, thank
Providence, his way only. I listened to Pilbeam's facetiæ while I was
mentally asking myself if it would be better--for me--for her to be
found living or dead. In the one case I knew that she would denounce me
at once to the police, and I should sleep that night in gaol--and then,
what could I say or do? In the other, the odds might be slightly in my
favour. Under the circumstances, I naturally enjoyed Pilbeam's jokes.
They were so funny, and so suited to my mood.
That was a dreadful day. There was no business doing. Had there been I
might have been saved from thinking--and from drinking. As a rule, I
never drink anything in town. But that day I had to. I was too
invertebrate to keep going without it.
Soon after midday I was sitting in one of the City bars--one of those
in which men play chess and draughts and dominoes. I was leaning on one
of the little marble tables scribbling aimlessly upon a sheet of paper.
Some one, standing in front of me, addressed me by my name. I looked
up. It was a man with whom I had occasionally done business--a man
named Townsend, a tall, well-built fellow, with what one sometimes
hears called the "beauty of the devil." He had always been something of
a mystery to me. Although I had done a good deal for him at one time or
another, he had never given me an address at which, in case of
necessity, I could find him. His reference, which hitherto had been a
sufficient one, had been a City bank. He used to give me instructions,
and then would call at the office to see what I had made of them. He
certainly seemed to get hold of reliable information, principally about
mining securities; but that he was no City man I was persuaded. There
was about him an indefinable something which irresistibly suggested the
West End. He struck me as some butterfly of fashion with opportunities
and tastes for punting of various kinds. That he confined his
transactions to me I never for a moment believed, and in spite of his
being the best dressed and the handsomest man I ever saw, whenever he
gave me anything like a large line, before I operated I was always
careful to have an eye for cover.
"I've been looking for you," he said, as I glanced up at him. "They
told me at the office I should probably find you here. I want you to do
a little deal for me." He dropped into a chair on the other side of the
table. "What's this you've been scribbling here; anything private?"
He referred to the piece of paper on which I had been allowing my
pencil to scrawl, I knew not what. "It's nothing; only rubbish."
He picked the piece of paper up; I was watching him as he did so. As
his eyes fell on it, not a little to my surprise a most singular change
took place in his countenance. Although his face was clean shaven, and,
therefore, as one would have thought, likely to give visual evidence of
any passing shades of feeling, it had always seemed to me the most
inscrutable of masks. Neither success nor failure seemed to make the
slightest difference to him. His expression was ever the same. The
change which now took place in it therefore, was all the more
surprising. In an instant there came into his face a look of the most
unmistakable terror. His eyes dilated, his jaw dropped open. He sat
staring at the paper as if paralysed by horror.
"What the devil's this?" he gasped, when his attitude and his continued
silence were beginning to make me conscious of discomfort, and,
goodness knows, I had been, and was, uncomfortable enough without his
help!
I had not the faintest notion what it was which had had on him so
singular an effect. I took the paper out of his momentarily nerveless
hands. So soon as I saw what was on it, I too had something like a fit
of the horrors. "Goodness gracious!" I exclaimed.
It showed in what sort of groove my mind had been working.
Unconsciously I had been scribbling the name of the woman whom the
stranger, when we had been together in the cab the night before, had
told me he had been searching for in Brighton. There it was, "Louise
O'Donnel, Louise O'Donnel," scrawled all over the paper, perhaps fifty
times.
"What an extraordinary thing," I murmured.
And, indeed, it seemed to me to be a very extraordinary thing; and by
no means a pleasant thing either. Very much the other way. It showed
what I was capable of doing without being aware of it. I did not like
it at all.
By the time I had regained some of my composure Mr. Townsend appeared
to have regained some of his. He had called the waiter, from whom he
was ordering brandy. I ordered brandy too--a shillingsworth; what they
give you for sixpence would have had no effect upon me. We both drank
before anything was said. Then Mr. Townsend looked at me over the top
of his glass.
"May I ask, Mr. Tennant, what you know about Louise O'Donnel?"
The effect which the discovery of that name upon the sheet of paper--my
sheet of paper--had had upon me was sufficiently capable of
explanation. Only too capable. Why it should have affected Townsend
surpassed my comprehension. I hardly knew what to answer when he put
his question.
"Know! I know nothing."
"Is that so? Then how came you to write the name upon that scrap of
paper?"
"I know no more than the man in the moon."
"Indeed. Then are you suggesting that its presence there is an
illustration of the new kind of force which promises to be the
craze--telepathic writing, don't they call it?"
This was said with a sneer. Something about the tone, the manner in
which it was uttered, reminded me forcibly of some one I had heard
quite recently elsewhere. The resemblance was so strong that it came to
me with the force of a sudden shock. To whom could it be? It came to me
in a flash; the stranger of the night before. Directly he had appeared
at the carriage door he had reminded me of some one. Now I knew of
whom. He was sitting in front of me at that moment--Mr. Townsend. His
tone was the stranger's, his manner was the stranger's; even his face,
in some strange fashion, was the stranger's too. The stranger wore
side-whiskers and a moustache, he was older, he was not nearly so
good-looking, he lacked Mr. Townsend's peculiar air of polish, but in
spite of the differences which existed between them, there was the
resemblance too. The more I stared--and I did stare--the more the
resemblance grew. Mr. Townsend leaned towards me across the table. The
attitude was the stranger's.
"Are you trying to think of where you heard the name before? I see that
you have heard it."
"Yes; last night."
"Last night!"
He was holding the glass in which the waiter had brought his brandy
in his hand. As he echoed my words he brought it down upon the
marble-topped table with a crash. It was strange that it was not
splintered.
"Last night, as I came from Brighton."
Mr. Townsend must have been in an oddly clumsy mood. As I spoke it
seemed to me that he deliberately knocked his glass off the table on to
the floor. When he bent over it, it was to find it shivered into
fragments. From the waiter, who came to remove the broken remnants, he
ordered a fresh supply of brandy. I had my glass replenished too.
"Have you a double, Mr. Townsend, moving about the world?"
He was raising his glass to his lips when I put the question. He spoke
before he drank. "A double? What on earth do you mean?"
"Because it was from the lips of your double I heard the name of Louise
O'Donnel."
"My double?" He put down his glass, untasted.
"I came up with him in the same train last night from Brighton."
"You came up with him in the same train last night from Brighton? With
whom?"
"Your double."
His face was absolutely ghastly. He had gone white to the lips, and a
curiously unnatural, sickly white. I could not make him out at all. I
suspected that he could not make me out either. I know that something
about him had for me, just then, a dreadful sort of fascination.
"I do not know, Mr. Tennant, if you are enjoying a little jest at my
expense. I am not conscious of having a double, nor am I conscious of
having come up with you last night in the same train from Brighton. By
what train did you travel?"
"By the 8.40 express."
"By the train, that is, which leaves Brighton at 8.40?"
"Yes; and which arrives in town at ten."
Unless I was mistaken, a look of distinct relief passed over his face.
"Oh, then, you certainly never came from Brighton with me. It occurs to
me, Mr. Tennant, that you are not looking well. You almost look as if
you had had a recent serious shock. I trust that it is only my fancy."
He looked at me with eager, searching eyes, which reminded me very
acutely of the stranger's.
"I am not feeling very well to-day, and that's a fact."
"You don't look very well. By the by, how came this double of mine to
mention the name?"
Mr. Townsend nodded towards the sheet of paper, almost, as it seemed to
me, as if he were unwilling to pronounce the name which was upon it.
"He merely mentioned that he had been down to Brighton to look for a
woman named Louise O'Donnel."
Mr. Townsend's glass came down on to the table with the same startled
gesture as before. If he was not careful, he would break a second one.
And, since he glanced our way, so the waiter seemed to think.
"Been looking for her? What had he been doing that for?"
"That is more than I can tell you."
Mr. Townsend sat and stared at me as if doubting whether I spoke the
truth.
"May I ask you, in my turn, what you know about this mysterious Louise
O'Donnel?"
He looked down, and then up at me. He smiled, his smile striking me as
being more than a little forced.
"That is the funny part of it. I, too, know nothing of Louise
O'Donnel--no more than you do."
"It seems odd that you should take so great an interest in a person of
whom you know nothing."
"Does not the same remark apply to you?"
"Not at all. I heard the name mentioned last night, casually, for the
first time. It seems to have lingered in my memory, and I appear to
have scribbled it, in a fit of abstraction, and, certainly, quite
unconsciously."
Taking out a cigar, Mr. Townsend commenced to light it with an
appearance of indifference which was, perhaps, a trifle too pronounced.
"Very odd, very odd indeed, that both you and I should seem to evince
so much interest in a person whose name we have merely heard casually
mentioned. It occurred to me that, when you found the name confronting
you, you appeared--shall I say startled?--as if it or its owner was
connected in your mind with disagreeable associations. Perhaps,
however, that was simply a consequence of the general ill-health from
which you say you suffer. And, I must say myself, that you don't look
well. I hope that, next time I see you, you will be better."
He carried it off with an air. But I did not believe him. I felt
persuaded that he knew more of Louise O'Donnel than he chose to
confess. What he knew was more than I could say. But I felt equally
persuaded that he wished that he knew less. He went off without saying
anything further about the little deal which he had said that he wanted
me to do for him. It had, apparently, escaped his recollection. I, too,
had forgotten it till after he had gone. I had never felt less inclined
for business in my life.
Scarcely had I returned to the office than the door opened, and, wholly
unannounced, the stranger of the night before came in. He might,
almost, have been waiting and watching for my return.
CHAPTER IV.
BLACKMAIL.
Again I was struck by the man's resemblance to Mr. Townsend. It was
obvious even in the way in which he advanced towards me across the
room. It was almost as if Townsend had slipped on some costume of a
masquerade, and reappeared in it to play tricks with me. The fellow,
going to the centre of the room, crossed his arms, in theatrical
fashion, across his chest, and stood and stared at me--glared at me
would be the more correct expression. Not caring to meet his glances,
and to return him glare for glare, as if we were two madmen trying to
outstare each other, I fumbled with the papers on my table.
"You have called for that handkerchief of yours? I am obliged to you
for the loan of it; but I had to leave home for town so early this
morning that my wife was not able to get it ready in time for me to
bring it with me. If you will give me your address I will see that it
is sent to you through the post."
There was a considerable interval before he answered me--an interval
during which he continued to glare, and I to fumble with my papers.
When he did speak, it was in one of those portentous and assumed bass
voices, which one inevitably connects with the proverbial "Villain at
the Vic."
"I have not called for my handkerchief."
"Then, may I ask to what I am indebted for the pleasure of your
presence here. I have only just come in, and I have some rather
pressing business which I must do."
"Your business has nothing to do with me."
"Probably not; but it has with me."
He came a step nearer, still keeping his arms crossed upon his chest.
This time he spoke in a sort of a hiss. It seemed obvious that at some
period of his career he must have had something to do with the stage.
"Do you not know what has brought me here. Does your own conscience not
tell you, man?"
I began to suspect that he had been drinking. I looked up at him. He
was eyeing me with a scowl which, to say the least of it, was scarcely
civil.
"How should I know what has brought you here, if it is not a desire to
regain possession of your property? I take it that you hardly intend to
suggest a further deposit."
I do not think that he altogether relished the allusion. His scowl
became less theatrical, and a good deal more natural. He seemed, for a
moment, to be at a loss as to what to say. Then a word came from
between his lips which startled me.
"Murderer!"
That was rather more than I could stand. I sprang to my feet.
"What do you mean, sir, by addressing me like that? Are you mad?"
My assumption of indignation did not seem to impress him in the least.
He returned to the basso profundo.
"Have you seen the evening papers?"
At the question something began to swim before my eyes. I had to lean
against the edge of the table.
"No; what is there in the evening papers to interest me?"
"I will show you."
He began to unfold a paper which he took from his pocket. Laying the
open sheet before me on the table, he pointed to a column of leaded
type.
"Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest that, if you can."
The heading of the column was enough for me. It was headed, "Tragedy on
the Brighton Line." I could read no farther. I dropped down into my
chair again. The stranger continued to regard me with accusatory eyes.
"What's the matter with you? You don't seem well."
"I've not been feeling well all day."
"So I should imagine. Else you had been more or less than human. Since
you are not able to read the paper yourself, at which I am not
surprised, I will read it for you. The paper says that the body of a
woman has been found on the up side of the Brighton line, just before
Three Bridges Station."
"Dead?"
"Dead--murdered."
I was speechless, tongue-tied. The whole hideous folly of which I had
been guilty rose in front of me, and paralysed my brain. I saw, too
clearly, and too late, the dreadful nature of the error I had made. I
realised the awful something which, owing to my own cowardice, now
stared me in the face. It might have been bad enough if I had played
the man; but it would have been better than this.
The stranger kept his eyes fixed on my countenance. I have no doubt
that on it was seen some of the horror which racked me. His voice
sounded to me like an echo from far away.
"That explains how it was that I saw a woman get into your carriage at
Brighton, and that she was not there when we reached Victoria. You had
left her on the line."
I made an effort to shake off the stupor which oppressed me. It was out
of the question that I should continue to sit there passively, and
allow this fellow to jump, in his own fashion, at his own conclusions.
Better late than never! There might still be time for me to play the
man. I took out my handkerchief to wipe away the moisture from my brow.
I looked at the man in front of me.
"May I ask you for your name, sir?"
"My name is immaterial."
"Excuse me, but it is not immaterial. You thrust yourself upon me last
night, you thrust yourself upon me again to-day. If I am to have
anything to say to you, I must know with whom I am dealing."
"You are dealing with the witness of your crime."
"That is not the case. I have been guilty of no crime."
"Why do you lie to me? Don't you know that I could go straight from
this room and hang you?" He raised his voice in a manner which told
upon my nerves. I looked furtively about the room. I had to wipe the
moisture from my brow again.
"Is it necessary that you should speak so loudly, sir! Do you wish to
be overheard? There are clerks in the adjoining room."
"Then send them away; or don't try to hoodwink me--me!" He struck his
hand against his chest, accentuating the second "me," as if he were an
individual altogether separate and apart. "If I were to follow the
promptings of my bosom, I should go at once to the police, and leave
you to dangle on the gallows."
"You are under a misapprehension, sir. I give you my word of honour
that you are. I may have been guilty--I have been guilty--of an error
of judgment, but not of a crime."
"Do you call murder an error of judgment?"
"There has been no murder--I swear it!"
He held up his hand to check me. "Let me tell you how much I know about
the business before you go out of your way to lie to me." Seating
himself on the edge of my writing-table, he brought his right hand down
upon it now and then to emphasise his words. "Directly the train
started I heard two voices in the compartment next to mine--in your
compartment. The voices were raised in quarrelling. I had, by the
purest accident, seen a woman get into your compartment just as we were
leaving Brighton, and I knew that the voices were yours and hers. The
quarrelling got worse and worse. I feared every moment that something
dreadful would happen. I was just going to sound the alarm, when there
was silence. Immediately after a door banged--the door of your
carriage. I was afraid that something dreadful had happened. And yet, I
told myself, if nothing had happened I should look foolish if I stopped
the train. Unable to make up my mind what to do, I did nothing. When on
reaching Victoria I made a bolt for your carriage and found that the
woman was not there, I saw that my worst fears were realised. Then I
understood the sudden silence, and the banging of the door."
"She had fallen out."
"Fallen out?"
"Yes."
"Who opened the door for her to fall?"
"I did." Seeing the slip I had made I endeavoured to correct myself.
"That is, I opened the door with the intention of leaving the carriage,
in order to escape her violence. In trying to prevent my leaving she
herself fell out."
"If, as you say, the whole thing was an accident, why did you not sound
the alarm?"
"I ought to have done; I know I ought to have done. I can only say that
it was all so sudden and so unexpected that I lost my head."
"To whom have you mentioned a word about the--accident, until this
moment I have charged you with your crime?"
"To no one. My reticence, unfortunately, is the error of judgment to
which I referred."
"You call that an error of judgment! Then, let me tell you, it was an
error of judgment of a somewhat peculiar kind. A mere outsider would
say that reticence was the best course you could possibly pursue."
The fellow's way of looking at the matter made things look blacker and
blacker. The moisture accumulated upon my brow so fast that I could
scarcely keep it from trickling down my cheeks.
"It might have been the best course to pursue had I been guilty, but I
am not guilty; I swear it. I am as innocent as you are. It was my
misfortune that there were peculiar circumstances connected with the
matter which I wished to keep private. I feared to be misunderstood."
"You were not misunderstood by me, I do assure you. I understood, and
understand you only too well. The point is that you still seem unable
to understand me. You still appear to be unable to realise that I was
in the next compartment to yours, that the divisions between the
compartments are thin, and that you shouted at the top of your voice. I
distinctly heard you threaten to kill the woman--yes, and more than
once, and in a tone of voice which sounded very much as if you meant
it."
He was wrong, and he was right. That was the worst of it. Undoubtedly,
there had been strong language used on either side, uncommonly strong
language. A listener who was not acquainted with all the circumstances
might have supposed that some of it was meant. I can only protest that,
so far as I was concerned, I had never meant what I had said half so
much as she had meant what she said. No, nor a quarter as much. Nor,
for the matter of that, an eighth. She had aggravated me to such an
extent that I undoubtedly had said something--and perhaps in rather a
loud tone of voice--to the effect that I should like to kill her. But I
said it metaphorically. Every one who knows me knows that in practice I
am the least bloodthirsty man alive. I never could kill a cat. Even
when there are kittens to drown I have to leave them to my wife.
Instead of the woman having killed herself I would infinitely rather
she had killed me.
But it was no use trying to explain these things to the man in front of
me. I saw that plainly. So far as he was concerned, my guilt was as if
it were written in the skies. Taking up a position in front of the
fire, he assumed what he possibly intended to be a judicial air, but
which struck me as being a mixture of truculence with impudence.
