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Recalled to Life

by Grant Allen · English · Gutenberg #5832 · 304,078 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Recalled to Life

Author: Grant Allen


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5832]
                Most recently updated: May 24, 2013

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECALLED TO LIFE ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.










RECALLED TO LIFE

BY GRANT ALLEN






CONTENTS.





I. UNA CALLINGHAM'S FIRST RECOLLECTION

II. BEGINNING LIFE AGAIN

III. AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

IV. THE STORY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS

V. I BECOME A WOMAN

VI. RE-LIVING MY LIFE

VII. THE GRANGE AT WOODBURY

VIII. A VISION OF DEAD YEARS

IX. HATEFUL SUSPICIONS

X. YET ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPH

XI. THE VISION RECURS

XII. THE MOORES OF TORQUAY

XIII. DR. IVOR OF BABBICOMBE

XIV. MY WELCOME TO CANADA

XV. A NEW ACQUAINTANCE

XVI. MY PLANS ALTER

XVII. A STRANGE RECOGNITION

XVIII. MURDER WILL OUT

XIX. THE REAL MURDERER

XX. THE STRANGER FROM THE SEA

XXI. THE PLOT UNRAVELS ITSELF

XXII. MY MEMORY RETURNS

XXIII. THE FATAL SHOT

XXIV. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL






CHAPTER I.

UNA CALLINGHAM'S FIRST RECOLLECTION


It may sound odd to say so, but the very earliest fact that
impressed itself on my memory was a scene that took place--so I was
told--when I was eighteen years old, in my father's house, The
Grange, at Woodbury.

My babyhood, my childhood, my girlhood, my school-days were all
utterly blotted out by that one strange shock of horror. My past
life became exactly as though it had never been. I forgot my own
name. I forgot my mother-tongue. I forgot everything I had ever done
or known or thought about. Except for the power to walk and stand
and perform simple actions of every-day use, I became a baby in arms
again, with a nurse to take care of me. The doctors told me, later,
I had fallen into what they were pleased to call "a Second State." I
was examined and reported upon as a Psychological Curiosity. But at
the time, I knew nothing of all this. A thunderbolt, as it were,
destroyed at one blow every relic, every trace of my previous
existence; and I began life all over again, with that terrible scene
of blood as my first birthday and practical starting point.

I remember it all even now with horrible distinctness. Each item in
it photographed itself vividly on my mind's eye. I saw it as in a
picture--just as clearly, just as visually. And the effect, now I
look back upon it with a maturer judgment, was precisely like a
photograph in another way too. It was wholly unrelated in time and
space: it stood alone by itself, lighted up by a single spark,
without rational connection before or after it. What led up to it
all, I hadn't the very faintest idea. I only knew the Event itself
took place; and I, like a statue, stood rooted in the midst of it.

And this was the Picture as, for many long months, it presented
itself incessantly to my startled brain, by day and by night, awake
or asleep, in colours more distinct than words can possibly paint
them.

I saw myself standing in a large, square room--a very handsome old
room, filled with bookshelves like a library. On one side stood a
table, and on the table a box. A flash of light rendered the whole
scene visible. But it wasn't light that came in through the window.
It was rather like lightning, so quick it was, and clear, and
short-lived, and terrible. Half-way to the door, I stood and looked
in horror at the sight revealed before my eyes by that sudden flash.
A man lay dead in a little pool of blood that gurgled by short jets
from a wound on his left breast. I didn't even know at the moment
the man was my father; though slowly, afterward, by the concurrent
testimony of others, I learnt to call him so. But his relationship
wasn't part of the Picture to me. There, he was only in my eyes a
man--a man well past middle age, with a long white beard, now
dabbled with the thick blood that kept gurgling so hatefully from
the red spot in his waistcoat. He lay on his back, half-curled round
toward one arm, exactly as he fell. And the revolver he had been
shot with lay on the ground not far from him.

But that wasn't all the Picture. The murderer was there as well as
the victim. Besides the table, and the box, and the wounded man, and
the pistol, I saw another figure behind, getting out of the window.
It was the figure of a man, I should say about twenty-five or
thirty: he had just raised himself to the ledge, and was poising to
leap; for the room, as I afterwards learned, though on the ground
floor, stood raised on a basement above the garden behind. I
couldn't see the man's face, or any part of him, indeed, except his
stooping back, and his feet, and his neck, and his elbows. But what
little I saw was printed indelibly on the very fibre of my nature. I
could have recognised that man anywhere if I saw him in the same
attitude. I could have sworn to him in any court of justice on the
strength of his back alone, so vividly did I picture it.

He was tall and thin, but he stooped like a hunchback.

There were other points worth notice in that strange mental
photograph. The man was well-dressed, and had the bearing of a
gentleman. Looking back upon the scene long after, when I had
learned once more what words and things meant, I could feel
instinctively this was no common burglar, no vulgar murderer.
Whatever might have been the man's object in shooting my father, I
was certain from the very first it was not mere robbery. But at the
time, I'm confident, I never reasoned about his motives or his
actions in any way. I merely took in the scene, as it were,
passively, in a great access of horror, which rendered me incapable
of sense or thought or speech or motion. I saw the table, the box,
the apparatus by its side, the murdered man on the floor, the pistol
lying pointed with its muzzle towards his body, the pool of blood
that soaked deep into the Turkey carpet beneath, the ledge of the
window, the young man's rounded back as he paused and hesitated. And
I also saw, like an instantaneous flash, one hand pushed behind him,
waving me off, I almost thought, with the gesture of one warning.

Why didn't I remember the murderer's face? That puzzled me long
after. I must have seen him before: I must surely have been there
when the crime was committed. I must have known at the moment
everything about it. But the blank that came over my memory, came
over it with the fatal shot. All that went before, was to me as
though it were not. I recollect vaguely, as the first point in my
life, that my eyes were shut hard, and darkness came over me. While
they were so shut, I heard an explosion. Next moment, I believe, I
opened them, and saw this Picture. No sensitive-plate could have
photographed it more instantaneously, as by an electric spark, than
did my retina that evening, as for months after I saw it all. In
another moment, I shut my lids again, and all was over. There was
darkness once more, and I was alone with my Horror.

In years then to come, I puzzled my head much as to the meaning of
the Picture. Gradually, step by step, I worked some of it out, with
the aid of my friends, and of the evidence tendered at the coroner's
inquest. But for the moment I knew nothing of all that. I was a
newborn baby again. Only with this important difference. They say
our minds at birth are like a sheet of white paper, ready to take
whatever impressions may fall upon them. Mine was like a sheet all
covered and obscured by one hateful picture. It was weeks, I fancy,
before I knew or was conscious of anything else but that. The
Picture and a great Horror divided my life between them.

Recollect, I didn't even remember the murdered man was my father. I
didn't recognise the room as one in our own old house at Woodbury. I
didn't know anything at all except what I tell you here. I saw the
corpse, the blood, the box on the table, the wires by the side, the
bottles and baths and plates of an amateur photographer's kit,
without knowing what they all meant. I saw even the books not as
books but as visible points of colour. It had something the effect
on me that it might have upon anyone else to be dropped suddenly on
the stage of a theatre at the very moment when a hideous crime was
being committed, and to believe it real, or rather, to know it by
some vague sense as hateful and actual.

Here my history began. I date from that Picture. My second babyhood
was passed in the shadow of the abiding Horror.




CHAPTER II.

BEGINNING LIFE AGAIN


Wha happened after is far more vague to me. Compared with the
vividness of that one initial Picture, the events of the next few
months have only the blurred indistinctness of all childish
memories. For I was a child once more, in all save stature, and had
to learn to remember things just like other children.

I will try to tell the whole tale over again exactly as it then
struck me.

After the Picture, I told you, I shut my eyes in alarm for a second.
When I opened them once more there was a noise, a very great noise,
and my recollection is that people had burst wildly into the room,
and were lifting the dead body, and bending over it in astonishment,
and speaking loud to me, and staring at me. I believe they broke the
door open, though that's rather inference than memory; I learnt it
afterwards. Soon some of them rushed to the open window and looked
out into the garden. Then, suddenly, a man gave a shout, and leaping
on to the sill, jumped down in pursuit, as I thought, of the
murderer. As time went on, more people flocked in; and some of them
looked at the body and the pool of blood; and some of them turned
round and spoke to me. But what they said or what they meant I
hadn't the slightest idea. The noise of the pistol-shot still rang
loud in my ears: the ineffable Horror still drowned all my senses.

After a while, another man came in, with an air of authority, and
felt my pulse and my brow, and lifted me on to a sofa. But I didn't
even remember there was such a thing as a doctor. I lay there for a
while, quite dazed; and the man, who was kindly-looking and
close-shaven and fatherly, gave me something in a glass: after which
he turned round and examined the body. He looked hard at the
revolver, too, and chalked its place on the ground. Then I saw no
more, for two women lifted me in their arms and took me up to bed;
and with that, the first scene of my childhood seemed to end
entirely.

I lay in bed for a day or two, during which time I was dimly aware
of much commotion going on here and there in the house; and the
doctor came night and morning, and tended me carefully. I suppose I
may call him the doctor now, though at the time I didn't call him
so--I knew him merely as a visible figure. I don't believe I THOUGHT
at all during those earliest days, or gave things names in any known
language. They rather passed before me dreamily in long procession,
like a vague panorama. When people spoke to me, it was like the
sound of a foreign tongue. I attached no more importance to anything
they said than to the cawing of the rooks in the trees by the
rectory.

At the end of five days, the doctor came once more, and watched me a
great deal, and spoke in a low voice with a woman in a white cap and
a clean white apron who waited on me daily. As soon as he was gone,
my nurse, as I learned afterwards to call her,--it's so hard not to
drop into the language of everyday life when one has to describe
things to other people,--my nurse got me up, with much ado and
solemnity, and dressed me in a new black frock, very dismal and
ugly, and put on me a black hat, with a dreary-looking veil; and
took me downstairs, with the aid of a man who wore a suit of blue
clothes and a queer kind of helmet. The man was of the sort I now
call a policeman. These pictures are far less definite in my mind
than the one that begins my second life; but still, in a vague kind
of way, I pretty well remember them.

On the ground floor, nurse made me walk; and I walked out to the
door, where a cab was in waiting, drawn slowly by a pair of horses.
People were looking on, on either side, between the door and the
cab--great crowds of people, peering eagerly forward; and two more
men in blue suits were holding them off by main force from surging
against me and incommoding me. I don't think they wanted to hurt me:
it was rather curiosity than anger I saw in their faces. But I was
afraid, and shrank back. They were eager to see me, however, and
pressed forward with loud cries, so that the men in blue suits had
hard work to prevent them.

I know now there were two reasons why they wanted to see me. I was
the murdered man's daughter, and I was a Psychological Phenomenon.

We drove away, through green lanes, in the cab, nurse and I; and in
spite of the Horror, which surrounded me always, and the Picture,
which recurred every time I shut my eyes to think, I enjoyed that
drive very much, with all the fresh vividness of childish pleasure.
Though I learnt later I was eighteen years old at least, I was in my
inner self just like a baby of ten months, going ta-ta. At the end
of the drive, we drew up sharp at a house, where some more men stood
about, with red bands on their caps, and took boxes from the cab and
put them into a van, while nurse and I got into a different
carriage, drawn quickly by a thing that went puff-puff, puff-puff. I
didn't know it was a railway, and yet in a way I did. I half forgot,
half remembered it. Things that I'd seen in my previous state seemed
to come back to me, in fact, as soon as I saw them; or at least to
be more familiar to me than things I'd never seen before. Especially
afterwards. But while things were remembered, persons, I found
by-and-by, were completely forgotten. Or rather, while I remembered
after a while generalities, such as houses and men, recognising them
in the abstract as a house, or a man, or a horse, or a baby, I
forgot entirely particulars, such as the names of people and the
places I had lived in. Words soon came back to me: names and facts
were lost: I knew the world as a whole, not my own old part in it.

Well, not to make my story too long in these early childish stages,
we went on the train, as it seemed to me, a long way across fields
to Aunt Emma's. I didn't know she was Aunt Emma then for, indeed, I
had never seen her before; but I remember arriving there at her
pretty little cottage, and seeing a sweet old lady--barely sixty, I
should say, but with smooth white hair,--who stood on the steps of
the house and cried like a child, and held out her hands to me, and
hugged me and kissed me. And it was there that I learned my first
word. A great many times over, she spoke about "Una." She said it so
often, I caught vaguely at the sound. And nurse, when she answered
her, said "Una" also. Then, when Aunt Emma called me, she always
said "Una." So it came to me dimly that Una meant ME. But I didn't
exactly recollect it had been my name before, though I learned in
due time afterwards that I'd always been called so. However, just at
first, I picked up the word as a child might pick it up; and when,
some months later, I began to talk easily, I spoke of myself always
in the third person as Una. I can remember with a smile now how I
went one day to Aunt Emma--I, a great girl of eighteen--and held up
my skirt, that I'd muddied in the street, and said to her, with
great gravity:

"Una naughty girl: Una got her frock wet. Aunt Emma going to scold
poor Una for being so naughty!"

Not that I often smiled, in those days; for, in spite of Aunt Emma's
kindness, my second girlhood, like my first, was a very unhappy one.
The Horror and the Picture pursued me too close. It was months and
months before I could get rid for a moment of that persistent
nightmare. And yet I had everything else on earth to make me happy.
Aunt Emma lived in a pretty east-coast town, with high bracken-clad
downs, and breezy common beyond; while in front stretched great
sands, where I loved to race about and to play cricket and tennis.
It was the loveliest town that ever you saw in your life, with a
broken chancel to the grand old church, and a lighthouse on a hill,
with delicious views to seaward. The doctor had sent me there (I
know now) as soon as I was well enough to move, in order to get me
away from the terrible associations of The Grange at Woodbury. As
long as I lived in the midst of scenes which would remind me of poor
father, he said, and of his tragical death, there was no hope of my
recovery. The only chance for me to regain what I had lost in that
moment of shock was complete change of air, of life, of
surroundings. Aunt Emma, for her part, was only too glad to take me
in: and as poor papa had died intestate, Aunt Emma was now, of
course, my legal guardian.

She was my mother's sister, I learned as time went on; and there had
been feud while he lived between her and my father. Why, I couldn't
imagine. She was the sweetest old soul I ever knew, indeed, and what
on earth he could have quarrelled with her about I never could
fathom. She tended me so carefully that as months went by, the
Horror began to decrease and my soul to become calm again. I grew
gradually able to remain in a room alone for a few minutes at a
time, and to sleep at night in a bed by myself, if only there was a
candle, and nurse was in another bed in the same room close by me.

Yet every now and again a fresh shivering fit came on. At such times
I would cover my head with the bedclothes and cower, and see the
Picture even so floating visibly in mid-air like a vision before me.

My second education must have been almost as much of a business as
my first had been, only rather less longsome. I had first to relearn
the English language, which came back to me by degrees, much
quicker, of course, than I had picked it up in my childhood. Then I
had to begin again with reading, writing, and arithmetic--all new
to me in a way, and all old in another. Whatever I learned and
whatever I read seemed novel while I learned it, but familiar the
moment I had thoroughly grasped it. To put it shortly, I could
remember nothing of myself, but I could recall many things, after a
time, as soon as they were told me clearly. The process was rather a
process of reminding than of teaching, properly so called. But it
took some years for me to recall things, even when I was reminded of
them.

I spent four years at Aunt Emma's, growing gradually to my own age
again. At the end of that time I was counted a girl of twenty-two,
much like any other. But I was older than my age; and the shadow of
the Horror pursued me incessantly.

All that time I knew, too, from what I heard said in the house that
my father's murderer had never been caught, and that nobody even
knew who he was, or anything definite about him. The police gave him
up as an uncaught criminal. He was still at large, and might always
be so. I knew this from vague hints and from vague hints alone; for
whenever I tried to ask, I was hushed up at once with an air of
authority.

"Una, dearest," Aunt Emma would say, in her quiet fashion, "you
mustn't talk about that night. I have Dr. Wade's strict orders that
nothing must be said to you about it, and above all nothing that
could in any way excite or arouse you."

So I was fain to keep my peace; for though Aunt Emma was kind, she
ruled me still in all things like a little girl, as I was when I
came to her.




CHAPTER III.

AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR


One morning, after I'd been four whole years at Aunt Emma's, I heard
a ring at the bell, and, looking over the stairs, saw a tall and
handsome man in a semi-military coat, who asked in a most audible
voice for Miss Callingham.

Maria, the housemaid, hesitated a moment.

"Miss Callingham's in, sir," she answered in a somewhat dubious
tone; "but I don't know whether I ought to let you see her or not.
My mistress is out; and I've strict orders that no strangers are to
call on Miss Callingham when her aunt's not here."

And she held the door ajar in her hand undecidedly.

The tall man smiled, and seemed to me to slip a coin quietly into
Maria's palm.

"So much the better," he answered, with unobtrusive persistence; "I
thought Miss Moore was out. That's just why I've come. I'm an officer
from Scotland Yard, and I want to see Miss Callingham--alone--most
particularly."

Maria drew herself up and paused.

My heart stood still within me at this chance of enlightenment. I
guessed what he meant; so I called over the stairs to her, in a
tremor of excitement:

"Show the gentleman into the drawing-room, Maria. I 'll come down to
him at once."

For I was dying to know the explanation of the Picture that haunted
me so persistently; and as nobody at home would ever tell me
anything worth knowing about it, I thought this was as good an
opportunity as I could get for making a beginning towards the
solution of the mystery.

Well, I ran into my own room as quick as quick could be, and set my
front hair straight, and slipped on a hat and jacket (for I was in
my morning dress), and then went down to the drawing-room to see the
Inspector.

He rose as I entered. He was a gentleman, I felt at once. His manner
was as deferential, as kind, and as considerate to my sensitiveness,
as anything it's possible for you to imagine in anyone.

"I'm sorry to have to trouble you, Miss Callingham," he said, with a
very gentle smile; "but I daresay you can understand yourself the
object of my visit. I could have wished to come in a more authorised
way; but I've been in correspondence with Miss Moore for some time
past as to the desirability of reopening the inquiry with regard to
your father's unfortunate death; and I thought the time might now
have arrived when it would be possible to put a few questions to you
personally upon that unhappy subject. Miss Moore objected to my
plan. She thought it would still perhaps be prejudicial to your
health--a point in which Dr. Wade, I must say, entirely agrees with
her. Nevertheless, in the interests of Justice, as the murderer is
still at large, I've ventured to ask you for this interview; because
what I read in the newspapers about the state of your health--."

I interrupted him, astonished.

"What you read in the newspapers about the state of my health!" I
repeated, thunderstruck. "Why, surely they don't put the state of MY
health in the newspapers!"

For I didn't know then I was a Psychological Phenomenon.

The Inspector smiled blandly, and pulling out his pocket-book,
selected a cutting from a pile that apparently all referred to me.

"You're mistaken," he said, briefly. "The newspapers, on the
contrary, have treated your case at great length. See, here's the
latest report. That's clipped from last Wednesday's Telegraph."

I remembered then that a paragraph of just that size had been
carefully cut out of Wednesday's paper before I was allowed by Aunt
Emma to read it. Aunt Emma always glanced over the paper first,
indeed, and often cut out such offending paragraphs. But I never
attached much importance to their absence before, because I thought
it was merely a little fussy result of auntie's good old English
sense of maidenly modesty. I supposed she merely meant to spare my
blushes. I knew girls were often prevented on particular days from
reading the papers.

But now I seized the paragraph he handed me, and read it with deep
interest. It was the very first time I had seen my own name in a
printed newspaper. I didn't know then how often it had figured
there.

The paragraph was headed, "THE WOODBURY MURDER," and it ran
something like this, as well as I can remember it:

"There are still hopes that the miscreant who shot Mr. Vivian
Callingham at The Grange, at Woodbury, some four years since, may be
tracked down and punished at last for his cowardly crime. It will be
fresh in everyone's memory, as one of the most romantic episodes in
that extraordinary tragedy, that at the precise moment of her
father's death, Miss Callingham, who was present in the room during
the attack, and who alone might have been a witness capable of
recognising or describing the wretched assailant, lost her reason on
the spot, owing to the appalling shock to her nervous system, and
remained for some months in an imbecile condition. Gradually, as we
have informed our readers from time to time, Miss Callingham's
intellect has become stronger and stronger; and though she is still
totally unable to remember spontaneously any events that occurred
before her father's death, it is hoped it may be possible, by
describing vividly certain trains of previous incidents, to recall
them in some small degree to her imperfect memory. Dr. Thornton, of
Welbeck Street, who has visited her from time to time on behalf of
the Treasury, in conjunction with Dr. Wade, her own medical
attendant, went down to Barton-on-the-Sea on Monday, and once more
examined Miss Callingham's intellect. Though the Doctor is
judiciously reticent as to the result of his visit, it is generally
believed at Barton that he thinks the young lady sufficiently
recovered to undergo a regular interrogatory; and in spite of the
fact that Dr. Wade is opposed to any such proceeding at present, as
prejudicial to the lady's health, it is not unlikely that the
Treasury may act upon their own medical official's opinion, and send
down an Inspector from Scotland Yard to make inquiries direct on the
subject from Miss Callingham in person."

