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Title: Gilead Balm, knight errant

His adventures in search of the truth

Author: Bernard Capes

Illustrator: Cyrus Cuneo

Release date: February 21, 2023 [eBook #70105]

Language: English

Original publication: Canada: THE COPP CLARK COMPANY, LIMITED, 1911

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70105

Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GILEAD BALM, KNIGHT ERRANT ***

GILEAD BALM

KNIGHT ERRANT

His Adventures in Search of the Truth

BY

BERNARD CAPES

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS

BY CYRUS CUNEO

TORONTO

THE COPP CLARK COMPANY, LIMITED

1911

[COPYRIGHT]

[All Rights Reserved]

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

I. THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

II. THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (CONTINUED)

III. THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

IV. THE QUEST OF THE DOG

V. THE QUEST OF THE MARBLE STATUETTE

VI. THE QUEST OF THE ROSE-RING

VII. THE QUEST OF THE WAX HAND

VIII. THE QUEST OF THE RED-MOROCCO HANDBAG

IX. THE QUEST OF THE REGISTERED PARCEL

X. THE QUEST OF THE SHADOW

XI. THE QUEST OF THE VEILED WOMAN

XII. THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN

XIII. THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN (CONTINUED AND CONCLUDED)

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“A Little Old Man, shrewd and withered,”

“A Soft, Seal-Like Head was seen driving across the shining Flood,”

“He dabbed at the Reply Form, fuming and sputtering,”

“‘I desire to be put into communication with this,’”

“‘This is a Pleasantry, Mr Balm,’ he said,”

“A Little Monkey-Like Figure of a Man balancing on a Window-sill,”

“The Young Lady gave a scream which ‘shivered to the Stars,’”

“‘Look, Sir,’ he said, ‘Them Cushions where She sat!’”

GILEAD BALM

PROLOGUE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Would that be fair?” said Gilead.

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

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

“Yes?” said Gilead, calmly inquisitorial.

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

“Yes?” said Gilead again.

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

“What was his last?” asked the client.

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

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

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

CHAPTER I.

THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

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

“Anything especial?” asked Gilead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You think it promising?” he said.

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

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

Gilead reflected.

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course, Mr Balm.”

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

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

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

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

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

She caught at a sob to interrupt him.

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

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

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

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

“You are speaking of?” said Gilead.

“My mistress,” answered the girl.

“How long ago was that?”

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

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

The girl hesitated.

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

“I will,” said Gilead.

She gaped at him aghast, blinking her swollen lids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tweenie shook her poor little watery noddle.

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

“How long ago was that?”

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

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

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

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

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

He backed towards the door.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II.

THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (continued)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She smiled, a little wanly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little irrepressible sigh escaped her.

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

She shook her head slightly.

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

Her eyes opened upon him wonderingly.

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

He bowed gravely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Most certainly,” he answered.

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

“If you should desire it.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, utter,” she said low.

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

“Compensate!” she exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Be prepared. Winsom Wyllie.”

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

She shivered, and gave a little gulp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And the will was indisputable?”

“Quite, I fear.”

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

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

“Yes?” she whispered.

“You must come with me, please.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III.

THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

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

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

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

Nestle shook his head, with a smile.

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

Gilead mused a little.

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

He rose, and looked about him.

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

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

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

“A LITTLE OLD MAN, SHREWD AND WITHERED.”

“Mr Judex?” said Gilead.

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

The exclamation was addressed to the boy, who vanished.

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

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

“No, not hard-up.”

“What then?”

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

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

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

“Entirely,” said Gilead.

The old man rubbed his palms gleefully together.

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

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

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

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

“Have you a clean conscience?” he said.

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

“No sense of guilt anywhere within?”

“Nothing to trouble me.”

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

“O! no.”

“Even in the dark?”

“Even in the dark.”

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

“It is very likely, I think.”

“Especially in the dark?”

“I daresay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at her kindly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little reluctantly Gilead joined him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is your house, you say?”

“Unquestionably.”

“It is empty—unoccupied.”

“But it is my house, all the same.”

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

“Will you come?” said Mr Judex.

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr Judex!” he cried—“Mr Judex!”

A tiny chuckling laugh reached him from without.

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

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

“Darkness is the very essence of the problem, Mr Balm. I wish you to remain there, entirely by yourself, until the morning, when I will return to release you.”

“Mr Judex, why? In God’s name, why, Mr Judex?”

He dwelt in anguish on the answer.

“Shall I tell you?” said the voice, apparently after consideration. “I wish you no harm—I wish you no harm whatever, Mr Balm. On the contrary, in your mastery of fate lies my hope. Did you ever hear of Mr Justice Starkey?”

“Yes.”

“I am he, Mr Balm, and this is my house. You will pardon, I am sure, the deception, excusable and necessary under the circumstances. I desired to demonstrate to the world the wickedness of its conclusions in holding me primarily responsible for the man Maudsley’s suicide. Confinement in the dark cell would, I am convinced, never drive a guiltless conscience to self-destruction. It remains with you, if you have not lied to me, to substantiate that truth.”

Somewhere in his racing thoughts, Gilead found and caught at a memory. It was of a notorious recent case in which a prisoner, sentenced to a term of penal servitude, and too late proved innocent, had strangled himself in the dark cell to which he had been committed for insubordination. There had been considerable press comment on the matter, when aired, and Mr Justice Starkey, who had summed up flagrantly against the accused, in despite of a strong presumption in his favour, had met with some caustic criticism, with the result that he had shortly after retired from the bench and withdrawn into seclusion.

“Into the seclusion of a madhouse,” thought Gilead, appalled; “and he has either escaped or been discharged from it.” Such, indeed, appeared the fair presumption. He leaned against the solid door, gasping for speech.

“I daresay the man,” he began, and stopped. He had been going to say, “was guilty after all;” but, even in that crisis, he would not commit his soul to a conscious untruth.

“Yes?” enquired the voice.

“Was unsophisticated, unselfpossessed in the sense of educated reason,” he finished.

“I admit that the cases are not parallel,” answered the voice. “The advantage is certainly on your side in that respect.”

“I would submit,” said Gilead, “that the test, to be adequate, should be applied to a like unintelligence.”

“I am dogged and spied upon,” said the voice. “The time is too short, and the risk of delay too instant. A bird in the hand—eh? And you make it your interest to pursue the truth. I am sure you will surmount the ordeal triumphantly. Good-night! I shall be here again in the morning.”

The thread of light went out. Gilead threw himself against the door, yelling and battering; but its jambs were solidly sunk in the brick-work, and he barked his knuckles in vain. Pausing in the midst of his frenzy, he heard a far distant boom as of the hall door shutting, and knew that he was left alone, immured deep down in the deserted house.

On the instant he recollected himself, and, with a violent wrench of will, brought all his reason to bear on the situation.

To be buried for a few hours in a dark crypt! What was there in that to appal an educated mind? He tried to laugh; but stopped aghast to hear his own voice in that tremendous silence. It seemed to evoke somewhere a wicked response. That was nonsense, of course. There was nothing inherently sinister in his position or his surroundings. He was merely shut into the commonplace wine-cellar of a commonplace house. Let him consider the prospect and its obvious necessities. The first was to forget himself—in sleep, if possible. That should be obtainable by a calm method of reflection.

He had not moved as yet—had not dared to. The blackness was gross, terrific. Now, all of a sudden, he remembered his matchbox, and with a sigh of relief felt for and found it. Opening it with infinite caution, he fingered a couple of matches, no more. One on the instant slipped from his nervous hold, and fell to the floor. Taking an instinctive step to recover it, his foot trod out a little flare and explosion, gone in a moment, and only a single match remained to him. He clutched it as a drowning man a straw.

Should he nurse that little potential spark—keep the moral of its consolation always between himself and despair? Better, he thought, to resolve at once the mystery of his prison than to torment himself with imagined terrors.

The match was a stout wax one. Giving himself no time for reflection, he struck it, and, guarding the flame jealously, held it aloft.

The cellar he found himself in was fairly deep, but nothing out of the common. Stone bins pigeon-holed all one side of it; the other was the bare wall. Moving pallidly, Gilead examined all its bricked-up length. At the last moment he recollected the door, and thinking to return to it and investigate the lock, found the match burned low in his fingers. Only a second or two of life remained to it; he was standing by the ultimate bin, when he perceived a heap of sacking lying within it. He dragged the mass hurriedly out, and, casting it on the floor, observed a solitary bottle which it had concealed. He had but time to grasp this by the neck, when the match burned his fingers, and, with a gasping exclamation, he dropped it, and was in utter darkness once more. Feeling for the sacking, he let himself down upon it, hugging his find.

And now, in truth, he was committed to the ordeal, with only a bottle for his companion. He was a completely temperate man, and in any case he had no idea what the bottle contained; yet somehow the feel of its sleek sides was a solace to him. Unopened it seemed to cheer and inebriate, as the presence of a jovial comrade might, though fast asleep by one’s side in a haunted house. He patted it fondly, and closed his eyes.

The blackness weighed upon them, instantly and horribly. He opened them with a start, as if he had only emerged just in time from drowning waters. But they took no comfort from that sightless recovery. He strove to concentrate his thoughts on his interests, his ambition, even his gold. It was all useless. Light, he realized, or at least some dilution of darkness, was necessary to sane thought as it was to healthy growth. Without it all things stagnated and fed upon themselves. The coffers of his banks might be bursting with his hoards; they were impotent to buy him one moment of self-forgetfulness. All his omnipotence could not command him a right ray of reason.

“This will not do,” he thought. “It is childish and contemptible.” Lying on his side, he closed his lids again determinedly; and straight with the action, it seemed, there was shut into his mind a torturing demon. “The innocent man,” it kept whispering to him, “failed, for all his innocence, to keep his reason. No self-conscious probity can be proof for long against these supernormal conditions. A hardened conscience could resist them more effectually.”

He reviled the tempter, hated him, found himself suddenly listening to him, with his forehead all clammy and his hands shaking. To be goaded into strangling himself in this black and loathsome pit! The thought was monstrous, incredible—and it clung to him. He sat up in a gasping panic. He forced himself to repeat hundreds of lines and passages from memory. Presently he found that his tongue was running involuntarily into inanities and blasphemies, and he stopped.

“What on earth is the matter with me?” he reflected. For the moment a re-dawn of sanity glowed within him; his pulses slowed. “It is too utterly ridiculous!” he said aloud.

He rose to his feet, and, feeling by the wall, went up and down, up and down, hoping to tire himself in a normal way. But gradually he seemed to become conscious, every time he approached the door, of some evil invisible presence lurking outside. The vast emptiness of the house above occurred to him with a horror even greater than his cell inspired. “They are trooping down,” he thought awfully, “to listen at my door.”

Who the ‘they’ were only his excited imagination might say. Little by little, he contracted his area, until he was standing once more motionless by the heap of sacking.