"When a man threatens to kill a woman, and she is killed immediately
afterwards, one asks who killed her. I do not ask, simply because I
know. My impulse is to let the world know too. When I do get into the
witness-box my evidence will hang you."
I thought it possible, nay, I thought it probable. If I had only made a
clean breast of it when the scoundrel had first accosted me the night
before!
"The thing now is, what am I to do?"
"I should have thought," I gasped, "that the thing now is what am I to
do."
"Nothing of the sort. You have placed yourself outside the pale of
consideration. It is myself I must consider." He said this with a
lordly wave of the hand.
Crushed though I was, I found his manner a little trying.
"It is my misfortune that my ears are ever open to the promptings of
mercy."
"I had not previously supposed that a characteristic of that kind was a
misfortune."
"It is a misfortune, and one of the gravest kind. It is one, moreover,
against which I have had to battle my whole life long. The truly
fortunate man is he who can always mete out justice. But the still,
small voice of mercy I have ever heard. It is a weakness, but it is
mine own. My obvious duty to society would be to take prompt steps to
rid it of such a man as you."
That was a pleasant sort of observation to have addressed to one.
"It strikes me that you take rather a strained view of your duty, sir."
"That would strike you. It doesn't me. But I will be frank with you.
Why should I not be frank--although you are not frank with me. Though
perhaps I can afford to be frank better than you can."
He threw his ancient overcoat, faced with ancient mock astrachan, wide
open. He tilted his ancient silk hat on to the back of his head. He
thrust his hands into the pockets of his ancient trousers.
"The plain fact is, Mr. Tennant, that I am a victim of the present
commercial depression."
He looked it, every inch of him. Though, at the moment, I scarcely
cared to tell him so.
"The depreciation in landed property, and in various securities, has
hit me hard."
"To what securities do you allude?"
I fancy he made an effort at recollection, and that the effort failed.
"To South American securities, and others. But I need not
particularise." He repeated the former lordly gesture with his hand.
"The truth is that my income is not only seriously crippled, but that I
am, at this present moment, actually in want of ready cash." I believed
him, without his protestations. I judged from his looks. "Now, if I do
something for you, will you do something for me?"
"What will you do for me?"
"Keep silence. I am not compelled to blurt out all I know. If I show
mercy to you, what return will you make me for my kindness?"
I did not quite like his way of putting it. But that I had to stomach.
"What return will you require?"
He looked at me; then round the room; then back again to me. He was
evidently making up his mind as to what it would be advisable for him
to say.
"I should require you to make me an immediate, and, of course,
temporary advance of £100--in gold."
"A hundred pounds? I am not exactly a poor man; on the other hand, I am
emphatically not a rich one. To me a hundred pounds are a hundred
pounds. Say ten."
"Say ten! I'll be hanged if I say ten! And you'll be hanged if you try
to make me."
"Twenty."
"Nor twenty."
"I'm afraid I could not go beyond thirty."
"Then the discussion is at an end."
"Suppose--I only say suppose, mind--that I was able to find fifty."
"I won't take a penny less than a hundred pounds--not one centime."
"Would you undertake to go abroad?"
"Go abroad! I'll be shot if I would. You might go abroad. I have my
business to attend to. You forget that I am a private detective in a
very extensive way."
"For how long will you keep silence?"
"A month."
"Then, in that case, I must decline to advance you even so much as a
hundred pence."
"Two months."
"No--nor in that case either."
"Three months."
"If you will undertake to keep silence until you are compelled to
speak, I will give your suggestion my most careful consideration."
"Give it your most careful consideration! Oh, will you? It strikes me,
Mr. Tennant, that you are as far from understanding me as ever. If you
don't put the money down upon that table at once I go to the police."
He straightened his hat. He began to button up his overcoat. He looked,
and, it struck me, sounded as though he meant it. I hesitated. If the
woman who hesitates is lost, so also is the man. I was lost before; I
was lost again, because I hesitated. I was conscious that still the
bold part was the better part; that I should be wise to go to the
authorities and tell them the whole plain truth, although so tardily. I
knew that this man was a mean bloodsucker; that he would spend my
money, and then come to me for more and more, and, after all, would
hang me if he could. But I dared not face the prospect of being handed,
there and then, to the police; of being delivered by him into their
clutches, with his evidence to hang me. I wanted to see my wife, my
child, again. I wanted, if I could, to prepare them for the cloud which
was about to burst in storm upon their heads. I wanted breathing space;
time to look about me; to make ready. I wanted to postpone the falling
of the hammer. So I gave him the hundred pounds which he demanded,
bitterly conscious all the while of what a fool I was for giving it.
He would not take my cheque. Nothing would do for him but gold. I had
to send a clerk to the bank to get it. He thrust the washleather bag in
which it came, as it was, into his pocket. He was good enough to say
that he would not insult me by counting it; he would treat me as one
gentleman should always treat another. Then, with a triumphant grin,
and an airy raising of his hat, he left me to enjoy my reflections--if
I could.
CHAPTER V.
THE FACE IN THE DARKNESS.
I did not go home even when he had left me, though shortly afterwards I
started to. As I was going along Throgmorton Street I met MacCulloch.
He was jubilant. He had pulled off a big stake over some race or
other--upon my word, I forget what. It was one which had been run that
day. He asked me to have a small bottle with him. While we were having
it three other fellows joined us. Then MacCulloch asked the lot of us
to go and dine with him. I knew that I ought not to, but I didn't care.
I seemed to care for nothing. The moral side of me seemed dead, or
sleeping. I was aware that, instead of plunging into dissipation with
MacCulloch and his friends, duty, not to speak of common sense,
required that, without further loss of time, I should prepare Lucy for
the worst. Instead of following the path of duty, I went to dine, and
that without sending to Lucy a word of warning not to wait for me. When
the usually good husband does misbehave himself, it strikes me that he
is worse than the usually bad one. I speak from what seems to me to be
the teachings of my own experience.
We went down, all of us, in two hansoms to the West End. I rode upon
MacCulloch's knees. We began by playing billiards at some place in
Jermyn Street. I know that I lost three pounds at pool. Then we dined
in a private room at the Café Royal. I have not the faintest
recollection of what we had for dinner, but I am under a strong
impression that I ate and drank of whatever there was to eat and drink,
and that of both there was too much. My digestion is my weak point. The
plainest possible food is best for me, and only a little of that. I was
unwell before the dinner was half way through. Still I kept pegging
away. I never did know why. By the time it was over I was only fit for
bed. But when I suggested that the next item on the programme should be
a liver pill or a seidlitz-powder and then home, they wouldn't hear of
it. Their idea of what was the proper thing for men in our situation
was another couple of cabs and a music-hall.
I am not certain what music-hall it was. Something, I can scarcely say
what, leads me to believe that it was one at which there was a ballet.
So far as I was concerned, as soon as I was in my stall I fell asleep.
They wouldn't let me sleep it out. Some one, I don't know who, woke me,
as I understood the matter, because I snored. When sleeping my
breathing is a trifle stertorous perhaps; at least, so Lucy has
informed me more than once. Then we went for a turn in the promenade.
So far as I am able to recollect, MacCulloch who, I suspect, in common
with the other men, had been since dinner making further efforts to
quench his thirst, wanted to introduce me to some one whom he didn't
seem to know, and who certainly didn't seem to want to know me. I fancy
Kenyan, one of the fellows who was with us, trod upon somebody else's
toes, or somebody else trod upon his. At any rate there was an
argument, which in an extraordinarily short time began to be punctuated
by blows. Some one hit me, I don't know who, and I hit some one--I am
disposed to think MacCulloch, because his back was turned to me, and he
happened to be nearest. Then there was a row. The next thing I can
remember was finding myself on the pavement in the street--sitting down
on it, if I do not err. They did not lock us up; personally, I should
rather have preferred their doing so; it would have relieved me of a
feeling of responsibility. Having, I believe, helped me up, MacCulloch,
slipping his arm through mine, suggested that we should go upon the
spree. I did not, and do not, know what he meant, nor what he supposed
we had been doing up to then. Anyhow, I strenuously objected. I
insisted upon a cab and home. He, or some one else, put me into one,
and off I went.
The presumption is that directly the cabman started I fell asleep. When
I awoke I found him bending over me, pulling at the collar of my coat.
"Now then, sir, wake up; this is Hackney."
I stared at him. I did not understand. "Hackney! What do you mean?"
"The gentleman told me to drive you to Hackney, and this is Mare
Street. What part of Hackney do you want?"
I supposed the man was joking. I had never been to Hackney in my life.
I did not even know, exactly, in what part of town it was situated. My
house is in West Kensington. Why he imagined that I wished to pay a
first visit to Hackney at that hour of the night I was at a loss to
understand. I told him so. In return, his bearing approached to
insolence. He wanted to know if I was having a lark with him. I, on my
side, wanted to know if he was having a lark with me. He declared that
the gentleman who had put me into the cab had instructed him to drive
me to Hackney. Then it dawned on me that MacCulloch, or his friends,
might have been having a little joke at my expense, and not the cabman.
When I desired to be taken to West Kensington in the shortest possible
space of time, Jehu did not altogether appear to see it. He observed
that his horse was tired, that he ought to have been in the stable
before now, and that the stable was on the Surrey side of Waterloo
Bridge. We compromised. He was to drive me to the Strand. When there, I
was to find another cab to take me the remainder of the distance. When
we did reach the Strand the man demanded a most extortionate sum for
his fare. But, as I did not feel in a fit frame of mind to conduct
another heated argument, I gave him what he asked, none the less
conscious that I was enjoying myself in a most expensive kind of way,
as I was aware that Lucy, if she ever came to hear of it, would think.
I was wide awake during the remainder of my journey. Having found
another cab, I made a point of seeing that its driver did not go wrong.
I did not want this time to find myself, say, at New Cross or Hampstead
Heath. When he drew up in front of my house--at last!--I was looking
forward, with a morbid sense of expectation and a bad headache, to the
sort of greeting I might expect to receive inside. But--I repeat it--I
was wide awake.
Directly the cab stopped, I got out. As I stepped upon the pavement,
something came at me, through the darkness--a woman. It was a dark
night--it all happened very suddenly. The details of the figure and the
costume I could not, or at least I did not, make out. That I own. But
about the face I have not the slightest doubt. I saw it as plainly as
ever I saw a face in my life. It looked at me with wide, staring eyes.
There was a look in them which I had never seen before. The lips were
parted--I saw that the teeth were clenched. It was very white, and it
struck me, just in the moment during which I saw it, as looking
strangely white.
But it was none of these things which made my heart stand still, which
made me, with a gasp of horror, reel backwards against the cab. I cared
nothing for what the face looked like. What I did care for was that I
should have seen that face at all. That it should have come to me, like
an accusing spirit, all in an instant, out of the darkness of the
night. For it was the face of the woman whom, like a coward, I had left
lying dead on the Brighton line. It was the face of Ellen Howth.
CHAPTER VI.
A CONFESSION.
"He will be all right now."
The voice seemed to come to me out of the land of dreams. I seemed to
be in a dream myself. What I saw, I seemed to see in a dream. It was
some moments before I realised that the man bending over me was
Ferguson, our doctor; that I was lying undressed in bed; that my wife
was standing by the doctor's side. When I did realise it, I sat up with
a start.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "Have I been ill?"
It struck me that, as he replied to my question with another, the
doctor's eyes were twinkling behind his glasses.
"How are you feeling?"
I felt, now that I was once more conscious of any sort of feeling, very
far from well. My head was splitting. Everything was dancing before my
eyes. I sank back on my pillow with a groan. The doctor laid his hand
upon my brow. It felt beautifully soft and cool. He said something to
my wife; then he went. Lucy went with him, I presume, to see him out.
Presently my wife returned. She did not even glance at me as she
passed. Going straight to the other side of the room, she began busying
herself with something on the dressing-table. I might not have been
there for all the notice she took of me. I could not make her demeanour
out at all. Indeed, the whole proceedings were mysterious to me. She
was wont to be so solicitous when I was ill.
"What's the time?" I asked.
"Half-past four."
That was all she said. She never turned her head to say that. The
silence became oppressive. "How long have I been lying here?"
"It's an hour since the cabman rang the bell."
"The cabman?" It all came back to me with a rush. The appearance of the
apparition--the face I had seen gleaming at me through the darkness;
the sudden blank which followed. I half rose in bed. "Has she gone?" I
cried.
Then Lucy did turn round. Words came from between her lips as if they
were icicles.
"Mr. Tennant, to whom are you alluding as 'she'? Have you not yet
grasped the fact that you are in the presence of your wife?"
Then I perceived that I was misunderstood. I lay down again. Seldom had
I felt so ill. I closed my eyes; even then I saw things dancing about.
This unkindness of Lucy's was the final straw. I could have cried.
"My dear, why do you speak to me like that? What has happened?"
"I will tell you what has happened. I can quite understand how it is
you do not know. You came home, Mr. Tennant, in such a condition that
when you got out of the cab which brought you, you could not stand. Had
the cabman not been a good Samaritan you might have lain in the gutter
till the milkman came. If the milkman had found you it would, of
course, have been pleasant both for your wife and family. I thought you
were dead. I sent for Dr. Ferguson; but, when he came, he informed me
that you were only"--what a stress she laid upon the adverb!--"drunk."
I knew that she misjudged me--that she had not even an inkling of the
situation I was in. But at that moment I could not even hint at it. She
went on--
"I don't know, Mr. Tennant, how much money you went out with. You have
come back with 1s. 3d. in your pockets."
That "Good Samaritan" of a cabman must have robbed me. I felt sure that
I had more than 1s. 3d. when I got into his cab.
"You have broken your watch; you have spoiled your clothes, and you
appear to have either given away or lost your hat. The cabman said that
you were not wearing one when you engaged him."
That I could hardly believe. What could I have done with it? It seemed
incredible that I could have driven to Hackney and back without a hat.
"I may add that, if you take my advice, at the earliest possible moment
you will have a bath." She moved towards the door. "I am going to try
to get some sleep in the spare room."
I could not bear to think of her leaving me like that. I called to her,
"Lucy."
"Well?"
"You are hard on me. I have been dining with MacCulloch."
"I don't know who MacCulloch may be, but next time you dine with him if
you give me warning I will keep a doctor waiting on the premises ready
for your return."
"Lucy! You would not speak to me like that if you knew all. I am in
great trouble."
Her tone changed on the instant. She came towards the bed.
"Tom! What do you mean!"
"I know that I have been a fool, and worse. Even you don't know how
great a fool I have been. To-night I have been trying to drown
thought."
She knelt on the floor beside the bed, stretching out her hands to me
across the coverlet.
"Tom! You're not playing with me, as they say some husbands do play
with their wives? Tell me what you mean?"
I found this tone harder to bear than the other. A shudder went all
over me. I closed my eyes. What did I mean? How could I tell her? My
throat went dry and husky--a condition which was not owing to the
potations of the night.
"I've been a good husband to you, haven't I? I've tried to be."
"My darling, you've been the best husband in the world. That's what
makes this seem so strange." She alluded to the events of the night.
"Why have you been so silly?" Putting her arms about my neck, she drew
me towards her.
"You have no conception how silly I have been."
She laid her cool cheek against my fevered one. "Tell me all about it.
Is it money?"
"Money would be nothing."
Her voice sank. "What is it?"
"It is something which happened last night."
I felt her shiver. "I knew it. I felt there was something wrong when
you came in, although you would not own there was."
"I was afraid to tell you."
She drew closer to me. Again her voice dropped to a whisper. "What was
it, Tom?"
"It was something which happened in the train." I paused. My tongue
seemed to stick in my throat. "When we left Brighton a woman got into
my carriage."
"A woman?" She withdrew herself a little. Then I felt that I could not
tell her who the woman was; at least, not then.
"She had been drinking. At least, so I suppose. As soon as the train
started she began to quarrel."
"To quarrel?"
"Yes. I was afraid there would be a row. You know the express does not
stop between London and Brighton. I did not know whether to pull the
alarm-bell or not. I made up my mind to try to leave my carriage and
get into the next."
"Do you mean while the train was moving?"
"Yes. I thought it better to run the risk than to stop the train, and
have a scene, and, possibly, a scandal. One never knows what may come
of being mixed up in that sort of thing with a woman."
"Well?"
"She tried to stop me leaving the carriage, and in trying she fell
out."
"Tom!" Taking her cheek away from mine, Lucy looked me in the face.
"Fell out?"
"Yes."
"While the train was moving?"
I nodded.
"How awful! She might have been hurt! What did you do?"
"That's where my folly began. I did nothing."
She continued to stare at me, evidently not comprehending. My task was
getting more and more difficult. After all, I almost wished that I had
not begun it.
"It was all so sudden, and I was so bewildered that I lost my head."
"Then don't you know what became of her?"
"I did not know till the evening papers appeared. She was killed."
"Killed!" Lucy's arms were still about my neck. I felt them give a
convulsive twitch. "What did you do when you knew she was killed?"
"Went with MacCulloch to dine. You see, it seems that the body was
found on the line. They appear to have jumped to the conclusion that
there has been murder done. It struck me that if I went and told my
story the odds were that I should be arrested as her murderer. I had
not the courage to face the situation, and so by way of a compromise I
went with MacCulloch to dine."
Lucy removed her arms from about my neck. She put her hand to her
forehead as if perplexed.
"Tell me, plainly, just what happened. How did she fall out? Was there
a scuffle?"
"In a sense there was. To prevent my leaving the carriage she took me
by the shoulder. In trying to maintain her hold she got her back to the
open door. She must have stepped backwards before either of us realised
how near to the open door she really was, because, before I had the
faintest suspicion of what had happened or was about to happen, she had
disappeared."
There was silence. I did not feel equal to meeting Lucy's eyes, but I
felt they were on my face. At last she spoke.