My head swam round. It was all like a dream to me. I held my
forehead with my hands, and gazed blankly at the Inspector.

"You understand what all this means?" he said interrogatively,
leaning forward as he spoke. "You remember the murder?"

"Perfectly," I answered him, trembling all over. "I remember every
detail of it. I could describe you exactly all the objects in the
room. The Picture it left behind has burned itself into my brain
like a flash of lightning!"

The Inspector drew his chair nearer. "Now, Miss Callingham," he said
in a very serious voice, "that's a remarkable expression--like a
flash of lightning.' Bear in mind, this is a matter of life and
death to somebody somewhere. Somebody's neck may depend upon your
answers. Will you tell me exactly how much you remember?"

I told him in a few words precisely how the scene had imprinted
itself on my memory. I recalled the room, the box, the green wires,
the carpet; the man who lay dead in his blood on the floor; the man
who stood poised ready to leap from the window. He let me go on
unchecked till I'd finished everything I had to say spontaneously.
Then he took a photograph from his pocket, which he didn't show me.
Looking at it attentively, he asked me questions, one by one, about
the different things in the room at the time in very minute detail:
Where exactly was the box? How did it stand relatively to the
unlighted lamp? What was the position of the pistol on the floor? In
which direction was my father's head lying? Though it brought back
the Horror to me in a fuller and more terrible form than ever, I
answered all his questions to the very best of my ability. I could
picture the whole scene like a photograph to myself; and I didn't
doubt the object he held in his hand was a photograph of the room as
it appeared after the murder. He checked my statements, one by one
as I went on, by reference to the photograph, murmuring half to
himself now and again: "Yes, yes, exactly so"; "That's right"; "That
was so," at each item I mentioned.

At the end of these inquiries, he paused and looked hard at me.

"Now, Miss Callingham," he said again, peering deep into my eyes, "I
want you to concentrate your mind very much, not on this Picture you
carry so vividly in your own brain, but on the events that went
immediately before and after it. Pause long and think. Try hard to
remember. And first, you say there was a great flash of light. Now,
answer me this: was it one flash alone, or had there been several?"

I stopped and racked my brain. Blank, blank, as usual.

"I can't remember," I faltered out, longing terribly to cry. "I can
recall just that one scene, and nothing else in the world before
it."

He looked at me fixedly, jotting down a few words in his note-book
as he looked. Then he spoke again, still more slowly:

"Now, try once more," he said, with an encouraging air. "You saw
this man's back as he was getting out of the window. But can't you
remember having seen his face before? Had he a beard? a moustache?
what eyes? what nose? Did you see the shot fired? And if so, what
sort of person was the man who fired it?"

Again I searched the pigeon-holes of my memory in vain, as I had
done a hundred times before by myself.

"It's no use," I cried helplessly, letting my hands drop by my side.
"I can't remember a thing, except the Picture. I don't know whether
I saw the shot fired or not. I don't know what the murderer looked
like in the face. I've told you all I know. I can recall nothing
else. It's all a great blank to me."

The Inspector hesitated a moment, as if in doubt what step to take
next. Then he drew himself up and said, still more gravely:

"This inability to assist us is really very singular. I had hoped,
after Dr. Thornton's report, that we might at last count with some
certainty upon arriving at fresh results as to the actual murder. I
can see from what you tell me you're a young lady of
intelligence--much above the average--and great strength of mind.
It's curious your memory should fail you so pointedly just where we
stand most in need of its aid. Recollect, nobody else but you ever
saw the murderer's face. Now, I'm going to presume you're answering
me honestly, and try a bold means to arouse your dormant memory.
Look hard, and hark back.--Is that the room you recollect? Is that
the picture that still haunts and pursues you?"

He handed me the photograph he held in his fingers. I took it, all
on fire. The sight almost made me turn sick with horror. To my awe
and amazement, it was indeed the very scene I remembered so well.
Only, of course, it was taken from another point of view, and
represented things in rather different relative positions to those I
figured them in. But it showed my father's body lying dead upon the
floor; it showed his poor corpse weltering helpless in its blood; it
showed myself, as a girl of eighteen, standing awestruck, gazing on
in blank horror at the sight; and in the background, half blurred by
the summer evening light, it showed the vague outline of a man's
back, getting out of the window. On one side was the door: that
formed no part of my mental picture, because it was at my back; but
in the photograph it too was indistinct, as if in the very act of
being burst open. The details were vague, in part--probably the
picture had never been properly focussed;--but the main figures
stood out with perfect clearness, and everything in the room was,
allowing for the changed point of view, exactly as I remembered it
in my persistent mental photograph.

I drew a deep breath.

"That's my Picture," I said, slowly. "But it recalls to me nothing
new. I--I don't understand it."

The Inspector stared at me hard once more.

"Do you know," he asked, "how that photograph was produced, and how
it came into our possession?"

I trembled violently.

"No, I don't," I answered, reddening. "But--I think it had something
to do with the flash like lightning."

The Inspector jumped at those words like a cat upon a mouse.

"Quite right," he cried briskly, as one who at last, after long
search, finds a hopeful clue where all seemed hopeless. "It had to
do with the flash. The flash produced it. This is a photograph taken
by your father's process.... Of course you recollect your father's
process?"

He eyed me close. The words, as he spoke them, seemed to call up
dimly some faint memory of my pre-natal days--of my First State, as
I had learned from the doctors to call it. But his scrutiny made me
shrink. I shut my eyes and looked back.

"I think," I said slowly, rummaging my memory half in vain, "I
remember something about it. It had something to do with
photography, hadn't it?...No, no, with the electric light....I
can't exactly remember which. Will you tell me all about it?"

He leaned back in his chair, and, eyeing me all the time with that
same watchful glance, began to describe to me in some detail an
apparatus which he said my father had devised, for taking
instantaneous photographs by the electric light, with a clockwork
mechanism. It was an apparatus that let sensitive-plates revolve one
after another opposite the lens of a camera; and as each was
exposed, the clockwork that moved it produced an electric spark, so
as to represent such a series of effects as the successive positions
of a horse in trotting. My father, it seemed, was of a scientific
turn, and had just perfected this new automatic machine before his
sudden death. I listened with breathless interest; for up to that
time I had never been allowed to hear anything about my
father--anything about the great tragedy with which my second life
began. It was wonderful to me even now to be allowed to speak and
ask questions on it with anybody. So hedged about had I been all my
days with mystery.

As I listened, I saw the Inspector could tell by the answering flash
in my eye that his words recalled SOMETHING to me, however vaguely.
As he finished, I leant forward, and with a very flushed face, that
I could feel myself, I cried, in a burst of recollection:

"Yes, yes. I remember. And the box on the table--the box that's in
my mental picture, and is not in the photograph--THAT was the
apparatus you've just been describing."

The Inspector turned upon me with a rapidity that fairly took my
breath away.

"Well, where are the other ones?" he asked, pouncing down upon me
quite fiercely.

"The other WHAT?" I repeated, amazed; for I didn't really understand
him.

"Why, the other photographs!" he replied, as if trying to surprise
me. "There must have been more, you know. It held six plates. Except
for this one, the apparatus, when we found it, was empty."

His manner seemed to crush out the faint spark of recollection that
just flickered within me. I collapsed at once. I couldn't stand such
brusqueness.

"I don't know what you mean," I answered in despair. "I never saw
the plates. I know nothing about them."




CHAPTER IV.

THE STORY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS


The Inspector scanned me close for a few minutes in silence. He
seemed doubtful, suspicious. At last he made a new move. "I believe
you, Miss Callingham," he said, more gently. "I can see this train
of thought distresses you too much. But I can see, too, our best
chance lies in supplying you with independent clues which you may
work out for yourself. You must re-educate your memory. You want to
know all about this murder, of course. Well, now, look over these
papers. They'll tell you in brief what little we know about it. And
they may succeed in striking afresh some resonant chord in your
memory."

He handed me a book of pasted newspaper paragraphs, interspersed
here and there in red ink with little manuscript notes and comments.
I began to read it with profound interest. It was so strange for me
thus to learn for the first time the history of my own life; for I
was quite ignorant as yet of almost everything about my First State,
and my father and mother.

The paragraphs told me the whole story of the crime, as far as it
was known to the world, from the very beginning. First of all, in
the papers, came the bald announcement that a murder had been
committed in a country town in Staffordshire; and that the victim
was Mr. Vivian Callingham, a gentleman of means, residing in his own
house, The Grange, at Woodbury. Mr. Callingham was the inventor of
the acmegraphic process. The servants, said the telegram to the
London papers, had heard the sound of a pistol-shot, about half-past
eight at night, coming from the direction of Mr. Callingham's
library. Aroused by the report, they rushed hastily to the spot, and
broke open the door, which was locked from within. As they did so, a
horrible sight met their astonished eyes. Mr. Callingham's dead body
lay extended on the ground, shot right through the heart, and
weltering in its life-blood. Miss Callingham stood by his side,
transfixed with horror, and mute in her agony. On the floor lay the
pistol that had fired the fatal shot. And just as the servants
entered, for one second of time, the murderer who was otherwise
wholly unknown, was seen to leap from the window into the shrubbery
below. The gardener rushed after him, and jumped down at the same
spot. But the murderer had disappeared as if by magic. It was
conjectured he must have darted down the road at full speed, vaulted
the gate, which was usually locked, and made off at a rapid run for
the open country. Up to date of going to press, the Telegraph said,
he was still at large and had not been apprehended.

That was the earliest account--bald, simple, unvarnished. Then came
mysterious messages from the Central Press about the absence of any
clue to identify the stranger. He hadn't entered the house by any
regular way, it seemed; unless, indeed, Mr. Callingham had brought
him home himself and let him in with the latchkey. None of the
servants had opened the door that evening to any suspicious
character; not a soul had they seen, nor did any of them know a man
was with their master in the library. They heard voices, to be
sure--voices, loud at times and angry,--but they supposed it was Mr.
Callingham talking with his daughter. Till roused by the fatal
pistol-shot, the gardener said, they had no cause for alarm. Even
the footmarks the stranger might have left as he leaped from the
window were obliterated by the prints of the gardener's boots as he
jumped hastily after him. The only person who could cast any light
upon the mystery at all was clearly Miss Callingham, who was in the
room at the moment. But Miss Callingham's mind was completely
unhinged for the present by the nervous shock she had received as
her father fell dead before her. They must wait a few days till she
recovered consciousness, and then they might confidently hope that
the murderer would be identified, or at least so described that the
police could track him.

After that, I read the report of the coroner's inquest. The facts
there elicited added nothing very new to the general view of the
case. Only, the servants remarked on examination, there was a
strange smell of chemicals in the room when they entered; and the
doctors seemed to suggest that the smell might be that of
chloroform, mixed with another very powerful drug known to affect
the memory. Miss Callingham's present state, they thought, might
thus perhaps in part be accounted for.

You can't imagine how curious it was for me to see myself thus
impersonally discussed at such a distance of time, or to learn so
long after that for ten days or more I had been the central object
of interest to all reading England. My name was bandied about
without the slightest reserve. I trembled to see how cavalierly the
press had treated me.

As I went on, I began to learn more and more about my father. He had
made money in Australia, it was said, and had come to live at
Woodbury some fourteen years earlier, where my mother had died when
I was a child of four; and some accounts said she was a widow of
fortune. My father had been interested in chemistry and photography,
it seemed, and had lately completed a new invention, the acmegraph,
for taking successive photographs at measured intervals of so many
seconds by electric light. He was a grave, stern man, the papers
said, more feared than loved by his servants and neighbours; but
nobody about was known to have a personal grudge against him. On the
contrary, he lived at peace with all men. The motive for the murder
remained to the end a complete mystery.

On the second morning of the inquest, however, a curious thing
happened. The police, it appeared, had sealed up the room where the
murder took place, and allowed nobody to enter it till the inquiry
was over. But after the jury came round to view the room, the
policeman in charge found the window at the back of the house had
been recently opened, and the box with the photographic apparatus
had been stolen from the library. Till that moment nobody had
attached any importance to the presence of this camera. It hadn't
even been opened and examined by the police, who had carefully noted
everything else in the library. But as soon as the box was missed
strange questions began to be asked and conjecturally answered. The
police for the first time then observed that though it was half-past
eight at night when the murder occurred, and the lamp was not
lighted, the witnesses who burst first into the room described all
they saw as if they had seen it clearly. They spoke of things as
they would be seen in a very bright light, with absolute
definiteness. This set up inquiry, and the result of the inquiry was
to bring out the fact, which in the excitement of the moment had
escaped the notice of all the servants, that as they entered the
room and stared about at the murder, the electric flash of the
apparatus was actually in operation. But the scene itself had
diverted their attention from the minor matter of the light that
showed it.

The Inspector had been watching me narrowly as I read these
extracts. When I reached that point, he broke in with a word of
explanation.

"Well, that put me on the track, you see," he said, leaning forward
once more. "I thought to myself, if the light was acting, then the
whole apparatus must necessarily have been at work, and the scene as
it took place must have been photographed, act by act and step by
step, exactly as it happened. At the time the murderer, whoever he
was, can't have known the meaning of the flashes. But later, he must
have come to learn in some way what the electric light meant, and
must have realised, sooner than we did, that therein the box, in the
form of six successive negatives of the stages in the crime, was the
evidence that would infallibly convict him of this murder." He
stroked his moustache thoughtfully. "And to think, too," he went on
with a somewhat sheepish air, "we should have had those photographs
there in our power all those days and nights, and have let them in
the end slip like that through our fingers! To think he should have
found it out sooner than we! To think that an amateur like the
murderer should have outwitted us!"

"But how do you know," I cried, "there was ever more than one
photograph? How do you know this wasn't the only negative?"

"Because," the Inspector answered quickly, pointing to a figure in
the corner of the proof, "do you see that six? Well, that tells the
tale. Each plate of the series was numbered so in the apparatus.
Number six could only fall into focus after numbers one, and two,
and three, and four, and five, had first been photographed. We've
only got the last--and least useful for our purpose. There must have
been five earlier ones, showing every stage of the crime, if only
we'd known it."

I was worked up now to a strange pitch of excitement.

"And how did this one come into your possession?" I asked, all
breathless. "If you managed to lay your hands on one, why not on all
six of them?"

The Inspector drew a long breath.

"Ah, that's the trouble!" he replied, still gazing at me hard. "You
see, it was this way. As soon as we found the camera was missing, we
came to the conclusion the murderer must have returned to The Grange
to fetch it. But it was a large and heavy box, and the only one of
its kind as yet manufactured; so, to carry it away in his hands
would no doubt have led to instant detection. I concluded,
therefore, the man would take off the box entire, so as to prevent
the danger of removing the plates on the spot; and as soon as he
reached a place of safety in the shrubbery, he'd fling away the
camera, either destroying the incriminating negatives then and there
or carrying them off with him. The details of the invention had
already been explained to me by your father's instrument-maker, who
set up the clockwork for him from his own designs; and I knew that
the removal of the plates from the box was a delicate, and to some
extent a difficult, operation. So I felt sure they could only have
been taken out in a place of comparative safety, not far from the
house; and I searched the shrubbery carefully, to find the camera."

"And you found it at last?" I asked, unable to restrain my
agitation.

"I found it at last," he answered, "near the far end of the grounds,
just flung into the deep grass, behind a clump of lilacs. The camera
was there intact, but five plates were missing. The sixth, from
which the positive you hold in your hand was taken, had got jammed
in the mechanism in the effort to remove it. Evidently the murderer
had tried to take out the plates in a very great hurry and with
trembling hands, as was not unnatural. He had succeeded with five,
when the sixth stuck fast in the groove of the clockwork. Just at
that moment, as we judged, either an alarm was raised in the rear,
or some panic fear seized on him. Probably the fellow judged right
that the most incriminating pictures of all had by that time been
removed, and that the last would only show his back, if it included
him at all, or if he came into focus. Perhaps he had even been able
unconsciously to count the flashes at the moment, and knew that
before the sixth flash arrived he was on the ledge of the window. At
any rate, he clearly gave up the attempt to remove the sixth, and
flung the whole apparatus away from him in a sudden access of
horror. We guessed as much both from the appearance of the spot
where the grass was trampled down, and the way the angle of the
camera was imbedded forcibly in the soft ground of the shrubbery."

"And he got away with the rest!" I exclaimed, following it up like a
story, but a story in which I was myself an unconscious character.

"No doubt," the Inspector answered, stroking his chin regretfully.
"And what's most annoying of all, we've every reason to suppose the
fellow stole the things only a few minutes before we actually missed
them. For we saw grounds for supposing he jumped away from the spot,
and climbed over the wall at the back, cutting his hands as he went
with the bottle-glass on the top to prevent intruders. And what
makes us think only a very short time must have elapsed between the
removal of the plates and the moment we came upon his tracks is
this--the blood from his cut hands was still fresh and wet upon the
wall when we found it."

"Then you only just missed him!" I exclaimed. "He got off by the
skin of his teeth. It's wonderful, when you were so near, you
shouldn't have managed to overtake him! One would have thought you
must have been able to track him to earth somehow!"

"One would have thought so," the Inspector answered, rather
crestfallen. "But policemen, after all, are human like the rest of
us. We missed the one chance that might have led to an arrest. And
now, what I want to ask you once more is this: Reflecting over what
you've heard and read to-day, do you think you can recollect--a
very small matter--whether or not there were SEVERAL distinct
flashes?"

I shut my eyes once more, and looked hard into the past. Slowly, as
I looked, a sort of dream seemed to come over me. I saw it vaguely
now, or thought I saw it. Flash, flash, flash, flash. Then the sound
of the pistol. Then the Picture, and the Horror, and the awful
blank. I opened my eyes again, and told the Inspector so.

"And once more," he went on, in a very insinuating voice. "Shut your
eyes again, and look back upon that day. Can't you remember whether
or not, just a moment before, you saw the murderer's face by the
light of the flashes?"

I shut my eyes and thought. Again the flashes seemed to stand out
clear and distinct. But no detail supervened--no face came back to
me. I felt it was useless.

"Impossible!" I said shortly. "It only makes my head swim. I can
remember no further."

"I see," the Inspector answered. "It's just as Dr. Wade said.
Suggest a fact in your past history, and you may possibly remember
it; but ask you to recall anything not suggested or already known,
and all seems a mere blank to you! You haven't the faintest idea,
then, who the murderer was or what he looked like?"

I rose up before him solemnly, and stared him full in the face. I
was wrought up by that time to a perfect pitch of excitement and
interest.

"I haven't the faintest idea," I answered, feeling myself a woman at
last, and realising my freedom; "I know and remember no more of it
than you do. But from this moment forth, I shall not rest until I've
found him out and tracked him down, and punished him. I shall never
let my head rest in peace on my pillow until I've discovered my
father's murderer!"

"That's well," the Inspector said sharply, shutting his notes up to
go. "If you persevere in that mind, and do as you say, we shall soon
get to the bottom of the Woodbury Mystery!"

And even as he spoke a key turned in the front door. I knew it was
Aunt Emma, come in from her marketing.




CHAPTER V.

I BECOME A WOMAN


Aunt Emma burst into the room, all horror and astonishment. She
looked at the Inspector for a few seconds in breathless indignation;
then she broke out in a tone of fiery remonstrance which fairly
surprised me:

"What do you mean by this intrusion, sir? How dare you force your
way into my house in my absence? How dare you encourage my servants
to disobey my orders? How dare you imperil this young lady's health
by coming here to talk with her?"

She turned round to me anxiously. I suppose I was very flushed with
excitement and surprise.

"My darling child," she cried, growing pale all at once, "Maria
should never have allowed him to come inside the door! You should
have stopped upstairs! You should have refused to see him! I shall
have you ill again on my hands, as before, after this. He'll have
undone all the good the last four years have done for you!"

But I was another woman now. I felt it in a moment.

"Auntie dearest," I answered, moving across to her, and laying my
hand on her shoulder to soothe her poor ruffled nerves, "don't be
the least alarmed. It's I who'm to blame, and not Maria. I told her
to let this gentleman in. He's done me good, not harm. I'm so glad
to have been allowed at last to speak freely about it!"

Aunt Emma shook all over, visibly to the naked eye.

"You'll have a relapse, my child!" she exclaimed, half crying, and
clinging to me in her terror. "You'll forget all you've learned:
you'll go back these four years again!--Leave my house at once, sir!
You should never have entered it!"

I stood between them like a statue.

"No, stop here a little longer," I said, waving my hand towards him
imperiously. "I haven't yet heard all it's right for me to hear....
Auntie, you mistake. I'm a woman at last. I see what everything
means. I'm beginning to remember again. For four years that hateful
Picture has haunted me night and day. I could never shut my eyes for
a minute without seeing it. I've longed to know what it all meant;
but whenever I've asked, I've been repressed like a baby. I'm a baby
no longer: I feel myself a woman. What the Inspector here has told
me already, half opens my eyes: I must have them opened altogether
now. I can't stop at this point. I'm going back to Woodbury."