“Solitary confinement in a dark cell is an unutterable wickedness—an unutterable wickedness,” he kept repeating to himself. Then, in a spasm of horror, he turned, and clawed blindly at the wall, like a trapped animal. He dared not go near the door again, or he would have concentrated all his strength on one frenzied effort to burst it open. But he had come to dread horribly the thought of evoking an uproar in that blind silence. As long as he was quiet they might keep outside.

Presently, his legs seeming to give under him, he sank down again upon his rough couch. An hour went by in such mental suffering as he had never before experienced or conceived. And then, suddenly, with a ghastly groan, he pulled himself together and sat up.

“I can stand no more,” he whispered, and, reaching for the bottle, knocked its head off against the wall. A gush of liquid came over his hand, a stinging fragrance to his nostrils—brandy!

“Thank God!” he ejaculated fervently, and without hesitation put his mouth to the shattered edge, indifferent to consequences, and gulping once or twice, replaced the bottle on the stones. The potent stuff poured into his veins; its fumes rose to his brain. Like any overtaken sot, he toppled prone, and lapsed into quick insensibility.

A cry in his brain, a pertinacious worry of light in his eyes, awoke him, and he raised his head. There were people in the cellar—his secretary, Miss Halifax, a curious stranger, a police constable holding a dark-lantern. The lady, from whom the pity-stricken exclamation seemed to have come, stood, one hand poised at her lips, a little apart. The secretary bent over him.

“It’s all right, sir,” he said. “He’s caught, thank God!”

Gilead, with assistance, staggered to his feet.

“What—where!” he exclaimed wildly—“Mr Justice Starkey?”

“Ah!” said the secretary; “you know his name, then?”

“He told me plain enough,” said Gilead faintly—“and his purpose; but that was after he’d locked me in. How did you know? how did you find me?”

“It was Miss Halifax, sir,” said the secretary. “You told her about the appointment, you know, and the thing worried her—worried her to that degree that in the evening she must come round to confide her fears to me. I didn’t like the sound of it myself, and, after consultation, we decided to take a cab to Raxe’s hotel and discover what we could about Mr Judex. That was near ten o’clock, and we reached the place to find it in a commotion over the man himself. It appeared that he had escaped from a private asylum at Sutton, and had eluded recapture until his own advertisement gave him away. The attendants had been waiting for his return to the hotel, and had nabbed him just before our arrival. I stated our fears to them, and sure enough, on overhauling him, they found in his possession the key of his own front-door, which he had procured, under his assumed name, from the house-agents. This gentleman representing the asylum, we all came on together, and engaging the services of a constable, entered the house. From a hint let fall by the madman, we gathered that we should find you locked in somewhere down here, and your snoring, sir, led us to the spot.”

Gilead, with a faint blush, glanced down at the tell-tale bottle.

“He said it was his wish to demonstrate,” he murmured, “how the dark cell could hold no terrors for the impeccable conscience, and how, therefore, arguing per contra, the man Maudsley must have been guilty of the crime for which he was sentenced.”

The constable put in a word:—

“He went mad on it, sir, did his Lordship. The papers and his own conscience druv him off of his head.”

“Thank you,” said Gilead quietly; “and thank you, too, Nestle.” He crossed, with some sign of emotion, to where Miss Halifax stood by the wall. “You advised me,” he said, “and I have had a fine lesson in self-sufficiency. It is humiliating to have to own that I owe my reason, such as it is, to a chance bottle of brandy which I found in one of the bins. But for that, I am afraid, you would have exhumed a gibbering idiot. I shall think more mercifully of one form of drunkard for the future, and less confidently of myself.” He turned. “If this gentleman,” he added courteously, “will favour me with his address, I shall take pleasure in acquitting myself of my considerable obligations to him. You, Constable, will no doubt find an opportunity of calling at Lamb’s Agency some time during your off-hours, when a closed envelope will be put into your hands.”

He bowed punctiliously to each, offered his arm to Miss Halifax, and, waiting for the Constable to lead, quitted the place of durance.

CHAPTER IV.

THE QUEST OF THE DOG

GILEAD had often encountered in the Daily Post—sandwiched, say, between a heart-moving appeal on behalf of the outcast and houseless, and a last drowning cry for help from a soul almost submerged—a plea for some dog or cat seeking a kind home, and had reflected on the curious variety and varied quality of the petitions which a medium for benevolence was calculated to attract. He hoped that those, thus fondly appealing to charity for their animal beloveds, were in the habit of scrutinizing the lists in which their advertisements appeared, and of justifying their own title to help in one form by vouchsafing it in another. But he believed he had always noticed that an excessive devotion to animals entailed a rather ironic attitude towards the needs of the human family, and it was in no very sympathetic mood, therefore, that he read the first words of the following advertisement, which his secretary one morning pointed out to him:—

“Will anyone give a kind home to Pilot, a dog. O, please do help! This is genuine. No money-lenders need apply. Address Judy, Marshlock Old Rectory, Shipton-on-Thames.”

“Why do you show me this, Nestle?” he said, looking up.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the secretary. “Have you read to the end?”

Gilead bent to the paper again, and smiled.

“What a very odd advertisement!” he said. “Is it nonsense or innocence, do you think?”

The secretary shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“Supposing we ask Miss Halifax’s opinion, Mr Balm?”

Gilead said “certainly,” and leaned back in his chair as the secretary carried the paper to the young lady, who was engaged at her desk over correspondence.

“Do you take that for a hoax, Miss Halifax?”

The beautiful amanuensis read and considered.

“No, Mr Balm,” she said. “This was written, I am sure, by some distressed child, whose people take in the Daily Post. If it were a hoax, some covering address would have been given.”

Gilead rose.

“Give me the paper, please,” he said.

She smiled, rather wistfully.

“I knew the very suggestion of a child would win you,” she said.

He looked at her kindly.

“It is your feminine perspicacity that wins me,” he said. “I cannot tell you how it touches me to find us all three in such accord over this business of humanitarianism, and so superior, in its pursuit, to ignoble jealousies and misunderstandings.”

That was a tribute to the secretary, who had never shewn the least resentment over the lady’s inclusion in the inner confidences of his Chief. Nestle stood quiet a moment or two, as Gilead, having spoken, left the room; and then, moving softly, addressed a word to the amanuensis. She waved him away; and he saw at once, to his curious concern, that she was crying.

Gilead, foreseeing a long day and a queer experience, drove to Paddington Station, whence he took a train presently to a distant up-river junction, from which a short branch line carried him leisurely to Shipton-on-Thames. It was a quiet torrid day in late April, hot as the ideal Midsummer, and, after asking his direction, he started on foot across the fields for the Old Rectory, which, it appeared, was situated at no great distance away on the banks of the river. His path was a pleasant one, remote and peaceful, leading him by sweet-smelling pastures and lanes to a waterside hamlet, where a scrap of church-tower, ruined and ivy-grown, and a fragment of antique graveyard at its foot spoke of some ancient benefice long since discontinued or translated. He was looking about in this sleepy retreat for someone to correct his way for him, when a sound of youthful voices breaking out if a leafy road reached his ears, and he saw two children, a boy and a girl, turn a corner and make in his direction. He advanced to meet them.

“Can you tell me the way to the Old Rectory?” he asked.

The boy went on without answering, but, finding that his little companion had stopped embarrassed, swaggered round and came back.

“Beg your pardon?” he said.

Gilead repeated his question.

“Well, we’re going there,” said the boy. “You can come with us, if you like.”

He was a meaty youth of some twelve summers, with an imbecile self-satisfied face and porky eyes; but his stylish white flannels and little Oxford-blue blazer with the yellow badge on its pocket spoke him quite the riverside dandy.

Gilead fell into pace with the two, and the little girl kept peeping up at him from the other side of her cavalier. She was the dearest charmer of nine, dressed in a sort of sweet Directory frock with heliotrope sprays; and the shepherd’s straw hat on her head had its mauve ribbon poked full of real daisies.

Presently the boy, shouldering his companion a little apart, spoke something in her ear, and she whispered back “O, Georgy!” and flushed as pink as an apple-blossom.

“Please,” she said, being nudged to the soft impeachment, “Georgy says he believes you must have come about Pilot.”

Gilead smiled, oddly enlightened.

“The dog mentioned in the advertisement?” he said. “Did you put it in?”

“No, I did,” said the boy, sniggering. “I say, what a lark! Have you really come about him?”

“Supposing I have,” said Gilead; “what then?”

The boy grinned, but did not answer.

“Is this Judy, by any chance?” asked the young man.

“Yes, it is,” said the boy.

“Your sister?”

“Not much. I say, you know!” exclaimed the youth. “Her name’s Brown. My name’s George Wimble. My father’s Captain Wimble. We live at the Court. I only made it up for her, and got old Gask the stationer to send it on.”

“I see,” said Gilead. “What was that about no moneylenders applying?”

“O! I don’t know,” said the boy. “You aren’t one, are you?”

“No, I’m not one.”

“I made it up out of the advertisements,” said Master Wimble. “They always put in that sort of thing. I did it for her.”

“Father said I might,” ventured the little girl, between apology and self-defence. “At leastways he said I might try and find a good home for him.”

“He didn’t mean that way, you bet,” said the boy, glancing slyly up at the stranger.

“No,” said Judy, her small mouth tightening a little. “When he saw it in the newspaper this morning he was simply furiated. He is a very boracic man.”

The boy stifled an explosion.

“Isn’t she funny?” he whispered.

“O! boracic,” said Gilead; and added, in some vague association of ideas, “Is he a doctor?—O! no; a clergyman, I suppose?”

The boy plucked his sleeve.

“He’s neither the one nor the other,” he confided to his private ear. “He’s a radical.” He spoke the word with a weight of social significance. “He stood for Henley in the last by-election, but our man beat him at the post. He doesn’t live here. He’s only taken the house for the summer. He isn’t a gentleman, you know; he’s a radical; but she’s all right.”

The magnificence of the distinction quite silenced Gilead. He walked on while the boy strutted on; but suddenly he was moved very sweetly to feel little confiding fingers thrust into his.

“Please,” said the little girl, who had slipped round to his side, “have you really and truly come about Pilot?”

“Really and truly,” said Gilead, looking down with a smile. “Do you want to part with him?”

“No,” said the child, flushing very pink.

“Perhaps someone else does?” suggested Gilead.

“Yes, father.”

“Shall I see him about it, then?” She did not answer. “What’s wrong with him—the dog, I mean?” asked the young man.

The boy answered for her, with a contemptuous laugh.

“He bit somebody. Anybody would have, her.”

Gilead kept a discreet silence.

“Here’s the gate of the Rectory, if you want to see Mr Brown,” said the boy, stopping; and then Gilead saw that the little girl was in floods of tears. He bent down, very concerned.

“If he has to go, Judy,” he whispered, “he shall find a good friend.”

“O! don’t be such a ninny,” said the boy. “What’s a dog anyway? I’m not going to go fishing with you, you know, if you’re going on like this.”