"I see. No wonder I saw that something had happened. No wonder that you
found it difficult to tell me what it was." Rising to her feet, she
went to the fireplace. Leaning her elbow on the mantelshelf, she stood
in such a position that her face was turned away from me. "Is there any
probability of their being able to connect the affair with you?"
"Given certain conditions, there is an absolute certainty. To my shame
be it said, that is really the reason why I went with MacCulloch to
dine."
Then I told her about the fellow who had been in the adjoining
compartment. How he had forced himself upon me at Victoria; how he
claimed to have overheard all that had taken place; how he had arrived
at his own conclusions; how he had levied on me blackmail. Lucy
listened quietly, putting a question now and then, but never looking at
me all the time.
"And am I to understand that this person believes that you committed
murder, and is prepared to go into the witness-box and swear it?"
It was not only the question, it was, more than anything, the way in
which she asked it, which made me shiver.
"The fellow is a scoundrel."
"Is that why you gave him the hundred pounds? If he is such a scoundrel
as you say, why did you not show him the door, and defy him to do his
worst?"
The calmness with which she spoke made me writhe. My tone became
dogged.
"I have no excuse to offer. I was, and am, quite conscious of my
folly."
"I don't wish to say anything unkind to you; I quite realise how you
stand in need of all the kindness one can show you; but I don't at all
understand your story as you tell it. Why did you quarrel with this
woman?"
"I did not quarrel with her; she quarrelled with me."
"But it takes two to make a quarrel. Why did she quarrel with you?"
"I tell you, she had been drinking."
"But, even then, what did she say to you, or what did you say to her,
which could have caused such a disturbance? Because, I can see, from
your own statements, that both of you had lost your tempers."
I was silent. I knew not what to answer.
"I suppose that the woman was a stranger to you--that you had never
seen her before?"
What could I say? I felt that if I did not tell the truth then it would
come out afterwards. Better, while I was about it, make a clean breast
of everything.
And yet I found it hard. Lucy's ideas are narrow. She has her own views
of things, and strong views some of them are. She thinks, for instance,
that there ought to be the same standard for a man as for a woman: the
same moral standard--that a man ought to come to his wife with clean
hands, in the same sense in which a woman ought to come with clean
hands to her husband. I am afraid that I had been rather in the habit
of finding favour in her eyes by endorsing her opinions. It seemed hard
that the only real peccadillo of which I had been guilty should be
cropping up against me after all this lapse of time. I had repented of
it, and put it behind me, long ago; and yet here it was, as fresh and
vigorous as ever, rising to confront me from its tomb.
Lucy seemed struck by my continued silence. She repeated her question
in an altered form. "Had you seen her before?"
"Many years ago."
"Many years ago? You knew her, then?"
"I used to know her, to my sorrow, once upon a time, long before I knew
you, my dear."
The final words were intended as a sort of propitiation--I saw that she
was getting roused at last--but they failed in their effect. She stood
straight up, facing me, her fists clenched at her sides.
"Who was she? What was her name?"
"Her name was Ellen Howth. I assure you, my dear, that there is no
necessity for you to get warm. I have heard and seen nothing of her
since I married you. Indeed, these many years I have thought she was
dead."
"Why did you think she was dead? What did it matter to you if she was
dead or alive? What did you know of her?"
"Really nothing, I am afraid, to her advantage."
"What do you mean? Tell me the truth, Tom, if you have never told me it
before. What was she to you?"
"She was nothing to me. My dear, she was a person of indifferent
character."
"Do you mean----" She paused. She came close to the bed. She leant over
me. "Was she----"
I knew what she meant too well. My heart and my voice sank as I
replied. I did not know how she would take it.
"I'm afraid that she was."
She stood straight up. She drew a long breath. She looked down at me.
When she spoke her voice trembled--half with passion, half with scorn.
"I see! Now I understand your story very well, and just what happened
in the train. And you are the man who has always held himself up to me
as different to other men--as a model of what a man should be. And all
the time you have had this story in your life; and how many more
besides?"
"You are very hard on me, my dear. I assure you, this is the only one."
"So you tell me now. Not long ago you told me there was not one."
"I have always meant to tell you all about it."
"Indeed? Then how skilfully you have concealed your meaning! I suppose
that, like other men, when you wearied of your light-o'-love you cast
her from you. Years afterwards she meets you in the train. She takes
advantage of the opportunity--probably the first opportunity which has
offered--to tell you what she thinks of you. Your coward conscience
plays you such tricks that you try to flee from her, even at the peril
of your life. She will not let you off so easily, so you threw her from
the train."
"I did not. I never laid a hand on her. So far as I was concerned, it
was pure accident. I swear it."
"Whether that is true or not can only be known to your God, and you."
Lucy turned on her heels. Without another word she left the room.
CHAPTER VII.
A VISITOR.
These might be a silver lining to the cloud. If there was, I should
have liked to have had a peep at it. Just then it would have done me
good. I could not see much promise of happiness either in the near or
in the distant future. I had been reading a good deal lately about the
"ethics of suicide." If my wife believed me guilty, I should find it
difficult to convince a judge and jury of my innocence. I might as well
commit suicide as hang. I should be the victim of a judicial murder if
they did hang me; but I did not see how my situation would be
materially improved by that.
Such reflections did not tend to make me sleep. As a matter of fact, I
never closed my eyes. The consequence was that, when the time came for
me to rise and start for the City, I was ill--really ill. My head
burned. It felt every moment as if it would burst. I could not see out
of my eyes. The paroxysms of indigestion from which I suffered bent me
double. My wife came and found me in this condition.
"You are not looking well," she said.
I was aware of that without her telling me. I could not see how it
could be otherwise, suffering as I was suffering then. If ever there
was an object of pity, I felt that I was one. But there did not seem to
be much pity either in her voice, words, or manner. I said nothing in
reply to her remark. I only groaned.
"Will you have your breakfast in bed?"
"I don't want any breakfast, thank you."
"Shall I send for Dr. Ferguson? Though I don't know if he is an
authority on dipsomania."
"Lucy! don't talk to me like that!"
"Why not? I merely made a statement of fact. And, of course, you are
suffering from the after effects of overindulgence."
That was a charming fashion in which to endeavour to smooth the pillow
of an invalid. I changed the subject.
"How is Minna?"
Minna is my little girl--a little fair-haired darling she is. With all
her father's tender-heartedness; more--with, I hope, some of that
father's power of forgiving injuries.
"I am going to send her away to-day."
"Send her away?"
"Certainly. I have not yet made up my mind whether I shall go with her
myself or send nurse with her alone. Are you well enough to enter into
a discussion?"
"No," I said; "I'm not."
Nor was I. At that moment I was neither mentally nor physically her
equal. Since, at any time, Lucy has about nine-parts of speech to my
one, I had no intention of measuring myself against her,
conversationally and argumentatively, when I had none.
I was ill four days. So ill that I could not leave my bed. At least, I
was clear upon that point, if no one else was. I am almost inclined to
suspect that Lucy had her doubts; or she pretended to have them. I am
disposed to believe that she would not have allowed me to have stayed
in bed at all if she had had her way. She threw out hints about the
necessity of attending to matters in the City; though I explained to
her, as clearly as my illness would permit me, that in the City things
were absolutely stagnant. Then she dropped hints upon more delicate
subjects still; but to these I resolutely turned a deaf ear. I vowed
that I was too ill to listen.
However, on the afternoon of the fourth day things reached a climax.
Facts became too strong for me. I had to listen. Lucy came into the
room with an envelope in her hand.
"There is some one who wishes to see you."
I supposed it was Parker, my senior clerk. He had been backwards and
forwards bothering me two or three times a day.
"Is it Parker?"
"No. It is a stranger to me. I believe you will find his name in that
envelope. He would not give it me."
I opened the envelope which she handed to me. It contained half a sheet
of paper, on which was written, "The gentleman who travelled in the
next compartment to yours." At sight of those words I sat up in
bed--rather hurriedly, I fancy.
"Good gracious!" I exclaimed; "where is he? I hope you haven't let him
in."
"Jane let him in. At present he is in the drawing-room waiting to see
you."
"It's that blackmailing ruffian."
I gave her the sheet of paper.
"I guessed he was something of the kind. So this is the man who holds
you in the hollow of his hand? I see."
She might see, but I didn't. There was about her vision a clearness and
coolness which made me shudder. It was dreadful to hear her talk in
that cold-blooded way about anybody "holding me in the hollow of his
hand." She continued to regard me in a manner which I had noticed about
her once or twice of late, and which, although I said nothing about it,
I resented.
"Perhaps now I may be allowed to talk to you as if you were a
reasonable man. During the last few days I have hardly known whether
you wished me to regard you as a child."
"My dear!"
"You have been lying there, pretending to be ill, doing nothing, and
worse than nothing, while your fate and my fate has been hanging by a
hair. I had not thought that my husband could be so contemptible a
thing."
"Really, Lucy, I wish you wouldn't speak to me like that."
"Possibly. I have discovered, too late, how you dislike to hear
unpleasant things."
"I don't know that I am peculiar in that respect."
"I don't doubt that there are other backboneless creatures in existence
besides yourself--unfortunately for their children and their wives."
"Lucy, I won't have you talk to me like that--I won't."
"Then get up and play the man! Do you know that the hue and cry is out
all over England for you?"
"For me?"
"For the man who threw the woman from the train. 'The Three Bridges
Tragedy,' they've christened it. The papers are full of it; it is the
topic of the day. They have found the carriage from which she was
thrown. It seems that it was all in disorder and stained with blood,
and that the window was broken. You said nothing about that to me. They
have found the porter who saw her into your carriage. Who was it saw
you off from Brighton?"
"Jack and George. Why do you ask?"
"Because the porter who admitted her to your carriage declares that you
were talking to two gentleman. They are looking for them now."
"Surely they will never make Jack and George give evidence against me."
"You may be sure they will. A porter has come forward who says he saw
you in the carriage at Victoria. He has given a description of you,
which is sufficiently like you to show that he will probably recognise
you if he sees you again. It seems that the only thing they are in want
of is your name."
I sank back in bed, appalled. The prospect, in my weak state, was too
terrible for contemplation. It seemed incredible that a wholly innocent
man could, by any possibility, be placed in such a situation.
My wife went on, her voice seeming to ring in my ears almost as if it
had been a knell of doom--
"Play the man! I have been playing the part for you up to now. Now play
it yourself. I need not tell you what it has meant to me to learn that
my husband has been, as it were, a living lie. You know how I have
believed in you, and what you have been to me because I believed in
you. To have the object of one's faith collapse, like an air-pricked
bladder, into nothingness, and worse than nothingness, is calculated to
give one something of a shock. But I realise that this is not a moment
for reproaches--that it is a time for deeds, not words. I realise, too,
that I still owe my duty to you, as your wife, although, as my husband,
you have failed in that which you owe to me. If you will take my
advice, you will get up, and you will go at once to a first-rate
lawyer; you will tell him the truth--the whole truth, mind--and you
will place yourself entirely in his hands, even if he counsels you to
surrender yourself to the police. I should do so without a moment's
hesitation."
"It's all very well to talk about surrendering to the police. It's easy
enough in theory. It's I who shall hang, not you."
"Tom, don't deprive me of all my faith in you; leave me something
of my belief; try to be a little of a man. Don't add blunder to
blunder--blunders which are worse than crimes--simply because you have
not courage enough to be frank. As for the man who is waiting to see
you in the drawing-room downstairs----"
She was interrupted by a voice speaking from behind.
"As for that man, is it not Paul Pry who says in the play, 'I hope I
don't intrude?'"
The speaker was my friend, the blackmailer. He had forced himself into
my bedroom unannounced.
CHAPTER VIII.
MORE THAN HIS MATCH.
Yes, unannounced. I am sure that if I had had the least suspicion of
his approaching presence I should have kept him out by the simple
expedient of turning the key in the door. As it was, there he stood, as
bold as brass, holding in one hand the handle of the door which he had
closed behind him, and in the other his hat, the brim of which he was
pressing to his breast.
A striking change had been effected in his appearance since I had seen
him last. He had expended a portion of my hundred pounds to advantage
in a tailor's shop. He was newly clad from top to toe. The overcoat
which he had on was new, and so also was the astrachan which made it
glorious. Thrown wide open, it revealed the fact that the gloss of
newness was still upon the garments which it covered. A gold
watch-chain ran from pocket to pocket of his waistcoat. Beautiful kid
gloves encased his hands. Spats adorned his brand-new polished boots.
His silk hat shone like a mirror. Even the dye upon his hair and
whiskers had been renewed; it gleamed a beautiful blue-black. In his
new splendour his resemblance to Mr. Townsend was more pronounced than
ever. Even in the state of agitation which, ill as I was, his sudden
appearance caused me, I could not but be struck by that.
He showed not the slightest sign of discomposure at the manner in which
I greeted him. He stood grinning like a mountebank, not only as if he
was sure of a hearty welcome, but as if the whole house belonged to
him.
"Sorry, Mr. Tennant, to hear you are unwell--really grieved. I can only
hope that it is nothing serious."
His impudence was a little more than even I could stand. I let him see
it.
"What the dickens do you mean, sir, by entering my bedroom?"
In reply, he only smiled the more.
"My dear sir, I am here out of pure consideration for you. When I heard
of your ill-health, I could not bear the thought of subjecting you to
the inconvenience of coming down to me. So, instead, I came to you."
"Then, having come, perhaps you would be so good as, at once, to go
again."
He turned towards me with a movement of his eyebrows, as if to express
surprise.
"Gently, sir! Surely you presume upon the presence of a lady. Is that
the way in which you should speak to me? I have no desire to keep you.
My business with you ought not to detain me more than half a minute."
He seated himself on a chair, which he drew up towards the fire.
Placing his hat upon his knee, he began to smooth the nap with his
gloved hand. Unbearable though I felt his insolence to be, I saw that,
unless I employed actual violence, I should not be able to induce him
to budge. I looked at my wife. I should not have minded so much if she
had not been there. I had borne with the fellow's insolence before; I
might have borne with it again. But I was conscious that Lucy's eye was
upon me, and that, unreasonably enough, she was expecting me to show
the sort of stuff of which I was made. I say that this attitude of hers
was an unreasonable attitude, because, what could she expect of a man
who was recovering from a severe attack of illness, and whose nervous
system was a shattered wreck. I temporised.
"What do you want with me?"
I fixed my gaze upon him. Avoiding it, he flicked his gloved fingers in
the direction of my wife.
"At your service! Pray do not let me inconvenience the lady."
"You do inconvenience the lady greatly."
Both my tone and my manner were severe--as severe, that is, as they
could be--considering that I was in my night-shirt sitting up in bed.
"I trust not. I would not wish her to leave the room one moment sooner
on our account."
Then I saw what he was at. He wanted to get me alone and without the
aid of my wife's moral support to back me. I looked at Lucy. She was
standing very straight, looking alternately at both of us, as if she
were making up her mind which she ought to admire most--or least. I
caught a gleam from the corner of her eye. It was the one I sought.
"I have no secrets from my wife. What you wish to say to me you may say
in her presence, and be so good as to say it quickly, sir."
Leaning back in his chair, thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of
his waistcoat, the fellow looked at Lucy with a smile upon his impudent
face for which I could have struck him--and no doubt I should have
struck him, had my health permitted it.
"No secrets from your wife? What a model husband you must be! Permit
me, madam, to tender you my most sincere congratulations--you have
secured a prize."
My wife said nothing. But I saw her lips curl.
"Do not address yourself to my wife, sir; address yourself to me."
Still lolling back in the chair, the fellow turned, with the same
impudent smile, to me.
"To you? Certainly I will address myself to you. I am here to address
myself to you, though my address will not occupy more than half a dozen
words. I want from you a hundred pounds. That is the only remark which
I wish to address to you."
"What!"
I was reduced to gasping.
"Surely what I say is plain enough. And don't I say it plainly? I want
from you a hundred pounds."
"This is Friday, and you only had a hundred pounds from me on Monday."
"Yes, and this, as you say, is Friday. A hundred pounds are but a
hundred pounds. In the hands of a gentleman they fly. Especially when
he has to provide for what may be called preliminary expenses of a
certain kind, which, in themselves, make a hole in a century."
I knew to what he referred. He meant that he had replenished his
wardrobe. As though that had anything to do with me.
"Do you imagine that I am a bank at which you have a large current
account on which you can draw at sight."
He laughed--or pretended to.
"That is precisely what I not only imagine, but fervently believe."
"Then your belief is a very foolish one. I assure you that you were
never more in error in your life."
He glanced at a gold watch which he took out of his waistcoat pocket.
"Why should we waste time over these small quibbles? Are we children,
you and I? I have an engagement shortly. If you have not the sum in the
house in gold I will take what you have in cash, and the balance in an
open cheque to bearer."
"You will have neither cash nor cheque from me. I will not give you one
single penny."
"Do you mean it?"
He replaced his watch in his pocket. He rose from his chair. There was,
in his bearing a return to the manner of "the Villain at the Vic." The
fellow was theatrical all through. All his moods were equally unreal.
At the same time there was something about the change which I did not
altogether relish.
"Of course I mean it. You don't suppose that I am going to be robbed
and plundered with impunity by you."
"You prefer to hang?"
"You know that I am as innocent of crime as you are, and probably much
more so."
"Don't lie to me, you hound!" He turned with a sweeping gesture towards
my wife. "You must excuse me, madam, but you will do me the justice to
remember that I suggested your departure from the room. I cannot allow
your presence to debar me from plain speaking." Directing his attention
again towards me, he began to button up his brand-new overcoat, with a
deliberation which was, doubtless, intended to impress me. "As you have
been lying in your bed, like a cur hiding in its kennel--because pray
don't suppose that you can make me believe that you have been sick with
anything else but terror--I don't know, my man, if you are aware that
all England is on tiptoe, watching for your capture. If I were to point
you out, at this moment, in any street in England, the people would
tear you limb from limb. The whole country is thirsting, righteously
thirsting, for your blood."