Aunt Emma clung to me still harder in a perfect agony of passionate
terror.

"To Woodbury, my darling!" she cried. "Going back! Oh, Una, it'll
kill you!"

"I think not," the Inspector answered, with a very quiet smile.
"Miss Callingham has recovered, I venture to say, far more
profoundly than you imagine. This repression, our medical adviser
tells us, has been bad for her. If she's allowed to visit freely the
places connected with her earlier life, it may all return again to
her; and the ends of Justice may thus at last be served for us. I
notice already one hopeful symptom: Miss Callingham speaks of going
back to Woodbury."

Aunt Emma looked up at him, horrified. All her firmness was gone
now.

"It's YOU who've put this into her head!" she exclaimed, in a
ferment of horror. "She'd never thought of it herself. You've made
her do it!"

"On the contrary, auntie," I answered, feeling my ground grow surer
under me every moment as I spoke, "this gentleman has never even by
the merest hint suggested such an idea to my mind. It occurred to me
quite spontaneously. I MUST find out now who was my father's
murderer! All the Inspector has told me seems to arouse in my brain
some vague, forgotten chords. It brings back to me faint shadows. I
feel sure if I went to Woodbury I should remember much more. And
then, you must see for yourself, there's another reason, dear, that
ought to make me go. Nobody but I ever saw the murderer's face. It's
a duty imposed upon me from without, as it were, never to rest again
in peace till I've recognised him."

Aunt Emma collapsed into an easy-chair. Her face was deadly pale.
Her ringers trembled.

"If you go, Una," she cried, playing nervously with her gloves, "I
must go with you too! I must take care of you: I must watch over
you!"

I took her quivering hand in mine and stroked it gently. It was a
soft and delicate white little hand, all marked inside with curious
ragged scars that I'd known and observed ever since I first knew
her. I held it in silence for a minute. Somehow I felt our positions
were reversed to-day. This interview had suddenly brought out what I
know now to be my own natural and inherent character--self-reliant,
active, abounding in initiative. For four years I had been as a
child in her hands, through mere force of circumstances. My true
self came out now and asserted its supremacy.

"No, dear," I said, soothing her cheek; "I shall go alone. I shall
try what I can discover and remember myself without any suggestion
or explanation from others. I want to find out how things really
stand. I shall set to work on my own account to unravel this
mystery."

"But how can you manage things by yourself?" Aunt Emma exclaimed,
wringing her hands despondently. "A girl of your age! without even a
maid! and all alone in the world! I shall be afraid to let you go.
Dr. Wade won't allow it."

I drew myself up very straight, and realised the position.

"Aunt Emma," I said plainly, in a decided voice, "I'm a full-grown
woman, over twenty-one years of age, mistress of my own acts, and no
longer a ward of yours. I can do as I like, and neither Dr. Wade nor
anybody else can prevent me. He may ADVICE me not to go: he has no
power to ORDER me. I'm my father's heiress, and a person of
independent means. I've been a cipher too long. From to-day I take
my affairs wholly into my own hands. I 'll go round at once and see
your lawyer, your banker, your agent, your tradesmen, and tell them
that henceforth I draw my own rents, I receive my own dividends, I
pay my own bills, I keep my own banking account. And to-morrow or
the next day I set out for Woodbury."

The Inspector turned to Aunt Emma with a demonstrative smile.

"There, you see for yourself," he said, well pleased, "what this
interview has done for her!"

But Aunt Emma only drew back, wrung her hands again in impotent
despair, and stared at him blankly like a wounded creature.

The Inspector took up his hat to leave. I followed him out to the
door, and shook hands with him cordially. The burden felt lighter on
my shoulders already. For four long years that mystery had haunted
me day and night, as a thing impenetrable, incomprehensible, not
even to be inquired about. The mere sense that I might now begin to
ask what it meant seemed to make it immediately less awful and less
burdensome to me.

When I returned to the drawing-room, Aunt Emma sat there on the
sofa, crying silently, the very picture of misery.

"Una," she said, without even raising her eyes to mine, "the man may
have done as he says: he may have restored you your mind again; but
what's that to me? He's lost me my child, my darling, my daughter!"

I stooped down and kissed her. Dear, tender-hearted auntie! she had
always been very good to me. But I knew I was right, for all that,
in becoming a woman,--in asserting my years, my independence, my
freedom, my duty. To have shirked it any longer would have been
sheer cowardice. So I just kissed her silently, and went up to my
own room--to put on my brown hat, and go out to the banker's.

From that moment forth, one fierce desire in life alone possessed
me. The brooding mystery that enveloped my life ceased to be
passive, and became an active goad, as it were, to push me forward
incessantly on my search for the runaway I was the creature of a
fixed idea. A fiery energy spurred me on all my time. I was
determined now to find out my father's murderer. I was determined to
shake off the atmosphere of doubt and forgetfulness. I was
determined to recall those first scenes of my life that so eluded my
memory.

Yet, strange to say, it was rather a burning curiosity and a deep
sense of duty that urged me on, than anything I could properly call
affection--still less, revenge or malice. I didn't remember my
father as alive at all: the one thing I could recollect about him
was the ghastly look of that dead body, stretched at full length on
the library floor, with its white beard all dabbled in the red blood
that clotted it. It was abstract zeal for the discovery of the truth
that alone pushed me on. This search became to me henceforth an end
and aim in itself. It stood out, as it were, visibly in the
imperative mood: "go here;" "go there;" "do this;" "try that;"
"leave no stone unturned anywhere till you've tracked down the
murderer!" Those were the voices that now incessantly though
inaudibly pursued me.

Next day I spent in preparations for my departure. I would hunt up
Woodbury now, though fifty Aunt Emma's held their gentle old faces
up in solemn warning against me. The day after that again, I set out
on my task. The pull was hard. I had taken my own affairs entirely
into my own hands by that time, and had provided myself with money
for a long stay at Woodbury. But it was the very first railway
journey I could ever remember to have made alone; and I confess,
when I found myself seated all by myself in a first-class carriage,
with no friend beside me, my resolution for a moment almost broke
down again. It was so terrible to feel oneself boxed up there for an
hour or two alone, with that awful Picture staring one in the face
all the time from every fence and field and wall and hoarding. It
obliterated Fry's Cocoa; it fixed itself on the yellow face of
Colman's Mustard.

I went by Liverpool Street, and drove across to Paddington. I had
never, to my knowledge, been in London before: and it was all so new
to me. But Liverpool Street was even newer to me than Paddington, I
noticed. A faint sense of familiarity seemed to hang about the Great
Western line. And that was not surprising, I thought, as I turned it
over; for, of course, in the old days, when we lived at Woodbury, I
must often have come down from town that way with my father. Yet I
remembered nothing of it all definitely; the most I could say was
that I seemed dimly to recollect having been there before--though
when or where or how, I hadn't the faintest notion.

I was early at Paddington. The refreshment room somehow failed to
attract me. I walked up and down the platform, waiting for my train.
As I did so, a boy pasted a poster on a board: it was the
contents-sheet of one of the baser little Society papers. Something
strange in it caught my eye. I looked again in amazement. Oh, great
heavens! what was this in big flaring letters?

"MISS UNA CALLINGHAM AND THE WOODBURY MYSTERY! Is SHE SCREENING THE
MURDERER? A POSSIBLE EXPLANATION!"

The words took my breath away. They were too horrible to realise. I
positively couldn't speak. I went up to the bookstall, laid down my
penny without moving my lips, and took the paper in my hand in
tremulous silence.

I dared not open it there and then, I confess. I waited till I was
in the train, and on my way to Woodbury.

When I did so, it was worse, even worse than my fears. The article
was short, but it was very hateful. It said nothing straight
out--the writer had evidently the fear of the law of libel before
his eyes as he wrote,--but it hinted and insinuated in a detestable
undertone the most vile innuendoes. A Treasury Doctor and a Police
Inspector, it said, had lately examined Miss Callingham again, and
found her intellect in every respect perfectly normal, except that
she couldn't remember the face of her father's murderer. Now, this
was odd, because, you see, Miss Callingham was in the room at the
moment the shot was fired; and, alone in the world, Miss Callingham
had seen the face of the man who fired it. Who was that man? and why
was he there, unknown to the servants, in a room with nobody but Mr.
Callingham and his daughter? A correspondent (who preferred to guard
his incognito) had suggested in this matter some very searching
questions: Could the young man--for it was allowed he was
young--have been there with Miss Callingham when Mr. Callingham
entered? Could he have been on terms of close intimacy with the
heroine of The Grange Mystery, who was a young lady--as all the
world knew from her photographs--of great personal attractiveness,
and who was also the heiress to a considerable property? Could he
have been there, then, by appointment, without the father's
knowledge? Was this the common case of a clandestine assignation?
Could the father have returned to the house unexpectedly, at an
inopportune moment, and found his daughter there, closeted with a
stranger--perhaps with a man who had already, for sufficient
grounds, been forbidden the premises? Such things might be, in this
world that we live in: he would be a bold man who would deny them
categorically. Could an altercation have arisen on the father's
return, and the fatal shot have been fired in the ensuing scuffle?
And could the young lady then have feigned this curious relapse into
that Second State we had all heard so much about, for no other
reason than to avoid giving evidence at a trial for murder against
her guilty lover?

These were suggestions that deserved the closest consideration of
the Authorities charged with the repression of crime. Was it not
high time that the inquest on Mr. Callingham's body should be
formally reopened, and that the young lady, now restored (as we
gathered) to her own seven senses, should be closely interrogated by
trained legal cross-examiners?

I laid down the paper with a burning face. I learned now, for the
first time, how closely my case had been watched, how eagerly my
every act and word had been canvassed. It was hateful to think of my
photograph having been exposed in every London shop-window, and of
anonymous slanderers being permitted to indite such scandal as this
about an innocent woman. But, at any rate, it had the effect of
sealing my fate. If I meant even before to probe this mystery to the
bottom, I felt now no other course was possibly open to me. For the
sake of my own credit, for the sake of my own good fame, I must find
out and punish my father's murderer.




CHAPTER VI.

RELIVING MY LIFE


Often, as you walk down a street, a man or woman passes you by. You
look up at them and say to yourself, "I seem to know that face"; but
you can put no name to it, attach to it no definite idea, no
associations of any sort. That was just how Woodbury struck me when
I first came back to it. The houses, the streets, the people, were
in a way familiar; yet I could no more have found my way alone from
the station to The Grange than I could find my way alone from here
to Kamschatka.

So I drove up first in search of lodgings. At the station even
several people had bowed or shaken hands with me respectfully as I
descended from the train. They came up as if they thought I must
recognise them at once: there was recognition in their eyes; but
when they met my blank stare, they seemed to remember all about it,
and merely murmured in strange tones:

"Good-morning, miss! So you're here: glad to see you've come back
again at last to Woodbury."

This reception dazzled me. It was so strange, so uncanny. I was glad
to get away in a fly by myself, and to be driven to lodgings in the
clean little High Street. For to me, it wasn't really "coming back"
at all: it was coming to a strange town, where everyone knew me, and
_I_ knew nobody.

"You'd like to go to Jane's, of course," the driver said to me with
a friendly nod as he reached the High Street: and not liking to
confess my forgetfulness of Jane, I responded with warmth that
Jane's would, no doubt, exactly suit me.

We drew up at the door of a neat little house. The driver rang the
bell.

"Miss Una's here," he said, confidentially; "and she's looking for
lodgings."

It was inexpressibly strange and weird to me, this one-sided
recognition, this unfamiliar familiarity: it gave me a queer thrill
of the supernatural that I can hardly express to you. But I didn't
know what to do, when a kindly-faced, middle-aged English
upper-class servant rushed out at me, open-armed, and hugging me
hard to her breast, exclaimed with many loud kisses:

"Miss Una, Miss Una! So it's YOU, dear; so it is! Then you've come
back at last to us!"

I could hardly imagine what to say or do. The utmost I could assert
with truth was, Jane's face wasn't exactly and entirely in all ways
unfamiliar to me. Yet I could see Jane herself was so unfeignedly
delighted to see me again, that I hadn't the heart to confess I'd
forgotten her very existence. So I took her two hands in mine--since
friendliness begets friendliness--and holding her off a little
way, for fear the kisses should be repeated, I said to her very
gravely:

"You see, Jane, since those days I've had a terrible shock, and you
can hardly expect me to remember anything. It's all like a dream to
me. You must forgive me if I don't recall it just at once as I ought
to do."

"Oh! yes, miss," Jane answered, holding my hands in her delight and
weeping volubly. "We've read about all that, of course, in the
London newspapers. But there, I'm glad anyhow you remembered to come
and look for my lodgings. I think I should just have sat down and
cried if they told me Miss Una'd come back to Woodbury, and never so
much as asked to see me."

I don't think I ever felt so like a hypocrite in my life before. But
I realised at least that even if Jane's lodgings were discomfort
embodied, I must take them and stop in them, while I remained there,
now. Nothing else was possible. I COULDN'T go elsewhere.

Fortunately, however, the rooms turned out to be as neat as a new
pin, and as admirably kept as any woman in England could keep them.
I gathered from the very first, of course, that Jane had been one of
the servants at The Grange in the days of my First State; and while
I drank my cup of tea, Jane herself came in and talked volubly to
me, disclosing to me, parenthetically, the further fact that she was
the parlour-maid at the time of my father's murder. That gave me a
clue to her identity. Then she was the witness Greenfield who gave
evidence at the inquest! I made a mental note of that, and
determined to look up what she'd said to the coroner, in the book of
extracts the Inspector gave me, as soon as I got alone in my bedroom
that evening.

After dinner, however, Jane came in again, with the freedom of an
old servant, and talked to me much about the Woodbury Mystery.
Gradually, as time went on that night, though I remembered nothing
definite of myself about her, the sense of familiarity and
friendliness came home to me more vividly. The appropriate emotion
seemed easier to rouse, I observed, than the intellectual memory. I
knew Jane and I had been on very good terms, some time, somewhere. I
talked with her easily, for I had a consciousness of companionship.

By-and-by, without revealing to her how little I could recollect
about her own personality, I confessed to Jane, by slow degrees,
that the whole past was still gone utterly from my shattered memory.
I told her I knew nothing except the Picture and the facts it
comprised; and to show her just how small that knowledge really was,
I showed her (imprudently enough) the photograph the Inspector had
left with me.

Jane looked at it long and slowly, with tears in her eyes. Then she
said at last, after a deep pause, in a very hushed voice:

"Why, how did you get this? It wasn't put in the papers."

"No," I answered quietly, "it wasn't put in the papers. For reasons
of their own, the police kept it unpublished."

Jane gazed at the proof still closer. "They oughtn't to have done
that," she said.

"They ought to have sent it out everywhere broadcast--so that
anybody who knew the man could tell him by his back."

That seemed to me such obvious good sense that I wondered to myself
the police hadn't thought long since of it; but I supposed they had
some good ground of their own for holding it all this time in their
own possession.

Jane went on talking to me still for many minutes about the scene:

"Ah, yes; that was just how he lay, poor dear gentleman! And the
book on the chair, too! Well, did you ever in your life see anything
so like! And to think it was taken all by itself, as one might say,
by magic. But there! your poor papa was a wonderful clever man. Such
things as he used to invent! Such ideas and such machines! We were
sorry for him, though we always thought, to be sure, he was dreadful
severe with you, Miss Una. Such a gentleman to have his own way,
too--so cold and reserved like. But one mustn't talk nothing but good
about the dead, they say. And if he was a bit hard, he was more than
hard treated for it in the end, poor gentleman!"

It interested me to get these half side-lights on my father's
character. Knowing nothing of him, as I did, save the solitary fact
that he was the white-haired gentleman I saw dead in my Picture, I
naturally wanted to learn as much as I could from this old servant
of ours as to the family conditions.

"Then you thought him harsh, in the servants'-hall?" I said
tentatively to Jane. "You thought him hard and unbending?"

"Well, there, Miss," Jane ran on, putting a cushion to my back
tenderly--it was strange to be the recipient of so much delicate
attention from a perfect stranger,--"not exactly what you'd call
harsh to us ourselves, you know: he was a good master enough, as
long as one did what was ordered, though he was a little bit
fidgetty. But to you, we all thought he was always rather hard.
People said so in Woodbury. And yet, in a way, I don't know how it
was, he always seemed more'n half afraid of you. He was careful
about your health, and spoiled and petted you for that; yet he was
always pulling you up, you know, and looking after what you did: and
for one thing, I remember, there's many a time you were sent to bed
when you were a good big girl for nothing on earth else but because
he heard you talking to us in the hall about Australia."

"Talking to you about Australia!" I cried, pricking my ears. "Why,
what harm was there in that? Why on earth didn't he want me to talk
about Australia?"

"Ah! what harm indeed?" Jane echoed blandly. "That's what we often
used to say among ourselves downstairs. But Mr. Callingham, he was
always that way, miss--so strict and particular. He said he'd
forbidden you to say a word to anybody about that confounded
country; and you must do as you were told. He seemed to have a
grudge against Australia, though it was there he made his money. And
he always would have his own way, your father would."

While she spoke, I looked hard at the white head in the photograph.
Even as I did so, a thought occurred to me that had never occurred
before. Both in my mental Picture, and in looking at the photograph
when I saw it first, the feeling that was uppermost in my mind was
not sorrow, but horror. I didn't think with affection and regret and
a deep sense of bereavement about my father's murder. The emotional
accompaniment that had stamped itself upon the very fibre of my
soul, was not pain but awe. I think my main feeling was a feeling
that a foul crime had taken place in the house, not a feeling that I
had lost a very dear and near relative. Rightly or wrongly, I drew
from this the inference, which Jane's gossip confirmed, that I had
probably rather feared than loved my father.

It was strange to be reduced to such indirect evidence on such a
point as that; but it was all I could get, and I had to be content
with it.

Jane, leaning over my shoulder, looked hard at the photograph too. I
could see her eyes were fixed on the back of the man who was seen
disappearing through the open window. He was dressed like a
gentleman, in knickerbockers and jacket, as far as one could judge;
for the evening light rather blurred that part of the picture. One
hand was just waved, palm open, behind him. Jane regarded it hard.
Then she gave an odd little start:

"Why, just look at that hand!" she cried, with a tremor of surprise.
"Don't you see what it is? Don't you think it's a woman's?"

I gazed back at her incredulously.

"Impossible," I answered, shaking my head. "It belongs as clear as
day to the man you see in the photograph. How on earth could his
hand be a woman's then, I'd like to know? I can see the shirt-cuff."

"Why, yes," Jane answered, with simple common-sense: "it's DRESSED
like a man, of course, and it's a man to look at; but the hand's a
woman's, as true as I'm standing here. Why mightn't a woman dress in
a man's suit on purpose? And perhaps it was just because they were
so sure it was a man as did it, that the police has gone wrong so
long in trying to find the murderer."

I looked hard at the hand myself. Then I shut my eyes, and thought
of the corresponding object in my mental Picture. The result fairly
staggered me. The impression in each case was exactly the same. It
was a soft and delicate hand, very white and womanlike. But was it
really a woman's? I couldn't feel quite sure in my own mind about
that; but the very warning Jane gave me seemed to me a most useful
one. It would be well, after all, to keep one's mind sedulously open
to every possible explanation, and to take nothing for granted as to
the murderer's personality.




CHAPTER VII.

THE GRANGE AT WOODBURY


I stopped for three weeks in Jane's lodgings; and before the end of
that time, Jane and I had got upon the most intimate footing. It was
partly her kindliness that endeared her to me, and her constant
sense of continuity with the earlier days which I had quite
forgotten; but it was partly too, I felt sure, a vague revival
within my own breast of a familiarity that had long ago subsisted
between us. I was coming to myself again, on one side of my nature.
Day by day I grew more certain that while facts had passed away from
me, appropriate emotions remained vaguely present. Among the
Woodbury people that I met, I recognised none to say that I knew
them; but I knew almost at first sight that I liked this one and
disliked that one. And in every case alike, when I talked the matter
over afterwards with Jane, she confirmed my suspicion that in my
First State I had liked or disliked just those persons respectively.
My brain was upset, but my heart remained precisely the same as
ever.

On my second morning I went up to The Grange with her. The house was
still unlet. Since the day of the murder, nobody cared to live in
it. The garden and shrubbery had been sadly neglected: Jane took me
out of the way as we walked up the path, to show me the place where
the photographic apparatus had been found embedded in the grass, and
where the murderer had cut his hands getting over the wall in his
frantic agitation. The wall was pretty high and protected with
bottle-glass. I guessed he must have been tall to scramble over it.
That seemed to tell against Jane's crude idea that a woman might
have done it.

But when I said so to Jane, she met me at once with the crushing
reply: "Perhaps it wasn't the same person that came back for the
box." I saw she was right again. I had jumped at a conclusion. In
cases like this, one must leave no hypothesis untried, jump at no
conclusions of any sort. Clearly, that woman ought to have been made
a detective.