He walked off, whistling. She sniffed once or twice, dried her eyes on her sleeve, and fled after him. Gilead, watching the two a moment, turned through a gate into a leafy drive, which swept round a semi-circle of lawn to the front of a white-latticed creeper-hung house of two storeys, where, ringing the bell, he sent in his card to Mr Brown.

He had not waited a minute in an untidy tobacco-reeking study, into which he had been informally and rather suspiciously shown, when a gentleman came hurrying in with an air of effusive cordiality which took him completely by surprise.

“Mr Balm?” said the gentleman. “This is kind of you—this is more than kind. To come in person to answer my appeal? I had not expected such distinction, such consideration, and it makes me proud. Pray take a chair, sir, and let us discuss this matter.”

Gilead, immensely perplexed, bowed and seated himself. He saw before him a fluffy fiery little man, wearing spectacles like burning glasses, and clad in a blazing rhubarb tweed, with knickerbockers and bright brown shoes. He was snappy in his movements, jerky in his speech, and, in disposition, he alternated, it seemed, between white heats of enthusiasm and dead ashes of depression.

“Your Agency, sir,” he said, “justifies its title to being the most prompt and princely institution of its kind. I am favoured in a visit from its founder.”

“Its representative,” corrected Gilead.

Mr Brown raised his hands and eyes with an air of polite deprecation.

“True,” he said; “we know your humour and respect it, Mr Balm. I say no more. I am completely dumb.”

“Well,” said Gilead, a little chilly: “as to the purpose of my visit, sir, I was led to suppose that the—the form of appeal somewhat lacked your sanction.”

“Not at all,” said Mr Brown, with a surprised look. “How could you have gathered that impression when I dictated its terms myself?”

“O! I didn’t know,” said the visitor. “I was misenlightened, no doubt—made the victim very possibly of a trifling hoax.” He smiled. “Then the little lady’s name was an intentional mask?”

“I don’t know, sir, what you mean by a mask,” said Mr Brown with some apparent heat. “It was quoted to illustrate a very genuine sentiment. If you had said a bait, I might have admitted the impeachment.”

“A bait, then,” said Gilead—“and a sweet one.”

“I am indebted to you for the term, Mr Balm,” said the gentleman, with a certain dry dignity; “but I can hold it hardly applicable to a personality endowed with such supreme gifts of force and intelligence. I would as soon call the Mother of the Gracchi sweet, sir, for my part.”

Gilead felt himself at a loss for words. Could it be possible that the little girl so contradicted her appearance as to be an infant phenomenon of an advanced type?

“Well, sir,” he said, utterly at sea—“a bait of whatever nature you please. In any case, I am to understand, its purpose was to find someone who would be willing to take this discarded pet off your hands?”

Mr Brown rose from his chair.

“Sir—Mr Balm!” he exclaimed.

“To secure a kind home for it,” explained Gilead, “whether because it is old, or because it bites, or—”

Mr Brown seized up a heavy paper-weight, poised it an instant furiously, and replaced it on the desk calmly.

“I think, I am sure,” he said, “that there must be some mistake.”

Gilead, risen also, faced him gravely.

“Would you mind telling me,” he said, “to what you are alluding all this time?”

“I am alluding, sir,” said Mr Brown, with sarcastic emphasis, “to the letter I had the honour of addressing to you yesterday, and the substance of which, I flattered myself, you had come to answer in person. My name is Brown.”

“I am unfortunate,” said Gilead. “I have much correspondence and a poor memory, and a name, however distinctive, is apt to slip me. I devoted, I am afraid, but a cursory examination to this morning’s letters. The penalty is mine.”

Mr Brown bowed stiffly.

“Assuredly not, sir, since, it seems, I have appealed to your munificence in vain.”

“The misfortune, sir,” said Gilead, “is, by your favour, easily amended for both of us.”

His courtesy was so charming, that the indignant gentleman was instantly mollified.

“You are very good,” he said. “Your frankness invites a warmer confidence than that I had already ventured in a sacred cause. You are acquainted, no doubt, with the name of Mrs Craddock Flight?”

Gilead bowed.

“Of all the militant sisterhood,” said Mr Brown, “the bright particular star. It was she, if you remember, who chained herself to the wheel of the Prime Minister’s carriage, just as he was about to enter it to drive to the House of Commons, and so forced him to seek his infamous destination on foot. A woman of extraordinary resource and originality.”

“Extraordinary,” said Gilead. “If I recollect, she was nearly killed by the horses becoming restive before she could be released.”

“She would have been glad to die, sir,” said Brown, “in that glorious situation—a second St Catherine broken on the wheel for her faith.” He looked at his visitor searchingly. “Do not distress me, Mr Balm,” he said, “by affirming that the cause is to be denied its share of the vast resources at your disposal. No, no, you must be with us, sir. It was for that purpose that I wrote to you; it was for that purpose that I identified myself in my letter with a name calculated to shed refulgence on any propaganda to which it should elect to give itself—the name of Mrs Craddock Flight. That name, sir, and that cause lack nothing but the devotion of a sympathetic capitalist to ensure their immortality. It was to that stately name that I questioned the right application of so sugary an epithet as ‘sweet’. Finally, sir, that name—if I may dare the confidence—has pledged itself to become, on a single condition, my priceless possession; to adorn with its widowed lustre my no less widowed insignificance. I confess, sir, that I yearn to bask in that reflected glory—to follow in the tail of its comet-like flight to the new world its radiance is destined to discover to the enraptured vision of posterity.”

“You allude—?” said Gilead.

“I allude,” said Mr Brown, “to a world reconsecrated, through the political enfranchisement of woman, to reason, justice and purity. Everything, you will grant, is wrong as it is. Civilization, as a male imposition, has proved itself a depressing failure. Men, on true premises, labour to false conclusions; women, on false, jump to true. Their unerring moral sensitiveness penetrates all massed and complicated sophistries, and pierces in a flash to the heart of the real. Unbiassed by formulas, untrammelled by dogma, they will blow through our corrupt institutions like a cleansing gale, whirling the dead leaves of discredited systems before them. Woman is not conscientious, so to speak, in the prescriptive sense. She will strip from equity, justice and the moral law the trappings in which they have been too long confounded, and show us nature again, primitive and fearless.”

“Indeed?” said Gilead. “You surprise me.”

“There will be many surprises when the time comes,” said Mr Brown grandiloquently; and, on the very word, suffered a surprising change of countenance. “Why, why,” he cried, flushing scarlet; “my letter—my letter, sir, in which I expatiated at some length on this very subject. You have not seen it, you say? To what, then, am I to attribute the honour of your visit?”

“To an advertisement, sir,” said Gilead quietly, “about a dog.”

The effect of his words was startling. Mr Brown seemed to burst at the head, like an over-charged bottle of ginger-beer, and thence to spout a volume of incoherent expletives. He then, as if impelled by some uncontrollable emotion, went racing up and down the room, until, the pressure slacking, he gradually slowed, and finally came to a stop opposite his visitor, the steam, so to speak, all out of him.

“I see it all,” he said, in a state of the limpest depression. “By an irony of circumstance scarce credible, the sympathies I sought to engage have been forestalled by my own child in a trivial matter.”

“By a young friend of your child, sir, if I am correctly informed,” said Gilead kindly.

“You mean the boy Wimble?” said Mr Brown bitterly. “No doubt, sir, your information—”

“It was at first hand,” put in the visitor, smiling. “I met the young people outside, and got into talk with them. The boy, he himself confessed to me, composed and inserted the advertisement.”

“The grotesque impertinence of it!” cried Mr Brown, boiling over; “the assurance and the inopportuneness!”

“I understand,” said Gilead, “that you authorized the little lady to find, if possible, a home for the animal?”

“Go on, sir, go on!” said Mr Brown resignedly. “Tell me that I authorized her to hold her father up to ridicule before the world.”

“Nay, sir,” said Gilead, “I am quite at sea in the matter.”

“I will acquaint you, Mr Balm,” said the father dismally, “with the facts of the case—especially as they bear in some measure on a confidence I have already reposed in you. Mrs Craddock Flight, sir, made it a condition of our union that the dog should be destroyed.”

“It was the single condition to which you referred, I assume,” said the visitor. “May I venture to ask what suggested it?”

“The dog had bitten her, sir. They will take these unaccountable aversions. It was during a short visit she lately paid us.”

“Pardon me,” said Gilead, “if I enquire if your little girl is not very attached to the animal?”

“There is no denying,” said Mr Brown, “that Judy is devoted to Pilot, and Pilot to Judy. It was on that account that I was moved to sanction the compromise of a new home, in which compromise, I have not the least doubt, Mrs Flight’s superior reason will acquiesce, particularly when she is informed of the character of the applicant.”

Gilead bowed. “May I see the dog?” he asked.

Mr Brown shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands in a manner of patient repudiation.

“With pleasure,” he said, and evidently without the least. “We will go at once.”

He led the visitor out by a back door, across a fair but neglected lawn, through a space of untended kitchen garden, and so down to the river bank, where, by some water steps and a little boat-house, stood a dog-kennel of considerable dimensions. And straight, on the sound of their approach, there issued from this last, with a rattle of iron links, a magnificent Newfoundland.

Gilead exclaimed.

“But he is superb! I am quite astonished! His value, Mr Brown!”

The master was engaged in releasing swivel from collar. The beautiful dog, fawning and delighted, made up to him endearingly.

“Judy, I am sure,” said Judy’s father in a suppressed voice, “would never dream of making a transaction of her pet. Yes, there’s your little mistress, boy.”

The great dog, released, went bounding joyously and sniffing riverwards. There was a punt out there in mid-stream, and a small meaty boy was upright in it, endeavouring to find soft bottom, for fishing purposes, with one of its poles. A little girl in a flowered hat sat in the stern.

“It seems a harsh necessity,” said the father, in a voice which made Gilead approve him for the first time; “but the cause, sir, the cause is paramount.”

Gilead, quite fascinated, called to the dog—approached him. At that instant there came a shrill cry from the father: “Sit down, Judy, sit down! My God!”

There was an answering screech from the river; a splash; the small boy, slipping his hold in a panic, went down among the thwarts, and the punt, leaving its pole sticking in the mud, began to swing downstream. Judy, in anguish of the scene enacting on the banks, thinking to see her pet ravished away before her eyes, had stood up, and, blind with grief, had lost her footing and tumbled overboard. She could not swim; neither of the men could swim; the boy in the punt, nerveless and blubbered, was worse then inept. A dreadful moment of paralysis followed, and then two little arms and a draggled head came above the surface.

“A SOFT, SEAL-LIKE HEAD WAS SEEN DRIVING ACROSS THE SHINING FLOOD.”

Gilead, in agony, stumbled for the boat-house; the father, sobbing and staring, was already waist-deep in the water. “My little child!” he gasped—“my little child!”—there went by them both a great bound and surge, and swift and unerring a soft seal-like head was seen driving across the shining flood. They stood like things of stone, hardly breathing—and then there came a swirl, a reasoned snap; and the little face, wild and choking, was lifted above the surface. Good Pilot! Loyal and lovely friend! He brought her, crying, to the steps, and there having deposited her, shook himself, and crouched, somewhat appealing, as if he had taken a liberty.