"It is false!"
"Is it? Refuse to give me what I ask, and I will prove to you if it is
false."
"I won't be robbed by you."
"Then you'll be hung by me instead." He raised his hat, as if he was
about to put it on his head. "Once more, and for the last time, which
is it to be--the gallows or the hundred pounds?"
"You'll get no hundred pounds from me. I swear it."
"Then it will be the gallows. In ten minutes the news will be flashing
through the land that justice has its hands about the murderer's neck."
He clapped his hat upon his head. He moved towards the door. I went all
hot and cold--anybody would have gone all hot and cold with such a
prospect as the scoundrel pictured in front of him. Whether, with a
view of appealing to his better self--if he had one, which I doubt--I
should have prevented his leaving the room, is more than I can say. I
might have done. After all, self-preservation is nature's first and
greatest law. I had, and always should have, an incurable objection to
being hanged by such a rascal. As it was, it was my wife that
interposed.
"One moment, sir, before you go."
He removed his hat--with a flourish which, as usual, was reminiscent of
the transpontine drama.
"Madam, ten thousand, if you wish it."
"Are you the person who travelled in the next compartment to my
husband's from Brighton?"
"Madam, I am."
"You look it."
The fellow might be excused for looking a little startled--which he
certainly did do. I have found that particular tone of Lucy's, now and
then, a little startling myself. The man did not seem as if he quite
knew what to make of it.
"I look it, madam--how do you mean?"
"You look the sort of character."
"To what sort of character, madam, do you refer?"
"You look like the sort of person who would wear another man's
clothes."
He drew himself bolt upright, as if his backbone had suddenly been
straightened by a spring.
"Madam! I would have you to know that I wear no one's clothes but my
own."
"You are wearing my husband's clothes at this present moment."
"Your husband's clothes?"
"Were they not purchased with his money?"
"Madam! you have a very extraordinary way of putting things. Is it
possible that you intend to be offensive?"
"Is it possible to be offensive to such as you?"
"I, madam, am a gentleman, born and bred."
"That you are a gentleman of a certain kind I have no doubt whatever."
The man began to look badgered, as if he were growing conscious of a
feeling of tightness about the region of the chest. He commenced to
smooth the nap of his hat, violently, with his gloved hand.
"I take it, Mrs. Tennant, that you don't quite realise the position in
which your husband stands."
"And I take it that you don't at all realise the position in which you
stand."
The fellow ceased brushing his hat, the better to enable him to stare.
"I stand?"
"Yes, you."
"And pray, madam, how do I stand?"
"Have you ever heard of such a thing as an accessory after the fact?"
"An accessory after the fact?"
"Because that is the position in which you stand--in the position of an
accessory after the fact."
The man looked unmistakably uneasy. He continued to suspend the
operation of smoothing his hat.
"You are pleased to be facetious."
"You will find that that view will not be taken by a judge and jury."
It was with a distinct effort that the fellow returned to an attitude
of defiance--squaring his shoulders and tugging at his moustache.
"I have no wish, and no intention, to chop phrases with a lady. I
imagined, madam, that you desired to say something pertinent to your
husband's terrible position--with the gallows already shadowing him.
Since it appears to be otherwise I can but proceed to do my duty."
"By all means do your duty. But you understand that when my husband is
arrested you will be arrested too."
"Pooh, madam--you cannot frighten me!"
"But I can, and will, get you penal servitude for life."
"Can you, indeed, madam? May I ask how you propose to do it?"
"By telling the plain and simple story of your connection with my
husband. That will be sufficient, as you know."
"I know nothing of the sort; tell your story, and be hanged!"
Thrusting his hat upon his head, the fellow marched out of the room in
a couple of strides. His exit, whether consciously to himself or not,
was marked rather by haste than by dignity. When he had gone I looked
at my wife. Lucy, on her part, looked at the door through which he had
vanished.
"Now you've done it," I observed.
Lucy turned to me with a smile hovering about her lips, which, under
the circumstances, I thought was a little out of place.
"I have done it, as you say."
"You don't seem to be aware of what you've done. What's the good of
talking to him like that? Do you suppose that you can frighten
him--that you can take him in? He knows very well that whatever happens
to me he'll go scatheless. He's the one witness whom the prosecution
will not be able to do without."
"I think you are mistaken. With a man of that type the high horse is
the only horse you ought to ride. He desires nothing less than to get
into the witness-box, or I misjudge the man. I suspect that his own
record is not of a kind which he would care to have exposed to the
cross-examining light of day."
Hardly were the words out of her mouth than there came a tap at the
panel of the door. Lucy shot a glance towards me.
"Who's there?" she asked.
Whom should it be but our friend the scoundrel. He came in with quite a
dove-like air of mildness, mincing, like a dancing-master, on his toes.
"Excuse me, but even on the front door steps my heart got the upper
hand of me. I could not do what seemed even to approximate to cruelty.
I could not hang anybody--I judge not, so that I may not be judged. My
one aspiration is, and always has been, to be a friend in need. I
cannot help it, but so I am."
Producing a parti-coloured silk handkerchief--brand new--he manipulated
it in such a manner as to diffuse an odour of perfume through the room.
My wife looked him up and down. Her tone was dry.
"Your sentiments do you credit."
"They do, I know it; but, such as they are, they are mine own." He
coughed. "So far as I am personally concerned, financial considerations
are as nothing. It is circumstances which weigh me down. Instead of one
hundred pounds, suppose we say seventy-five--in a cheque and cash."
Lucy took upon herself to answer him--
"I am afraid we cannot say seventy-five."
"Merely as a temporary advance, till Monday. I expect remittances on
Monday, very large remittances, from my agents."
Lucy's tone was even drier than before. "I am glad to hear it."
"Yes, quite so." The fellow glanced towards me. He came sneaking
towards my bed. He spoke to me under cover of his hat. "I think, Mr.
Tennant, if you were to ask your good lady to withdraw, and were to
allow me to have one word with you, between ourselves, in private--just
one--I know we should understand each other; I am sure we should."
I looked at Lucy. She also looked at me. I am bound to admit that what
I saw in her eyes supplied me, to a certain extent, with the moral
stamina in which, owing to the severe illness from which I had recently
been suffering, I was temporarily deficient. I spoke to the fellow
plainly--
"No, sir. As I have already told you, I have no secrets from my wife,
and whatever you wish to say to me must be said while she is present."
"You are--you are"--I suspect that he was going to say something the
reverse of complimentary, only Lucy's presence and attitude induced him
to change his mind--"a husband in a million. Now, Mr. Tennant, allow
me, as one gentleman speaking to another, to ask you if, considering
all things, you are not disposed to advance me, on unimpeachable
surety--that of my word--the sum of seventy-five pounds."
"I am not, sir."
"You are not? Strange! I confess I had not thought it possible.
However, I will not utter what may seem a word of reproach. We will
make it fifty pounds, then."
"We will not. At least, I won't."
"Then, since fifty pounds is insufficient to supply even my most
pressing needs, it is useless for me to attempt to carry the discussion
further. You are compelling me, Mr. Tennant, to take a step which, when
it is taken, we shall both of us regret. But, remember, whatever comes
of it--and ill will come--the act is yours, not mine. I wish you
good-day, sir; a last good-day! Also, madam, I wish good-day to you."
He marched to the door in a fashion which, this time, made up in
dignity what it lost in haste. With the handle of the open door in his
hand, he turned to me again, "I will concede still one more point. We
will make it forty-five."
"We won't."
"Then nothing remains." He vanished, to immediately reappear; his head
and shoulders were inserted through the partly open door. "Shall we
make it forty?"
"Nor forty."
Instead of taking the rebuff as final, he brought his legs and body
into the room after his head and shoulders. He addressed himself to
Lucy.
"I am conscious, madam, that in this matter yours is the controlling
voice. May I ask if you quite realise the responsibilities of your
position? Your husband's life hangs in the balance. My necessities urge
me on. Were it otherwise, I shall be only too happy to give that
assistance of which, at present, I stand in need. Even as it is, you
shall find in me no huckster. In proof of it, I need only state that I
am willing to accept the loan of a paltry five-and-twenty pounds."
"You won't get it."
"Then what shall I get? I find it hard to believe that a man can be
reduced to the position of a mendicant! I ask again--what shall I get?"
"Nothing."
"That is not only foolish, madam, it is cruel. Shall we speak of such a
bagatelle as fifteen pounds?"
"No."
The fellow made a grimace as if he ground his teeth.
"Ten?"
"No."
He threw out his arms as if appealing to the gods of the gallery.
"Confound it; is a gentleman to be reduced to ask for the loan of a
trumpery five-pound note!"
"Though he asks, he will not get it."
He looked at Lucy, as if he could not believe she was in earnest. Then
he sighed, or groaned. His hat, which he had been holding in his hand,
he replaced upon his head. Throwing his overcoat wide open, he began to
examine his pockets, methodically, one by one, as if he searched for
something. He did not find it, whatever it was.
"Bare, absolutely bare! This is awful. 'To err is human, to forgive
divine!'" He raised his hat about an inch from his head, possibly under
the impression that it was a text which he was quoting. "I came into
this house with my heart beating high with hope, filled with the milk
of human kindness, and it ends in this. It seems absurd to pawn a watch
within four-and-twenty hours of buying it, though I certainly never
should have bought it had I foreseen that I should receive such
treatment. Might I ask you to oblige me with the loan of a sovereign to
keep me going till I receive my remittances on Monday?"
"Better not. Your request would only meet with a refusal."
"Would it? That does finish it, that does. I'm off." I thought that
this time he was off finally, but scarcely was he off than he was back
again. He came hurrying towards me across the room. "I say, Tennant,
I'm actually without a cab fare. Lend me five shillings, there's a
trump."
"I will not lend you fivepence."
"You won't, won't you? Now we do know where we are." He glared about in
his best tragedy style. "Perhaps you will give me back that
handkerchief you borrowed."
Lucy interposed. "I shall not."
"You won't? Do you mean to steal it? Is it your intention to add theft
to the rest of the family crimes?"
"I mean to keep it as evidence."
"As evidence? What do you mean?"
"As evidence of your being an accessory after the fact. If you take my
advice, with the proceeds of the pawning of the watch which you
purchased with my husband's money, you will remove yourself as far from
the reach of the police as you conveniently can."
He put his hand up to his chin, as if pondering her words.
"If you will lend me----"
Lucy cut him short. She threw the door wide open.
"I will lend you nothing. Now go--unless you wish me to send for the
police."
He looked at her, not seeming to like what he saw. He scowled his
finest scowl.
"Go? Oh yes, I'll go." He cast his eyes up towards the ceiling.
"Ingratitude, thy name is woman!" Then down to me--"Not to mention
man." He began to button up his overcoat as if in a hurry. "I'll be
even with some one over this, you see if I don't."
Then he went finally. We heard him stamping down the stairs; then we
heard him shut the hall door behind him with a clatter and a bang as he
went out into the street.
CHAPTER IX.
FOR THE SECOND TIME.
Lucy turned to me as soon as it was quite clear that the fellow had
gone.
"Now get up and dress, and go at once to some great lawyer and tell him
everything. To whom shall you go?"
"My dear! At this time of day? By the time that I reach town they'll
have all gone home."
Lucy looked at me in that freezing fashion which has always struck me
as being so singularly unsympathetic.
"What do you propose to do?"
"Well, my dear, I think I'll get up and dress, if you don't mind, and
have a little dinner."
"Dinner?"
"Yes, dinner. It's easy enough for you to sneer, but if you'd been
living on toast and water, which, to some extent, during the last four
days, I practically have been doing, the prospect of a little decent
food would even appeal to you."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"And you're a man? As, I suppose, is the individual who has just taken
himself out of the house."
"I should be obliged, Lucy, if you would not institute comparison
between that vagabond and me. I don't like it. In the morning I will
follow your advice. I will go to a lawyer, and I will place myself
unreservedly in his hands. Just now the thing is out of the question; I
shouldn't find one, to begin with; and, in the second place, I'm
hungry."
We had dinner. Or at least I had dinner, and she looked on at me while
I was eating it. Her companionship did not tend to increase one's
appetite. She sat in front of me, bolt upright on her chair, her hands
clasped in her lap, eating nothing, and saying nothing either. She
seemed to be counting every mouthful which I took, as though I was
doing something of which I ought to be ashamed. I don't know what there
was to be ashamed of. I don't see why a man shouldn't eat, even if he
is going to be hanged, especially if he is innocent as a babe unborn,
and is about to be made the victim of a judicial murder, as I bade fair
to be.
A knock which came at the front door just as I was finishing came as a
positive relief. I should have had words with Lucy if she had continued
to sit, like an unblinking statue, in front of me much longer. The
servant announced that the knocker was Mr. Keeley. Adolphus Keeley and
I on Fridays play chess together, all through the winter--one week at
his house, the next at mine. Owing to my illness, and the preoccupation
of my mind and body, I had forgotten that this was Friday, and that it
was his turn to come to me.
When Keeley was announced Lucy looked inquiringly at me.
"Shall I tell Jane to ask Mr. Keeley to excuse you?"
"Certainly not." I had not been by any means looking forward to the
pleasurable prospects of a _tête-à-tête_. Keeley came as a relief.
"Tell Mr. Keeley I will be with him in a minute."
Adolphus Keeley, to be frank, and to use an idiom, is not so wise as
they make them. He is well intentioned, but dull. I have known him
pretty well my whole life long, and I can stand as much of him as any
one. But that night I found him particularly trying. He persisted in
keeping the conversation in a groove for which I had a strong distaste.
One of his weak points is an inability to see a hint in time to take
it. I not only dropped hints, I threw them at him as hard as I could;
but I threw them all away. I had a dreadful time. In preferring his
society to Lucy's I had stepped from the frying-pan into the fire.
He began as soon as I was in the room.
"Well, Tennant, what do you think about the murder?"
"Murder? What murder?
"The Three Bridges tragedy; isn't it a dreadful thing?"
At the mere mention of the subject a shiver went all over me. I tried
to make him see that it was a topic for which I had no relish. I might
as well have tried to put two heads upon his shoulders.
"I have heard scarcely anything about it. I've been ill--very ill."
"I heard that you'd been seedy. Got a bit fluffy on Monday, eh?"
It is true that Mrs. Tennant was not in the room at the moment, but she
might have been just outside the door; and, in any case, the
insinuation was of an unwarrantable kind.
"Got chucked from the Empire, eh? Went home Hackney way, without a hat.
I know. Shouldn't be surprised if you have been a little queerish; you
look puffy even now. I tell you what, Tennant, you ought to go in for
training. I could get a couple of stone off you, and you'd be all the
better for it. But about this murder. I'm not a bloodthirsty creature,
as a rule, but I should like to have the fellow who did it all alone to
myself for about five-and-twenty minutes."
Keeley is one of the large army of muscular maniacs. He stands six feet
three in his socks. He spends most of his spare time in a gymnasium,
and the rest in what he calls "keeping himself fit." He could kill me
with a single blow of his fist. Just then Lucy came in.
"Sorry to hear that Tom's been seedy, Mrs. Tennant."
"He's been in bed."
"So I hear. And what do you think of the murder?"
Lucy had brought some work in with her. Seating herself by the fire,
she began busying herself with it.
"Do you think it was a murder?"
"I should think it was a murder. What else could it have been?"
"The woman might have fallen out of the train by accident."
"Accident? A lot of that!" I have told Lucy over and over again that,
in the presence of ladies, Adolphus Keeley is sometimes brusque to the
verge of rudeness. "Do you think that if there had been any accident
about it, the fellow who was with her wouldn't have given the alarm? He
knew better."
I had been setting out the chessmen on the board, and turned to Keeley
with a pawn in either hand.
"Which hand will you have?"
"Left."
The white pawn was in the left hand. We sat down to play. Still he
continued to prose. "Fred Courtney wanted to bet that they wouldn't
have the fellow in a month. I should be almost inclined to take short
odds that they'll have him within four-and-twenty hours."
He had moved to king's pawn. I was about to give the usual reply, but
when he said that my hand faltered on the piece.
"Within four-and-twenty hours? What makes you think that?"
Keeley winked.
"I've heard something, that's all. It's your move."
I moved.
He brought his knight out. I fancy that I brought mine. But I am not
sure. I found that, after all, I was not sufficiently recovered to do
myself justice over a chessboard. I am more than his match as a rule. I
have played him three weeks in succession--one night a week--without
his ever winning a game. But on that occasion I was not a foeman worthy
of his steel. He beat me with even ridiculous ease. And directly he had
won he began again.
"You're fond of murders, aren't you?"
"Fond of murders, Keeley! What do you mean?"
"I've heard you say more than once that you like a first-class murder."
"I don't remember ever having said anything of the sort. It seems
incredible that I could have done. It would have been in direct
opposition to all my principles."
"Come!--I say!" He looked at me as if to see if I was joking. I
emphatically was not. "I've heard you say that you'd like to be in the
position of a murderer yourself, just for the sake of a new sensation."
"Keeley!"
"I have! And when the Putney mystery was on you took as much interest
in it as if it had been a personal matter. Why, you have even talked
about starting as an amateur detective to see if you couldn't ferret
out the business yourself. You used to declare that the fellow who did
it deserved flaying alive; and, when I suggested that there might be
extenuating circumstances, you used to get quite mad with me."
"My dear Keeley, the Putney mystery belongs to ancient history. Won't
you have another game?"
"But it seems to me that this Three Bridges business is quite as pretty
a puzzle. What did he kill her for? They talk about getting up a
sweepstake in the office. The possible reasons to be put down on pieces
of paper, and whoever draws what proves to be the right one when the
fellow comes to be tried and hung, to take the sweep. Now, what should
you say he killed her for?"
"Would you mind changing the subject, Keeley. You forget that I have
been ill, and still am very far from well, and that the topic is hardly
one which is likely to appeal to an invalid's brain. I think I'll have
a little whisky, Lucy."