As I entered the house the weird sense of familiarity that pursued
me throughout rose to a very high pitch. I couldn't fairly say,
indeed, that I remembered the different rooms. All I could say with
certainty was that I had seen them before. To this there were three
exceptions--the three that belonged to my Second State--the library,
my bedroom, and the hall and staircase. The first was indelibly
printed on my memory as a component part of the Picture, and I found
my recollection of every object in the room almost startling in its
correctness. Only, there was an alcove on one side that I'd quite
forgotten, and I saw why most clearly. I stood with my back to it as
I looked at the Picture. The other two bits I remembered as the room
in which I had had my first great illness, and the passage down
which I had been carried or helped when I was taken to Aunt Emma's.

I had begun to recognise now that the emotional impression made upon
me by people and things was the only sure guide I still possessed as
to their connection or association with my past history. And the
rooms at The Grange had each in this way some distinctive
characteristic. The library, of course, was the chief home of the
Horror which had hung upon my spirit even during the days when I
hardly knew in any intelligible sense the cause of it. But the
drawing-room and dining-room both produced upon my mind a vague
consciousness of constraint. I was dimly aware of being ill at ease
and uncomfortable in them. My own bedroom, on the contrary, gave me
a pleasant feeling of rest and freedom and security: while the
servants'-hall and the kitchen seemed perfect paradises of liberty.

"Ah! many's the time, miss," Jane said with a sigh, looking over at
the empty grate, "you'd come down here to make cakes or puddings,
and laugh and joke like a child with Mary an' me. I often used to
say to Emily--her as was cook here before Ellen Smith,--'Miss Una's
never so happy as when she's down here in the kitchen.' And 'That's
true what you say,' says Emily to me, many a time and often."

That was exactly the impression left upon my own mind. I began to
conclude, in a dim, formless way, that my father must have been a
somewhat stern and unsympathetic man; that I had felt constrained
and uncomfortable in his presence upstairs, and had often been
pleased to get away from his eye to the comparative liberty and ease
of my own room or of the maid-servants' quarters.

At last, in the big attic that had once been the nursery, I paused
and looked at Jane. A queer sensation came over me.

"Jane," I said slowly, hardly liking to frame the words, "there's
something strange about this room. He wasn't cruel to me, was he?"

"Oh! no, miss," Jane answered promptly. "He wasn't never what you
might call exactly cruel. He was a very good father, and looked
after you well; but he was sort of stern and moody-like--would have
his own way, and didn't pay no attention to fads and fancies, he
called 'em. When you were little, many's the time he sent you up
here for punishment--disobedience and such like."

I took out the photograph and tried, as it were, to think of my
father as alive and with his eyes open. I couldn't remember the
eyes. Jane told me they were blue; but I think what she said was the
sort of impression the face produced upon me. A man not unjust or
harsh in his dealings with myself, but very strong and masterful. A
man who would have his own way in spite of anybody. A father who
ruled his daughter as a vessel of his making, to be done as he would
with, and be moulded to his fashion.

Still, my visit to The Grange resulted in the end in casting very
little light upon the problem before me. It pained and distressed me
greatly, but it brought no new elements of the case into view: at
best, it only familiarised me with the scene of action of the
tragedy. The presence of the alcove was the one fresh feature.
Nothing recalled to me as yet in any way the murderer's features. I
racked my brain in vain; no fresh image came up in it. I could
recollect nothing about the man or his antecedents.

I almost began to doubt that I would ever succeed in reconstructing
my past, when even the sight of the home in which I had spent my
childish days suggested so few new thoughts or ideas to me.

For a day or two after that I rested at Jane's, lest I should
disturb my brain too much. Then I called once more on the doctor who
had made the post mortem on my father, and given evidence at the
inquest, to see if anything he could say might recall my lapsed
memory.

The moment he came into the room--a man about fifty, close-shaven
and kindly-looking--I recognised him at once, and held out my hand
to him frankly. He surveyed me from head to foot with a good medical
stare, and then wrung my hand in return with extraordinary warmth
and effusion. I could see at once he retained a most pleasing
recollection of my First State, and was really glad to see me.

"What, you remember me then, Una!" he cried, with quite fatherly
delight. "You haven't forgotten me, my dear, as you've forgotten all
the rest, haven't you?"

It was startling to be called by one's Christian name like that, and
by a complete stranger, too; but I was getting quite accustomed now
to these little incongruities.

"Oh, yes; I remember you perfectly," I answered, half-grieved to
distress him, "though I shouldn't have known your name, and didn't
expect to see you. You're the doctor who attended me in my first
great illness--the illness with which my present life began--just
after the murder."

He drew back, a little crestfallen.

"Then that's all you recollect, is it?" he asked. "You don't
remember me before, dear? Not Dr. Marten, who used to take you on
his knee when you were a tiny little girl, and bring you lollipops
from town, to the great detriment of your digestion, and get into
rows with your poor father for indulging you and spoiling you? You
must surely remember me?"

I shook my head slowly. I was sorry to disappoint him; but it was
necessary before all things to get at the bare truth.

"I'm afraid not," I answered. "Do please forgive me! You must have
read in the papers, like everybody else, of the very great change
that has so long come over me. Bear in mind, I can't remember
anything at all that occurred before the murder. That first illness
is to me the earliest recollection of childhood."

He gazed across at me compassionately.

"My poor child," he said in a low voice, like a very affectionate
friend, "it's much better so. You have been mercifully spared a
great deal of pain. Una, when I first saw you at The Grange after
your father's death, I thanked heaven you had been so seized. I
thanked heaven the world had become suddenly a blank to you. I
prayed hard you might never recover your senses again, or at least
your memory. And now that you're slowly returned to life once more,
against all hope or fear, I'm heartily glad it's in this peculiar
way. I'm heartily glad all the past's blotted out for you. You can't
understand that, my child? Ah, no, very likely not. But I think it's
much best for you, all your first life should be wholly forgotten."
He paused for a second. Then he added slowly: "If you remembered it
all, the sense of the tragedy would be far more acute and poignant
even than at present."

"Perhaps so," I said resolutely; "but not the sense of mystery. It's
THAT that appals me so! I'd rather know the truth than be so wrapped
up in the incomprehensible."

He looked at me pityingly once more.

"My poor child," he said, in the same gentle and fatherly voice,
"you don't wholly understand. It doesn't all come home to you. I can
see clearly, from what Inspector Wolferstan told me, after his visit
to you the other day--"

I broke in, in surprise.

"Inspector Wolferstan!" I cried. "Then he came down here to see you,
did he?"

It was horrible to find how all my movements were discussed and
chronicled.

"Yes, he came down here to see me and talk things over," Dr. Marten
went on, as calmly as if it were mere matter of course. "And I could
see from what he said you were still spared much. For instance, you
remember it all only as an event that happened to an old man with a
long white beard. You don't fully realise, except intellectually,
that it was your own father. You're saved, as a daughter, the misery
and horror of thinking and feeling it was your father who lay dead
there."

"That's quite true," I answered. "I admit that I can't feel it all
as deeply as I ought. But none the less, I've come down here to make
a violent effort. Let it cost what it may, I must get at the truth.
I wanted to see whether the sight of The Grange and of Woodbury may
help me to recall the lost scenes in my memory."

To my immense surprise, Dr. Marten rose from his seat, and standing
up before me in a perfect agony of what seemed like terror, half
mixed with affection, exclaimed in a very earnest and resolute
voice:

"Oh, Una, my child, whatever you do--I beg of you--I implore
you--don't try to recall the past at all! Don't attempt it! Don't
dream of it!"

"Why not?" I cried, astonished. "Surely it's my duty to try and find
out my father's murderer!"

Instead of answering me, he looked about him for half a minute in
suspense, as if doubtful what next to do or to say. Then he walked
across with great deliberation to the door of the room, and locked
and double-locked it with furtive alarm, as I interpreted his
action.

So terrified did he seem, indeed, that for a moment the idea
occurred to me in a very vague way--Was I talking with the murderer?
Had the man who himself committed the crime conducted the post
mortem, and put Justice off the scent? And was I now practically at
the mercy of the criminal I was trying to track down? The thought
for a second or two made me feel terribly uncomfortable. But I
glanced at his back and at his hands, and reassured myself. That
broad, short man was not the slim figure of my Picture and of the
photograph. Those large red hands were not the originals of the
small and delicate white palm just displayed at the back in both
those strange documents of the mysterious murder.

The doctor came over again, and drew his chair close to mine.

"Una, my child," he said slowly, "I love you very much, as if you
were my own daughter. I always loved you and admired you, and was
sorry--oh, so sorry!--for you. You've quite forgotten who I am; but
I've not forgotten you. Take what I say as coming from an old
friend, from one who loves you and has your interest at heart. For
heaven's sake, I implore you, my child, make no more inquiries. Try
to forget--not to remember. If you do recollect, you'll be sorry in
the end for it."

"Why so?" I asked, amazed, yet somehow feeling in my heart I could
trust him implicitly. "Why should the knowledge of the true
circumstances of the case make me more unhappy than I am at
present?"

He gazed harder at me than ever.

"Because," he replied in slow tones, weighing each word as he spoke,
"you may find that the murder was committed by some person or
persons you love or once loved very much indeed. You may find it
will rend your very heart-strings to see that person or those
persons punished. You may find the circumstances were wholly
otherwise than you imagine them to be.... Let sleeping dogs lie, my
dear. Without your aid, nothing more can be done. Don't trouble
yourself to put the blood-hounds on the track of some unhappy
creature who might otherwise escape. Don't rake it all up afresh.
Bury it--bury it--bury it!"

He spoke so earnestly that he filled me with vague alarm.

"Dr. Marten," I said solemnly, "answer me just one question. Do you
know who was the murderer?"

"No, no!" he exclaimed, starting once more. "Thank heaven, I can't
tell you that! I don't know. I know nothing. Nobody on earth knows
but the two who were present on the night of the murder, I feel
sure. And of those two, one's unknown, and the other has forgotten."

"But you suspect who he is?" I put in, probing the secret curiously.

He trembled visibly.

"I suspect who he is," he replied, after a moment's hesitation. "But
I have never communicated, and will never communicate, my suspicions
to anybody, not even to you. I will only say this: the person whom I
suspect is one with whom you may now have forgotten all your past
relations, but whom you would be sorry to punish if you recovered
your memory. I formed a strong opinion at the time who that person
was. I formed it from the nature and disposition of the wound, and
the arrangement of the objects in the room when I was called in to
see your father's body."

"And you never said so at the inquest!" I cried, indignant.

He looked at me hard again. Then he spoke in a very slow and earnest
voice:

"For your sake, Una, and for the sake of your affections, I held my
peace," he said. "My dear, the suspicion was but a very slender one:
I had nothing to go upon. And why should I have tried to destroy
your happiness?"

That horrible article in the penny Society paper came back to my
mind once more with hideous suggestiveness. I turned to him almost
fiercely.

"So far as you know, Dr. Marten," I asked, "was I ever in love? Had
I ever an admirer? Was I ever engaged to anyone?"

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled a sort of smile of relief.

"How should I know?" he answered. "Admirers?--yes, dozens of them;
I was one myself. Lovers?--who can say? But I advise you not to
push the inquiry further."

I questioned him some minutes longer, but could get nothing more
from him. Then I rose to go.

"Dr. Marten," I said firmly, "if I remember all, and if it wrings my
heart to remember, I tell you I will give up that man to justice all
the same! I think I know myself well enough to know this much at
least, that I never, never could stoop either to love or to screen a
man who could commit such a foul and dastardly crime as this one."

He took my hand fervently, raised it with warmth to his lips and
kissed it twice over.

"My dear," he said, with tears dropping down his gentle old cheeks,
"this is a very great mystery--a terrible mystery. But I know you
speak the truth. I can see you mean it. Therefore, all the more
earnestly do I beg and beseech you, go away from Woodbury at once,
and as long as you live think no more about it."




CHAPTER VIII.

A VISION OF DEAD YEARS


The interview with Dr. Marten left me very much disquieted. But it
wasn't the only disquieting thing that occurred at Woodbury. Before
I left the place I happened to go one day into Jane's own little
sitting-room. Jane was anxious I should see it--she wanted me to
know all her house, she said, for the sake of old times: and for the
sake of those old times that I couldn't remember, but when I knew
she'd been kind to me, I went in and looked at it.

There was nothing very peculiar about Jane's little sitting-room:
just the ordinary English landlady's parlour. You know the
type:--square table in the middle; bright blue vases on the
mantelpiece; chromo-lithograph from the Illustrated London News on
the wall; rickety whatnot with glass-shaded wax-flowers in the
recess by the window. But over in one corner I chanced to observe a
framed photograph of early execution, which hung faded and dim
there. Perhaps it was because my father was such a scientific
amateur; but photography, I found out in time, struck the key-note
of my history in every chapter. I didn't know why, but this
particular picture attracted me strangely. It came from The Grange,
Jane told me: she'd hunted it out in the attic over the front
bedroom after the house was shut up. It belonged to a lot of my
father's early attempts that were locked in a box there. "He'd
always been trying experiments and things," she said, "with
photography, poor gentleman."

Faded and dim as it was, the picture riveted my eyes at once by some
unknown power of attraction. I gazed at it long and earnestly. It
represented a house of colonial aspect, square, wood-built, and
verandah-girt, standing alone among strange trees whose very names
and aspects were then unfamiliar to me, but which I nowadays know to
be Australian eucalyptuses. On the steps of the verandah sat a lady
in deep mourning. A child played by her side, and a collie dog lay
curled up still and sleepy in the foreground. The child, indeed,
stirred no chord of any sort in my troubled brain; but my heart came
up into my mouth so at sight of the lady, that I said to myself all
at once in my awe, "That must surely be my mother!"

The longer I looked at it, the more was I convinced I must have
judged aright. Not indeed that in any true sense I could say I
remembered her face or figure: I was so young when she died,
according to everybody's account, that even if I'd remained in my
First State I could hardly have retained any vivid recollection of
her. But both lady and house brought up in me once more to some
vague degree that strange consciousness of familiarity I had noticed
at The Grange: and what was odder still, the sense of wont seemed
even more marked in the Australian cottage than in the case of the
house which all probability would have inclined one beforehand to
think I must have remembered better. If this was indeed my earliest
home, then I seemed to recollect it far more readily than my later
one.

I turned trembling to Jane, hardly daring to frame the question that
rose first to my lips.

"Is that--my mother?" I faltered out slowly.

But there Jane couldn't help me. She'd never seen the lady, she
said.

"When first I come to The Grange, miss, you see, your mother'd been
buried a year; there was only you and Mr. Callingham in family. And
I never saw that photograph, neither, till I picked it out of the
box locked up in the attic. The little girl might be you, like
enough, when you look at it sideways; and yet again it mightn't. But
the lady I don't know. I never saw your mother."

So I was fain to content myself with pure conjecture.

All day long, however, the new picture haunted me almost as
persistently as the old one.

That night I went to sleep fast, and slept for some hours heavily. I
woke with a start. I had been dreaming very hard. And my dream was
peculiarly clear and lifelike. Never since the first night of my new
life--the night of the murder--had I dreamed such a dream, or seen
dead objects so vividly. It came out in clear colours, like the
terrible Picture that had haunted me so long. And it affected me
strangely. It was a scene, rather than a dream--a scene, as at the
theatre; but a scene in which I realised and recognised everything.

I stood on the steps of a house--a white wooden house, with a
green-painted verandah--the very house I had seen that afternoon in
the faded photograph in Jane's little sitting-room. But I didn't
think of it at first as the house in the old picture: I thought of
it as home--our own place--the cottage. The steps seemed to me very
high, as in childish recollection. A lady walked about on the
verandah and called to me: a lady in a white gown, like the lady in
the photograph, only younger and prettier, and dressed much more
daintily. But I didn't think of her as that either: I called her
mamma to myself: I looked up into her face, oh, ever so much above
me: I must have been very small indeed when that picture first
occurred to me. There was a gentleman, too, in a white linen coat,
who pinched my mamma's ear, and talked softly and musically. But I
didn't think of him quite so: I knew he was my papa: I played about
his knees, a little scampering child, and looked up in his face, and
teased him and laughed at him. My papa looked down at me, and called
me a little kitten, and rolled me over on my back, and fondled me
and laughed with me. There were trees growing all about, big trees
with long grey leaves: the same sort of trees as the ones in the
photograph. But I didn't remember that at first: in my dream, and in
the first few minutes of my waking thought, I knew them at once as
the big blue-gum-trees.

I awoke in the midst of it: and the picture persisted.

Then, with a sudden burst of intuition, the truth flashed upon me
all at once. My dream was no mere dream, but a revelation in my
sleep. It was my intellect working unconsciously and spontaneously
in an automatic condition. For the very first time in my life, since
the night of the murder, I had really REMEMBERED something that
occurred before it.

This was a scene of my First State. In all probability it was my
earliest true childish recollection.

I sat up in bed, appalled. I dared not call aloud or ring for Jane
to come to me. But if I'd seen a ghost, it could hardly have
affected me more profoundly than this ghost of my own dead life thus
brought suddenly back to me. Gazing away across some illimitable
vista of dim years, I remembered this one scene as something that
once occurred, long ago, to my very self, in my own experience. Then
came a vast gulf, an unbridged abyss: and after that, with a
vividness as of yesterday, the murder.

I held my ears and crouched low, sitting up in my bed in the dark.
But the dream seemed to go on still: it remained with me distinctly.

The more I thought it over, the more certain it appeared as part of
my own experience. Putting two and two together, I made sure in my
own mind this was a genuine recollection of my life in Australia. I
was born there, I knew: that I had learned from everybody. But I
could distinctly remember having LIVED there now. It came back to me
as memory. The dream had reinstated it.

And it was the sight of the photograph that had produced the dream.
This was curious, very. A weird idea came across me. Had I begun, in
all past efforts to remember, at the wrong end? Instead of trying to
recollect the circumstances that immediately preceded the murder,
ought I to have set out by trying to reinstate my First Life,
chapter by chapter and verse by verse, from childhood upward? Ought
I to start by recalling as far as possible my very earliest
recollections in my previous existence, and then gradually work up
through all my subsequent history to the date of the murder?

The more I thought of it, the more convinced was I that that was the
right procedure.

It was certainly significant that this vague childish recollection
of something which might have happened when I was just about two
years old should be the very first thing to recur to my my memory.
Yet so appalled and alarmed was I by the weirdness of this sudden
apparition, looming up, as it were, all by itself in the depths of
my consciousness, that I hardly dared bring myself to think of
trying to recall any other scenes of that dead and past existence.
The picture rose like an exhalation, hanging unrelated in mid-air, a
mere mental mirage: and it terrified me so much, that I shrank
unutterably from the effort of calling up another of like sort to
follow it.




CHAPTER IX.

HATEFUL SUSPICIONS


The rest of that night I lay awake in my bed, the scene in the
verandah by the big blue-gum-trees haunting me all the time, much as
in earlier days the Picture of the murder had pursued and haunted
me. Early in the morning I rose up, and went down to Jane in her
little parlour. I longed for society in my awe. I needed human
presence. I couldn't bear to be left alone by myself with all these
pressing and encompassing mysteries.

"Jane," I said after a few minutes' careless talk--for I didn't
like to tell her about my wonderful dream,--"where exactly did you
find the picture of that house hanging over in the corner there?"

"Lor' bless your heart, miss," Jane answered, "there's a whole
boxful of them at The Grange. Nobody ever cared for them. They're up
in the top attic. They were locked till your papa died, and then
they were opened by order of the executors. Some of 'em's faded even
worse than that one, and none of 'em's very good; but I picked this
one out because it was better worth framing for my room than most of
'em. The executors took no notice when they found what they was.
They opened the box to see if it was dockyments."

"Well, Jane," I said, "I shall go up and bring them every one away
with me. It's possible they may help me to recollect things a bit."
I drew my hand across my forehead. "It all seems so hazy," I went
on. "Yet when I see things again, I sometimes feel as if I almost
recognised them."

So that very morning we went up together (I wouldn't go alone), and
got the rest of the photographs--very faded positives from
old-fashioned plates, most of them representing persons and places I
had never seen; and a few of them apparently not taken in England.

I didn't look them all over at once just then. I thought it best not
to do so. I would give my memory every possible chance. Take a few
at a time, and see what effect they produced on me. Perhaps--though
I shrank from the bare idea with horror--they might rouse in my
sleep such another stray effort of spontaneous reconstruction. Yet
the last one had cost me much nervous wear and tear--much mental
agony.

A few days after, I went away from Woodbury. I had learned for the
moment, I thought, all that Woodbury could teach me: and I longed to
get free again for a while from this pervading atmosphere of
mystery. At Aunt Emma's, at least, all was plain and aboveboard. I
would go back to Barton-on-the-Sea, and rest there for a while,
among the heathery hills, before proceeding any further on my voyage
of discovery.