* * * * *

The little girl, well-frightened but unharmed, was asleep upstairs; the greater dog lay blinking on the hearthrug; Gilead, by his host’s particular desire, delayed his departure yet a little.

Very few words had passed between them, and the young man was considering with what manner of blessing he could best terminate a visit, whose prolongation, in view of the subdued and obviously self-tormented figure before him, seemed an impertinence, when a ring at the bell sounded through the silent house, and its master was presented with a telegram. Its perusal appeared to act upon him like an instant and amazing stimulant. He rose, his spectacles seemed to glare, his head to bristle. Patently on the verge of an explosion, he stepped across to Gilead with an exaggerated softness, and laid the paper before him. “Oblige me by reading that,” he said. The young man, wondering, obeyed.

“Have just seen advertisement. Either the dog must be destroyed or our compact ends. Answer prepaid. Isabella.”

Gilead looked up.

“Yes, from her,” said Mr Brown, still with an icy quietude, in answer to the mute enquiry. And then the burst came—only a little rent at the outset, but rapidly roaring to a breach:—

“Now, isn’t that just like a woman—without reason or justice or decency—mere venomous spite, indifferent to the consequences to others so long as it can injure the object of its resentment. Sympathy? Nonsense! Tell me why, in the University boat-race on this river, nine women out of ten will be Cambridge? Out of pity for its persistent ill-success? Not in the least, sir. Simply because they think the colour the more becoming.” (The breach widened) “Consistency? Bosh! with minds the sport of any chance mood? Veering as the compass—changeable as the weather—you may forecast ’em fair in the morning, and be drenched or frozen by ’em in the afternoon?” (The breach split resoundingly) “Principles? Lunacy! Their one indestructible principle is vanity, and in their wild rush for personal notoriety of any sort, all principles and all decencies may go to the devil” (The breach, with a roar, rent from hem to hem). “From this moment I repudiate the cause,” shouted Mr Brown, glaring and dancing; “from this moment I refuse to identify myself with a sex so utterly deficient in the moral sense. Votes for women! Not unless we wish to see our national character for reason and fair-play thrown by the board! Not unless we wish to see our most cherished institutions of order and justice degraded to the uses of irresponsible malice. Incapable of governing, even themselves—a set of chattering harpies lusting for the blood of heroes!”

He ended with a roar. Gilead rose to his feet.

“The maid is waiting for an answer, sir,” he said; and, indeed, the poor girl stood as if petrified.

“Give me the paper!” yelled Mr Brown. He snatched it from the young man’s ready hand, slung out a pencil from his watch-chain, dabbed at the reply form, fuming and sputtering.

“HE DABBED AT THE REPLY FORM, FUMING AND SPUTTERING.”

“The dog must die, must he?” he panted ironically. “My child must be sacrificed to a swollen-headed harpy’s caprice! A useful lesson; I thank you, madam”—and he dashed off the following message. (Gilead had the assurance to glance at it, as he handed it to the girl): “Offer declined. The dog remains with me. Theophilus.”

A minute later, Gilead, being assured of the departure of the telegraph boy, took his own with much satisfaction, leaving Mr Brown fondly stroking the head of the great dog as he lay upon the rug.

CHAPTER V.

THE QUEST OF THE MARBLE STATUETTE

GILEAD, the most disinterested of utilitarians, had no sympathy with that order of State socialism which would deprive all personal effort of its motive and initiative by illegalising private Capital. On the contrary, he perceived in individual wealth the driving-wheels to an immense multitude of lesser parts, which, without that stimulus, would move sluggishly or not at all. Theoretic equality was no doubt a beautiful vision, only, as long as man should go lacking the eight beatitudes, he did not believe it a practical one. Disorder was the order of the human race, and that being so, no monotonous perfection, once attained, would long be suffered in peace. It was the way of the world, which builds on change and destruction, and will always of choice prefer the excitement of a picturesque and dangerous situation to the security of a tame one.

Now, while exhibiting in himself as complete a justification of capital as the world could afford, Gilead had by no means any qualms about spending his money exactly as he pleased. He was a young man of cultivated and artistic tastes, and these tastes he did not hesitate to indulge liberally. He had taken a set of rooms in the Albany, and was much interested in their equipment. On a certain occasion he spent three whole days hunting Japanese colour prints with an art expert, whom he much employed, without once going near the Agency. But on the fourth he recovered the thread of his duties.

Herbert Nestle, having as usual placed a copy of the Daily Post before his principal, stood by to await his comments. One soon followed, à propos the following advertisement, which Gilead read out aloud:—

“Young lady urgently in need of financial assistance to avert ruin. Every enquiry courted. No securities, but will repay honourably by installments. Address 023597 Daily Post.”

“I think,” said Gilead, “I shall make this my personal affair.”

He looked across at Miss Halifax, who, conscious of the implied challenge, answered evenly, but with a slight flush on her beautiful cheek:—

“Losses at bridge, probably, or motor fever. Granting that, it sounds plausible, Mr Balm.”

She was by this time an experienced and perspicacious Gileadite.

“Why, I think so too,” said her employer.

“The little bait,” she ventured, “is the only questionable part.”

“Bait? What bait?”

“She might have omitted the young, you see,” said the amanuensis. “People may construe it into an invitation to a personal interview.”

“Well, what harm, then?”

Miss Halifax turned one instant to him and, looking down again without speaking, resumed her work. He sat with his eyes fixed on her. Her sympathy and sweet reasonableness were generally so dependable that this sudden confession of the feminine sting in her a little surprised him. He did not like to think of it as wilful. His admiration for her was very great, and sometimes disturbing to himself. She had taken latterly to a black dress, as most becoming her official position, and the contrast it made with her creamy neck, and flower-like face, and lovely hair was sometimes dazzling. He found it often difficult to dissociate the beauty of her soul and body, or to estimate from which she drew her greater attractiveness.

He went out almost immediately, and without another word, and the moment he was well away the young lady turned on the secretary.

“Why did you let him see that advertisement at all?”

“It is its third appearance in three days,” answered Nestle, “and I judged it no good to keep from him what he had probably already noticed. What is it you fear?”

He took a calendar containing a scrap of mirror from the mantelpiece, and put it down before her face. She pushed his hand away, with a peevish shrug of her shoulders, and he laughed and went off about his business.

In the meanwhile Gilead had taken his way to the business offices of the Daily Post, where he made an enquiry at the desk appropriated to the reference number advertisements. “I desire,” said he, “to be put into communication with this,” and he signified to the clerk the appeal already quoted.

“‘I DESIRE TO BE PUT INTO COMMUNICATION WITH THIS.’”

The man accepted it with a profound deference. Gilead was well known at the bureau, and the privileges accorded to incalculable wealth, with a known tendency to giving, were always his without the asking. The editor himself would have rejoiced, if personally approached, to put his entire resources at his disposal; but the young plutocrat, with a very proper pride of fitness, would allow no claims of his own to ride at any time superior to the ordinary claims of courtesy or good-breeding.

Somewhat to his surprise, the clerk, having rapidly scanned the item, leaned forward to invite his ear to the opening in the brass wire netting which divided him from the public.

“There’s the advertiser herself, Mr Balm,” he whispered, “standing by the swing door.”

He signified the entrance into the street. This atrium to the great establishment was extensive, and glossy with mahogany and brass. Counters ran down either side of it, and its doors were as imposing as a bank’s. By one of these stood a slight young woman, awaiting apparently the termination of a sudden shower which was deluging the streets. She made a quite insignificant figure among the many that thronged the hall.

“One word,” said Gilead. “She has been to enquire about answers, I suppose? Were there any?”

“Not one, Mr Balm.”

Gilead nodded, and turned away. A slight smile was on his lips. ‘The bait,’ he was thinking, ‘does not appear to have been a very killing one.’

At that moment the young lady moved, pushed at the swing-doors, and disappeared into the open. Gilead, following, started in pursuit, and very quickly overtook her.

She went before him down Fleet Street, into the Strand, and, at Wellington Street, turned to cross the bridge. She walked fast, and he had enough to do to keep pace with her. It was still raining, and it struck him as curious that, although she was quite daintily attired, she never seemed to think of opening the umbrella she carried in her hand. The fact gave him a qualm, and in some way prepared him for the scene to follow. About the middle of the bridge he was delayed by a momentary pressure in the foot traffic, and, darting round and beyond the obstruction, suddenly saw his quarry in the grasp of a policeman.

The next instant he formed one of the group, sympathetic and protective.

“She was going over, Constable?” he whispered. “Is that so?”

The man recognized him at once. He was known to half the force.

“I see it in her eye, Mr Balm,” he said. “She’d have gone the next moment.”

He held the girl by the elbow, and Gilead saw her face for the first time. It was youth stricken into instant age, white, stunned, breathless. She made no effort to speak or escape—indeed she could not. The strung nerves had snapped at a touch, and she was paralyzed.

“I’ll make myself responsible for her,” said Gilead. “Quick, we mustn’t let a crowd gather.”

The constable, prompt man, bent down to the half blind, half deaf young face.

“You’re took bad, Missy,” he said; “you aren’t yourself. Now you just go with this gentleman, who’ll do you more good than all the doctors in the world.”

He held her, spoke to her, shouldered away an over-officious bystander or so, and stopped an empty four-wheeler, all with that comprehensiveness of resource which characterizes the London policeman. In another minute Gilead was rolling away, in charge of his poor little capture.

He did not address her for some time, not until, cowered into her corner, she suddenly gave a moan, and put her hands before her face. And then he spoke, in the voice that was like his name:—

“You mustn’t be frightened; you mustn’t mistrust me. I had come to answer your advertisement, to offer you help, when you were pointed out to me and I followed you. Now the help is very near—as near as the end of your trouble, I am sure.”

She appeared to listen; but no power was yet hers to answer.

“I know,” said Gilead, “I know. Some misery; someone’s wickedness—we have many such cases, and I know. I am going to take you where you will find rest, and sympathy, and strong wills to back you. You must just believe me, and not speak a word.”

He had his intention formed, and drove straight to the luxurious little flat, situated in the neighbourhood of Victoria Street, which his princely liberality had enabled Miss Halifax to take and furnish. He desired to retort upon that young lady with the fruits of her own scepticism, and to make her good-humouredly answer for it by succumbing to the bait which she had erstwhile depreciated. Arrived there, he delivered his charge, now partly recovered, but dazed and inclined to tears, to the lift-porter, with orders that he was to convey her to Miss Halifax’s rooms, and there keep her under unobtrusive observation until his return; having done which, he returned to his office, and confided the whole business to his fair amanuensis.

“Now,” said he, “I know nothing personally about the attractiveness of the bait; but I am very sure that no appeal is necessary to you to swallow it with a perfect grace. I have asked no questions, and penetrated no secrets. Why should I, when, in the loving sympathy and understanding of one of her own sex, she could seek the confidence which it would have been only an unjustified impertinence in me to offer.”