I had a little whisky. In fact I had a fairish quantity; I had to,
since I had to bear the burden of Keeley's conversation. That
particular topic seemed to be the only one he had inside his head. He
harked back to it nearly every time he opened his mouth. Had I not
known the man I should have concluded that he was doing it out of sheer
malignancy. But I did know him. I knew he was thick-headed. Lucy was
not of the slightest use. She went on sewing in silence, as if all
subjects were indifferent to her.
I was glad when Keeley rose to go. I went with him to the front door to
see him off the premises. After he had gone I remained standing on the
steps to get a mouthful of fresh air. It was a dark night; there was no
wind, and there was a suspicion of fog in the air. I was standing on
the bottom step but one. The nearest lamp-post was some distance down
the road. What with the darkness and the mist I could not see any of
the lamps on the hall doors on the other side of the street. It was
very quiet. There was not a sound of footsteps nor of any sort of
traffic.
Suddenly, while I was thinking of nothing in particular, except that
Keeley had been making rather a greater ass of himself than he
generally did, I saw something begin to shape itself in the air in
front of me. It did not come all at once, but by degrees. First a dim
outline, then feature after feature, until the whole was there. It
began to take the shape of a face. It was a face--a woman's face--her
face--Ellen Howth's. For the second time it had come to me, unwatched
for, undreamed of, unawares, a visitant from the dead--come to me with
its awful, staring eyes. There could be no question this time about my
having drunk too much. I was as sober as I ever was in my life. I can
give no adequate conception of the havoc with which I realised that
this was so, and that the face was there. It came slowly towards me.
The idea of a closer contact was more than I could endure. As it
advanced, I retreated, backwards, up the steps. Still the face came on.
I got into the house, and banged the door, as it seemed to me, just in
time to shut it out. I staggered against the wall. Lucy came to me, as
I stood there trembling.
"I was coming to tell you to come in. You will catch a cold." Then,
perceiving my state of agitation, "Tom! What is the matter?"
"Lucy, I have seen a ghost."
"A ghost?"
"As I live and breathe, I have seen a ghost. Oh, my God!"
"Tom!"
"This is the second time I have seen it. I have a premonition that the
third time will mean death."
There came a knocking at the door. Lucy looked at me.
"It is Mr. Keeley back again. The servants have gone to bed. I will
open and see."
It was not Keeley. It was a short, broadly-built man, with a bushy
beard. Other men were with him, though I could only just see them
standing in the shadow at the foot of the steps. The bearded man
addressed himself to me--
"Are you Thomas Tennant?"
"That is my name."
"I am a detective. You are my prisoner. I arrest you for wilful
murder."
Then I saw that the men who had been standing at the foot of the steps,
and who now, uninvited, were entering the house, were constables.
BOOK II.--THE CLUB.
(_The Tale is told by Reginald Townsend, Esq_.)
CHAPTER X.
THE HONOUR OF THE CLUB.
I had not a notion that it would be Louise, that evening at the
club--not the very faintest! How could I have? I did not know that the
lot would fall to me. I was the first to draw. When I saw that the card
which I had drawn was black, and that on it were inscribed, in gleaming
crimson letters, the words, "The Honour of the Club," it gave me quite
a start. Of course I knew that the odds were equal. But, somehow or
other, I had never expected to draw the thing. I held it up in front of
me.
"Gentlemen, the Honour of the Club is mine."
Pendarvon, in the chair, stood up. The others all rose with him.
"Gentlemen of the Murder Club, charge your glasses to the brim." They
filled them with neat brandy. Pendarvon turned to me, holding his
tumbler above his head.
"Mr. Townsend, we offer you our most sincere congratulations."
The others all chimed in--
"We do!"
They emptied their glasses, with inclinations of their heads towards
me. I don't fancy that, ordinarily, they would all of them have been
quite equal to drinking half a pint of brandy at one swallow, neat.
Some of them did not like it even then. As young Rasper-Stenning, who
was in front of me, put down his glass, he pulled a face, and caught at
the table. I thought he was going to be ill.
Pendarvon went on--
"The Honour of the Club, Mr. Townsend, rests with you. We do not doubt
that, this day month, you will return it to us, as untarnished as when
it came into your keeping." They sat down. I rose.
"Gentlemen, I thank you. I give you my word that, with me, the Honour
of the Club is safe. I will wear it next my heart. At our next meeting
I will return it to you with its crimson of a still more vivid hue. I
will show you that it is possible to paint even scarlet red."
I put the Honour of the Club into my pocket-book. I went away with
Archie Beaupré. He wanted to know if I had any one in my mind's eye.
"Not any one--unless it's you."
He was lighting a cigarette. He laughed.
"It's against the rules to kill each other. Have a light?"
I had one.
"I'll kill some one, never you fear. What is likely to afflict me is
not a poverty of choice, but an embarrassment of riches. The difficulty
will be to know, not whom to kill, but whom to leave alive. Think of
one's creditors. How they cry out for slaughter."
But Louise O'Donnel never occurred to me. I was too fond of her. The
little witch had twined herself about my heart. When I thought of her,
I thought of nothing else but kisses. I don't know how many women I
have loved in my time--I hope that, as becomes a gentleman, I have
loved them all! I never loved one better than, at that period of my
career, I loved Louise.
True enough, later on my love grew fainter. The fault was hers. My
experience, a tolerably wide one, teaches me that, when a man's love
does grow less, almost invariably the woman is at fault. The days went
by. The Honour of the Club remained in my pocket. I could not make up
my mind whom to choose. When it came to the scratch, I found the task
harder than I supposed. I thought of my scamp of a brother. Goodness
knows he would be all the better for killing. I might have pitched upon
him had not another choice been positively thrust upon me. None of
one's other relatives seemed worthy serious attention. The Depehurst
people are a nuisance. But one scarcely felt justified in killing one
of them, just by way of a joke, except it was Harold, who, what with
his temperance fad, and his anti-gambling fad, and his social purity
fad, and all the rest of his fads, is one of the most obnoxious prigs I
know. On the other hand, if one commenced killing men simply because
they were prigs, slaughter would know no ending.
Then Louise began to worry me. The usual story--her character at stake.
As though it mattered! But, try as I would, I could not induce her to
take my point of view. Never was a girl more unreasonable. I had always
foreseen that she was the sort with whom one might have trouble. But
then I had always supposed that she loved me. I made at least a dozen
suggestions--delicately, and almost inferentially, as it were, because
she was in a state of mind in which a slip on my part might have made
her dangerous. Nothing would do for her except that I should marry her,
which, of course, was absurd.
Then it happened. Up to the very last moment I was undecided. The fault
was hers all through.
She was staying in lodgings at Brighton--really at my expense. I had
enough expenses of that kind upon my hands just then! Her tenancy was
up on the Monday. I told her to leave instead on the Sunday. She was to
meet me at East Grinstead. She might have been under the impression
that, having met me, she was to stay with me--if so, again the fault
was hers. Leaving town early, I met her at East Grinstead Station. We
lunched at a tavern near the station. After lunch we walked over to
Turner's Hill. At the inn we had a hybrid sort of meal. Afterwards we
started, as she supposed, to walk back to East Grinstead Station.
In so supposing, she was wrong.
She had been affectionate all day--too affectionate--with a sort of
affection which suggested what a good wife she would be to her husband.
When we left the inn, instead of going in the direction she supposed, I
turned towards Paddockhurst, intending to walk through Tilgate Forest
to Three Bridges Station, distant some four or five miles. She was a
stranger in that country. I knew every inch of it--a lonely one it is
at night. I made up my mind to put the issue plainly to her on the
road. And that then, if she did not promise to be reasonable, I would
do something for the Honour of the Club. The month allowed by the rules
was up on the Thursday following. At the meeting I should be called to
account.
Louise continued to be as unreasonable as ever--if anything, she was
more so. She talked about my promises--as if they were anything! She
cried, making quite a scene--or rather, a succession of scenes. She
kept stopping, as we were going down Whitely Hill, accusing me of all
sorts of things. I fancy she was rather taken aback when I turned into
Tilgate Forest. It was pitch dark, and the walking was not too smooth.
The game seemed wide awake. We could hear the rustling of unseen feet,
the hurtling of unseen wings. Once we flushed a pheasant right from
beneath our feet. A startled cock-pheasant is not the quietest of
birds, but I don't think I ever heard one make such a noise as that
bird did then. It startled even me. Louise was frightened out of her
wits. I felt her trembling as she clung to my arm.
All the way along I kept saying to myself, "Now! now!" And I should
have done it in the forest, only just as I was bringing myself to the
sticking point, my eyes were saluted by a crimson glare. I thought for
a moment we had gone further than I supposed, and had reached Wrench's
farm. Then I thought of the charcoal-burners. You will find them
somewhere in Tilgate Forest all the year round. Sure enough it was
them. Their furnace was glowing blood-red--they had built it close to
the path. They had raised a barricade of faggots to screen it from the
wind. Louise wanted to stop and look at it, I believe, because she
wanted the encouragement of its companionship. But I would not agree; I
hurried her on. I had no desire to be seen just then, even by a
charcoal-burner. As I was congratulating myself that we should get past
unnoticed, a short, stunted figure, starting out from behind the
barricade, glared at us through the gloom.
Little was said by either of us, as, leaving the forest, we went across
the fields. Reaching the railway, we passed under the arch. I helped
Louise over the stile. We paused by the gate. About half a mile off
were the village and the station. I resolved I would give her another
chance; then if she was obstinate, I would do it.
She was obstinate, even, as it seemed to me, in a positively ascending
scale.
"You promised to marry me. I have your letter. I trusted you. If you
are going to leave me to face my shame alone, there is nothing for me
but death."
That saying of hers finished it; there was nothing for her but death.
Only it came a little sooner than she quite bargained for. Just at that
moment a train went thundering over the bridge towards town. As it went
a cloud must have parted, because, suddenly, the moon came out. It
shone upon us two. Louise looked up at me through the moonbeams.
Although she had been crying--and I never knew a woman's face which was
improved by tears--her prettiness, revealed, all at once, by the
moonlight, particularly struck me. She looked prettier even than when I
first saw her at the Coliseum. Her beauty went to my heart. She put her
hand upon my arm--a tiny hand it was.
"Reggie, has your love for me all gone? Don't you love me still?"
"Oh, yes," I said; "I love you still."
Then, putting my hands round her neck, I began to choke her. Hers was a
slender neck, so that I was able to put my hands right round and get a
good, firm grip. I don't think that at first she realised what I was up
to. She was thinking more of love than of death. At any rate she did
not attempt to scream. She looked to me as if she was startled. She
looked more startled as I increased the pressure. Appetite came with
eating. I had not altogether relished the business until I tackled it.
But, as I got a tighter and tighter hold, and felt her convulsive
writhings and her life slipping through my fingers, I began to feel the
joy of killing, for the killing's sake. I began to be filled with a
sort of ecstasy of passion--the sort of sensation which I had been in
search of when I joined the club. After all, it was worth feeling.
Lifting her up, I bent her backwards over the gate. She took longer to
die than I should have supposed. When she had ceased to move, and went
all limp in my grasp, I dropped her. My fingers were rigid with cramp.
For some seconds I could not move them. When I could, the pain was
excruciating. I found, too, that I was not only breathless, I was damp
with perspiration.
She lay in an ugly heap on the ground. I arranged her draperies and
straightened her. In her pocket was a purse--one which I had given her,
so I was only regaining my own--some letters in an envelope, which, I
guessed, were also mine, and a handkerchief. I knew that she was in the
habit of wearing a portrait of mine, which I had been ass enough to
give her, in a locket round her neck. Opening her dress at the
bosom--which I had a job in doing--I found the locket tied to a piece
of ribbon. Tearing it off, I put it, with the other things, into the
inside pocket of my overcoat. Not wishing to leave the body lying there
for the first passer-by to find in the morning, picking it up I carried
it a few feet along the hedge which bordered the railway embankment. On
the other side of this hedge shrubs were growing on the sloping banks.
Raising the body above my head, I threw it, as far as I could, among
these shrubs. I distinctly heard it fall. Then, immediately after, I
heard a sort of rustling--exactly the sort of rustling which the body
might have made had it been alive and was rising to its feet. I knew
well enough that it was not alive; I had taken care of that. But the
sound was, in one sense, so apposite, and, in another sense, so very
much the other way, that it filled me with an unreasoning panic terror.
I started off running across the open meadow as if I had been running
for my life.
I had meant to keep along the Brighton line to Three Bridges Station.
It was only when I struck the stile which leads to the footpath across
the Horsham line that I realised what an idiot I was. Then I pulled up,
and only then. I was in a muck of sweat. Sitting on the stile, I began
to mop myself with my pocket-handkerchief. I was exhausted--all of a
quiver. Something of my absurd attack of terror was with me still. I
actually thought that I had seen a face rise up from among the bushes
and stare at me--white in the moonlight. As I recalled my folly--even
though I was conscious it was folly--I shut my eyes and shivered.
As soon as I felt myself presentable and in a condition to move, I went
along the Horsham line into the station. I gained the platform
unobserved. I made at once for a refreshment-room. I was aware that it
was not the part of wisdom to expose myself too much, but I felt that I
must have a drink, even though directly after I was hanged. There being
two refreshment-rooms on the up platform, I had two drinks at each of
them.
The return half of my East Grinstead ticket was available to town from
there; so I had no concern on that account. As I came out of the second
refreshment-room, feeling that the stuff which they had sold me for
brandy had done me good, I tackled a porter about a train. The next,
and last, to London was at 10.20. Glancing at my watch, I found that it
was just past the hour.
A woman, coming up to me as I moved from the porter, asked me the
question which I had just been asking him. I noticed what a pleasant
voice she had--few things in a woman appeal to me so much as that.
Something in her bearing suggested that she might not resent a desire
on my part for sociability. I gave her the information she required,
with additions of my own, thrown out by way of feeler. She responded;
we began to talk. The long and short of it was that I travelled with
her in the same compartment to town.
Possibly I had at the moment an unconscious craving for congenial
society--I am a gregarious animal. Certainly, she did appeal to what I
take to be my instincts in an unusual degree. She was not in her first
youth, but she was still good-looking, and she was not made up. I hate
a woman who paints and powders; after all my experience I have never
got over a feeling that a woman who does that sort of thing can't be
clean. She was good style; if she was not exactly a woman of our world,
then she was either very clever or very near it. She had seen the
world, and it had not spoilt her. She was well dressed, and by the
right people. I would not have minded doing a turn in the Park with her
any day of the week.
She was frankness itself--it was that which made me shy a little. With
strangers our women are not so frank, though that I have a sympathetic,
not to say fascinating, way about me, I make no doubt. It is not a
question of conceit; I know it. I ought to, considering it is the
leading article of my stock-in-trade.
She said she was a widow. We got so thick that she gave me her
card--Mrs. Daniel J. Carruth, with an address at West Kensington. She
herself was English, her husband was American, which explained the
name. She had been out of England several years; had returned to find
herself alone. She felt her loneliness she said. I had no reason to
suppose she lied.
"Have you no children?"
"No. I have scarcely known whether to be glad or sorry. There is
something to be said on either side of the question." Looking down she
began pulling at the pile of her sealskin coat. "You must know that my
husband was many years my senior." I nodded. "It would have made a
difference if he had been young."
Though I did not quite see the sequence, I nodded again. She had given
me permission to light a cigarette. I was at my ease. I was conscious
of feeling a really curious interest in Mrs. Carruth.
She glanced up at me. Hers were fine eyes, though about them there were
two peculiarities--they seemed to be looking, not at me, but at
something far away, and they always smiled.
"It seems so odd. When I left England, though I was poor, I had troops
of friends. Now I have come back I am rich, but all my friends seem to
have vanished into air. I have not one."
"That is a state of things which is not likely to continue long."
"Perhaps not; I hope not--one does not like to be friendless. But it is
all so different to what I had looked forward to. When one has been
absent a long time from home, and is able to return at last, one dreams
dreams. Only those who have experienced it can know how"--she
hesitated, as if for a word--"strange it feels when one is forced to
recognise that those dreams have been but dreams." She glanced down;
then up again. "I have many acquaintances; they are not friends."
I agreed with her, asking myself at the same time what she might happen
to mean. Was she dropping a hint to me? If so, I might be more than
half disposed to take it. Mrs. Carruth appealed to me strangely, every
moment more and more. The minutes sped; before I knew it we were in
town.
I saw her into a hansom at Victoria. She asked me to call on her; to
renew and improve the acquaintance made in the train. I said that I
would. What is more, when she was gone, I told myself that I would keep
my promise.
Her voice lingered in my ears.
CHAPTER XI.
WHAT MR. TENNANT HAD WRITTEN.
There were several letters by the morning's post. One's creditors, at
any rate, seemed to be in town. Do those sort of people ever go away?
Lily Langdale wanted me to look her up. Confound little Lily Langdale!
I had looked her up too much already. Chirpy Mason, writing from Monte
Carlo, wanted to know if I could do him a hundred or two. Would I wire?
No; I would neither do the one or the other. I knew Chirpy. He had
probably made the same request to half a dozen more of us. There were
only two letters among the heap worth looking at. One contained just
two type-written words, "Buy Boomjopfs." No address, no signature, no
nothing. I put that aside. It would entail my going into the City as
soon as I could. The other letter was from Haselton Jardine:--
"SLOANE GARDENS.
"DEAR TOWNSEND,--If you are in town and this catches you, and you have
nothing else to do, come round to-morrow (Monday) and dine _en
famille_. Only Dora! I have something which I rather wish to say to
you.
"Yours,
"H. J."