But I took back Jane with me. I was fond of Jane now. In those two
short weeks I had learned to cling to her. Though I remembered her,
strictly speaking, no more than at first, yet the affection I must
have borne her in my First State seemed to revive in me very easily,
like all other emotions. I was as much at home with Jane, indeed, as
if I had known her for years. And this wasn't strange; for I HAD
known her for years, in point of fact; and and though I'd forgotten
most of those years, the sense of familiarity they had inspired
still lived on with me unconsciously. I know now that memory resides
chiefly in the brain, while the emotions are a wider endowment of
the nervous system in general; so that while a great shock may
obliterate whole tracts in the memory, no power on earth can ever
alter altogether the sentiments and feelings.

As for Jane, she was only too glad to come with me. There were no
lodgers at present, she said; and none expected. Her sister
Elizabeth would take care of the rooms, and if any stranger came,
why, Lizzie'd telegraph down at once for her. So I wrote to Aunt
Emma to expect us both next day. Aunt Emma's, I knew, was a home
where I or mine were always welcome.

Jane had never seen Aunt Emma. There had been feud between the
families while my father lived, so she didn't visit The Grange after
my mother's death. Aunt Emma had often explained to me in part how
all that happened. It was the one point in our family history on
which she'd ever been explicit: for she had a grievance there; and
what woman on earth can ever suppress her grievances? It's our
feminine way to air them before the world, as it's a man's to bury
them deep in his own breast and brood over them.

My mother, she told me, had been a widow when my father married
her--a rich young widow. She had gone away, a mere girl, to
Australia with her first husband, a clergyman, who was lost at sea
two or three years after, on the voyage home to England without her.
She had one little girl by her first husband, but the child died
quite young: and then she married my father, who met her first in
Australia while she waited for news of the clergyman's safety. Her
family always disapproved of the second marriage. My father had no
money, it seemed; and mamma was well off, having means of her own to
start with, like Aunt Emma, and having inherited also her first
husband's property, which was very considerable. He had left it to
his little girl, and after her to his wife; so that first my father,
and then I myself, came in, in the end, to both the little estates,
though my mother's had been settled on the children of the first
marriage. Aunt Emma always thought my father had married for money:
and she said he had been hard and unkind to mamma: not indeed cruel;
he wasn't a cruel man; but severe and wilful. He made her do exactly
as he wished about everything, in a masterful sort of way, that no
woman could stand against. He crushed her spirit entirely, Aunt Emma
told me; she had no will of her own, poor thing: his individuality
was so strong, that it overrode my mother's weak nature rough-shod.

Not that he was rough. He never scolded her; he never illtreated
her; but he said to her plainly, "You are to do so and so;" and she
obeyed like a child. She never dared to question him.

So Aunt Emma had always said my mother was badly used, especially in
money matters--the money being all, when one came to think of it,
her own or her first husband's;--and as a consequence, auntie was
never invited to The Grange during my father's lifetime.

When we reached Barton-on-the-Sea, Jane and I, on our way from
Woodbury, Aunt Emma was waiting at the station to meet us. To my
great disappointment, I could see at first sight she didn't care for
Jane: and I could also see at first sight Jane didn't care for her.
This was a serious blow to me, for I leaned upon those two more than
I leaned upon anyone; and I had far too few friends in the world of
my own, to afford to do without any one of them.

In the evening, however, when I went up to my own room to bed, Jane
came up to help me as she always did at Woodbury. I began at once to
tax her with not liking Aunt Emma. With a little hesitation, Jane
admitted that at first sight she hadn't felt by any means disposed
to care for her. I pressed her hard as to why. Jane held off and
prevaricated. That roused my curiosity:--you see, I'm a woman. I
insisted upon knowing.

"Oh, miss, I can't tell you!" Jane cried, growing red in the face,
"I can't bear to say it out. You oughtn't to ask. It'll hurt you to
know I even thought such a thing of her!"

"You MUST tell me, Jane," I exclaimed, with a cold shudder of
terror, half guessing what she meant. "Don't keep me in suspense.
Let me know what it is. I'm accustomed to shocks now. I know I can
stand them."

Jane answered nothing directly. She only held out her coarse red
hand and asked me, with a face growing pale as she spoke:

"Where's that picture of the murder?"

I produced it from my box, trembling inwardly all over.

Jane darted one finger demonstratively at a point in the photograph.

"Whose hand is THAT?" she asked with a strange earnestness, putting
her nail on the murderer's.

The words escaped me in a cry of horror almost before I was aware of
them:

"Aunt Emma's!" I said, gasping. "I NEVER noticed it before."

Then I drew back and stared at it in speechless awe and
consternation.

It was quite, quite true. No use in denying it. The figure that
escaped through the window was dressed in man's clothes, to be sure,
and as far as one could judge from the foreshortening and the
peculiar stoop, had a man's form and stature. But the hand was a
woman's--soft, and white, and delicate: nay more, the hand, as I
said in my haste, was line for line Aunt Emma's.

In a moment a terrible sinking came over me from head to foot. I
trembled like an aspen-leaf. Could this, then, be the meaning of Dr.
Marten's warning, that I should let sleeping dogs lie, lest I should
be compelled to punish someone whom I loved most dearly? Had Fate
been so cruel to me, that I had learned to cling most in my Second
State to the very criminal whose act had blotted out my First? Had I
grown to treat like a mother my father's murderer?

Aunt Emma's hand! Aunt Emma's hand! That was Aunt Emma's hand, every
touch and every line of it. But no! where were the marks, those
well-known marks on the palm? I took up the big magnifying-glass
with which I had often scanned that photograph close before. Not a
sign or a trace of them. I shut my eyes, and called up again the
mental Picture of the murder. I looked hard at the phantom-hand in
it, that floated like a vision, all distinct before my mind's eye.
It was flat and smooth and white. Not a scar--not a sign on it. I
turned round to Jane, that too natural detective.

"No, no!" I cried hastily, with a quick tone of triumph. "Aunt
Emma's hand is marked on the palm with great gashes and cuts. This
one's smooth as smooth can be. And so's the one I can see in the
Picture within me!"

Jane drew back with a startled air, and opened her mouth, all agog,
to let in a deep breath.

"The wall!" she said slowly. "The bottle-glass, don't you know! The
blood on the top! Whoever did it, climbed over and tore his hands.
Or HER hands, if it was a woman! That would account for the gashes."

This was more than I could endure. The coincidence was too crushing.
I bent down my head on my arms and cried silently, bitterly. I hated
Jane in my heart for even suggesting it. Yet I couldn't deny to
myself for a moment the strength and suggestiveness of her
half-spoken argument.

Not that for a second I believed it true. I could never believe it.
Aunt Emma, so gentle, so kindly, so sweet: incapable of hurting any
living thing: the tenderest old lady that breathed upon earth: and
my own mother's sister, whom I loved as I never before loved anyone!
Aunt Emma the murderess! The bare idea was preposterous! I couldn't
entertain it. My whole nature revolted from it.

And indeed, how very slight, after all, was the mere scrap of
evidence on which Jane ventured to suggest so terrible a charge! A
man--in man's clothes--fairly tall and slim, and apparently
dark-haired, but stooping so much that he looked almost hump-backed:
how different from Aunt Emma, with her womanly figure, and her upright
gait, and her sweet old white head! Why, it was clearly ridiculous.

And yet, the fact remained that as Jane pointed to the Picture and
asked, "Whose hand is that?" the answer came up all spontaneously to
my lips, without hesitation, "Aunt Emma's!"

I sat there long in my misery, thinking it over to myself. I didn't
know what to do. I couldn't go and confide to Aunt Emma's ear this
new and horrible doubt,--which was no doubt after all, for I KNEW it
was impossible. I hated Jane for suggesting it; I hated her for
telling me. Yet I couldn't be left alone. I was far too terrified.

"Oh, Jane;" I cried, looking up to her, and yet despising myself for
saying it, "you must stop here to-night and sleep with me. If I'm
left by myself in the room alone, I know I shall go mad--I can feel
it--I'm sure of it!"

Jane stopped with me and soothed me. She was certainly very kind.
Yet I felt in a dim underhand sort of way it was treason to Aunt
Emma to receive her caresses at all after what she had said to me.
Though to be sure, it was I, not she, who spoke those hateful words.
It was I myself who had said the hand was Aunt Emma's.

As I lay awake and thought, the idea flashed across me suddenly,
could Jane have any grudge of her own against Aunt Emma? Was this a
deliberate plot? What did she mean by her warnings that I should
keep my mind open? Why had she said from the very first it was a
woman's hand? Did she want to set me against my aunt? And was Dr.
Marten in league with her? In my tortured frame of mind, I felt all
alone in the world. I covered my head and sobbed in my misery. I
didn't know who were my friends and who were against me.

At last, after long watching, I dozed off into an uneasy sleep. Jane
had already been snoring long beside me. I woke up again with a
start. I was cold and shuddering. I had dreamed once more the same
Australian dream. My mamma as before stood gentle beside me. She
stooped down and smoothed my hair: I could see her face and her form
distinctly. And I noticed now she was like her sister, Aunt Emma,
only younger and prettier, and ever so much slighter. And her hand,
too, was soft and white like auntie's--very gentle and delicate.

It was just there that I woke up--with the hand before my eyes. Oh,
how vividly I noted it! Aunt Emma's hand, only younger, and
unscarred on the palm. The family hand, no doubt: the hand of the
Moores. I remembered, now, that Aunt Emma had spoken more than once
of that family peculiarity. It ran through the house, she said. But
my hand was quite different: not the Moore type at all: I supposed I
must have taken it, as was natural, from the Callinghams.

And then, in my utter horror and loneliness, a still more awful and
ghastly thought presented itself to me. This was my mother's hand I
saw in the picture. Was it my mother, indeed, who wrought the
murder? Was she living or dead? Had my father put upon her some
grievous wrong? Had he pretended to get her out of the way? Had he
buried her alive, so to speak, in some prison or madhouse? Had she
returned in disguise from the asylum or the living grave to avenge
herself and murder him? In my present frame of mind, no idea was too
wild or too strange for me to entertain. If this strain continued
much longer, I should go mad myself with suspense and horror!




CHAPTER X.

YET ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPH


Next morning my head ached. After all I'd suffered, I could hardly
bear to recur to the one subject that now always occupied my
thoughts. And yet, on the other hand, I couldn't succeed in
banishing it. To relieve my mind a little, I took out the
photographs I had brought from the box at The Grange, and began to
sort them over according to probable date and subject.

They were of different periods, some old, some newer. I put them
together in series, as well as I could, by the nature of the
surroundings. The most recent of all were my father's early attempts
at instantaneous electric photography--the attempts which led up at
last to his automatic machine, the acmegraph, that produced all
unconsciously the picture of the murder. Some of these comparatively
recent proofs represented men running and horses trotting: but the
best of all, tied together with a bit of tape, clearly belonged to a
single set, and must have been taken at the same time at an athletic
meeting. There was one of a flat race, viewed from a little in
front, with the limbs of the runners in seemingly ridiculous
attitudes, so instantaneous and therefore so grotesquely rigid were
they. There was another of a high jump, seen from one side at the
very moment of clearing the pole, so that the figure poised solid in
mid-air as motionless as a statue. And there was a third, equally
successful, of a man throwing the hammer, in which the hammer, in
the same way, seemed to hang suspended of itself like Mahomet's
coffin between earth and heaven.

But the one that attracted my attention the most was a photograph of
an obstacle-race, in which the runners had to mount and climb over a
wagon placed obtrusively sideways across the course on purpose to
baffle them. This picture was taken from a few yards in the rear;
and the athletes were seen in it in the most varied attitudes. Some
of them were just climbing up one side of the wagon: others had
mounted to the top ledge of the body: and one, standing on the
further edge, was in the very act of leaping down to the ground in
front of him. He was bent double, to spring, with a stoop like a
hunchback, and balanced himself with one hand held tightly behind
him.

As my eye fell on that figure, a cold thrill ran through me. For a
moment I only knew something important had happened. Next instant I
realised what the thrill portended. I could only see the man's back,
to be sure, but I knew him in a second. I had no doubt as to who it
was. This was HIM--the murderer!

Yes, yes! There could be no mistaking that arched round back that
had haunted me so long in my waking dreams. I knew him at sight. It
was the man I had seen on the night of the murder getting out of the
window!

Perhaps I was overwrought. Perhaps my fancy ran away with me. But I
didn't doubt for a second. I rose from my seat, and in a tremulous
voice called Jane into the room. Without one word I laid both
pictures down before her together. Jane glanced first at the one,
then turned quickly to the other. A sharp little cry broke from her
lips all unbidden. She saw it as fast and as instinctively as I had
done.

"That's him!" she exclaimed, aghast, and as pale as a sheet. "That's
him, right enough, Miss Una. That's the very same back! That's the
very same hand! That's the man! That's the murderer!"

And indeed, this unanimity was sufficiently startling. For nothing
could have been more different than the dress in the two cases. In
the murder scene, the man seemed to wear a tweed suit and
knickerbockers,--he was indistinct, as I said before, against the
blurred light of the window: while in the athletic scene, he wore
just a thin jersey and running-drawers, cut short at the knee, with
his arms and legs bare, and his muscles contracted. Yet for all
that, we both knew him for the same man at once. That stooping back
was unmistakable; that position of the hand was characteristic and
unique. We were sure he was the same man. I trembled with agitation.
I had a clue to the murderer!

Yet, strange to say, that wasn't the first thought that occurred to
my mind. In the relief of the moment, I looked up into Jane's eyes,
and exclaimed with a sigh of profound relief:

"Then you see how mistaken you were about the hands and Aunt Emma!"

Jane looked close at the hand in the photograph once more.

"Well, it's curious," she said, slowly. "That's a man, sure enough:
but he'd ought to be a Moore. The palm's your aunt's as clear as
ever you could paint it!"

I glanced over her shoulder. She was perfectly right. It was a man
beyond all doubt, the figure on the wagon. Yet the hand was Aunt
Emma's, every line and every stroke of it; except, of course, the
scars. Those, I saw at a glance, were wholly wanting.

And now I had really a clue to the murderer.

Yet how slight a clue! Just a photograph of men's backs. What men?
When and where? It was an athletic meeting. Of what club or society?
That was the next question now I had to answer. Instinctively I made
up my mind to answer it myself, without giving any notice to the
police of my discovery.

Perhaps I should never have been able to answer it at all but for
one of the photographs which, as I thought, though lying loose by
itself, formed part of the same series. It represented the end of a
hundred-yard race, with the winners coming in at the tape by a
pavilion with a flag-staff. On the staff a big flag was flying
loosely in the wind. The folds hid half of the words on its centre
from sight. But this much at least I could read:

"ER...OM..OY...LETI...UB."

I gazed at them long and earnestly. After a minute or two of
thought, I made out the last two words. The inscription must surely
be Something-or-other Athletic Club.

But what was "Er... om.. oy..."? That question staggered me. Gazing
harder at it than ever, I could come to no conclusion. It was the
name of a place, no doubt: but what place, I knew not.

"Er"? No, "Ber": just a suspicion of a B came round the corner of a
fold. If B was the first letter, I might possibly identify it.

I took the photograph down to Aunt Emma, without telling her what I
meant. She couldn't bear to think I was ever engaged in thinking of
my First State at all.

"Can you read the inscription on that flag, auntie?" I asked. "It's
an old photograph I picked up in the attic at The Grange, and I'd
like to know, if I could, at what place it was taken."

Aunt Emma gazed at it long and earnestly. Her colour never changed.
Then she shook her head quietly.

"I don't know the place," she said; "and I don't know the name. I
can't quite make it out. That's E, and R, and O. You see, the
letters in between might be almost anything."

I wasn't going to be put off, however, with the port thus in sight.
One fact was almost certain. Wherever that pavilion might be, the
murderer was there on the day unknown when those photo-graphs were
taken. And whatever that day might be, my father and the murderer
were there together. That brought the two into connection, and
brought me one step nearer a solution than ever the police had been;
for hitherto no one had even pretended to have the slightest clue to
the personality of the man who jumped out of the window.

I went into the library and took down the big atlas. Opening the map
of England and Wales, I began a hopeless search, county by county,
from Northumberland downward, for any town or village that would fit
these mysterious letters. It was a wild and foolish idea. In the
first place not a quarter of the villages were marked in the map;
and in the second place, my brain soon got muddled and dazed with
trying to fit in the names with the letters on the flag. Two hours
had passed away, and I'd only got as far down as Lancashire and
Durham. And, most probably even so, I would never come upon it.

Then suddenly, a bright idea broke on my brain at once. The Index!
The Index! Presumably, as no fold seemed to obscure the first words,
the name began with what looked like a B. That was always something.

A man would have thought of that at once, of course: but then, I
have the misfortune to be only a woman.

I turned to the Index in haste, and looked down it with hurried
eyes. Almost sooner than I could have hoped, the riddle unread
itself. "Ber-, Berb-, Berc-, Berd-," I read out: "Berkshire: Berham:
Berhampore: that won't do: Berlin: Berling: Bernina: Berry--what's
that? Oh, great heavens!"--my brain reeled--"Berry Pomeroy!"

It was as clear as day. How could I have missed it before? There it
seemed to stand out almost legible on the flagstaff. I read it now
with ease: "Berry Pomeroy Athletic Club."

I looked up the map once more, following the lines with my fingers,
till I found the very place where the name was printed. A village in
Devonshire, not far from Torquay. Yes! That's it; Berry Pomeroy. The
murderer was there on the day of that athletic meeting!

My heart came up into my mouth with mingled horror and triumph. I
felt like a bloodhound who gets on the trail of his man. I would
track him down now, no doubt--my father's murderer!

I had no resentment against him, no desire for vengeance. But I had
a burning wish to free myself from this environing mystery.

I wouldn't tell the police or the inspector, however, what clue I
had obtained. I'd find it all out for myself without anyone's help.
I remembered what Dr. Marten had said, and determined to be wise.
I'd work on my own lines till all was found out: and then, be it who
it might, I sternly resolved I'd let justice be done on him.

So I said nothing even to Jane about the discovery I'd just made. I
said nothing to anybody till we sat down at dinner. Then, in the
course of conversation, I got on the subject of Devonshire.

"Auntie," I ventured to ask at last, in a very casual way, "did I
ever, so far as you know, go anywhere near a place called Berry
Pomeroy?"

Aunt Emma gave a start.

"Oh, darling, why do you ask?" she cried.

"You don't mean to say you remember that, do you? What do you want
to know for, Una? You can't possibly recollect your Torquay visit,
surely!"

I trembled all over. Then I was on the right track!

"Was I ever at Torquay?" I asked once more, as firmly as I could.
"And when I was there, did I go over one day to Berry Pomeroy?"

Aunt Emma grew all at once as white as death.

"This is wonderful!" she cried in an agitated voice. "This is
wonderful--wonderful! If you can remember that, my child, you can
remember anything."

"I DON'T remember it auntie," I answered, not liking to deceive her.
"To tell you the truth, I simply guessed at it. But when and why was
I at Torquay? Please tell me. And did I go to Berry Pomeroy?" For I
stuck to my point, and meant to get it out of her.

Aunt Emma gazed at me fixedly.

"You went to Torquay, dear," she said in a very slow voice, "in the
spring of the same year your poor father was killed: that's more
than four years ago. The Willie Moores live at Torquay, and several
more of your cousins. You went to stop with Willie's wife, and you
stayed five weeks. I don't know whether you ever went over to Berry
Pomeroy. You may have, and you mayn't: it's within an easy driving
distance. Minnie Moore has often written to ask me whether you could
go there again; Minnie was always fond of you, and thinks you'd
remember her: but I've been afraid to allow you, for fear it should
recall sad scenes. She's about your own age, Minnie is; and she's a
daughter of Willie Moore, who's my own first cousin, and of course
your dear mother's."

I never hesitated a moment. I was strung up too tightly by that
time.

"Auntie dear," I said quietly, "I go to-morrow to Torquay. I must
know all now. I must hunt up these people."

Auntie knew from my tone it was no use trying to stand in my way any
longer.

"Very well, dear," she said resignedly. "I don't believe it's good
for you: but you must do as you like. You have your father's will,
Una. You were always headstrong."




CHAPTER XI.

THE VISION RECURS


I hated asking auntie questions, they seemed to worry and distress
her so; but that evening, in view of my projected visit to Torquay,
I was obliged to cross-examine her rather closely about many things.
I wanted to know about my Torquay relations, and as far as possible
about my mother's family. In the end I learned that the Willie
Moores were cousins of ours on my mother's side who had never
quarrelled with my father, like Aunt Emma, and through whom alone
accordingly, in the days of my First State, Aunt Emma was able to
learn anything about me. They had a house at Torquay, and
connections all around; for the Moores were Devonshire people. Aunt
Emma was very anxious, if I went down there at all, I should stop
with Mrs. Moore: for Minnie would be so grieved, she said, if I went
to an hotel or took private lodgings. But I wouldn't hear of that
myself. I knew nothing of the Moores--in my present condition--and I
didn't like to trust myself in the hands of those who to me were
perfect strangers. So I decided on going to the Imperial Hotel, and
calling on the Moores quietly to pursue my investigation.

Another question I asked in the course of the evening. I had
wondered about it often, and now, in these last straits, curiosity
overcame me.