She looked at him, with her eyes shining.

“I think, Mr Balm,” she said softly, “that the Quest of the Holy Grail is still inspiring some Knightly spirits in the world”—a cryptic utterance which he could not quite interpret.

They lost no time in returning to the flat. She addressed her lovely face to him on the threshold.

“I believe,” she said, smiling, “that you have never once yet condescended to visit the beautiful home which I owe to your kindness.”

“I merely found the setting for a thing of value,” he said, with perfect sincerity. “I can only say that it seemed to me, when I first went over it, something less than an adequate acknowledgement of your great services to the office.”

She sighed, a very little sigh, and they entered the lift together. He never had a doubt of the solace he was bringing to the poor little life above with its broken wings; and, indeed, the instant the child saw Vera enter, she rose, and standing breathless a little, with her face like a white wet flower, threw herself suddenly into the warm generous arms, and abandoned herself and her cause to that lovely refuge.

Gilead turned away, and, while he stood thus, he heard the first words of understanding uttered, and of reassurance, and of mastering control. Then a door shut, and he was alone in the room.

He was quite satisfied, and prepared to await developments as long as necessary. The appointments of the room pleased him extremely. He had hardly expected such taste, remembering the Norwood villa; but that, he reflected, had not represented Miss Halifax’s independent views. Here all was simple and harmonious, straight lines and flat tones, with rich sombre gleams of brass and pottery for their sole emphasis. The only photograph (blest deficiency) that was visible, stood on a Sheraton bureau in a dusky corner by the window. Venturing to inspect it, Gilead discovered to his concern that it was one of Herbert Nestle.

He shrank away, as if he had unwittingly surprised a secret. An odd pang shot through his breast. He turned and stood for a long while staring at nothing out of the window. And then he came about, with a grave smile, and a resolve in his heart.

“Why should I wonder,” he thought. “And still more, why should I grudge it? It would be, after all, an ideal union of interests. And there is no reason why it should separate us. On the contrary, it might very well cement our partnership. I will certainly use my best unobtrusive efforts to promote the match.”

When Miss Halifax returned to him, which she did only after a pretty long interval, he received her with a manner of courteous distinction, which, as eschewing all claim to familiarity, evidently surprised and disturbed her. She looked about her for a reason; and, being astonishingly quick-witted, instantly divined the right one. She bit her lip, and went a trifle pale; but immediately controlled herself and proceeded to the matter in hand.

“I have heard the whole story,” she said. “It has made my blood boil, Mr Balm. The poor little thing! Heaven certainly sent her her protecting angel to retort upon a villain.”

“No,” said Gilead, perfectly unconsciously, “the retort is my business. Tell me as much of the story as is necessary to my taking action in the matter.”

“There is nothing to conceal,” answered Miss Halifax, “save—” she flushed a little—“one’s natural disgust in handling a reptile. His victim—or his intended victim, thank goodness—has been candid to me with the candour of a child. I have completely won her confidence and trust. She is asleep now, quite worn out. I shall keep her with me, Mr Balm, until you have decided upon the course you will pursue with her.”

Gilead bowed, with his eyes kindling.

“Of course,” he said; “I knew. If I ever found myself mistaken in you, Miss Halifax, I think I should close the Agency, and abjure my whole faith in human nature.”

She looked down, wreathing her fingers in her lap. For some moments she seemed unable to proceed.

“The child,” she said at length, with a resolute effort at self-command, “is no more than eighteen. Her name is Clarissa Snowe. She is an orphan these two years, during which time she had kept, until latterly, a little post of nursery-governess in a small family at Clapham. Some two or three months ago, however, her health broke down, and she had to cease work for a while. On her recovery she failed, utterly failed, to secure a fresh situation. She is very pretty, as no doubt you noticed?” (She paused; Gilead shook his head. “I was thinking of her misery, poor soul,” he murmured)—“and employers,” continued Miss Halifax, “especially of domestic labour, do not favour attractiveness of that sort. Clarissa had her little lodging in Battersea, and there she cherished a few heirlooms which had descended to her from her father, who in his turn had inherited them from his. With these, owing to her unhappy situation, and the debts she had incurred during her illness, she was obliged to part one by one—and, no doubt, at absurdly small figures—until there remained to her of them all only a single marble statuette of a child with a bird. She had kept this to the last, as her father, she knew, had always referred to it as a thing of value. But now, urged by desperation, she resolved to sell it. Somebody recommended to her Globesteins, the great art dealers in Chalk Street, Piccadilly, and thither she bore the statuette in a cab.”

Gilead nodded. “I have had some considerable dealings with Mr Globestein,” he said. “He is one of the first experts in London.”

“And one of the greatest cheats and villains,” cried Miss Halifax indignantly. “I hope, Mr Balm, you had someone to advise you?”

Gilead smiled.

“It is very possible you are right,” he said. “But, as there is no morality in art, you can hardly expect it in its dealers. Did Miss Snowe inform you of the name of the sculptor of this statuette?”

“Yes; it was Pigalle, or something of that sort.”

“Pigalle? Indeed. And Mr Globestein bought it of her—?”

“For ten pounds.”

Gilead winced—in his lips, and frowned and nodded.

“O!” cried Miss Halifax. “If it was, as I suppose, a wicked fraud, that was only the beginning of his villainy. Mr Globestein—who is, it seems, unmarried—after asking the poor thing a few penetrating questions, suggested that she should become governess-companion to his motherless children. She consented, of course, happy beyond measure over her good fortune, and removed her small belongings to his private house. There were no children there; and she was put off from day to day with plausible accounts of their present absence and soon return. The rest I may hurry over. Once secured in his home, this man persuaded her to take occasionally a hand at cards with himself and some of his friends. She lost, of course; he advanced her money; at length things reached the point at which he had been aiming, and he had her completely in his power. It was ruin for her either way; he threatened—”

Gilead put up a gentle hand.

“Spare yourself the pain. She was good, she was desperate—I understand—and as a final resource she decided to implore the help of strangers through the public press. The barrenness of the result, the inhuman silence, drove her in the end to her last chance of escape through self-destruction. I hold the child a heroine. Great God, the stony indifference of the world to her appeal!—no wonder it killed her heart. This man is a particular scoundrel. He shall bleed, Miss Halifax, he shall bleed, I promise you.”

She did not know, actually, if he implied a moral or a physical blood-letting, and she did not care. He was to her like a God whose decrees were never to be questioned. If he had killed, and said “This is just,” she would have believed him. She rose, as he did, and looked at him with her bosom heaving; and, without another word spoken by either, he left her.

A few minutes later he telephoned from his private office for his art adviser to come and see him at once.

“Dexter,” he said, when that gentleman was closeted with him, “what is the market value of a statuette by Pigalle?”

“Marble, Mr Balm?”

“Yes.”

“If indisputable, and his best work, anything from one to two thousand guineas and upwards. An example, not so long ago, fetched three thousand guineas at public auction.”

“Globestein has lately secured one for ten pounds. I want you to bear that in mind.”

“I will not forget it, Mr Balm. It is quite likely. The man is a clever rogue.”

“Very well. Now come with me to his place.”

They found Mr Globestein in. He came hurrying, all smiles, to greet his most distinguished patron. His rooms were luxurious caves of treasure-trove, to the gathering of which he had sacrificed whatever conscience he had once possessed. He was a tall, black-moustached man, neither ill-looking nor ostentatious in dress, but, if anything, somewhat over glossy in appearance. He gave one the impression of having rubbed shoulders with gentlefolks to the extent of acquiring all their superficial polish, and nothing more. His nose was fleshy, his lips were a little gross; there was a suggestion in his smile, assured but a trifle sickly, of a challenge to justice to prove a case against him.

“Mr Globestein,” said Gilead, “I have been told that you have a statuette by Pigalle for sale. Is that so? Tell me plainly. I desire no huckstering.”

He, the prince of courtesy, could be unmerciful to baseness. He treated this famous expert with a haughty intolerance which should have closed all dealings on the spot.

“It is perfectly true, Mr Balm,” said the dealer smoothly; “there is no reason why I should deny it.”

“You know best, sir,” answered Gilead. “You will let us see it, if you please.”

Mr Globestein conducted them into a further room, enriched like the other, and led them to a pedestal, on which stood a little marble figure of a girl, with a bird settled on her uplifted hand. They all stood silent by it for a while.

“Well, Dexter?” said Gilead presently.

“Unimpeachable,” answered the adviser; “and a first example.”

Mr Globestein laughed.

“You do me proud, Mr Dexter, sir,” he said, with a shadow of mockery in his voice. “I was really afraid you were going to impugn my judgment.”

The adviser came erect with a smile.

“Surely, Mr Globestein,” he said, “you should be the last to recommend the buying of a pig in a poke.”

“Enough, sir,” said Gilead. “Tell me, if you please, what is the price you ask for this?”

The dealer shrugged his shoulders slightly, and extended his hands.

“Pigalles,” he said, “are scarce and costly, Mr Balm. They rarely, very rarely occur. I could not, in justice to myself, ask a penny less than three thousand guineas.”

“It is too much.”

Mr Globestein sighed, shrugged again, and said nothing.

“It is too much, I say.”

“I will not deny, Mr Balm,” said the expert, “that your patronage and good opinion are of the first importance to me. I will make a concession to them, unprofitable enough to me, but I will trust to you to make it up in other directions. You shall have the statuette for three thousand guineas less the shillings, the exact price I gave for it.”

“You will let me have the statuette for the exact price you gave for it?”

“That is so, Mr Balm.”

“Dexter,” said Gilead; “you mark that?”

The adviser answered in the affirmative, wondering what was to come.

Gilead went to a desk, produced a cheque-book, wrote out a cheque, and handed it to the dealer. Mr Globestein accepted the draft obsequiously, glanced at the amount smilingly, started imperceptibly, and paled obviously.

“This is a pleasantry, Mr Balm,” he said, in a jocular voice that quaked somewhat. “Your cheque is for ten pounds only.”

“‘THIS IS A PLEASANTRY, MR BALM,’ HE SAID.”

“The exact price, sir, you gave for the statuette.”

He rose, frowning, in the sternness of his anger, and the dealer, in the very effort at a protest, cowered and shrunk silent before him.

“Perhaps, sir,” said Gilead, “it may have occurred to you by now that the nature of the task I have set myself brings me acquainted with the secrets of many underhand dealings. This morning was fortunate in revealing to me the destined victim of a piece of quite unexampled cupidity and baseness—your own. It need not concern you to know how, but it may to learn that a certain young lady has found the friends and protectors of whom she stood most sorely in need. You may refuse to permit me to remove this statuette, which is most surely mine on your own undertaking. In that case I shall take particular care to acquaint the world of the nature of your dealings, with what effect to yourself, coming from such a source, you may judge. If, on the other hand, you are wise, you shall still possess the opportunity to reacquire, by private treaty if you wish, and at the figure at which you implied it was worth your while to obtain it, the object in question. You shall have, Mr Globestein, the statuette back at the price of three thousand guineas; or you can cancel all obligations by accepting this cheque for ten pounds here and now. Which is it to be?”