I was to go down to them at Cockington on Friday. What had he to say to
me which would not keep till then, I wondered. But I had nothing else
to do--and there was Dora! So, scribbling a line of acceptance, I told
Burton to take it round. When I opened the paper I found that Sir
Haselton was leading for the defendants in the great diamond earring
libel case--Mrs. Potter Segundi against Lady Lucretia Jenkyns. I should
not have minded being in court to see the fun. They say Mrs. P. S. has
brass enough to start a foundry. I know, of my own knowledge, that Lady
J. is fairly well equipped. When I am in Queer-street I hope that Sir
Haselton will be briefed for me.
It was past one when I got out. I ought to have gone straight to the
City. Instead, I dropped into the Climax, and had just one rubber. I
cut Pendarvon against Graeme and Bicketts. Pendarvon and I had the luck
of the devil: we scored a bumper. Altogether, with bets, I walked off
with about a pony. When I reached the City it was not very far from
four. I made for a broker in Austin Friars--a man named Tennant, Thomas
Tennant--as steady a file as ever I saw. I have done a good deal of
business through him at various times. I don't fancy that he has much
nose of his own; but he keeps quiet, asks no questions, and follows
instructions to the letter.
Tennant was out. He was not in the House. A clerk thought that he was
at Danby's; he would go and see. I knew where Danby's was--it is one of
those City restaurants where there is more drank than ate--so I saved
that clerk his trouble, and went myself.
I spotted Tennant directly I got inside the place--a plump little
fellow, with round, pasty face, and hair which always looked to me as
if he soaped it. A mild, unassuming neat-as-ninepence sort of man. He
had a table to himself. As a rule, in a mild sort of way, he is jolly
as a sandboy. Just then it appeared to me that he seemed hipped. Taking
a chair on the opposite side of the table, carelessly, thoughtlessly
enough, I took hold of a scrap of paper on which he had been
scribbling. When I glanced at it a thrill went down my back. It was a
bolt out of the blue. I do not think that in all my life before I was
ever so taken by surprise.
Tennant had been scribbling all over the sheet of paper a woman's
name--"Louise O'Donnel." That my appearance on the scene at that
particular moment was a pure coincidence, I had, of course, no doubt.
It could not have been otherwise. But how came he to have been writing
that name? I could scarcely believe my eyes. I stared at the paper, and
then at him.
"What is the meaning of this?" I asked.
"The meaning of what?"
When I showed him what he had been writing on the piece of paper he
seemed to be as much taken aback as I was. At first he wanted me to
believe that he had been writing a name over and over again without
having an idea of what it was that he was doing. I could not make him
out at all. He made me feel uneasy.
So far as I was aware, I was the only person in England who had been
acquainted with the girl's real name. She had always assured me that
such was the case, and I had believed her. Everybody, except myself,
knew her by her stage name--Milly Carroll. Her father was the only
relative she had in the world, and he was in Colorado. Father and
daughter had fallen out. Coming to England with a burlesque company
from New York, she had left him on the other side of the world. If
this story of hers was true--and I did not, and do not, believe she
lied--she was not that sort of girl--how did Mr. Thomas Tennant come to
be in possession of her name?
I put the question to him point blank.
"What do you know about Louise O'Donnel?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing? Tennant, I say!"
"I heard it mentioned for the first time in my life last night."
"Last night?" The coincidence made me shiver again.
"As I was coming up from Brighton."
"Brighton?" I had to gasp for breath. "Did you come up last night from
Brighton? By what train?"
"The 8.40."
I figured it out in my mind. I should not be surprised if that was the
identical train which had rattled over the arch while Louise and I had
been leaning against the gate, just before I did something for the
Honour of the Club. And Tennant was in it. "Was the long arm of
coincidence going to make things pleasant for me?"
"What did you hear about Louise O'Donnel as you were coming up from
Brighton?"
"Nothing. The name was casually mentioned in my hearing, that was all.
It seems to have stuck in my head."
It did seem to have stuck in his head--and it seemed to have crept
unawares from the ends of his fingers. That something had been said or
done to fix the name in his memory, I did not doubt. What had been said
or done was another matter. Somehow I did not seem to care to question
him too closely. Generally, in his own placid, fish-like fashion,
Tennant is as cool as you please. Then he was as fidgety as if he had
been sitting on hot bricks. He said he was ill, and he looked it--if
his ailment was not more mental than physical I misjudged him.
I clean forgot all about the Boomjopf shares, which I had come up to
instruct him to buy. I left Tennant in Danby's without having mentioned
them to him from first to last. Indeed, I never thought of them till I
pulled Groeden's tip out of my pocket when I got home to dress for
dinner. Seeing the girl's name upon that sheet of paper made me all of
a fluster.
Scarcely had I left Danby's when I all but cannoned into my scamp of a
brother. He seemed as little pleased to see me as I was to see him, but
as I had seen and heard nothing of him for the last two years, I
thought that I might as well do the fraternal. He looked seedy enough,
and cad enough to boot. The cad was in his face and bearing; the
seediness was in his clothes. He had on what looked like, not a second,
but a fourth-hand overcoat, trimmed with the usual imitation astrachan.
If he had his way, I believe that he would be buried in imitation
astrachan.
"Not in prison then?"
"No." He fidgeted inside his clothes. "I'm not in prison."
"Recently come out?"
"Nor have I recently come out."
"Or just going in?"
"Not unless, my dear Reginald, it is to visit you."
Alexander was cheeky; he must be in funds, although he did not look it.
"May I ask, my dear Alexander, what means you are at present taking to
increase your fortune?"
He blew his nose with an old silk handkerchief and a flourish. Did he
ever do anything without a flourish--even pick a pocket?
"I don't know, my dear Reginald, that it much matters to you what I am
doing, but I don't mind telling you, in confidence, that I am at
present devoting my energies to the detection of crime."
"To what?"
The idea seemed too funny.
"To the detection of crime. In other words, I am a private detective,
on, I think I may say, a considerable scale."
"The deuce you are! That is something new."
"And you--may I ask what you are doing?"
I stared at Alexander. He certainly was coming on.
"I'm talking to you."
"I trust that the occupation gives you satisfaction. I regret that I am
compelled to cut it short. My time is valuable. In fact, at this moment
I have a pressing appointment with a gentleman well known in City
circles."
"A bailiff or a policeman, Alexander? They are both of them well known
in City circles."
"Probably, my dear Reginald, they are better known to you than they are
to me. Good-day."
"Good-day!"
He raised his hat about three feet; I raised mine about three inches.
We parted, I do believe, for the first time in our lives, on the most
affable of terms.
CHAPTER XII.
SIR HASELTON JARDINE.
Sir Haselton Jardine was a man whom I had rather been in the habit of
holding in awe. One never could be certain how much he knew. A man
could scarcely rise to the forensic heights which he had reached
without knowing something of almost every one. He was so quiet and so
self-contained that it was impossible to gauge the extent of his
knowledge until too late.
He was rather short, and he was very thin, and he stooped. He had
colourless grey eyes, which you scarcely ever saw, though, if you had
your wits about you, you felt that they all the time saw you. He had a
peaked grey beard, too straggling to be Vandyke, and sandy hair, which
he parted low down on the right-hand side. His voice was as soft and
gentle as any girl's--when he was asking a jury to hang a man he was
always the very pink of courtesy, and I wonder how many he had sent
that way in his time. He had beautiful hands, and he either braced his
trousers too high or else it was a principle of his to have them made
too short. Jardine's trousers were a standing joke--he always looked as
if he had got into his younger, and distinctly smaller, brother's. He
was a widower, and Dora was his only child.
I always had had a tenderness towards Dora Jardine. I suspected that,
under certain circumstances, she might not be ill-disposed towards me.
It was Sir Haselton that I felt shy of. He had the reputation of being
rich, apart from his practice at the bar, and that was supposed to be
worth fifteen thousand a year. Dora was pretty; he might very well have
eyes for an altogether bigger man than Reginald T. But somehow of late
I had begun to fancy that he himself had a partiality for me. He had
become quite fatherly. I was in a measure free of the house. On Friday
I was to go down to his country place at Cockington to shoot; he had
quite made a point of my making an indefinite stay.
Now there had been his note of the morning!
Sir Haselton was not visible when I arrived. I found Dora alone in the
drawing-room. Very nice she looked. Not one of the new order of tall
girls, but tall enough, and straight as a dart. Brown hair, which,
in certain lights looked golden, and which had a natural crinkle.
Pouting lips--very pretty ones--good nose and chin. Her eyes were
her most remarkable feature, as was the case with her father. Blue
eyes--laughing blue eyes I have heard them called--and innocent and
girlish too. But to me they were something else besides. I never knew a
man or a woman with eyes like that who was deficient in grit. I will go
further. If the women who have gone to the devil, and smiled when they
met him face to face, could be polled, I should be disposed to wager
that the majority of them had eyes like Dora Jardine's. I am not
insinuating anything against her--quite the other way. Only I am a
student of women's eyes.
She was standing by the fire as I went in. She turned, holding out her
hand.
"I am glad you have come," she said.
I felt as I took her hand in mine--and I felt it not for the first
time--that she and I were kindred spirits, and that, girl though she
was, she was stronger than I. I said something; I don't know what. Then
I looked at the fire. I felt that her eyes were on my face.
"What a strange face you have, as though, in you, were the makings of a
man."
I don't know how she was in the habit of talking to other men; she was
always saying that sort of thing to me. I laughed. "What sort of man?"
She did not answer my question. She ran her conversation on lines of
her own.
"What have you been doing since I saw you last--killing time?"
"Unfortunately, Miss Jardine, I have nothing else to do."
"Would you like to have something?"
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On the something."
"I see. I suppose that you will be doing something else on Saturday;
you are going to kill papa's pheasants?"
"You speak as though that was an improper thing to do."
There was a slight movement of her shoulders.
"I suppose that some men kill pheasants, and that other men rule
empires. I might like to do both things, but I confess that if I had to
choose I should prefer the empires."
I looked at her. Quietly, and without any ostentation, she gave me back
glance for glance. Something from her eyes seemed to get into my veins.
"Suppose it was not yours to choose?"
"It would be were I a man."
"It certainly has never yet been mine."
"Then you certainly are not a man."
Her high-faluting amused me. That the little, brown-haired, blue-eyed
thing should talk in such an inflated strain! And yet I felt that if
she had been a man she would have gone for the gloves--nay, that though
she was a woman she might go for them still.
She went on--
"That is the very essence of being a man; that he can choose what he
will be and do."
"You are on the wrong track. He might choose to win the Derby--plenty
of them do--but the odds are he will fail."
"He might try."
"And come a cropper. Men of that sort get posted every settling day. If
he is a cautious man he will limit his range of choice to things which
are within his reach."
"Are you a cautious man?"
As I met her eyes I could not have told her. I seemed to see so clearly
in them something which was not caution, something which thrilled and
kept time with a pulse of mine. While I hesitated Sir Haselton
appeared--his dress shoes making the shortness of his trousers still
more conspicuous. Immediately after, dinner was announced.
They always feed you well at Jardine's, and it seems to me that lawyers
generally do. And, though to look at him you might not think it,
Jardine can drink with any man--perhaps to counterbalance the dryness
of his profession. And he has some stuff worth drinking. His guests can
do as they please; he himself is old-fashioned--he sticks to the cloth
when the women are gone. That evening, bearing the hint in his note in
my mind, I stuck to it with him.
I was curious to know what it was he wanted to say to me; it took me
aback when it came.
I lit up when Dora had gone--Jardine does not smoke--post-prandial
wine-drinkers seldom do. As he leaned back in his chair a lean, dried
up, insignificant little chap he looked; but whoever, on that account,
would have liked to have tried a fall with him would have done well to
get up early. The fingers of his left hand grasped the stem of his
wineglass, but, used though I was to his trick of peering through his
half-shut eyes, I could not make out if he was looking at me or at the
glass.
"Townsend, I want to say something to you in confidence."
I nodded; though I don't mind owning that I felt a bit uneasy. He might
have wanted to say all sorts of things to me in what he called
confidence--and he was the sort of man to say them too. His next words,
however, reassured me.
"I am not a man of strong likes or dislikes"--I should rather say he
wasn't, being about the most bloodless creature going!--"but I like
you, if you will excuse me, Townsend."
"Excuse you, sir? You flatter me too much."
He smiled--if the wrinkling of his thin lips could be called a smile.
"Flatter you? I hardly think I flatter you. I will tell you why I like
you, Townsend."
He paused. I waited. The old fox kept twisting the stem of his
wineglass round and round between his thin white fingers.
"I like you, Townsend, because, although you are out of the common run,
you are not sufficiently so to be unpleasantly conspicuous. You have
what I lack, passion. You are as likely to ascend to the top of the
tree as to the top of the gallows. I hardly think I flatter you."
"You at least credit me with having aspirations."
"I believe, Townsend, that your wealth scarcely exceeds the dreams of
avarice--eh?" The remark had so little connection with anything that
had gone before, that I think I stared. He favoured me with one of
those lightning flashes which are among the tricks of his trade--then
you can see what eyes he really has. "I said I wanted to speak to you
in confidence."
"Precisely. You only flatter me too much."
Again that wrinkling of the lips which he, perhaps, intended for a
smile. I wondered what the dickens he was at.
"You see, Townsend, things reach my ears which do not come to other
men. May we take it, Townsend, that you are not a millionaire?"
"You may certainly take it, sir, at that."
"Pressed, now and then, for ready-money, perhaps."
What was he driving at? Was he going to develop into a sixty per cent.
and offer me a loan?
"I believe that most men are."
"Yes--they are." It struck me that there was something about the pause
he made which was anything but complimentary. I was beginning to feel
like throwing something at him. "You have a brother, Townsend." How did
he know that? "Have you seen him lately?"
"This afternoon."
"So recently? Is he doing well?"
"He said he was."
"There is nothing clogs a man so much as a brother of a certain kind."
"I take care that my brother does not clog me."
"I believe, Townsend, that you do." What did he mean by the inflection
with which the words were uttered? "You are wondering why I talk to you
like this. I will explain."
He took a sip from his glass. Then held it up in front of him,
connoisseur fashion.
"I am something of a curiosity. I have lived my own life. In my way, I
have enjoyed it. But I have one thing with which to reproach
Providence. He has not bestowed on me a son." He emptied his glass.
"Townsend, why don't you drink? I can recommend this port. Drink up,
and let me fill the glasses." I let him. "That a son is not always an
unmixed blessing I am aware. On the other hand, Dora has been a model
child. Still, a daughter can hardly do for a father what a son can. So
I still am hoping for a son."
What did the old beggar mean? He was still so long that I thought he
had forgotten to go on. But I did not feel that it was my cue to break
the silence. And at last he condescended to remember.
"You have in you the makings of the sort of son that I should like to
have."
"I? Sir Haselton, did I not say you flattered me?"
"I hardly think I do. I think I know you pretty well. Dora seems to
think she knows you even better." Now I began to see his drift.
"Townsend, what do you think of Dora?"
"I have sometimes feared, sir, that I have thought of her too much."
"Indeed." The word, as it came from between his lips, was a gently
murmured sneer.
"I should not have imagined that you were that kind of man. Townsend,
would you like to marry?"
"It has been my constant dream."
"Has it? And about Lily Langdale and others?"
What did he know about Lily, and the rest of them? I would have given
something to have learned just how much the old sleuth-hound did know
about everything or anything. I felt all the time that he had me at a
strong advantage. When I am in his presence I always do feel like that.
"You yourself, sir, have been a bachelor."
"True--I have. I take it, Townsend, that when you marry you will cease
to be a bachelor."
"Undoubtedly."
"What would you say to ten thousand pounds a-year?"
"Sir!"
"When Dora marries she will have that income to commence with. Should
her marriage prove a happy one, it will be increased."
He paused, as if for me to speak. I deemed silence to be the better
part of wisdom.
"The man who marries Dora will have to have a clean slate, if it has to
be cleaned for the occasion. I shall require him to give me a correct
statement of his position. I will see that his house is set in order.
He will have to take my name; Dora shall always be a Jardine. He will
have to enter public life."
"Public life?"
"Have you any objection?"
"It depends upon what you mean, sir, by public life; it is an elastic
term."
"He will have to enter Parliament. Means will be furnished to enable
him to do so. As a country gentleman he will have to take an interest
in local and in county government. He will have to play a prominent
part on the stage of national politics. He will have to aim at the top
of the tree. Dora has ambitions; her husband must have them too."
When he paused I was silent again. There was a cut-and-dried way about
his fashion of settling things which nettled me.
"Have you no ambitions, Townsend?"
"I have such ambitions as a poor man may have."
"A poor man is entitled to have the same ambitions as a rich one--if he
is strong enough. I was poor once upon a time. I did not allow my
poverty to hamper my ambition. What do you think of the programme which
I have drawn up for Dora's husband?"
"I think it an alluring one."
"For a strong man it has possibilities. You may take it from me that,
properly backed, you are strong enough to be able to say, with truth,
that few things are beyond your reach."
"I think myself that, given the opportunity, I might find the man."
"I think so too. You shall have the opportunity. You have heard on what
conditions. That is what I wanted to say to you. We shall see you at
Cockington at the end of the week. Perhaps, before you leave us, you
may have something to say to me."
"I trust, sir, that I may have something to say to you that will be
pleasant to us both."
CHAPTER XIII.
AN AFTERNOON CALL.
"You're sleeping it out. Are you going to lie in bed all day?"
I opened my eyes. I looked up. Somebody was shaking me--Archie Beaupré.
"You don't mean to say that you're awake? I admire your hours."
"Is it late?"
"I don't know what you call late. It's nearly one. Do you generally
sleep to this time?"
"Made rather a night of it, my boy. It was five when I left the
Climax."
"Oh, you went to the Climax, did you, after you left Jardine's? Win?"
"A trifle. What brings you here--starting in the early-calling line?"
Archie seated himself on the bed, murmuring--
"He calls this early."
Beaupré is the third son of the Duke of Glenlivet--one of the duke's
famed thirteen. Not a bad sort--stone broke, like all the rest of us.