"Aunt Emma," I said unexpectedly after a pause, without one word of
introduction, "how ever did you get those scars on your hand? You've
never told me."

In a moment, Aunt Emma blushed suddenly crimson like a girl of
eighteen.

"Una," she answered very gravely, in a low strange tone, "oh, don't
ask me about that, dear. Don't ask me about that. You could never
understand it.... I got them... in climbing over a high stone
wall... a high stone wall, with bits of glass stuck on top of it."

In spite of her prohibition, I couldn't help asking one virtual
question more. I gave a start of horror:

"Not the wall at The Grange!" I cried. "Oh, Aunt Emma, how
wonderful!"

She gazed at me, astonished.

"Yes, the wall at The Grange," she said simply. "But I don't know
how you guessed it.... Oh, Una, don't talk to me any more about
these things, I implore you. You can't think how they grieve me.
They distress me unspeakably."

Much as I longed to know, I couldn't ask her again after that. She
was trembling like an aspen-leaf. For some minutes we sat and
looked at the fireplace in silence.

Then curiosity overcame me again.

"Only one question more, auntie," I said. "When I came to you first,
you were at home here at Barton. You didn't come to Woodbury to
fetch me after the murder. You didn't attend the inquest. I've often
wondered at that. Why didn't you bring me yourself? Why didn't you
hurry to nurse me as soon as you heard they'd shot my father?"

Aunt Emma gazed at me again with a face like a sheet.

"Darling," she said, quivering, "I was ill. I was in bed. I was
obliged to stay away. I'd hurt myself badly a little before.... Oh,
Una, leave off! If you go on like this, you'll drive me mad. Say no
more, I implore of you."

I couldn't think what this meant; but as auntie wished it, I held my
peace, all inwardly trembling with suppressed excitement.

That night, when I went up to bed, I lay awake long, thinking to
myself of the Australian scene. In the silence of the night it came
back to me vividly. Rain pattered on the roof, and helped me to
remember it. I could see the blue-gum trees waving their long
ribbon-like leaves in the wind: I could see the cottage, the
verandah, my mother, our dog: nay, even, I remembered now, with a
burst of recollection, his name was Carlo. The effort was more truly
a recollection than before: it was part of myself: I felt aware it
was really I myself, not another, who had seen all this, and lived
and moved in it.

Slowly I fell asleep, and passed from thinking to dreaming. My dream
was but a prolongation of the thoughts I had been turning over in my
waking mind. I was still in Australia; still on the verandah of our
wooden house; and my mamma was there, and papa beside her. I knew it
was papa; for I held his hand and played with him. But he was so
much altered, so grave and severe; though he smiled at me
good-humouredly. Mamma was sitting behind, with baby on her lap. It
seemed to me quite natural she should be there with baby. The scene
was so distinct--very vivid and clear. It persisted for many
minutes, perhaps even hours. It burnt itself into my brain. At last,
it woke me up by its very intensity.

As I woke, a great many thoughts crowded in upon me all at once.
This time I knew instantly it was no mere dream, but a true
recollection. Yet what a strange recollection! how unexpected! how
incomprehensible! How much in it to settle! how much to investigate
and hunt up and inquire about!

In the first place, though I was still in my dream a little girl,
much time must have elapsed since the earlier vision; for my papa
looked far older, and graver, and sterner. He had more hair about
his face, too, a long brown beard and heavy moustache; and when I
gazed hard at him mentally, I could recognise the likeness with the
white-bearded man who lay dead on the floor: while in my former
recollection, I could scarcely make out any resemblance of the
features. This showed that the second scene came long after the
first: my father must by that time have begun to resemble his later
self. A weird feeling stole over me. Was I going to relive my
previous life, piecemeal? Was the past going to unroll itself in
slow but regular panorama to my sleeping vision? Was my First State
to become known like this in successive scenes to my Second?

But that wasn't all. There were strange questions to decide, too,
about this new dream of dead days. What could be the meaning of that
mysterious baby? She seemed to be so vivid, so natural, so real; her
presence there was so much a pure matter of course to me, that I
couldn't for a moment separate her from the rest of the Picture. I
REMEMBERED the baby, now; as I remembered my mother, and my father,
and Australia. There was no room for doubt as to that. The baby was
an integral part of my real recollection. Floating across the dim
ocean of years, I was certain that night I had once lived in such a
scene, with my mamma, and baby.

Yet oh, what baby? I never had a brother or sister of my own, except
the half-sister that died--the clergyman's child, Mary Wharton. And
Mary, from what I had learned from Aunt Emma and others, must have
died when I was only just five months old, immediately before we
left Australia. How, then, could I remember her, even in this
exalted mental state of trance or dream? And, above all, how could I
remember a far earlier scene, when my papa was younger, when his
face was smooth, and when there was no other baby?

This mystery only heightened the other mysteries which surrounded my
life. I was surfeited with them now. In very despair and
listlessness, I turned round on my side, and dozed dreamily off
again, unable to grapple with it.

But still that scene haunted me. And still, even in sleep, I asked
myself over and over again, "How on earth can this be? What's the
meaning of the baby?"

Perhaps it was a little sister that died young, whom I never had
heard of. And perhaps not. In a life such as mine, new surprises are
always possible.




CHAPTER XII.

THE MOORES OF TORQUAY


Strange to say, in spite of everything, my sleep refreshed me. I
woke up in the morning strong and vigorous--thank goodness, I have
physically a magnificent constitution--and packed my box, with
Jane's help, for my Torquay expedition.

I went up to London and down to Torquay alone, though Jane offered
to accompany me. I was learning to be self-reliant. It suited my
plans better. Nobody could bear this burden for me but myself; and
the sooner I learnt to bear it my own way, the happier for me.

At Torquay station, to my great surprise, a fresh-looking girl of my
own age rushed up to me suddenly, and kissed me without one word of
warning. She was a very pretty girl, pink-cheeked and hazel-eyed:
and as she kissed me, she seized both my hands in hers, and cried
out to me frankly:

"Why, there you are, Una dear! Cousin Emma telegraphed us what train
you'd arrive by; so I've driven down to meet you. And now, you're
coming up with us this very minute in the pony-carriage."

"You're Minnie Moore, I suppose?" I said, gazing at her admiringly.
Her sweet, frank smile and apple-blossom cheek somehow inspired me
with confidence.

She looked back at me quite distressed. Tears rose at once into her
eyes with true Celtic suddenness.

"Oh, Una," she cried, deeply hurt and drawing back into her shell,
"don't tell me you don't know me! Why, I'm Minnie! Minnie!"

My heart went out to her at once. I took her hand in mine again.

"Minnie dear," I said softly, quite remorseful for my mistake, "you
must remember what has happened to me, and not be angry. I've
forgotten everything, even my own past life. I've forgotten that I
ever before set eyes upon you. But, my dear, there's one thing I've
NOT in a way forgotten; and that is, that I loved you and love you
dearly. And I 'll give you a proof of it. When I started, I knew
none of you; and I told Aunt Emma I wouldn't go among strangers. The
moment I see you, I know you're no stranger, but a very dear cousin.
When I've forgotten MYSELF, how can I remember YOU? But I'll go up
with you at once. And I'll countermand the room I ordered by
telegram at the Imperial."

The tears stood fuller in Minnie's eyes than before. She clasped my
hand hard. Her pretty lips trembled.

"Una darling," she said, "we always were friends, and we always
shall be. If you love me, that's all. You're a darling. I love you."

I looked at her sweet face, and knew it was true. And oh, I was so
glad to have a new friend--an old friend, already! For somehow, as
always, while the intellectual recollection had faded, the emotion
survived. I felt as if I'd known Minnie Moore for years, though I
never remembered to have seen her in my life till that minute.

Well, I remained at the Moores' for a week, and felt quite at home
there. They were all very nice, Cousin Willie, and Aunt Emily (she
made me call her aunt; she said I'd always done so), and Minnie, and
all of them. They were really dear people; and blood, after all, is
thicker than water. But I made no haste to push inquiries just at
first. I preferred to feel my way. I wanted to find out what they
knew, if anything, about Berry Pomeroy.

The first time I ventured to mention the subject to Minnie, she gave
a very queer smile--a smile of maidenly badinage.

"Well, you remember THAT, any way," she said, in a teasing little
way, looking down at me and laughing. "I thought you'd remember
that. I must say you enjoyed yourself wonderfully at Berry Pomeroy!"

"Remember what?" I cried, all eagerness; for I saw she attached some
special importance to the recollection. And yet, it was terrible she
should jest about the clue to my father's murderer!

Minnie looked arch. When she looked arch, she was charming.

"Why, I never saw you prettier or more engaging in your life than
you were that day," she said evasively, as if trying to pique me.
"And you flirted so much, too! And everybody admired you so.
Everybody on the grounds... especially one person!"

I looked up at her in surprise. I was in my own room, seated by the
dressing-table, late at night, when we'd gone up to bed; and Minnie
was beside me, standing up, with her bedroom candle in that pretty
white little hand of hers.

"What do you mean?" I exclaimed eagerly. "Was it a dance--or a
picnic?"

"Oh, you know very well," Minnie went on teasingly, "though you
pretend you forget. HE was there, don't you know. You must remember
HIM, if you've forgotten all the rest of your previous life. You say
you remember the appropriate emotions. Well, he was an emotion: at
least, you thought so. It was an Athletic Club Meeting: and Dr. Ivor
was there. He went across on his bicycle."

I gave a start of surprise. Minnie looked down at me half
maliciously.

"There, you see," she said archly again, "at Dr. Ivor you change
colour. I told you you'd remember him!"

I grew pale with astonishment.

"Minnie dear," I said, holding her hands very tight in my own, "it
wasn't that, I assure you. I've forgotten him, utterly. If ever I
knew a Dr. Ivor, if ever I flirted with him, as you seem to imply,
he's gone clean out of my head. His name stirs no chord--recalls
absolutely nothing. But I want to know about that Athletic Meeting.
Was my poor father there that day? And did he take a set of
photographs?"

Minnie clapped her hands triumphantly.

"I KNEW you remembered!" she cried. "Of course, Cousin Vivian was
there. We drove over in a break. You MUST remember that. And he took
a whole lot of instantaneous photographs."

My hand trembled violently in my cousin's. I felt I was now on the
very eve of a great discovery.

"Minnie," I said, tentatively, "do you think your papa would drive
us over some day and--and show us the place again?"

"Of course he would, dear," Minnie answered, with a gentle pressure
of my hand. "He'd be only too delighted. Whatever you choose. You
know you were always such a favourite of daddy's."

I knew nothing of the sort; but I was glad to learn it. I drew
Minnie out a little more about the Athletics and my visit to Berry
Pomeroy. She wouldn't tell me much: she was too illusive and
indefinite: she never could get the notion out of her head, somehow,
that I remembered all about it, and was only pretending to
forgetfulness. But I gathered from what she said, that Dr. Ivor and
I must have flirted a great deal; or, at least, that he must have
paid me a good lot of attention. My father didn't like it, Minnie
said; he thought Dr. Ivor wasn't well enough off to marry me. He was
a distant cousin of ours, of course--everything was always "of
course" with that dear bright Minnie--what, didn't I know that? Oh,
yes, his mother was one of the Moores of Barnstaple, cousin Edward's
people. His name was Courtenay Moore Ivor, you know--though I knew
nothing of the sort. And he was awfully clever. And, oh, so
handsome!

"Is he at Berry Pomeroy still?" I asked, trembling, thinking this
would be a good person to get information from about the people at
the Athletic Sports.

"Oh dear, no," Minnie answered, looking hard at me, curiously. "He
was never at Berry Pomeroy. He had a practice at Babbicombe. He's in
Canada now, you know. He went over six months after Cousin Vivian's
death. I think, dear,"--she hesitated,--"he never QUITE got over
your entirely forgetting him, even if you forgot your whole past
history."

This was a curious romance to me, that Minnie thus sprang on me--a
romance of my own past life of which I myself knew nothing.

We sat late talking, and I could see Minnie was very full indeed of
Dr. Ivor. Over and over again she recurred to his name, and always
as though she thought it might rouse some latent chord in my memory.
But nothing came of it. If ever I had cared for Dr. Ivor at all,
that feeling had passed away utterly with the rest of my
experiences.

When Minnie rose to go, I took her hand once more in mine. As I did
so, I started. Something about it seemed strangely familiar. I
looked at it close with a keen glance. Why, this was curious! It was
Aunt Emma's hand: it was my mother's hand: it was the hand in my
mental Picture: it was the hand of the murderer!

"It's just like auntie's," I said with an effort, seeing Minnie
noticed my start.

She looked at it and laughed.

"The Moore hand," she said gaily. "We all have it, except you. It's
awfully persistent."

I turned it over in front and examined the palm. At sight of it my
brain reeled. This was surely magic! Minnie Moore's hand, too, was
scarred over with cuts, exactly like Aunt Emma's!

"Why, how on earth did you do that?" I cried, thunderstruck at the
discovery.

But Minnie only laughed again, a bright girlish laugh.

"Climbing over that beastly wall at The Grange," she said with a
merry look. "Oh, what fun we did have! We climbed it together. We
were dreadful tomboys in those days, dear, you and I: but you were
luckier than I was, and didn't cut yourself with the bottle-glass."

This was too surprising to be passed over unnoticed. When Minnie was
gone, I lay awake and pondered about it. Had all the Moores got
scars on their hands, I wondered? And how many people, I asked
myself, had cut themselves time and again in climbing over that
barricaded garden-wall of my father's?

The Moore hand might be hereditary, but not surely the scars. Was
the murderer, then, a Moore, and was that the meaning of Dr.
Marten's warning?




CHAPTER XIII.

DR. IVOR OF BABBICOMBE


Two days later, Cousin Willie drove us over to Berry Pomeroy. The
lion of the place is the castle, of course; but Minnie had told him
beforehand I wanted, for reasons of my own, to visit the
cricket-field where the sports were held "the year Dr. Ivor won the
mile race, you remember." So we went there straight. As soon as we
entered, I recognised the field at once, and the pavilion, and the
woods, as being precisely the same as those presented in the
photograph. But I got no further than that. The captain of the
cricket-club was on the ground that day, and I managed to get into
conversation with him, and strolled off in the grounds. There I
showed him the photograph, and asked if he could identify the man
climbing over the wagon: but he said he couldn't recognise him.
Somebody or other from Torquay, perhaps; not a regular resident. The
figures were so small, and so difficult to make sure about. If I'd
leave him the photograph, perhaps--but at that I drew back, for I
didn't want anybody, least of all at Torquay, to know what quest I
was engaged upon.

We drove back, a merry party enough, in spite of my failure. Minnie
was always so jolly, and her mirth was contagious. She talked all
the way still of Dr. Ivor, half-teasing me. It was all very well my
pretending not to remember, she said; but why did I want to see the
cricket-field if it wasn't for that? Poor Courtenay! if only he
knew, how delighted he'd be to know he wasn't forgotten! For he
really took it to heart, my illness--she always called it my
illness, and so I suppose it was. From the day I lost my memory,
nothing seemed to go right with him; and he was never content till
he went and buried himself somewhere in the wilds of Canada.

That evening again, I sat with Minnie in my room. I was depressed
and distressed. I didn't want to cry before Minnie, but I could have
cried with good heart for sheer vexation. Of course I couldn't bear
to go showing the photograph to all the world, and letting everybody
see I'd made myself a sort of amateur detective. They would mistake
my motives so. And yet I didn't know how I was ever to find out my
man any other way. It was that or nothing. I made up my mind I would
ask Cousin Willie.

I took out the photograph, as if unintentionally, when I went to my
box, and laid it down with my curling-tongs on the table close by
Minnie. Minnie took it up abstractedly and looked at it with an
indefinite gaze.

"Why, this is the cricket-field!" she cried, as soon as she
collected her senses. "One of your father's experiments. The
earliest acmegraphs. How splendidly they come out! See, that's Sir
Everard at the bottom; and there's little Jack Hillier above; and
this on one side's Captain Brooks; and there, in front of all--well,
you know HIM anyhow, Una. Now, don't pretend you forget! That's
Courtenay Ivor!"

Her finger was on the man who stood poised ready to jump. With an
awful recoil, I drew back and suppressed a scream. It was on the tip
of my tongue to cry out, "Why, that's my father's murderer!"

But, happily, with a great effort of will I restrained myself. I saw
it all at a glance. That, then, was the meaning of Dr. Marten's
warning! No wonder, I thought, the shock had disorganised my whole
brain. If Minnie was right, I was in love once with that man. And I
must have seen my lover murder my father!

For I didn't doubt, from what Minnie said, I had really once loved
Dr. Ivor. Horrible and ghastly as it might be to realise it, I
didn't doubt it was the truth. I had once loved the very man I was
now bent on pursuing as a criminal and a murderer!

"You're sure that's him, Minnie?" I cried, trying to conceal my
agitation. "You're sure that's Courtenay Ivor, the man stooping on
the wagon-top?"

Minnie looked at me, smiling. She thought I was asking for a very
different reason.

"Yes, that's him, right enough, dear," she said. "I could tell him
among a thousand. Why, the Moore hand alone would be quite enough to
know him by. It's just like my own. We've all of us got it--except
yourself. I always said you weren't one of us. You're a regular born
Callingham."

I gazed at her fixedly. I could hardly speak.

"Oh, Minnie!" I cried once more, "have you ... have you any
photograph of him?"

"No, we haven't, dear," Minnie answered.

"That was a fad of Courtenay's, you know. Wherever he went, he'd
never be photographed. He was annoyed that day that your father
should have taken him unawares. He hated being 'done,' he said. He's
so handsome and so nice, but he's not a bit conceited. And he was
such a splendid bicyclist! He rode over and back on his bicycle that
day, and then ran in all the races as if it were nothing."

A light burst over me at once. This was circumstantial evidence. The
murderer who disappeared as if by magic the moment his crime was
committed must have come and gone all unseen, no doubt, on his
bicycle. He must have left it under the window till his vile deed
was done, and then leapt out upon it in a second and dashed off
whence he came like a flash of lightning.

It was a premeditated crime, in that case, not the mere casual
result of a sudden quarrel.

I must find out this man now, were it only to relieve my own sense
of mystery.

"Minnie," I said once more, screwing up my courage to ask, "where's
Dr. Ivor now? I mean--that is to say--in what part of Canada?"

Minnie looked at me and laughed.

"There, I told you so!" she said, merrily. "It's not the least bit
of use your pretending you're not in love with him, Una. Why, just
look how you tremble! You're as white as a ghost! And then you say
you don't care for poor Courtenay! I forget the exact name of the
place where he lives, but I've got it in my desk, and I can tell you
to-morrow.--Oh, yes; it's Palmyra, on the Canada Pacific. I suppose
you want to write to him. Or perhaps you mean to go out and offer
yourself bodily."

It was awful having to bottle up the truth in one's own heart, and
to laugh and jest like this; but I endured it somehow.

"No, it's not that," I said gravely. "I've other reasons of my own
for asking his address, Minnie. I want to go out there, it's true;
but not because I cherish the faintest pleasing recollection of Dr.
Ivor in any way."

Minnie scanned me over in surprise.

"Well, how you ARE altered, Una!" she cried. "I love you, dear, and
like you every bit as much as ever. But you've changed so much. I
don't think you're at all what you used to be. You're so grave and
sombre."

"No wonder, Minnie," I exclaimed, bursting gladly into tears--the
excuse was such a relief--"no wonder, when you think how much I've
passed through!"

Minnie flung her arms around my neck, and kissed me over and over
again.

"Oh, dear!" she cried, melting. "What have I done? What have I said?
I ought never to have spoken so. It was cruel of me--cruel, Una
dear. I shall stop here to-night, and sleep with you."

"Oh, thank you, darling!" I cried. "Minnie, that IS good of you. I'm
so awfully glad. For to-morrow I must be thinking of getting ready
for Canada."

"Canada!" Minnie exclaimed, alarmed. "You're not really going to
Canada! Oh, Una, you're joking! You don't mean to say you're going
out there to find him!"

I took her hand in mine, and held it up in the air above her head
solemnly.

"Dear cousin," I said, "I love you. But you must promise me this one
thing. Whatever may happen, give me your sacred word of honour
you'll never tell anybody what we've said here to-night. You'll
kill me if you do. I don't want any living soul on earth to know of
it."

I spoke so seriously, Minnie felt it was important.

"I promise you," she answered, growing suddenly far graver than her
wont. "Oh, Una, I haven't the faintest idea what you mean, but no
torture on earth shall ever wring a word of it from me!"

So I went to bed in her arms, and cried myself to sleep, thinking
with my latest breath, in a tremor of horror, that I'd found it at
last. Courtenay Ivor was the name of my father's murderer!




CHAPTER XIV.

MY WELCOME TO CANADA


The voyage across the Atlantic was long and uneventful. No whales,
no icebergs, no excitement of any sort. My fellow-passengers said
it was as dull as it was calm. But as for me, I had plenty to occupy
my mind meanwhile. Strange things had happened in the interval, and
were happening to me on the way. Strange things, in part, of my own
internal history.