Mr Globestein, speechless, and white to the lips, could only wave his hand renunciatory towards the pedestal.

“Dexter,” said Gilead, “have this carried down, and oblige me by calling a cab.”

He re-turned, with perfectly recovered serenity, upon the dealer.

“Mr Globestein,” he said, “you must permit me to congratulate you on the acumen which still does not fail you in a deal. You need not fear that I shall abandon you in your need of a prosperous customer. In your line you are invaluable, and no one would dream of accusing you of attempting to palm off upon inexperience a sham Pigalle. But in morality you are no expert, and it would do you no harm to take a lesson or so from much humbler individuals. Now, it may interest you to know that I shall very probably—always granting you the first refusal—retain this statuette for my own, while investing in the name of its former possessor a sum equal to your highest valuation. For the rest, it is quite likely that I shall be visiting you on business in the course of a few days. What a pity it is that you do not interest yourself in Japanese prints. I am investing quite a sum in Koriusais, and Haronobus, and Yeishis and the rest. I wish you a very good morning, Mr Globestein.”

“Good morning, Mr Balm, good morning, sir,” said the dealer—“and thank you.”

CHAPTER VI.

THE QUEST OF THE ROSE-RING

I.

WANTED, old parrakeet skins, in particular the rose-ringed. Description: Green Plumage; black band extending from chin nearly to nape; rose-coloured collar. Length about 16 inches. A fair price given for all and suitable. Apply 14a Lower Marsh, Westminster Bridge Rd.

Herbert Nestle, the astute, the resourceful, stood questioningly behind his principal as the latter ran through the above advertisement submitted to his consideration.

Gilead looked up, with a slightly puzzled expression.

“Certainly an odd requirement, Nestle,” he said. “But what do you see in it?”

“Nothing, indeed, sir,” answered the secretary, “but its oddity. It is a somewhat strange thing that the identical advertisement is repeated in another part of the paper, under the usual ‘Wants’ heading. The demand for parrakeet skins, especially for one description of parrakeet skins, should be urgent.”

“Are they the vogue?”

“Miss Halifax tells me not signally—not more than any other attractive plumage.”

“Nor rare and costly?”

“No, I think not. But of course I know little about such things.”

“Well, Nestle?”

“One might imagine, sir, that it was not parrakeet skins in general, but one parrakeet skin in particular that the advertiser had in view. The rose-ringed, you see, is the only one described in detail.”

“Perhaps it is the most marketable?”

“Yes, sir, perhaps.”

“You do not think that that is the reason?”

“No, frankly, sir, I do not—not a sufficient one to account for the distinction.”

“What is, then?”

“Ah! that, sir, I cannot guess. An inquiry might yield a very ordinary solution, or it might yield a surprising, or even a dramatic one. Things have been quiet of late. I thought no more than that here was a possible opportunity for you.”

“Well, I am obliged to you, Nestle. I will think it over.”

Gilead cogitated the matter, in fact, until he quite kindled to its possibilities. It looked trivial enough on the surface, to be sure; but by now he had had a sufficient experience of the tragedies often hidden under the blandest masks of commonplace. At the end of an hour he separated, folded, and put in his pocket the front page of the Daily Post, and, leaving the office, took a taxicab for the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, where he enquired for a certain assistant Keeper in the ornithological department, who happened to be a personal friend of his.

“Dereham,” he said abruptly, after an exchange of greetings, “please to tell me about the family of parrakeets, their names and their points.”

Mr Dereham laughed. He was accustomed, like many another of Gilead’s intimates, to regard the young plutocrat as the most courteous, admirable and lovable of cranks.

“O, certainly!” he said, and reeled off a string of names. “There are the Blue Mountain, the Crimson-fronted, the Jerryang, the Ground Parrot, the Dulang, the Coolich, the familiar Budgerigar, the King’s parrot, head, neck and body scarlet, tail shot black and green, the New Holland, with a yellow crest and grey-brown body, the Alexandrine, the rose-ringed, green, with a red collar and black stock, the—”

“Stop. That’s the one I want.”

“O, indeed?”

“Is it rare?”

“Not in the least.”

“I mean any reason for attaching an especial value to it, or to choice specimens of it?”

“None whatever. It’s a quite common species.”

“Where does it come from?”

“O! India and the Malay Archipelago and thereabouts.”

“Could I, do you think, procure a specimen of it—unstuffed; its skin, I mean?”

“Dozens, I have no doubt. Any taxidermist could do your business.”

“Thanks immensely, Dereham; I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Don’t mention it. What’s in the wind now?”

Gilead laughed, shook hands, and bolted.

A couple of days later he walked into Lower Marsh Street, with a brown-paper parcel under his arm.

It was a dreary depressing morning, brown grease under foot and brown fog in the air. The street from its appearance might have been sinking into the ooze and slime of the old Lambeth marshes from which it took its name. The basement windows of its houses were blinded with mud; a steady precipitate of soot descended upon it from impenetrable glooms. The moist squalor of the scene, the low unclassified shops, the shambling traffic and half stealthy half sinister aspect of a majority of the populace, wrought sombrely upon the young man’s spirits. It was in such places, he reflected, that the breed of human carrion-flies was hatched, swarming, to poison civilization, out of these bodies contaminate and decomposing carcases of houses. A sense of foreboding was already on him as he paused in front of a seemingly unoccupied shop and read, written on the head-board over its closed door and empty window: 14a J. Jenniver Clear-starcher 14a.

Of all trades the least appropriate, one might have thought, to the district. Gilead, hesitating a moment, looked about him. It came to him suddenly how empty the street was of policemen. He had not remembered, to be sure, its contiguity to the New Cut. He was standing in the close vicinity of penny gaffs and penny dreadfuls, of the indigenous coster and the cosmopolitan flat-catcher, of brokers’ shops, Sunday trading, chronic drunkenness, buffetted faces and vice in its most sodden aspect. But, if the realization gave him a thrill, it left his nerves unshocked. He was always imperturbable in his unselfconscious sanctity of motive. He felt his strength to be “as the strength of ten” because his heart was pure—though he did not, like Sir Galahad, applaud the fact in the first person.

Now suddenly, as he stood indetermined, and wondering if, after all, this quest was proper to his custom, the door of the shop opened, and there appeared in the aperture the figure of a young woman, speaking back, as she emerged, to someone within:—

“Yes, same place as the other, Doddington Grove. I say, I must hurry. So-long, Georgy!”

She ran out—a slight anæmic girl, a sempstress by her pallor, soberly dressed, but elaborate as to her head and low as to her neck—and, with a wondering stare at Gilead, sped on her way towards the tram terminus hard by. Regarding her retreat an instant, Gilead turned to see the figure of a man standing conning him from the shop-door.

He was a pert, wiry, truculent-looking young fellow, the very type of combative cockneyism. His nose was retroussé, his cheeks pink; an incipient red-gold moustache on his lip had been coaxed into two little upstanding stings or spikes; his cloth cap, tilted back from his forehead, revealed a rudimentary ‘cow-lick’, elaborated from a somewhat cropped head of the same Apollonian hue. He stood whistling softly, with his hands thrust loosely into his trouser pockets. Gilead stepped towards him.

“Jenniver?” he said. “Is that the name?”

“You may lay on it, my lord,” answered the young man, coolly blocking the way.

“O!” said Gilead; and produced his newspaper extract. “I came about an advertisement.”

The stranger nodded, eyeing the brown-paper parcel.

“Yus?” he said.

“I have a skin or two here of the sort you mention.”

“O! have you?” said the young man. He appeared to consider a moment. “Well, no harm in looking at ’em,” he said. “Come in.”

He led the way into a little dirty dismal shop with shelves and a counter, and all as empty as the window. A door at the back seemed to give upon remote and silent regions. There was not a sign of traffic, of any description whatever, in the whole place.

The stranger accepted the parcel, opened it, and revealed half a dozen parrakeet skins of sorts. He turned them over, examining each minutely, and looked up.

“You’ve forgotten about the ‘old’,” he said.

“Old!” echoed Gilead.

“Now, look here,” said the young man, in a sudden access of violence; “what the hell’s your little game?”

Gilead, taken completely by surprise, lacked words to answer.

“You’re a toff,” went on the stranger. “These skins ain’t old, but fresh-bought, with the importers’ labels still on ’em. What the devil do you mean by trying to pass them off on me as old?”

“I really didn’t realize that age was a sine qua non,” said the customer.

“Sine what?” said the young man. “O! didn’t you, now? You’re a pusson of observation, you are. Now, what do you mean?”

“Frankly,” said Gilead, who had recovered his self-possession, “I don’t quite know. My object was to find out what you did.”

“O! was it?” said the dealer, with a violently derisive emphasis. “Jest so.”

“There’s a skin there,” said Gilead, “which answers exactly to the description of the one you most require.”

“So I see,” said the dealer.

“Only it’s not old?”

“Only it’s not old.”

“Well, I suppose there’s a virtue in antiquity.”

“Don’t you know there is, being a toff?”

“I confess,” said Gilead, “that mangy plumes excite no emotion in me.”

“You’d understand their use, maybe, if you was curator to a perishing museum,” answered the dealer.

Gilead opened his eyes.

“Is that the explanation?” he said. “I humbly beg your pardon, Mr Jenniver. My curiosity is rebuked. Come, I apologize. But the advertisement really seemed to me such an odd one that I couldn’t resist following it up.”

“Well,” said the young man, with some appearance of relief, “you let your friends know my object, and we’ll say no more about it. I dussay as there’s plenty of fine ladies of your acquaintance what would like to get a price for their cast-offs.”

“It’s likely enough,” said Gilead. “I’m sorry to have seemed so obtrusive. Good morning, Mr Jenniver.”

The young man did not answer, and the customer left the shop. He walked rapidly at first, urged by a certain sense of humiliation; but in a little his steps had slackened, and he was proceeding on his way sunk deep in reverie.

The fact was that the dealer’s explanation, accepted as so plausible in its first utterance, was, as he reconsidered it, failing more and more to satisfy him. Perishing museums, forsooth! Was it in reason to arrest decay by patching it with decay? Besides surely secondhand stuff of the sort was easily procurable without having recourse to expensive advertisements. The elucidation appeared to him on reflection to have been rather inspired, and on the instant, by his own comments. And then the empty shop, the sinister neighbourhood, the aggressiveness and obvious suspicion of the dealer that he was being got at? No, he was convinced that he had actually touched the hem of some mystery, harmless possibly, but so far without a shadow of a clue to its meaning. And yet, the more puzzling it appeared, the more was he stimulated to persist in an endeavour to unravel it. He confided his non-success to Nestle when he reached the office.

The secretary listened very attentively to the end.