Archie was born in two different sections--one-half of him makes all
for wickedness, and the other half makes all the other way--and,
whichever half of him is to the fore, he's thorough. Jardine and I had
found him in the drawing-room with Dora when we had finished our
hobnobbing--at which I was not sorry. When a man has had the sort of
talk with the father which I had had, he is not, on the instant, all
agog for a _tête-à-tête_ with the child. He wants to straighten things
out inside his head a bit. We had left the Jardines together, Beaupré
and I. He had gone to some twenty-third cousin of his great
grandmother--the man's relations are as the sands of the sea for
multitude, and he keeps in with every one of them--and I had gone on to
the Climax Club. Now, I wondered what he wanted on my bed.
When Burton had brought me my coffee, and Archie had put himself
outside a soda, tempered, he began.
"Don't laugh at me, old chap." Of course, when he told me not to laugh,
I was at once upon the grin--it's human nature. But he went on, "I am a
miserable wretch, I swear I am."
"Who says you aren't?"
"What a muck I've made of things!"
"Who denies it? Give me the rascal's name?"
"And I might have been a respectable chap once, if I had liked."
"My dear Archie! When?"
He was too woebegone to heed my chaff. He went and leaned his elbow on
my mantelshelf, and his head upon his hand.
"Reggie, I've been thinking that you and I ought to cut the Jardines."
"The deuce, you have!"
"For their sake. It is not fair to them that we should let them run the
risk of being contaminated by even a remote connection with the shadow
which, I suppose sooner or later, is sure to fall on us. It will come
specially hard on me--because I don't mind telling you, between
ourselves, that Miss Jardine's society to me means much." I stared;
things were coming out. "But the knowledge that this is so has come too
late. Unless the whole business of the club--I won't give it a name,
but you know the club which meets once a month in Horseferry Road--is a
ghastly joke."
"That is what it is."
"What?"
"A ghastly joke."
Beaupré looked up at me. I don't know what he saw in my face, but a
funny look came on his own--a look almost of fear.
"Sometimes, Townsend, I don't know if you're a man or a devil."
"The devil was a sublimated sort of man, and I expect he still is. This
coffee is just a trifle too sweet."
It was my second cup. I was sitting up in bed and stirring it.
"Of course, you have done nothing."
He said "Of course"; but I saw he was uneasy.
"Of course, I have."
"Townsend!"
The man gave quite a jump. He brought the back of his head with a bump
against the wall, without seeming to notice it.
"I hope, as I said, on Thursday to have the pleasure of returning the
Honour of the Club with its scarlet a more vivid hue."
He was glaring at me as if I had been some sort of hideous wild animal.
"You don't mean that you have killed some one?"
"Certainly. What else should I mean? Though I don't perceive that there
is any necessity for you to announce it from the tiles."
He staggered to a chair, plumping down in it with the stiffening all
gone out of him.
I laughed.
"My dear Archie, you had better have another drink. You don't seem
quite the thing."
He looked me straight in the face, I giving him look for look. When he
had sustained my glance for a moment or two he shut his eyes and
shivered. I saw a shudder go all over him. I drank my coffee.
"You're sure that you're not joking?"
"Some men joke most when they are most in earnest. Perhaps I am one of
them."
"Who was it?"
"A little girl I knew."
"A girl? My gracious! When was it?"
"Sunday evening."
He turned to me with a sort of gasp.
"Was it near Three Bridges Station?"
"Within half a mile."
"My God! It's in the paper! Townsend, what have you done?"
"It is in the paper, is it? May I ask what is in the paper?"
"They've found the body." He sprang from the chair.
"Reggie, I wish that I had died before you did this thing, and before
ever I heard of that accursed club."
"That is rather good, from you--the club having been a suggestion of
your own."
"I had been on the drink, hadn't I? I was mad. I swear, before the
living God, that I never dreamed that you fellows would take the thing
up in bitter earnest."
"My dear Archie, respect the proprieties, if you respect nothing
else--not quite that sort of language, if you please." He stared at me
and laughed--a queer laugh it was. "You remember the rule which directs
what course the members shall pursue towards a colleague who, for any
cause, turns tail and rats. That also, I believe, was a suggestion of
your own."
"Are you afraid that I shall turn tail and rat? You need have no fear.
That I shall never do, especially now. If we are to go to the devil,
we'll all travel the same road. But there is one thing on which I do
insist. I insist on your ceasing your connection with the Jardines."
"You insist?"
"I beseech you, then."
"I don't wish to say anything which may sound at all unkind, but don't
you think, my dear Archie, that you are taking rather a liberty in
intruding yourself into my affairs? The accident of our both being
members of the same club gives you no warrant for anything of the kind.
It certainly gives you none which I am likely to recognise even in the
faintest degree."
He began to pace about the bedroom like a caged wild cat. Presently he
made an announcement:
"It strikes me that I had better go home."
"I trust that you will allow nothing which I have said to deprive me of
the pleasure of your society, but perhaps it might do you good if you
were to toddle home and take a pill."
"Good-day!" he shouted.
Snatching up his hat and stick from the couch, he banged out of the
room without another word.
I don't mind owning--since, in these pages, at any rate, candour is the
order of the day--that when Beaupré had gone I did not feel altogether
up to concert pitch. Things were going contrary. The club did bid fair
to be a bit of a failure. Although the suggestion, as I had said, had
been Archie's, it was Pendarvon who had put it into shape.
I don't quite know how Archie first came to think of the thing. Some of
us had been playing poker in his rooms. Pendarvon had been losing. He
began to tell us about a story which he had been reading in which there
was a suicide club. He said that he had half a mind to start such a
club himself. Archie at once suggested that he should go one better;
instead of a suicide, let him make it a murder club. Let the members
draw lots, and whoever drew the lot, instead of suicide let him go in
for murder--for the Honour of the Club. Pendarvon took up the idea in a
way which startled us. We had all been drinking; there and then drawing
up a sort of rough outline of the club, he got us all to promise to
join. There were to be thirteen members; the club was to meet once a
month; lots were to be drawn; whoever drew the lot was to kill someone,
not a member of the club, within the month. On this basis Pendarvon had
actually got the thing into shape. We had had one meeting. The lot had
fallen to me.
I can safely say that if I had had the slightest inkling that old
Jardine was going to say what he had said I should have given
Pendarvon's pretty little plaything the widest of wide berths. I might
easily have succeeded in keeping Louise quiet by the use of some less
drastic means; at any rate, until I was sure of Dora. On Sunday I had
cared for nothing. The very next day I had something for which to care.
A golden future dangled before my eyes.
It was like the irony of fate.
Still the game might not be lost. I yet had time. I might, at any rate,
make my hay and enjoy it while the sun was shining. To-morrow--whose
to-morrow it was, or what weather it might bring, no man could tell. I
would live out to-day.
I looked at the newspaper. It was as Archie had said; how funny that he
should be touched by Dora! They had found the body--but that was
nothing, if that was all--and it was all. I had not supposed for a
moment that the body could stay hidden. It had all happened just as I
expected. A platelayer, walking along the line, had seen something
lying among the bushes--Louise. There was some sensational rubbish to
catch the pennies of the mob, but the whole thing merely amounted to
this, that Louise was found.
Queer stick, old Jardine! Fancy his having taken to me, after all! He
was a keen judge of character; I have seldom met a keener, and, as he
said, there was that in me which differentiates strength from weakness.
I had known, I had felt it, all along. I have, to begin with, the
courage of the devil. Give me something of a chance, and my foot in the
bottom niche, it should not be my fault if I did not reach the top of
the pillar of fame.
The mischief was, my affairs were in a muddle. It was not money so
much; I could manage for that, and, if things went as they ought to go,
not impossibly Jardine would stand by me there. I had a shrewd
suspicion, from the remarks which he had dropped, that he knew as much
about my pecuniary position as he cared to know. It was other things,
and one of those things was Lily Langdale. It is extraordinary how I
always have managed to get myself mixed up with women. The teachings of
my experience I should sum up in something like a bull--the best thing
that can happen to a man is for him to be born sexless.
While I was dressing Burton imparted a piece of information which
brought me to a rapid resolution.
"Mrs. Langdale was here after you went out, sir. Made rather a noise.
Talked about stopping for your return."
"Did she?" That settled it.
I went straight off to Miss Lily. I was plain with her. She did not
like it--she was equally plain with me. What home truths one does get
from women! A woman in a temper is ten thousand times more candid than
a man. But she had sense enough to understand that she could scarcely
expect to score, on those lines, off me. I explained that what would be
done for her depended upon how she behaved herself, but I did not
explain that it depended much more upon Sir Haselton Jardine.
Lily's place was in the Hammersmith Road. As I was leaving it,
something like calm having followed the storm--never, if you can help
it, leave a woman in a rage, it is cruel--whom should I encounter but
Mrs. Daniel J. Carruth, my acquaintance of the train. Very nice she
looked, with a natty little toque on her clever head, and a fluffy fur
thing round her throat. I have seen many uglier women ten years
younger--yes, and as far as appearances went, further gone in the sere
and yellow.
She came sailing up when she saw me.
"I hope, Mr. Townsend, that you are coming to give me a call, and that
I am just getting home in time."
I was not going to give her a call. I had forgotten that the address
she had given me was at West Kensington. Her very existence had escaped
my memory. But when she asked me, why, I went.
A decent house she seemed to have, in a street at the back of St.
Paul's School. An old fellow was in the drawing-room when we got in. I
say old, though I daresay he was not more than fifty. He reminded me,
somehow, of some one I had seen somewhere before, and known intimately,
as it seemed to me, but I could not for the life of me think whom. He
was tall and thin, and stooped, though he looked as tough as leather
and sinewy and strong. He was bald on the top of his head. What hair he
had, and the fringe of whisker on his chin, was grey. He wore an
undertaker's frock-coat, and in his open shirt-front was a diamond as
big as a pea.
Mrs. Carruth introduced us.
"Mr. Townsend, this is an old friend of mine, Mr Haines."
The old chap did not stay long. I fancy he did not altogether relish my
intrusion, or what he took to be such. When he had gone I told Mrs.
Carruth that he seemed to remind me of some one I had known.
"Is that so? One does sometimes fancy that one sees a resemblance. I
think that in your case it is only fancy. Mr. Haines is an American, a
Westerner. He has only recently arrived in England. He was my husband's
friend for many years."
I found Mrs. Carruth very pleasant. Friendly--but not too friendly. She
seemed to do everything in fairly good style. The room in which we sat
was not only prettily furnished, it was distinctly that sort of
prettiness which costs money--it had no connection with the "How to
furnish a twelve-roomed house tastefully for £200" kind of thing. Tea
was served with the accompaniments of silver and Wedgewood china, by a
maid who knew her work. Altogether Mrs. Carruth and her way of doing
things favourably impressed me.
She alluded to the queerness of our meeting.
"I hope, Mr. Townsend, that you will not allow the informal fashion of
our introduction to each other to prejudice me in your eyes."
"Quite the other way. Chance acquaintances are sometimes the
pleasantest one makes."
"You speak from the man's point of view. From the woman's, I think that
you are wrong. I have had my share of moving about in the world. I have
found that, generally speaking, chance acquaintances are things to be
avoided."
"It is I, then, who must warn you that both prejudgment and prejudice
begin with a 'P.'"
"I promise, for my part, that I won't judge you until I know you
better. Only you must give me a chance. Were you really coming to see
me when we met?"
"No, I wasn't. Frankly, I was not at all sure that you would care to
see me. I know, as you have said, that my view of chance acquaintances
is a man's; and how was I to know that your words as you rattled off in
your hansom were not merely intended as a courteous dismissal?"
She put down her cup and saucer, seeming quite distressed.
"Oh, I hope you won't think that of me! I assure you, Mr. Townsend,
that if I had wished to dismiss you I should have done so. I hope you
won't mind my saying--since you have yourself said so much--that as I
left you my feeling was that, for once in a way, I had made a chance
acquaintance which it might be worth one's while to cultivate. And, as
I told you, I was practically alone in this big town, and when one is
alone one does want friends, and--I think that that's all."
That might be all, but I understood. When I left I felt that I liked
Mrs. Carruth even better than I had done at first. She interested me in
a really curious way.
CHAPTER XIV.
SELLING BOOMJOPFS.
The newspapers on the Wednesday and Thursday were beyond my
understanding. I had never before so clearly realised how great a stir
a little thing might make. The little incident at Three Bridges had
assumed the dimensions of an event of national importance. Had one of
the great decisive battles of the world just been fought it could
scarcely have seemed to occupy a greater space in the public mind.
Everywhere the words stared you in the face, everywhere you heard the
words slipping from somebody's tongue--Three Bridges Tragedy! At least
the thing received a magnificent advertisement. What a heap of money
would have been required to procure a similar advertisement for
Pickemup's Pills.
They appeared to have got the business into an elegant muddle. Either
the luck was on my side, or some one had blundered. People seemed to
have leaped to the conclusion that Louise had been thrown from a
passing train--my pitching the body over the hedge on to the railway
embankment, read by the light of after events, amounted to a stroke of
inspiration. The papers were full of observations on the dangers of
English railway travelling. Why were not our carriages all thrown open
to the world? Our present system of horse-boxes rendered it possible
for the innocent A. to be cooped up with the dangerous B. through sixty
miles of country. The means provided for inter-communication, the
alarm-bell, and all the rest of it, were fatally insufficient, as
witness this most horrid instance. As I read I stared.
From my point of view the most extraordinary part of the affair was
that there actually seemed some excuse for the public blundering.
Immediately after the arrival at Victoria of the 8.40 from Brighton, it
had been discovered that the window of one of the first-class carriages
was smashed to shivers, the compartment was stained with blood, and
bore every appearance of having been the scene of a recent struggle.
That was the very train which had passed while Louise and I had been
arguing at the gate--had another little argument been taking place on
board the train? But what capped the record was a statement which had
been volunteered by a Brighton porter. He declared--or was stated to
have declared--that he had shown a lady into the identical compartment
in which the window was smashed, just as the train was starting; that
the only other passenger the compartment contained was a gentleman,
whom, if he saw him again, he thought he should recognise;
and--_mirabile dictum!_ he had seen the body which had been found on
the line, and in the dead woman had instantly recognised the lady he
had shown into the carriage. The question now was--all the world was
asking it--where was the gentleman?
Yes--where was he?
On the Thursday I received another line from Groeden--"Sell Boomjopfs."
This recalled to my mind the fact that, by the Monday morning's post,
he had counselled me to buy them. I had started Citywards to act on his
advice. The curious coincidence of finding Mr. Tennant scribbling
Louise's name all over a sheet of paper had prevented my putting my
intention into execution.
Groeden's latest advice sent me to the money article. Since Monday
Boomjopfs had gone up fourteen. What an ass I had truly been! A pretty
pile I had thrown away! What little game Mr. Groeden and his friends at
Johannesburg were up to, I was not sufficiently in the know to be able
to say. I took it that, the bulls having had an innings, the bears were
to have their turn. The top price having been reached, the word was
"Knock 'em." So off I went to sell what I had been fool enough to just
miss buying.
I thought that I would give Tennant another try. When I reached Austin
Friars I was informed that he was ill--had been away from the office
since Monday. While I was hesitating what I should do--whether, that
is, I should give a commission to his managing man, or go elsewhere--I
heard a voice in the inner office which rather made me cock my ears.
The voice was my rascally brother's. He was not speaking in a whisper.
His words struck me as queer ones.
"If Mr. Tennant takes my advice, he'll see me though he's dying."
"I shall see Mr. Tennant at his private address to-night. I will tell
him what you say. What name shall I give?"
"Name? Tell him the gentleman who came up with him on Sunday night from
Brighton."
I went out into the street, still not clear in my mind as to what I
should do. Presently, along came Alexander. But what a change had come
over him since Monday! Then he was a faded ruin; now he was a vision of
splendour. He was arrayed in new garments from top to toe--and not
garments which had been procured at a slop-shop either. Alexander must
have come into a fortune. The glory of him made one blink one's eyes.
Again, at sight of me he did not seem glad.
"Still out?" I began.
"Sir!" He pulled his hat more over to the side of his head. "Allow me
to point out to you that the fact of your being my brother does not
entitle you to insult me. May I ask what you mean by saying 'Still
out'?"
"My dear Alexander, is it possible that you can think me capable of
insulting you? I am only too glad to see that you still are out. And in
such gorgeous apparel! What universal provider have you been inspiring
with confidence?"
He drew his imitation astrachan cuffs further down over his wrists.
"I believe, my dear Reginald, that I informed you on Monday that I am a
private detective on a considerable scale. As such, it is part of my
business to wear disguises. You saw me in one of them on Monday. At
this moment I am in my usual attire."
"Indeed! and excellently it becomes you. Almost anybody might mistake
you for a respectable person. Alexander, by the way, what was that you
were saying about your having come up with Mr. Tennant on Sunday night
from Brighton?"
Alexander looked at me for a moment as if my question had knocked the
sense right out of him. Then, without a word, turning into a narrow
passage which was on our right, he walked off down it at the rate of a
good five miles an hour. I let him go, though what had sent him off in
such a style at such a pace was hidden from me.
I did sell Boomjopfs, but not through Mr. Tennant's managing man.
That night was to be the second meeting of the club. I dressed when I
got home: then I put my proofs into my pocket. After a solitary dinner
I started off to give back to the Club its Honour.
CHAPTER XV.
THE CLUB.
The club held its meetings in Horseferry Road. I had never been there
in the daytime, but by night the approaches, the surroundings, the
place itself did not strike one as being particularly savoury. One
wondered what the deuce one was doing in that galley.
We were instructed to tell cabmen to pull up at the Gas Light and Coke
Company's Offices. Since it was not deemed expedient to let even
jarveys know exactly where in that salubrious locality men with the
price of a cab-fare in their pockets happened to be going, the rest of
the distance was to be walked.