For before I left England, as I sat with Aunt Emma in her little
drawing-room at Barton-on-the-Sea, discussing my plans and devising
routes westward, she made me, quite suddenly, an unexpected
confession.

"Una," she said, after a long pause, "you haven't told me, my dear,
why you're going to Canada. And I don't want to ask you. I know
pretty well. We needn't touch upon that. You're going to hunt up
some supposed clue to the murderer."

"Perhaps so, Auntie," I said oracularly: "and perhaps not."

For I didn't want it to get talked about and be put into all the
newspapers. And I knew now if I wanted to keep it out, I must first
be silent.

Aunt Emma drew nearer and took my hand in hers. At the same time,
she held up the other scarred and lacerated palm.

"Do you know when I got that, Una?" she asked with a sudden burst.
"Well, I'll tell you, my child.... It was the night of your father's
death. And I got it climbing over the wall at The Grange, to escape
detection."

My blood ran cold once more. What on earth could this mean? Had
Auntie--? But no. I had the evidence of my own senses that it was
Courtenay Ivor. I'd tracked him down now. There was no room for
doubt. The man on the wagon was the man who fired the shot. I could
have sworn to that bent back, of my own knowledge, among a thousand.

I hadn't long to wait, however. Auntie went on after a short pause.

"I was there," she said, "by accident, trying for once to see you."

I looked at her fixedly still, and still I said nothing.

"I was stopping with friends at the time, ten miles off from
Woodbury," Aunt Emma went on, smoothing my hand with hers, "and I
longed so to see you. I came over by train that day, and stopped
late about the town in hopes I might meet you in the street. But I
was disappointed. Towards evening I ventured even to go into the
grounds of The Grange, and look about everywhere on the chance that
I might see you. Perhaps your father might be out. I went round
towards the window, which I now know to be the library. As I went, I
saw a bicycle leaning up against the wall by the window. I thought
that must be some visitor, but still I went on. But just as I
reached the window, I saw a flash of electric light; and by the
light, I could make out your father's head and beard. He looked as
if he were talking angrily and loudly to somebody. The window was
open. I was afraid to stop longer. In a sudden access of fear, I ran
across the shrubbery towards the garden-wall. To tell you the truth,
I was horribly frightened. Why, I don't know; for nothing had
happened as yet. I suppose it was just the dusk and the mean sense
of intrusion."

She paused and wiped her brow. I sat still, and listened eagerly.

"Presently," she went on, very low, "as I ran and ran, I heard
behind me a loud crash--a sound as of a pistol-shot. That terrified
me still more. I thought I was being pursued. Perhaps they took me
for a burglar. In the agony of my terror, I rushed at the wall in
mad haste, and climbed over it anyhow. In climbing, I tore my hand,
as you see, and made myself bleed, oh, terribly! However, I
persevered, and got down on the other side, with my clothes very
little the worse for the scramble. And, fortunately, I was carrying
a small light dust-cloak: I put it on at once, and it covered up
everything. Then I began to walk along the road as fast as I could
in the direction of the station. As I did so, a bicycle shot out
from the gate in the opposite direction, going as hard as it could
spin, simply flying towards Whittingham. Three minutes later, a man
came up to me, breathless. It was the gardener at The Grange, I
believe.

"'Have you seen anybody go this way?' he asked. 'A young man,
running hard? A young man in knickerbockers?'

"'N--no,' I answered, trembling; for I was afraid to confess. 'Not a
soul has gone past!'

"Of course, I didn't know of the murder as yet; and I only wanted to
get off unperceived to the station.

"I'd bound up my hand in my handkerchief by that time, and held it
tight under my cloak. I went back by train unnoticed, and returned
to my friends' house. I hadn't even told them I was going to
Woodbury at all. I pretended I'd been spending the day at
Whittingham. Next morning, I read in the paper of your father's
murder."

I stared hard at Aunt Emma.

"Why didn't you tell me this long ago?" I cried, in an agony of
suspense. "Why didn't you give evidence and say so at the inquest?"

"How could I?" Aunt Emma answered, looking back at me appealingly.
"The circumstances were too suspicious. As it was, everybody was
running after the young man in knickerbockers. Nobody took any
notice of a little old lady in a long grey dust-cloak. But if once
I'd confessed and shown my wounded hand, who would ever have
believed I'd nothing to do with the murder?--except you, perhaps,
Una. Oh no: I came back here to my own home as fast as ever I could;
for I was really ill. I took to my bed at once. And as nobody called
me to give evidence at the inquest, I said nothing to anybody."

"But the bicycle!" I cried. "The bicycle! You ought to have
mentioned that. You were the only one who saw it. It was a clue to
the murderer."

"If I'd told," Aunt Emma answered, "I should never have been allowed
to take charge of you at all. I thought my one clear duty was to my
sister's child: it was to take care of your health in your shattered
condition. And even now, Una, I tell you only for this: if you find
out anything new, in Canada or here, try not to drag me into it. I
couldn't stand the strain. Cross-examination would kill me."

"I'll remember it, auntie," I said, wearied out with excitement.
"But I think you did wrong, all the same. In a case like this, it's
everybody's first duty to tell all he knows, in the interests of
justice."

However, this confession of Aunt Emma's rendered one thing more
certain to me than ever before. I was sure I was on the right track
now, after Courtenay Ivor. The bicycle clinched the proof.

But I said nothing as yet to the police, or to my friendly
Inspector. I was determined to hunt the whole thing up on my own
account first, and then deliver my criminal, when fully secured, to
the laws of my country.

Not that I was vindictive. Not that I wanted to punish the man. No;
I shrank terribly from the task. But to relieve myself from this
persistent sense of surrounding mystery, and to free others from
suspicion, I felt compelled to discover him. It seemed to me like a
duty laid upon me from without. I dared not shirk it.

On the way out to Quebec, the sea seemed to revive strange memories.
I had never crossed it before, except long, long ago, on my way home
from Australia. And now that I sat on deck, in a wicker-chair, and
looked at the deep dark waves by myself, I began once more, in vague
snatches, to recall that earlier voyage. It came back to me all of
itself. And that was quite in keeping with my previous recollections.
My past life, I felt sure, was unfolding itself slowly to me in
regular succession, from childhood onward.

Sitting there on the quarter-deck, gazing hard at the waves, I
remembered how I had played on a similar ship years and years
before, a little girl in short frocks, with my mamma in a long
folding-chair beside me. I could see my mamma, with a sort of
frightened smile on her poor pale face; and she looked so unhappy.
My papa was there too, somewhat older and greyer--very unlike the
papa of my first Australian picture. His face was so much hairier.
Mamma cried a good deal at times, and papa tried to comfort her.
Besides, what struck me most, there was no more baby. I wasn't even
allowed to speak about baby. That subject was tabooed--perhaps
because it always made mamma cry so much, and press me hard to her
bosom. At any rate, I remembered how once I spoke of baby to some
fellow-passenger in the saloon, and papa was very angry, and caught
me up in his arms and took me down to my berth; and there I had to
stop all day by myself (though it was rolling hard) and could have
no fruit for dinner, because I'd been naughty. I was strictly
enjoined never to mention baby to anyone again, either then or at
any time. I was to forget all about her.

Day after day, as we sailed on, reminiscences of the same sort
crowded thicker and thicker upon me. Never reminiscences of my later
life, but always early scenes brought up by distinct suggestion
of that Australian voyage. When we passed a ship, it burst upon me
how we'd passed such ships before: when there was fire-drill on
deck, I remembered having assisted years earlier at just such
fire-drill. The whole past came back like a dream, so that I could
reconstruct now the first five or six years of my life almost
entirely. And yet, even so there was a gap, a puzzle, a difficulty
somehow. I couldn't make the chronology of this slow-returning
memory fit in as it ought with the chronology of the facts given to
me by Aunt Emma and the Moores of Torquay. There was a constant
discrepancy. It seemed to me that I must be a year or two older at
least than they made me out. I remembered the voyage home far too
well for my age. I fancied I went back further in my Australian
recollections than would be possible from the dates Aunt Emma
assigned me.

Slowly, as I compared these mental pictures of my first childhood
one with the other, a strange fact seemed to loom forth,
incomprehensible, incredible. When first it struck me, all unnerved
as I was, my reason staggered before it. But it was true, none the
less: quite true, I felt certain. Had I had two papas, then?--for
the pictures differed so. Was one, clean-shaven, trim, and in a
linen coat, the same as the other, older, graver, and sterner, with
much hair on his face, and a rough sort of look, whom I saw more
persistently in my later childish memories? I could hardly believe
it. One man couldn't alter so greatly in a few short years. Yet I
thought of them both alike quite unquestioningly as papa: I thought
of them too, I fancied, in a dim sort of way, as one and the same
person.

These fresh mysteries occupied my mind for the greater part of that
uneventful voyage. To throw them off, I laughed and talked as much
as possible with the rest of the passengers. Indeed, I gained the
reputation of being "an awfully jolly girl," so heartily did I throw
myself into all the games and amusements, to escape from the burden
of my pressing thoughts: and I believe many old ladies on board were
thoroughly scandalised that a woman whose father had been brutally
murdered should ever be able to seem so bright and lively again. How
little they knew! And what a world of mystery seemed to oppress and
surround me!

At last, early one morning, we reached the Gulf, and took in our
pilot off the Straits of Belleisle. I was on deck at the time,
playing a game called "Shovelboard." As the pilot reached the ship,
he took the captain's hand, and, to my immense surprise, said in an
audible voice:

"So you've the famous Miss Callingham for a passenger, I hear, this
voyage. There's the latest Quebec papers. You'll see you're looked
for. Our people are expecting her."

I rushed forward, fiery hot, and with a trembling hand took one of
the papers he was distributing all round, right and left, to the
people on deck. It was unendurable that the memory of that one event
should thus dog me through life with such ubiquitous persistence. I
tore open the sheet. There, with horrified eyes, I read this hateful
paragraph, in the atrociously vulgar style of Transatlantic
journalism:

"The Sarmatian, expected off Belleisle to-morrow morning, brings
among her passengers, as we learn by telegram, the famous Una
Callingham, whose connection with the so-called Woodbury Mystery is
now a matter of historical interest. The mysterious two-souled lady
possesses, at present, all her faculties intact, as before the
murder, and is indeed, people say, a remarkably spry and intelligent
young person; but she has most conveniently forgotten all the events
of her past life, and more particularly the circumstances of her
father's death, which is commonly conjectured to have been due to
the pistol of some unknown lover. Such freaks of memory are common,
we all know, in the matter of small debts and of newspaper
subscriptions, but they seldom extend quite so far as the violent
death of a near relation. However, Una knows her own business best.
The Sarmatian is due alongside the Bonsecours Quay at 10 a.m. on
Wednesday, the 10th; and all Quebec will, no doubt, be assembled at
the landing-stage to say 'Good-morning' to the two-souled lady."

The paper dropped from my hand. This was too horrible for anything!
How I was ever to go through the ordeal of the landing at Quebec
after that, I hadn't the faintest conception. And was I to be dogged
and annoyed like this through all my Canadian trip by anonymous
scribblers? Had these people no hearts? no consideration for the
sensitiveness of an English lady?

I looked over the side of the ship at the dark-blue water. Oh, how
I longed to plunge into it and be released for ever from this
abiding nightmare!




CHAPTER XV.

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE


The moment we reached the quay at Quebec, some two days later, a
dozen young men, with little notebooks in their hands, jumped on
board all at once.

"Miss Callingham!" they cried with one accord, making a dash for the
quarter-deck. "Which is she? Oh, this!--If you please, Miss
Callingham, I should like to have ten minutes of your time to
interview you!"

I clapped my hands to my ears, and stood back, all horrified. What I
should have done, I don't know, but for a very kind man in a big
rough overcoat, who had jumped on board at the same time, and made
over to me like the reporters. He stepped up to me at once, pushed
aside the young men, and said in a most friendly tone:

"Miss Callingham, I think? You'd better come with me, then. These
people are all sharks. Everybody in Quebec's agog to see the
Two-souled Lady. Answer no questions at all. Take not the least
notice of them. Just follow me to the Custom House. Let them rave,
but don't speak to them."

"Who are you?" I asked blindly, clinging to his arm in my terror.

"I'm a policeman in plain clothes," my new friend answered; "and
I've been specially detailed by order for this duty. I'm here to
look after you. You've friends in Canada, though you may have quite
forgotten them. They've sent me to help you. Those are two of my
chums there, standing aside by the gangway. We'll walk you off
between us. Don't be afraid.--Here, you sir, there; make way!--No
one shall come near you."

I was so nervous, and so ashamed that I accepted my strange escort
without inquiry or remonstrance. He helped me, with remarkable
politeness for a common policeman, across to the Custom House, where
I sat waiting for my luggage. Reporters and sightseers, meanwhile,
pressed obtrusively around me. My protector held them back. I was
half wild with embarrassment. I'm naturally a reserved and somewhat
sensitive girl, and this American publicity made me crimson with
bashfulness.

As I sat there waiting, however, the two other policemen to whom my
champion had beckoned sat one on each side of me, keeping off the
idle crowd, while my first friend looked after the luggage and saw
it safely through the Customs for me. He must be an Inspector, I
fancied, or some other superior officer, the officials were so
deferential to him. I gave him my keys, and he looked after
everything himself. I had nothing, for my part, to do but to sit and
wait patiently for him.

As soon as he had finished, he called a porter to his side.

"Vite!" he cried, in a tone of authority, to the man. "Un fiacre!"

And the porter called one.

I started to find that I knew what he meant. Till that moment, in my
Second State, I had learned no French, and didn't know I could speak
any. But I recognised the words quite well as soon as he uttered
them. My lost knowledge reasserted itself.

They bundled on my boxes. The crowd still stood around and gaped at
me, open-mouthed. I got into the cab, more dead than alive.

"Allez!" my policeman cried to the French-Canadian driver, seating
himself by my side.

"A la gare du chemin de fer Pacific! Aussi vite que possible!"

I understood every word. This was wonderful. My memory was coming
back again.

The man tore along the streets to the Pacific railway station. By
the time we reached it we had distanced the sightseers, though some
of them gave chase. My policeman got out.

"The train's just going!" he said sharply. "Don't take a ticket for
Palmyra, if you don't want to be followed and tracked out all the
way. They'll telegraph on your destination. Book to Kingston
instead, and then change at Sharbot Lake, and take a second ticket
on from there to Palmyra."

I listened, half dazed. Palmyra was the place where Dr. Ivor lived.
Yet, even in the hurry of the moment, I wondered much to myself how
the policeman knew I wanted to go to Palmyra.

There was no time to ask questions, however, or to deliberate on my
plans. I took my ticket as desired, in a turmoil of feelings, and
jumped on to the train. I trusted by this time I had eluded
detection. I ought to have come, I saw now, under a feigned name.
This horrid publicity was more than I could endure. My policeman
helped me in with his persistent politeness, and saw my boxes
checked as far as Sharbot Lake for me. Then he handed me the checks.

"Go in the Pullman," he said quietly. "It's a long journey, you
know: four-and-twenty hours. You've only just caught it. But if
you'd stopped in Quebec, you'd never have been able to give the
sightseers the slip. You'd have been pestered all through. I think
you're safe now. It was this or nothing."

"Oh, thank you so much!" I cried, with heartfelt gratitude, leaning
out of the window as the train was on the point of starting. I
pulled out my purse, and drew timidly forth a sovereign. "I've only
English money," I said, hesitating, for I didn't know whether he'd
be offended or not at the offer of a tip--he seemed such a perfect
gentleman. "But if that's any use to you--"

He smiled a broad smile and shook his head, much amused.

"Oh, thank you," he said, half laughing, with a very curious air.
"I'm a policeman, as I told you. But I don't need tips. I'm the
Chief Constable of Quebec--there's my card; Major Tascherel,--and
I'm glad to be of use, I'm sure, to any friend of Dr. Ivor's."

He lifted his hat with the inborn grace of a high-born gentleman. I
coloured and bowed. The train steamed out of the station. As it
went, I fell back, half fainting, in the comfortable armchair of the
Pullman car, hardly able to speak with surprise and horror. It was
all so strange, so puzzling, so bewildering! Then I owed my escape
from the stenographic myrmidons of the Canadian Press to the polite
care and attention of my father's murderer!

Major Tascherel was a friend, he said, of Dr. Ivor's!

Then Dr. Ivor knew I had come. He knew I was going to Palmyra to
find him. And yet he had written to Quebec, apparently, expecting
this crush, and asking his friend the Chief Constable to protect and
befriend me. Had he murdered my father, and was he in love with me
still? Did he think I'd come out, not to track him down, but to look
for him? Strange, horrible questions! My heart stood still within me
at this extraordinary revelation. Yet I was so frightened at the
moment, alone in a strange land, that I felt almost grateful to the
murderer himself for his kindness in thinking of me and providing
for my reception.

As I settled in my seat and had time to realise what these things
meant, it dawned upon me by degrees that all this was less
remarkable, after all, than I first thought it. For they had
telegraphed from England that I sailed on the Sarmatian; and Dr.
Ivor, like everybody else, must have read the telegram. He might
naturally conclude I would be half-mobbed by reporters; and as it
was clear he had once been fond of me--hateful as I felt it even to
admit the fact to myself--he might really have desired to save me
annoyance and trouble. It was degrading, to be sure, even to think I
owed anything of any sort to such a wretch as that murderer; yet in
a certain corner of my heart I couldn't help being thankful to him.
But how strange to feel I had come there on purpose to hunt him
down! How horrible that I must so repay good with evil!

Then a still more ghastly thought surged up suddenly in my mind. Why
on earth did he think I was going to Palmyra? Was it possible he
fancied I loved him still--that I wanted to marry him? Could he
imagine I'd come out just to fling myself at his feet and ask him to
take me? Could he suppose I'd forgotten all the rest of my past
life, and his vile act as well, and yet remembered alone what
little love, if any, I ever had borne him? It was incredible that
any man, however wicked, however conceited, should think such folly
as that--that a girl would marry her father's murderer; and yet what
might not one expect from a man who, after having shot my father,
had still the inconceivable and unbelievable audacity to take
deliberate steps for securing my own comfort and happiness? From
such a wretch as that, one might look for almost anything!

For ten minutes or more, as we whirled along the line in the Pullman
car, I was too dazed and confused to notice anything around me. My
brain swam vaguely, filled full with wild whirling thoughts; the
strange drama of my life, always teeming with mysteries, seemed to
culminate in this reception in an unknown land by people who
appeared almost to know more about my business than I myself did. I
gazed out of the window blankly. In some vague dim way I saw we were
passing between rocky hills, pine-clad and beautiful, with deep
glimpses now and then into the riven gorge of a noble river. But I
didn't even realise to myself that these were Canadian hills--those
were the heights of Abraham--that was the silver St. Lawrence. It
all passed by like a living dream. I sat still in my chair, as one
stunned and faint; I gazed out, more dead than alive, on the
unfamiliar scene that unrolled itself in exquisite panorama before
me. Quebec and the Laurentian hills were to me half unreal: the
inner senses alone were awake and conscious.

Presently a gentle voice at my side broke, not at all unpleasantly,
the current of my reflections. It was a lady's voice, very sweet and
musical.

"I'm afraid," it said kindly, with an air of tender solicitude, "you
only just caught the train, and were hurried and worried and
flurried at the last at the station. You look so white and tired.
How your breath comes and goes! And I think you're new to our
Canadian ways. I saw you didn't understand about the checks for the
baggage. Let me take away this bag and put it up in the rack for
you. Here's a footstool for your feet; that'll make you more
comfortable."

At the first sound of her sweet voice, I turned to look at the
speaker. She was a girl, perhaps a year or two younger than myself,
very slender and graceful, and with eyes like a mother's. She wasn't
exactly pretty, but her face was so full of intelligence and
expression that it was worth a great deal more than any doll-like
prettiness.

Perhaps it was pleasure at being spoken to kindly at all in this
land of strangers; perhaps it was revulsion from the agony of shame
and modesty I had endured at Quebec; but, at any rate, I felt drawn
at first sight to my sweet-voiced fellow-traveller. Besides, she
reminded me somewhat of Minnie Moore, and that resemblance alone was
enough to attract me. I looked up at her gratefully.

"Oh, thank you so much!" I cried, putting my bag in her hand. "I've
only just come out from England; and I'd hardly time at Quebec to
catch the train; and the people crowded around so, that I was
flustered at landing; and everything somehow seems to be going
against me."

And with that my poor overwrought nerves gave way all at once, and
without any more ado I just burst out crying.

The lady by my side leant over me tenderly.

"There--cry, dear," she said, as if she'd known me for years,
stooping down and almost caressing me. "Jack,"--and she turned to a
tall gentleman at her side,--"quick! you've got my black bag; get me
out the sal volatile. She's quite faint, poor thing; we must look
after her instantly."