“In a matter of this sort, sir,” he said, “any word linking an outer with an inner association is of value. The young woman, you say, mentioned Doddington Grove. Well, my advice is, transfer your investigations to Doddington Grove.”

“It seems ridiculous, Nestle. What possible base have I to my inquiries?”

“A morbid craving for old parrakeet skins, sir,” said the secretary.

Gilead laughed.

“I am half afraid,” he said, “that the cause of the Quest has given me a morbid craving for mares’ nests. Where is Doddington Grove?”

It was not likely that there would be a second of that name, and in fact, referring to the map of London, they traced the street they sought to the locality of Kennington Park. Gilead made his way thither that very afternoon.

He found the Grove to occupy one side of a dully respectable little congeries of squares and places covering a considerable estate to the north of the Park. There was nothing more remarkable about it than about any other semi-suburban avenue of bricks and mortar. The houses were the substantial middle-class houses of an orthodox neighbourhood, detached for the most part, and cased in stucco. A parrot in a brass cage standing in a window was the nearest approach to a clue vouchsafed him. Clearly the place itself was utterly barren of suggestion; and indeed what else could he have expected?

Pausing at length, and gazing about him, the young gentleman lapsed into a good-humoured smile and turned to retreat. “No,” he cogitated. “I haven’t the faculty, I’m afraid. I can’t produce a rabbit, or even a parrakeet, from an empty hat.”

So he decided, and walked away—and there in a moment before his eyes lay the end of the very clue he sought to follow. Fate, no doubt, had been captivated as always by the sweetness and modesty of his disposition.

For many days succeeding that excursion Mr Balm, during his somewhat rare visits to the Agency, appeared deeply preoccupied and rather unapproachable. Even the privileged amanuensis would venture no attempt to penetrate his reserve, though the heart in her fair breast suffered some pangs thereby, which, in a baser nature, might have been attributed to jealousy. She would have been indeed quite satisfied to leave him to himself, were she assured that that was the sole company he affected; but men, she knew, were often, when appearing most alone, most particularly vis-à-vis with visionary comrades, and the image of some rival to her own and the secretary’s interests occupying that silent and inscrutable mind would occasionally rise to perturb her.

How her apprehensions were relieved will appear in the sequel, where we are to pass at a leap from the meagre opening to the prolific close of that same little affair of the bird-skins.

II.

Mr Ingram, Chief Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department, was sitting in his office at Scotland Yard one chill afternoon, when a respected visitor, Mr Gilead Balm, sent in his name with a request for an immediate interview on a matter of urgency. The gentleman was at once shown in.

Gilead, courteous and quiet as ever, failed nevertheless to conceal from the astute officer some evidences of suppressed excitement in his demeanour. There was a suggestion in his face of a subdued self-satisfaction, of a conscious victoriousness, as it were, which both impressed and tickled the Superintendent.

“Well, Mr Balm,” he said, “you’ve pulled it off single-handed this time, and no mistake.”

Gilead, taking the chair offered him, with an expression in which astonishment and a certain twinkling sobriety fought for mastery, asked “Pulled what off?”

“I haven’t a notion,” said the Superintendent.

Gilead stared a moment and then laughed.

“What! Is my manner such an index?” he said. “Well, I confess I am just a little elated—or conceited. Please to read that, Ingram.”

The Superintendent accepted and examined the page of the Daily Post offered him.

“The marked ‘ad’?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve read it, sir.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Make?” The Superintendent, quite at a loss, shook his head in a guarded way.

“Anything suspicious?” demanded the client.

“Not that I can see.”

“Ah!” Gilead mutely requested the return of the paper, folded, and restored it to his pocket. “Now, I’ll tell you, Ingram,” he said quietly. “That advertisement represents a quite transcendent piece of fraud and trickery, and, with no more to go upon than you see, I’ve traced it, as I believe, to its source. Could any one of your men have done better, do you think? But I wont believe he could, and I’m just as proud as Punch of my success. If I’m wrong, I will cry off all detective work for the future. But I may be right, and yet miss my quarry through circumstance or misjudgment. I want you to lend me a plain-clothes officer, a strong, skilful, and trustworthy man.”

“Certainly, Mr Balm. Will you tell me—”

“I’ll tell you nothing, Ingram. I’m going to claim to myself all the honour and glory of this business. I’ll tell you nothing; but—yes, I’ll ask you a question. Do you know George Lightfoot by name?”

“Wait—wait—George Lightfoot? Yes, sir, I remember the man.”

“And the crime for which he was sentenced?”

“Yes, to be sure.”

“Would it be legal to arrest him on a charge of larceny arising out of that crime, but subsequent to it?”

“Better take out a warrant.”

“Very well, procure me a warrant for the arrest of George Lightfoot, and send it on with the officer to the Agency.”

“You won’t tell me the charge?”

“No.”

“Well, sir, we must stretch a point for you. What time do you want them?”

“At six o’clock this evening, punctually. I undertake full responsibility for this course, you understand, Ingram? If anything, in any way, should miscarry, I am the one to blame.”

His manner had grown suddenly very grave and earnest. He left the Superintendent curious, but impressed against his will.

At six o’clock to the tick the detective arrived at the office, presenting the appearance of a stalwart, silent man, who knew how to keep his thoughts to himself. Gilead, after a few words of instruction, slipped an electric torch into his pocket (a precaution impressed upon him through his late experiences in the Empty House), locked up the place, and, descending to the hall, deposited the keys with the porter and issued with his companion into the street.

It was a shrill inclement evening. Bitter north-easterly winds had succeeded to the fogs of the week past, and the mud in the roads was long crumbled into an arid dust, which was swept up in clouds and blown in stormy veils above the house-tops. The pavements were as white as picked bones; the very flames of the lamps shivered in their little glass-houses; one took the stinging blasts headforemost, grinding them in palpable grit between one’s teeth, and, detesting all things and people, butted aggressive into struggling pedestrians, and gloried in the proverbial coldness of charity.

Gilead was constitutionally incapable of such spleen; yet even his invincible courtesy found a difficulty in keeping, so to speak, its equilibrium; and when, as it once happened, a little cold grimy hand, gripping a couple of match-boxes, was thrust across his path, he drove half-consciously upon the obstruction, and scattered it to the winds.

The act, repented as soon as done, had been due more to a sense of urgency than of irritation; but it had the effect of checking his somewhat excited career, and of restoring to him his moral balance. The fortunate urchin, having profited by it to the tune of a gold piece, dropped voicelessly behind.

The two men beating up Victoria Street, and across the cold comfort of Broad Sanctuary, headed for Westminster Bridge with set teeth. If they had attempted speech, the wind would have howled them down. It was a charging voice, a destructive terrorist, that shivered the lamps on the river into splinters of light, and hammered screeching on the doors and windows of the timid, and blew such an accumulation of human fuel into the public-house bars that they blazed and roared again.

It was for this reason, no doubt, that Lower Marsh exhibited, when they turned into it, a darkly depopulated aspect. Its traffic seemed shrunk to a minimum, the bones of its squalid ugliness were laid bare, the small grime of humanity that drifted down its pavements appeared of less account than the dust whirled about its lamp-posts. It was in the shadowy neutral ground between two of these that Gilead halted his companion, and pointed to the name of J. Jenniver written above their heads.

“It’s here,” he whispered—“and so is he.”

A weak perpendicular edge of light drawn upon the lowered blind of the shop seemed indeed to witness to the presence of someone in the back room, the door of which was patently ajar.

“I never doubted that he would be,” whispered Gilead, excusably vainglorious. “We’d better not delay. He’s vicious and suspicious. Now, officer! And be prepared for contingencies.”

“You won’t wait, then, sir, for the young woman’s arrival?”

“No, I think not. Better make sure of our bird in the hand. We shall find her more amenable to argument when once we’ve settled with her confederate. She’s little to blame, poor creature—his tool, no worse. Now.”

“Very well, sir. Stand by. It’s like he’ll take us for her.”

He tapped on the door. Almost with the sound, the streak of light vanished from the blind, and left all in darkness.

No response followed. They waited a breathless minute.

“Queer!” muttered the detective. “The young woman can’t have arrived before us, I suppose?”

“Not if I’m right in my calculations,” said Gilead. “Try again.”

The officer knocked a second time, and louder. “It’s all right,” he whispered in a moment. “I hear steps. He’s coming.”

But still the door was not opened—only some indefinable consciousness of a presence standing silent behind it was conveyed to them.

The detective rapped again.

Then suddenly, so close that it made Gilead start, a voice spoke through the keyhole—an odd strained little voice, with a hiccup in it.

“Who’s there? What d’you want?”

Gilead, glancing at the detective, put his finger to his lips and bent to respond:

“I’ve brought some bird skins.”

“I don’t want no bird skins,” answered the voice.

“But you advertised.”

“I don’t care. I’ve got all I need.”

“Won’t you look at them?”

“No.”

“Just a squint, while I stand here. I’m short of cash.”

“Wos that to me? You clear out.”

“You advertised, you know. I’m not going to be put off without a reason. If you won’t open, I’ll kick the door in.”

“Gosh! will you? Now, look ’ere; I’ll consider of ’em just this once to oblige you, if you’ll pass ’em in and take my answer and git. Is that a bargain?”

“All right.”

A chain rattled; a key was turned; the door opened an inch or two—and quick as thought the detective shot into the aperture an inflexible munition boot. There followed an oath, a crash; the vicious elastic figure of Mr Lightfoot, alias Jenniver, glimmered one moment in semi-darkness, and the next they were in, and the man was gone.

“The room behind! Quick!” cried Gilead.

They were round and into it on the echo of his cry. As they stumbled forward blindly—for the light had been extinguished—a flash and explosion met them full face, and Gilead tripped and half fell against the wall. But in the very act he remembered his electric torch, and whipped it out and pressed the button. The sudden flash revealed two men down upon the floor, wrestling together in a mortal grip.

“Make for his revolver!” gasped the detective—“quick, before he can get at it.”

Gilead saw where the weapon had fallen, and, snatching at it on the instant, presented it at the young dealer’s head.

“Give in, Lightfoot,” he said, in a voice as cool as judgment. “I allow you two seconds.”

With a ghastly groan, the man rolled over and surrendered.

They got him to his feet and handcuffed. From the moment of his defeat he appeared void of all volition. His face was as grey as streaked putty; the sockets of his eyes were white; drops of sweat stood on his forehead. They relit the gas, and helped him all limp into a chair, where he sat half-collapsed.

“Good God!” whispered Gilead: “has he shot himself?”

“Not he,” said the detective, coolly picking the dust of the fray from his coat. “A mercy he didn’t one of us. You’re all right, sir?”

“Yes. And you?”

“A bit scorched—no more. I wonder at you, Lightfoot. You’ve made a bad mess of this business, my lad.”

Gilead uttered a sudden cry.

“It’s there! Look!”

The room was empty, save for a common chair or two and a bare deal table; and in the middle of the latter lay a single folded parrakeet skin, green, with a rose and black collar round its neck.