I fancy that in the daytime the lower part of the house was used as
offices. When I reached it the street door was closed, the place seemed
deserted, not a light was to be seen. Each of us had been provided with
a pass-key. Letting myself in, I found myself in a pitch-dark passage.
Striking a match, I used it to light me up two flights of stairs. At
the top of the second flight I was confronted by another door. On the
left-hand side, against the wall, was an electric button. I pressed it
twice, then counted three; pressed it once, counted another three, then
pressed it twice again. Almost immediately afterwards a gong was struck
within. While the sound was still vibrating in the air, I sang out--
"Reginald!"
As I uttered my Christian name the door was opened and Pendarvon
received me on the threshold within.
"Welcome, Reginald! You are the first-comer," he said.
We turned into a room on the right. The room was plainly furnished, the
walls were painted red, a red carpet was on the floor. In the centre
stood a good-sized oval-shaped mahogany table. Thirteen chairs were
placed round it. In front of each was a decanter of brandy and a glass.
In front of one was a manuscript book, bound in crimson morocco, pens,
ink, a crimson velvet bag, and a small heap of red cards, of the size
and shape of ordinary playing-cards.
As Pendarvon had said, he and I, up to the present, had the place to
ourselves. Cecil Pendarvon was fairly tall and fairly broad--the florid
type of man. He had fair hair, fair beard, and light blue eyes. Your
first impression of the man was that he was always laughing. When you
came to study him a little closer you began to doubt if his laugh
suggested merriment. I knew him well. I had come to understand that the
more he laughed the worse it would be for some one.
He stood, stroking his long fair beard, laughing at me now.
"Pendarvon, I don't quite see what's the use of the counting, and the
ornamental ringing, and all the rest of it outside the door."
"You mayn't see it now. One of these days you may. There may come a
time when it will be advisable that we should know that the person at
the door is not a member of the club."
"If you mean that one of these days we are likely to receive a visit
from the police, you don't suppose that we should be able to keep them
out, if they had made up their minds to enter. We should be trapped
like rabbits in a warren."
"I think not. That door is of sheet iron. It is held in position by
four steel bolts which run into a wall made of solid Portland cement.
By the time the police got through it we should be miles away."
I looked round the apartment.
"Is this room then not what it seems? Is there a hidden door?"
"There is not. But there is something quite as good. There is a
fireplace."
"A fireplace?"
"And likewise a chimney, which is a chimney. When I took this place I
had an eye to all the possibilities. Look here."
He went to the fireplace, a huge old-fashioned one, probably over six
feet wide. The stove occupied not one-third of it. He stepped inside, I
following. There was ample room for both of us. He pointed upwards.
"Stanchions, which will make excellent steps."
I saw that there were stanchions, rising one above the other, set in
the side of the chimney.
"Where do they lead to?"
"Climb up twelve, put your hand out to the right, you will find a bolt.
Draw it, push, a door will open. Go through it, you will find yourself
upon the roof."
"The roof, at night--I thank you!"
"The chimney-stack will be on your left, between you and a fall into
the street. Keep it on your left, go straight forward--you will find
yourself upon the edge."
"The edge! Of the roof? Pendarvon, my thanks increase!"
"If you feel for it on your right you will find a rail. This is the
rail of a bridge which crosses from this house to one in the street
behind. When I took this room I took that house. It will remain empty.
Cross the bridge. Close to your hand, on your left, you will find an
iron ladder set straight against the wall. Descend it, you will land
yourself on the flat roof of an outhouse. Within a foot of you, still
to your left, there is a window. It will be always left unlatched. You
have only to raise it, enter the empty house, strike a light, and walk
downstairs into the street. To reach that particular house, in that
particular street, by road, a policeman will have to walk two miles."
"How long is this bridge of yours?"
"Under twenty feet."
"And how wide?"
"Perhaps ten inches--it is a single plank. The rail by which you hold
is firmly fixed and bolted at either end. What the whole arrangement
was intended for originally is a puzzle I have not attempted to solve.
I heard of it. I thought it might suit us."
"Don't you think we ought to do what the firemen do--have a full dress
rehearsal? I, for one, should hardly care to seek that path to safety
without having had some practical experience of the peculiarities and
perils of the way."
Pendarvon laughed.
"You fellows can have a rehearsal to-night, if you like--only you will
get yourselves into a deuce of a mess. I don't guarantee that you will
be able to keep yourselves clean. I only guarantee that that way, at a
pinch, you will be able to save your necks."
As he finished speaking, the electric bell rang twice; there was a
pause; then a single ring; another pause; then twice more. Pendarvon
went to a gong which was suspended from the ceiling outside the room.
He struck it, not too loudly. A voice on the other side of the other
door exclaimed--
"Gustave!"
As Pendarvon opened the door, he turned to me.
"Gustave Rudini."
It was Rudini--an undersized, ill-dressed little fellow, more like a
waiter out of work than anything else I know. Pendarvon had had some
difficulty in completing the tail of his thirteen. He had insisted that
there must be thirteen members. In order to make up the number he had
had to bring in three fellows who, to say the least of it, were not in
society. Of these three Rudini was one. According to Pendarvon, he was
a Swiss anarchist. Since he killed on principle, he was not likely to
hesitate to kill for fun. His was not a pleasant personality. He
addressed every one as "Citizen "--as he did me now.
"Well, citizen, the good work begins." I asked him what he meant. "Have
you not seen about the bombs at Saragosa--that is what I call good
reading."
I shuddered. I felt more than half disposed to knock the creature down.
Some demons had thrown bombs among a crowded audience at a theatre. No
end of people had been killed and injured. The brute called the account
of the affair good reading.
I suppose he read my feelings in my face. He stretched out his hands in
front of him--with a snarl which was perhaps meant for a grin.
"Do you not agree with me, citizen, that it is good reading? If it
comes to killing, why kill units instead of tens? It is only a little
matter of arithmetical progression."
The next comer was a madman out and out. He was a religionist of a sect
of which, I suspect, he was the first member and the last. He believed,
it seemed, that death meant annihilation. Annihilation, to use a
paradox, was all he lived for. But it had been revealed to him--I never
heard by whom, or how--that he himself never could attain annihilation
until he had killed some one, as it were, to clear the way. So he had
joined the club, in order that his destiny might the sooner be
fulfilled. His name was Shepherd--Henry Shepherd. He was a lanky,
loosely-built man, with long iron grey hair, and sailors' eyes--eyes,
that is, which were calm and deep. As he entered, he seated himself at
table without uttering a word. He was the second of Pendarvon's
gathered and garnered three.
The fellows now came hard upon each others' heels. Unless I was
mistaken, they had for the most part, been quenching their thirst.
Their eyes shone; their speech was inclined to be erratic; about some
of them there was a joviality which they had found in their glasses.
Teddy Hibbard, for one, was distinctly drunk. He came with Eugene
Silvester, who was not much better. The pair staggered up to me.
Teddy tried to steady himself by a somewhat close attachment to
Silvester's arm.
"I say, Reggie, old fellow, Eugene and I have been making up our minds
whom we'll slaughter. Whom do you think we've decided on?"
"My dear Teddy, I haven't the faintest notion. Don't you think you'd
better take a chair?"
"Thank you, old boy, I think I will." He took one just in time.
"We've decided on slaughtering the first chap we meet of the name of
Jones--there are such a lot of them about, you know."
Archie Beaupré came across to me. He was among the last to arrive. He
also had been drinking. But liquor did not affect him as it did Teddy
Hibbard. He never lost his equilibrium. There never came a stammer into
his speech. Nor, in Iago's sense, did it steal away his brains. When
drink entered into Archie, the devil went with it. When he had drunk
enough to stupefy an ordinary man, he was very near to genius. In that
condition I have known him write lines which no poet need be ashamed to
own; and I have known him do things which must have set all the imps of
Satan chuckling.
As he advanced to me, a casual acquaintance might not have supposed
that he had been exceeding in the slightest degree. But I knew better.
I knew it by something that was in his face, and in his eyes; by the
ring that was in his voice, when he spoke; by the very way in which he
clasped me by the hand.
"Here's luck!" he said--"I'm with you all the way."
CHAPTER XVI.
DRAWING THE LOT.
When we had taken our places, Pendarvon commenced proceedings. He
looked round at us and laughed, as if the whole proceedings had been
some mighty joke.
"Gentlemen, the usual preliminaries, if you please."
He had the crimson-covered book open in front of him. He read aloud the
oath by which we all had bound ourselves. As he did so, men sobered
down a little. The oath which he had evolved from his mischief-making
brain was calculated to make one sober. It was the rule that, at each
meeting, the oath was to be re-sworn. Having recited it, with his right
hand resting on the open page, Pendarvon affixed to it his signature.
The book went round. Each man recited the oath, his hand resting on the
page, and signed.
By the time Pendarvon had the book again, a change came over the spirit
of the scene. The suggestion of frivolity which had been in the air had
vanished. Hibbard and Silvester, in spite of the assistance which they
had received from outside sources, did not look happy. Pendarvon read
out the signatures. When he came to one he stopped.
"Teddy, have you signed?"
Hibbard was indignant--or feigned to be.
"Signed? Of course I've signed! Can't you read it?"
Pendarvon tugged at his beard and laughed.
"Be shot if I can! I can see a smudge, and that's all I can see. In a
matter of this importance a signature should be writ as plain as
copper-plate, so that all who run may read. Teddy, would you mind
signing again, this time a little clearer? and Silvester might follow
suit. You would not care to take us at an advantage, and be the only
two among us to keep your names dark."
Pendarvon went to Teddy with the book in his hand. Placing it on the
table in front of him, he leaned over his shoulder while he wrote.
"That's better, Teddy; that's plain as print. 'Edward Hibbard,' that's
something like a name. Now, Silvester, if you won't mind."
Silvester leaned back in his chair, and frowned.
"I don't understand. That's my usual signature. What else do you want?"
"We want it a little plainer; nothing more."
Silvester grumbled, but he did what he was asked to do. He signed
again, and plainer. That was like Pendarvon. If he had made up his mind
that a man should do a thing, the odds were that the man would do it,
although against his own will.
Pendarvon returned to his seat in triumph. As he talked to us he kept
on laughing. The ugliest thing about him was his voice; it was harsh
and strident--sometimes it seemed to strike one like a whip.
"Gentlemen, we have all of us been looking forward with pleasurable
anticipations to this, our second, meeting. I need not tell you why. A
month to-night our Honour was committed to the hands of one of us. We
are here to ask for its return."
With a laughing gesture, he turned to me.
"Reggie, our Honour is in your hands."
As he sat down, I rose, and as I rose a sound which was almost like a
sigh went round the room. I fancy that some of the fellows were
preparing themselves for what might be to come, by taking in a
good supply of breath. That all eyes were fixed on me I was well
aware--fixed on me, I mean, with a curious, unusual kind of stare. They
looked at me as if they would have almost rather not, and yet could not
help but look. I took out my pocket-book; I laid it on the table. Every
little movement which I made was followed by their eyes. I doubt if
ever a man had a more attentive audience.
"Gentlemen of the Murder Club, I greet you."
I bowed to each individual. As I did so I noticed how pale they seemed
to look.
"I occupy, on this occasion, a unique position. I take it that no man
ever stood in such a pair of shoes as mine before. There have been
murder clubs, which have been called by other names. They have
concerned themselves with revolutions--with religious, social,
political reforms. A murder club, the object of which has been
amusement, pure and simple, I doubt if there ever before has been. To
our founders I owe a special, a peculiar gratitude. Beaupré, I bow to
you--the original suggestion of our Club was yours."
I bowed to Archie. In return he waved his hand to me.
"And a devilish good suggestion, too!"
"Beaupré, the words you use could not be bettered. They exactly
describe the theme. Mr. Chairman, I bow to you--it was you who clothed
with flesh the dry bones of the suggestion, breathed on them, and gave
them life."
I bowed to Pendarvon. Laughing, he bowed again to me. He knew I hated
him, and I knew he hated me.
"I owe these special thanks to our founders, gentlemen, because, during
the month which is past, they have provided me with such great, such
unwonted sport. So soon as I knew that the Honour of the Club was
indeed entrusted to my keeping, I became like the old-fashioned
sportsman, who had to do his own beating and flush for himself his
birds. In my case there was this marked peculiarity, that I did not
even know where to find the cover in which a bird might happen to be
hiding."
Pausing, I looked each member in the face in turn. Odd spectacles they
most of them presented. The majority of them shifted their eyes as they
saw mine coming, as if they were unwilling, or unable, to meet my
glances.
"Gentlemen, I found the cover and the bird. I have had the
gratification of being able to fulfil the promise which I made to you.
I return the Honour of the Club, dyed a more vivid crimson stain."
As I spoke, two or three fellows gasped. I don't know who they were,
but the queer sound which they emitted caused me to smile. Taking out
the Honour of the Club from my pocket-book, I held it up in front of
me. There was silence. Then Pendarvon spoke--
"Are we to take you literally?"
"In the sense that the Honour of the Club has, literally, been dyed a
more vivid crimson--that, in other words, it has been dipped in the
sacrificial blood? No. My meaning, there, was metaphorical. There was
no blood to dip it in."
I handed the Honour of the Club across the table to Pendarvon. As he
took it, he looked at me askance.
"That is not all you are going to tell us? The rules require you to
furnish full particulars."
"Those particulars, Mr. Chairman, I am now about to furnish. The bird I
flushed, marked, and bagged was a hen."
"A hen?"
"A woman, Mr. Chairman. Name, Louise O'Donnel. Age, turned twenty.
Date, last Sunday. Scene, Three Bridges. Cause of death,
strangulation."
Pendarvon leaned towards me over the table.
"Are you responsible, then, for what the papers have christened the
Three Bridges Tragedy?"
"I am."
"Did you throw the woman from the train?"
"I did not. I threw the woman from the field, over the hedge, on to the
railway embankment. I should explain to you, gentlemen, that it seems
not unlikely that I may become the subject of a curious coincidence. I
killed the bird under the railway bridge. As I was doing so a train
passed overhead. This must have been the train of which you have read
in the public prints. I cannot pretend to predict the course of events,
but I can assure you that whoever smashed that window and had that
little rough and tumble in the railway carriage had nothing to do with
the Three Bridges Tragedy. For that I am responsible, and I alone."
Silence followed my words. I glanced round. Various expressions were on
the fellows' faces, and among them was one which suggested doubt. I
noted, with amusement, that what I had anticipated had taken place.
They doubted if I had done what I had declared I had.
Pendarvon gave this feeling voice.
"The case is a little delicate, dear Reggie. A man say that he has done
a thing, and then when B, on the strength of what A says, goes and does
likewise, he may find that A has been having a joke with him--don't you
see my point?"
"You want proofs."
"You say that this Three Bridges business is yours. Suppose that some
one else is arrested for it, and--we will go so far--is hung, what
shall you do?"
"Do? Why, let him hang."
"I see. Of course. You would."
"In a matter of this sort proofs are rather difficult to give, unless
you were all to come with me to see the fun. I will tell you my story."
Then I told them exactly what had happened on the Sunday evening, as it
is written. At the close I took two letters from my pocket-book.
"Mr. Chairman, I have here two letters. The first is the one which I
wrote asking the lady to meet me at East Grinstead--that I took from
her pocket after she was dead. The second is the one in which she
promised that she would. I have pleasure in submitting them to the
attention of the club."
I passed the letter to Pendarvon. From one of my tail pockets I
produced a small parcel.
"You will have observed, gentlemen, that it is stated that nothing was
found in the woman's pockets. That was owing to the fact that I had
previously taken the precaution to empty it. I hold the contents of her
pocket in my hand: a letter--that the chairman has--a purse, some keys,
a pocket-handkerchief. This scrap of silk ribbon suspended this locket
to her neck; in the locket you will find my portrait. That also I took
from her after she was dead. I offer it, with the other items, for the
inspection of the club."
Pendarvon read the letters carefully through; then, without remark, he
passed them to the man who sat beside him. After examining my relics,
he passed them too. The batch went round. One or two of the men
carefully examined each separate item; most just glanced at them in
passing; some seemed to shrink from touching them, as if afraid of
coming into close contact.
When they had gone round, Pendarvon rose.
"I think, gentlemen, that our friend's statement has given general
satisfaction."
Rudini tapped with his finger on the table.
"It was a woman; it is not a man's work to kill a woman."
Pendarvon laughed.
"There, Rudini, you must excuse me if I differ. I think that it is
essentially a man's work. The women are always killing us. It is just
as well that we should take our turn at killing them. Indeed, were it
not too late I should almost be disposed to suggest that it should
always be a woman who was killed."
Budini brought his fist down with a bang.
"Then I shall go."
"It will be soon enough, Budini, for you to talk of going when the
suggestion's made. I repeat, gentlemen, that I think that Mr. Townsend
has satisfied us that he really has done something for the Honour of
the Club. As he himself says, in cases of this sort, the ocular proof
it is almost impossible to give. But he has given us proofs, as it
seems to me, of a sufficiently convincing kind. Are you content? Those
of you who are will please stand up."
All rose--Rudini after a moment's hesitation.
"I see, gentlemen, that we are all content. We have excellent cause. Be
so good as to charge your glasses. We thank you, Reggie; we appreciate
the good deed which you have done, and we drink to your next fortunate
adventure."
They drained their glasses--not, I suspect, before some of them were in
need of what was in them. They would have sampled the brandy before had
it not been a rule of the club that nothing was to be drunk except in
response to the chairman's toasts.
Pendarvon continued--
"There only remains one thing for our friend to do."
He wrote something in the book in front of him. Then he passed the book
to me.
"We have to ask you, Reggie, to put your name to that."
I saw that he had put the date of the preceding Sunday, and then--
"Louise O'Donnel--For the Honour of the Club."
"If I put my name to that it may be tantamount to a conf
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