The person to whom she spoke, and who was apparently her husband or
her brother, took down the black bag from the rack hastily, and got
out the sal volatile, as my friend directed him. He poured a little
into a tumbler and held it quietly to my lips. I liked his manner,
as I'd liked the lady's. He was so very brotherly. Besides, there
was something extremely soothing about his quick, noiseless way. He
did it all so fast, yet without the faintest sign of agitation. I
couldn't help thinking what a good nurse he would make; he was so
rapid and effective, yet so gentle and so quiet. He seemed perfectly
accustomed to the ways of nervous women.

I dried my eyes after a while, and looked up in his face. He was
very good-looking, and had a charming soft smile. How lucky I should
have tumbled upon such pleasant travelling companions! In my present
mental state, I had need of sympathy. And, indeed, they took as much
care of me, and coddled me up as tenderly, as if they'd known me for
years. I was almost tempted to make a clean breast of my personality
to them, and tell them why it was I had been so worried and upset by
my reception at Quebec: but I shrank from confessing it. I hated my
own name, almost, it seemed to bring me such very unpleasant
notoriety.

In a very few minutes, I felt quite at home with my new friends. I
explained to them that when I landed I had no intention of going on
West by train at once, but that news which I received on the way had
compelled me to push forward by the very first chance; and that I
had to change my ticket at a place called Sharbot Lake, whose very
position or distance I hadn't had time to discover. The lady smiled
sweetly, and calmed my fears by telling me we wouldn't reach Sharbot
Lake till mid-day to-morrow, and that I would have plenty of time
there to book on to my destination.

Thus encouraged, I went on to tell them I had no Canadian money,
having brought out what I needed for travelling expenses and hotels
in Bank of England 20 pound notes. The lady smiled again, and said
in the friendliest way:

"Oh, my brother'll get them changed for you at Montreal as we pass,
won't you, Jack? or at least as much as you need till you get
to"--she checked herself--"the end of your journey."

I noticed how she pulled herself up, though at the moment I attached
no particular importance to it.

So he was her brother, not her husband, then! Well, he was a very
nice fellow, either way, and nobody could be kinder or more
sympathetic than he'd been to me so far.

We fell into conversation, which soon by degrees grew quite
intimate.

"How far West are you going?" the man she called Jack asked after a
little time, tentatively.

And I answered, all unsuspiciously:

"To a place called Palmyra."

"Why, we live not far from Palmyra," the sister replied, with a
smile. "We're going that way now. Our station's Adolphus Town, the
very next village."

I hadn't yet learned to join the wisdom of the serpent to the
innocence of the dove, I'm afraid. Remember, though in some ways I
was a woman full grown, in others I was little more than a
four-year-old baby.

"Do you know a Dr. Ivor there?" I asked eagerly, leaning forward.

"Oh, yes, quite well," the lady answered, arranging my footstool
more comfortably as she spoke. "He's got a farm out there now, and
hardly practises at all. How queer it is! One always finds one knows
people in common. Is Dr. Ivor a friend of yours?"

I recoiled at the stray question almost as if I'd been shot.

"Oh, no!" I cried, horrified at the bare idea of such treason. "He's
anything but a friend... I--I only wanted to know about him."

The lady looked at Jack, and Jack looked at the lady. Were they
telegraphing signs? I fancied somehow they gave one another very
meaning glances. Jack was the first to speak, breaking an awkward
silence.

"You can't expect everyone to know your own friends, or to like them
either, Elsie," he said slowly, with his eyes fixed hard on her, as
if he expected her to flare up.

My heart misgave me. A hateful idea arose in it. Could my sweet
travelling companion be engaged--to my father's murderer?

"But he's a dear good fellow, for all that, Jack," Elsie said
stoutly; and strange as it sounds to say so, I admired her for
sticking up for her friend Dr. Ivor, if she really liked him. "I
won't hear him run down by anybody, not even by YOU. If this lady
knew him better, I'm sure she'd like him, as we all do."

Jack turned the conversation abruptly.

"But if you're going to Palmyra," he asked, "where do you mean to
stop? Have you thought about lodgings? You mustn't imagine it's a
place like an English town, with an inn or hotel or good private
apartments. There's nowhere you can put up at in these brand-new
villages. Are you going to friends, or did you expect to find
quarters as easily as in England?"

This was a difficulty which, indeed, had never even occurred to me
till that moment. I stammered and hesitated.

"Well," I said slowly, "to tell you the truth, I haven't thought
about that. The landing at Quebec was such a dreadful surprise to
me, and"--tears came into my eyes again--"I had a great shock
there--and I had to come on so quick, I didn't ask about anything
but catching the train. I meant to stop a night or two either at
Quebec or in Montreal, and to make all inquiries: but circumstances,
you see, have prevented that. So I really don't know what I'd better
do when I get to Palmyra."

"I do," my new friend answered quickly, her soft sweet voice having
quite a decisive ring in it. "You'd better not go on to Palmyra at
all. There's no sort of accommodation there, except a horrid
drinking-saloon. You'd better stop short at Adolphus Town and spend
the night with us; and then you can look about you next day, if you
like, and see what chance there may be of finding decent quarters.
Old Mrs. Wilkins might take her in, Jack, or the Blacks at the
tannery."

I smiled, and felt touched.

"Oh, how good of you!" I cried. "But I really couldn't think of it.
Thank you ever so much, though, for your kind thought, all the same.
It's so good and sweet of you. But you don't even know who I am. I
have no introduction."

"You're your own best introduction," Elsie said, with a pretty nod:
I thought of her somehow from the very first moment I heard her name
as Elsie. "And as to your not knowing us, never mind about that. We
know YOU at first sight. It's the Canadian way to entertain Angels
unawares. Out here, you know, hospitality's the rule of the
country."

Well, I demurred for a long time; I fought off their invitation as
well as I could: I couldn't bear thus to quarter myself upon utter
strangers. But they both were so pressing, and brought up so many
cogent arguments why I couldn't go alone to the one village
saloon--a mere whisky-drinking public-house, they said, of very bad
character,--that in the long run I was fain almost to acquiesce in
their kind plan for my temporary housing. Besides, after my horrid
experience at Quebec, it was such a positive relief to me to meet
anybody nice and delicate, that I couldn't find it in my heart to
refuse these dear people. And then, perhaps it was best not to go
quite on to Palmyra at once, for fear of unexpectedly running
against my father's murderer. If I met him in the street, and he
recognised me and spoke to me, what on earth could I do? My head was
all in a whirl, indeed, as to what he might intend or expect: for I
felt sure he expected me. I made one last despairing effort.

"If I stop at your house, though," I said, half ashamed of myself
for venturing to make conditions, "there's one promise you must make
me--that I sha'n't see Dr. Ivor unless you let me know and get my
consent beforehand."

Jack, as I called him to myself, answered gaily back with a rather
curious smile:

"If you like, you need see nobody but our own two selves. We'll
promise not to introduce anybody to you without due leave, and to
let you do as you like in that and in everything."

So I yielded at last.

"Well, I must know your name," I said tentatively.

And Jack, looking queerly at me with an inquiring air, said:

"My sister's name's Elsie; mine's John Cheriton."

"And yours?" Elsie asked, glancing timidly down at me.

My heart beat hard. I was face to face with a dilemma. These were
friends of Courtenay Ivor's, and I had given myself away to them. I
was going to their house, to accept their hospitality--and to
betray their friend! Never in my life did I feel so guilty before.
Oh! what on earth was I to do? I had told them too much; I had gone
to work foolishly. If I said my real name, I should let out my whole
secret. I must brazen it out now. With tremulous lips and flushed
cheek, I answered quickly, "Julia Marsden."

Elsie drew back, all abashed. In a moment her cheek grew still
redder, I felt sure, than my own.

"Oh, Marsden!" she cried, eyeing me close. "Why, I thought you were
Miss Callingham!"

"How on earth did you know that?" I exclaimed, terrified almost out
of my life. Was I never for one moment to escape my own personality?

"Why, they put it in the papers that you were coming," Elsie
answered, looking tenderly at me, more in sympathy than in anger.
"And it's written on your bag, you know, that Jack put up in the
rack there... That's why we were so sorry for you, and so grieved at
the way you must have been hustled on the quay. And that's also why
we wanted you to come to us... But don't be a bit afraid. We quite
understand you want to travel incognita. After the sort of reception
you got at Quebec, no wonder you're afraid of these hateful
sightseers!... Very well, dear," she took my hand with the air of an
old friend, "your disguise shall be respected while you stop at our
house. Miss Marsden let it be. You can make any inquiries you like
about Dr. Ivor. We will be secrecy itself. We'll say nothing to
anyone. And my brother'll take your ticket at Sharbot Lake for
Adolphus Town."

I broke down once more. I fairly cried at such kindness.

"Oh, how good you are!" I said. "How very, very good. This is more
than one could ever have expected from strangers."

She held my hand and stroked it.

"We're not strangers," she answered. "We're English ourselves. We
sympathise deeply with you in this new, strange country. You must
treat us exactly like a brother and sister. We liked you at first
sight, and we're sure we'll get on with you."

I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it.

"And I liked you also," I said, "and your brother, too. You're both
so good and kind. How can I ever sufficiently thank you?"




CHAPTER XVI.

MY PLANS ALTER


The rest of that day we spent chatting very amicably in our Pullman
arm-chairs. I couldn't understand it myself--when I had a moment to
think, I was shocked and horrified at it. I was so terribly at home
with them. These were friends of Dr. Ivor's--friends of my father's
murderer! I had come out to Canada to track him, to deliver him
over, if I could, to the strong hand of Justice. And yet, there I
was talking away with his neighbours and friends as if I had known
them all my life, and loved them dearly. Nay, what was more, I
couldn't in my heart of hearts help liking them. They were really
sweet people--so kind and sympathetic, so perceptive of my
sensitiveness. They asked no questions that could hurt me in any
way. They showed no curiosity about the object of my visit or my
relation to Dr. Ivor. They were kindness and courtesy itself. I
could see Mr. Cheriton was a gentleman in fibre, and Elsie was as
sweet as any woman on earth could be.

By-and-by, the time came for the Pullman saloon to be transformed
for the night into a regular sleeping-car. All this was new to me,
and I watched it with interest. As soon as the beds were made up, I
crept into my berth, and my new friend Elsie took her place on the
sofa below me. I lay awake long and thought over the situation. The
more I thought of it, the stranger it all seemed. I tried hard to
persuade myself I was running some great danger in accepting the
Cheritons' invitation. Certainly, I had behaved with consummate
imprudence. Canada is a country, I said to myself, where they kidnap
and murder well-to-do young Englishmen. How much easier, then, to
kidnap and murder a poor weak stray English girl! I was entirely at
the mercy of the Cheritons, that was clear: and the Cheritons were
Dr. Ivor's friends. As I thought all the circumstances over, the
full folly of my own conduct came home to me more and more. I had
let these people suppose I was travelling under an assumed name. I
had let them know my ticket was not for Palmyra but for Kingston,
where I didn't mean to go. I had told them I meant to change it at
Sharbot Lake. So they were aware that no one on earth but themselves
had any idea where I had gone. And I had further divulged to them
the important fact that I had plenty of ready money in Bank of
England notes! I stood aghast at my own silliness. But still, I did
NOT distrust them.

No, I did NOT distrust them. I felt I ought to be distrustful. I
felt it might be expected of me. But they were so gentle-mannered
and so sweet-natured, that I couldn't distrust them. I tried very
hard, but distrust wouldn't come to me. That kind fellow Jack--I
thought of him, just so, as Jack already--couldn't hurt a fly, much
less kill a woman. It grieved me to think I would have to hurt his
feelings.

For now that I came to look things squarely in the face in my berth
by myself, I began to see how utterly impossible it would be for me
after all to go and stop with the Cheritons. How I could ever have
dreamt it feasible I could hardly conceive. I ought to have refused
at once. I ought to have been braver. I ought to have said outright,
"I'll have nothing to do or say with anyone who is a friend or an
acquaintance of Courtenay Ivor's." And yet, to have said so would
have been to give up the game for lost. It would have been to
proclaim that I had come out to Canada as Courtenay Ivor's enemy.

I wasn't fit, that was the fact, for my self-imposed task of
private detective.

A good part of that night I lay awake in my berth, bitterly
reproaching myself for having come on this wild-goose chase without
the aid of a man--an experienced officer. Next morning, I rose and
breakfasted in the car. The Cheritons breakfasted with me, and, sad
to say, seemed more charming than ever. That good fellow Jack was so
attentive and kind, I almost felt ashamed to have to refuse his
hospitality; and as for Elsie, she couldn't have treated me more
nicely or cordially if she'd been my own sister. It wasn't what they
said that touched my heart: it was what they didn't say or do--their
sweet, generous reticence.

After breakfast, I steeled myself for the task, and broke it to them
gently that, thinking it over in the night, I'd come to the
conclusion I couldn't consistently accept their proffered welcome.

"I don't know how to say NO to you," I cried, "after you've been so
wonderfully kind and nice; but reasons which I can't fully explain
just now make me feel it would be wrong of me to think of stopping
with you. It would hamper my independence of action to be in anybody
else's house. I must shift for myself, and try if I can't find board
and lodging somewhere."

"Find it with us then!" Elsie put in eagerly. "If that's all that's
the matter, I'm sure we're not proud--are we, Jack?--not a bit.
Sooner than you should go elsewhere and be uncomfortable in your
rooms, I'd take you in myself, and board you and look after you. You
could pay what you like; and then you'd retain your independence,
you see, as much as ever you wanted."

But her brother interrupted her with a somewhat graver air:

"It goes deeper than that, I'm afraid, Elsie," he said, turning his
eye full upon her. "If Miss Callingham feels she couldn't be happy
in stopping with us, she'd better try elsewhere. Though where on
earth we can put her, I haven't just now the very slightest idea.
But we'll turn it over in our own minds before we reach Adolphus
Town."

There was a sweet reasonableness about Jack that attracted me
greatly. I could see he entered vaguely into the real nature of my
feelings. But he wouldn't cross-question me: he was too much of a
gentleman.

"Miss Callingham knows her own motives best," he said more than
once, when Elsie tried to return to the charge. "If she feels she
can't come to us, we must be content to do the best we can for her
with our neighbours. Perhaps Mrs. Walters would take her in: she's
our clergyman's wife, Miss Callingham, and you mightn't feel the
same awkwardness with her as with my sister."

"Does she know--Dr. Ivor?" I faltered out, unable to conceal my real
reasons entirely.

"Not so intimately as we do," Jack answered, with a quick glance at
his sister. "We might ask her at any rate. There are so few houses
in Palmyra or the neighbourhood where you could live as you're
accustomed, that we mustn't be particular. But at least you'll spend
one night with us, and then we can arrange all the other things
afterward."

My mind was made up.

"No, not even one night," I said. I couldn't accept hospitality from
Dr. Ivor's friends. Between his faction and mine there could be
nothing now but the bitterest enmity. How dare I even parley with
people who were friends of my father's murderer?

Yet I was sorry to disappoint that good fellow, Jack, all the same.
Did he want me to sleep one night at his house on purpose to rob me
and murder me? Girl as I was, and rendered timorous in some ways by
the terrible shocks I had received, I couldn't for one moment
believe it. I KNEW he was good: I KNEW he was honourable, gentle, a
gentleman.

So, journeying on all morning, we reached Sharbot Lake, still with
nothing decided. At the little junction station, Jack got me my
ticket. That was the turning point in my career. The die was cast.
There I lost my identity. A crowd lounged around the platform, and
surged about the Pullman car, calling to see "Una Callingham." But
no Una Callingham appeared on the scene. I went, on in the same
train, without a word to anyone, all unknown save to the two
Cheritons, and as an unrecognised unit of common humanity. I had
cast that horrid identity clean behind me.

The afternoon was pleasant. In spite of my uncertainty, it gave me a
sense of pleased confidence to be in the Cheritons' company. I had
taken to them at once: and the more I talked with them, the better I
liked them. Especially Jack, that nice brotherly Jack, who seemed
almost like an old friend to me. You get to know people so well on a
long railway journey. I was quite sorry to think that by five
o'clock that afternoon we should reach Adolphus Town, and so part
company.

About ten minutes to five, we were collecting our scattered things,
and putting our front-hair straight by the mirror in the ladies'
compartment.

"Well, Miss Cheriton," I said warmly, longing to kiss her as I
spoke, "I shall never forget how kind you two have been to me. I do
wish so much I hadn't to leave you like this. But it's quite
inevitable. I don't see really how I could ever endure--"

I said no more, for just at that moment, as the words trembled on my
lips, a terrible jar thrilled suddenly through the length and
breadth of the carriage. Something in front seemed to rush into us
with a deep thud. There was a crash, a fierce grating, a dull hiss,
a clatter. Broken glass was flying about. The very earth beneath the
wheels seemed to give way under us. Next instant, all was blank. I
just knew I was lying, bruised and stunned and bleeding, on a bare
dry bank, with my limbs aching painfully.

I guessed what it all meant. A collision, no doubt. But I lay faint
and ill, and knew nothing for the moment as to what had become of my
fellow-passengers.




CHAPTER XVII.

A STRANGE RECOGNITION


Gradually I was aware of somebody moistening my temples. A soft palm
held my hand. Elsie was leaning over me. I opened my eyes with a
start.

"Oh, Elsie," I cried, "how kind of you!"

It seemed to me quite natural to call her Elsie.

Even as I spoke, somebody else raised my head and poured something
down my throat. I swallowed it with a gulp. Then I opened my eyes
again.

"And Jack, too," I murmured.

It seemed as if he'd been "Jack" to me for years and years already.

"She knows us!" Elsie cried, clasping her hands. "She's much
better--much better. Quick, Jack, more brandy! And make haste
there--a stretcher!"

There was a noise close by. Unseen hands lifted me up, and Jack laid
me on the stretcher. Half-an-hour at least must have elapsed, I felt
since the first shock of the accident. I had been unconscious
meanwhile. The actual crash came and went like lightning. And my
memory of all else was blotted out for the moment.

Next, as I lay still, two men took the stretcher and carried me off
at a slow pace, under Jack's direction. They walked single-file
along the line, and turned down a rough road that led off near a
river. I didn't ask where they were going: I was too weak and
feeble. At last they came to a house, a small white wooden cottage,
very colonial and simple, but neat and pretty. There was a garden in
front, full of old-fashioned flowering shrubs; and a verandah ran
round the house, about whose posts clambered sweet English creepers.

They carried me in, and laid me down on a bed, in a sweet little
room, very plain but dainty. It was panelled with polished
pitchpine, and roses peeped in at the open window. Everything about
the cottage bore the impress of native good taste. I knew it was
Jack's home. It was just such a room as I should have expected from
Elsie.

The bed on which they placed me was neat and soft. I lay there
dozing with pain. Elsie sat by my side, her own arm in a sling.
By-and-by, an Irish maid came in and undressed me carefully under
Elsie's direction. Then Elsie said to me, half shrinking:

"Now you must see the doctor."

"Not Dr. Ivor!" I cried, waking up to a full sense of this new
threatened horror. "Whatever I do, dear, I WON'T see Dr. Ivor!"

Jack had come in while she spoke, and was standing by the bed, I saw
now. The servant had gone out. He lifted my arm, and held my wrist
in his hand.

"I'm a doctor myself, Miss Callingham," he said softly, with that
quiet, reassuring voice of his. "Don't be alarmed at that; nobody
but myself and Elsie need come near you in any way."

I smiled at his words, well pleased.

"Oh, I'm so glad you're a doctor!" I cried, much relieved at the
news; "for I'm not the least little bit in the world afraid of YOU.
I don't mind your attending me. I like to have you with me." For I
had always a great fancy for doctors, somehow.

"That's well," he said, smiling at me such a sweet sympathetic smile
as he felt my pulse with his finger. "Confidence is the first great
requisite in a patient: it's half the battle. You're not seriously
hurt, I hope, but you're very much shaken. Whether you like it or
not, you'll have to stop here now for some days at least, till
you're thoroughly recovered."

I'm ashamed to write it down; but I was really pleased to hear it.
Nothing would have induced me to go voluntarily to their house with
the intention of stopping there--for they were friends of Dr.
Ivor's. But when you're carried on a stretcher to the nearest
convenient house, you're not responsible for your own actions. And
they were both so nice and kind, it was a pleasure to be near them.
So I was almost thankful for that horrid accident, which had cut the
Gordian knot of my perplexity as to a house to lodge in.

It was a fortnight before I was well enough to get out of bed and
lie comfortably on the sofa. All that time Jack and Elsie tended me
with unsparing devotion. Elsie had a little bed made up in my room;
and Jack came to see me two or three times a day, and sat for whole
hours with me. It was so nice he was a doctor! A doctor, you know,
isn't a man--in some ways. And it soothed me so to have him sitting
there with Elsie by my bedside.

They were "Jack" and "Elsie" to me, to their faces, before three
days were out; and I was plain "Una" to them: it sounded so sweet
and sisterly. Elsie slipped it out the second morning as naturally
as could be.

"Una'd like a cup of tea, Jack;" then as red as fire all at once,
she corrected herself, and added, "I mean, Miss Callingham."

"Oh, do call me Una!" I cried; "it's so much nicer and more
natural.... But how did you come to know my name was Una at all?"
For she slipped it out as glibly as if sh

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