He stood staring a moment, then went and lifted and balanced the thing in his hand. And, so holding it, he turned, with a lost expression on his face.

“Why,” he said, “I must have miscalculated after all, and she’s been here before us.”

The detective uttered a quick exclamation:—

“Look at the man! What’s taken him?”

He was writhing and tearing at his bonds. Suddenly he broke into a whining unearthly cry, that tailed off into a string of inarticulate blasphemies.

“Officer,” said Gilead whitely: “there’s something beyond what I looked for in this business—something, I believe, infinitely blacker and more deadly. Stay you here while I go over the house.”

The prisoner, straightening himself convulsively, moved as if to spring.

“All right, sir,” said the detective, prompt to interpose. “You can leave him to me.”

Gilead, clipping his little torch into flame, hurried instantly out of the room. A deadly constricted feeling was at his heart; he looked with certainty for some horror to be revealed in a moment. Yet he had no least reason for blaming himself. He had merely watched, not directed, the course of events. Indeed, Providence, it might be said, had appointed in him its unconscious Nemesis. Would only that it had permitted him to forestall in that character the deed he feared.

In the passage he paused an instant to shut and relock the front door, which had remained open from their first entrance. Then he turned to consider his ground. A narrow flight of stairs rose before him; beyond, at the black end of the passage, a second dropped into the basement. He mounted the former in the first instance, his heart beating thickly, and came to a little cluster of rooms, three in all, which revealed nothing but dust and emptiness and peeling wall-paper. Satisfied that they contained, and could contain, no secret, he left them, and, returning to the passage, descended to the basement. He knew now that what he sought, if it existed, must be hidden somewhere here. A sense of something monstrous to be revealed tingled in his veins; stealthy things seemed to rustle and escape before him; at the bottom of the flight he hesitated, momentarily sickened from his quest.

What business was it of his? A bugbear, very likely, of his own fancy! The shock of unforeseen defection in an act of larceny was no doubt sufficient to account for the state of the man above.

A glow came to his face in the darkness. He was glad that heaven and he had been alone together with that shameful thought. He breathed out all his pusillanimity in a great scornful sigh—and the sigh was answered.

He stood a moment as if paralysed. It had been little and tremulous, but unmistakable—an echo, perhaps, of his own. Vaulted darkness gasped at him in front, exhaling a smell of cold flags and cold soot. Close beside him was the near-closed door of the coal-cellar. In a sudden spasm of horror he pushed this open, and, casting his light before him, saw the body of a young girl lying prone upon her back on the stones.

Now a great sorrow and pity came on the instant to nerve him. He bent to look into the bloodless face and saw its eyes closed, its white lips parted; but the nostrils quivered slightly and he knew that she still lived. There was little need to question what had struck her down. High on the bosom of the cheap frock she wore was a crimson splash, and from under her shoulder spread and crawled a black and sluggish little pool.

But she was not dead. God help him yet to mend a deed so foul and inhuman! He rose—hope was to the swift. As he turned to go he saw leaning against the wall a spade and mattock, and he shuddered in the knowledge of their purpose.

It was with a face as set as stone that he came hurrying into the little room above.

“He has shot her,” he said. “She is lying in the cellar—but she still breathes. Look to him there while I run for a doctor.”

He was gone before the officer could speak. But, at his words, the abject figure in the chair had ceased to moan and writhe. It sat up; it made an attempt with its damp manacled hands to repoint the little red spurs on its lip; it spoke even in a thick unsteady voice:—

“I’ll make you all pay hell for this. It’s a plot to rob me. She shot herself—she did on my living oath. What have you done with my rose-ring?”

The detective exerted some cool pressure.

“It’s my duty to warn you, Lightfoot,” he said, “that I’ve a warrant for your arrest in my pocket, and that whatever you say now will be used as evidence before the magistrate.”

III.

“Of course it is an acquired taste,” said Gilead. “All education is acquired. Do you like olives?”

“No, I can’t bear them,” said Miss Halifax, making a face over the unexpected question.

“They are invaluable,” he answered, “in bringing out the bouquet of claret. So it is with that Japanese print” (he was standing with her before a fine hachirakaki by Masonobu, which hung upon the wall). “Take it in the right spirit, and then see what that exquisite little arrangement by Whistler yonder owes to it. Why you yourself, you know, are truly insensible of your obligations to this same Masonobu among others.”

It was a Sunday afternoon, and he had invited his secretary and amanuensis to tea with him in the Albany, with the express purpose of relating to them, for their personal and private edification, the history in detail of the bird-skins, about which, during the whole day preceding, he had maintained an amused but impenetrable reserve. They knew that he had been successful in his quest, and they knew little else. He tantalized them even now by delaying the recital.

“My obligations!” said the young lady, raising her brows in a very pretty puzzled way. “How, Mr Balm?”

“Why,” said he, “to what, beyond a naturally refined taste, do you think you owe the judgment so charmingly displayed in the decoration of your own rooms? It was these early Japanese artists who were as responsible as any for the growth among us of a spirit of true appreciation of the beauty and value of line in decorative composition. You must really learn to honour your artistic ancestry, Miss Halifax.”

She sighed.

“I will try; only I do wish my ancestry had adopted a more attractive convention for its faces. They have no more expression than eggs. It will do, I suppose, if I taste Masonobu and drink in Whistler. You tell me, you know, to love the wine for the olive, and not the olive for the wine.”

He laughed.

“That is well answered; but I don’t despair of you yet. You shall come by and by to love the olive for its own sake. Yes, that is the Pigalle.”

“Isn’t it a dear!” she exclaimed, this time with a whole-hearted admiration.

“It ought to be,” he answered. “I gave three thousand guineas for it.”

She smiled lovelily on him, thanking him silently for the little whimsical significant confidence. “Mr Balm,” she said plaintively: “when, please, are we to hear about the Quest?”

“At once,” he answered. “I was only waiting your command. I am just spoiling, as the Americans say, for an audience. You shall own, Nestle, that I have managed, in spite of the French proverb, to draw oil from a wall.”

He brought and settled them snugly about the fire, went to a cabinet, and, returning with some article in his hand, placed a little occasional table in their midst ready for its reception.

“You will remember,” he said, “the terms of the advertisement, and the emphasis laid on a particular species of parrakeet skin—the rose-ringed, in short. It was from the first our astute secretary’s opinion, Miss Halifax, that the advertiser had in view less that species than a single example of that species, and he was perfectly right. I hold the proof in my hand.”

He offered it for their inspection. Nestle, uttering an exclamation, bent to look.

“Take it,” said Gilead, “examine it, weigh it, and return it to me. What do you make of it?”

“It answers to the description certainly,” said the secretary—“green plumage, rose and black band. It is about sixteen inches long, and it has been worn. Two things only strike me.”

“What?”

“The weight of its head, and the fact that it has eyes.”

“Precisely. Now will you lay it down here awhile? It came into my hands the night before last under pretty tragic circumstances. There was an attempt at murder—yes indeed there was, Miss Halifax—of which an unhappy girl was the victim. I arrived on the scene too late to prevent the crime, but not too late to have the criminal arrested red-handed. It was only then that I reached a final solution of the problem I had set myself to unravel, and which solution it needed no more than a single piece of corroborative evidence, since supplied, to confirm. By the courtesy, or perhaps I should say the particular favour, of Chief Superintendent Ingram, I am allowed the temporary custody of these pièces-de-conviction. Yes, Miss Halifax?”

“The girl? the poor victim?”

“She is not, I am happy to say, so mortally hurt as at first it was feared. There is a chance, at least, of her recovery. The bullet has been extracted.”

“The bullet?”

“I am beginning, you see, at the end, like a Chinese book.”

“O! please to go on. I will not interrupt you again.”

“As often and as much as you like. By the way, where am I to begin?”

“O! from your visit to Doddington Grove. I know so far.”

“Very well. Now, as you may suppose, I found nothing whatever in Doddington Grove, a respectable street in a respectable neighbourhood, to afford me the slightest clue to what I sought. I had, in fact, after a hopeless investigation, come to realise my complete inability to make bricks without straw, when chance, or Providence, directed my steps, in retreating, past a shop in the Kennington Road, in the window of which I saw something which brought me to an instant stand. This something was nothing less than a bundle of bright-coloured bird-skins, tied round with a piece of red tape.

“I went at once into the shop. It was one of those second-hand concerns, used by small brokers for the disposal of articles picked up by them at sales; and I ascertained without any difficulty that the packet of skins—which I bought there and then—represented the remainder of a considerable parcel, the bulk of which had been sold to a hat and bonnet shop proprietor in the Borough. The original lot, had, I learned, figured in its entirety among the effects in a sale at a house in Doddington Grove; and with small pains I was able to discover the number of that house, the date of the auction, and the name of the late tenant, who it appeared, had been a Mrs Barclay Rivers, a widow.

“So far, so good. I had secured at length a definite base from which to conduct operations, and I felt considerably elated. I must beg you both to bear always in mind that from first to last I was my own sole detective in this matter. Any doubt in that respect would seem to tarnish my laurels, of which I am inordinately vain.

“Now, to continue. There was here, you will perceive, at least a certain relation established between a Mrs Barclay Rivers and a packet of bird-skins, with the man and girl in Lower Marsh for the hyphen connecting them as it were. How to ascertain the nature of the relationship, the degree of kindred so to speak, was the question. Obviously, the simplest course was to hunt out the widow herself, and to make a frank offer to her of my services; and that was the course I adopted.

“The auctioneers who had sold the property were fortunately in a position to acquaint me with the present address of the lady. She was living in lodgings in the Earl’s Court Road, they informed me, and, to supplement her income, which was small, she gave music lessons. They opined that her husband’s death—which occurred in the Malay Peninsula some eighteen months ago—had left her very ill provided for, and that the sale of her household effects had been due to that cause. I must confess that both here and elsewhere I did not hesitate to quote, when necessary, my credentials. You may think that hardly playing the game; in which case I offer no defence. But it saved a world of explanations.

“I called upon Mrs Rivers. She was accessible, of course, professionally, and I took the opportunity to introduce myself and to state my object in visiting her. Fortunately she was well acquainted with the reputation of our Agency, and from that first moment all, so far as she was concerned, was plain sailing. It is unnecessary for me to enter into particulars; but I may say, generally, that she gave me her complete confidence.”

Miss Halifax, fluttering butterfly lashes, shot one glance at the secretary. He sat absorbed and intent, and her lids fell again.

“She was the widow, it appeared,” continued Gilead, “of a Captain Barclay Rivers, who, at the time of his death, had been abroad on a scientific expedition in the Malay Peninsula, and its contiguous islands. Some few weeks before the news of his death had reached her, there had arrived from him through a shipping agency, and directed in his handwriting, a small bale of bird-skins, but unaccompanied by any letter or notification of their despatch. There was nothing about the parcel to lead her to attach any particular significance to its contents, or to any part of its contents, and she put the skins aside, after a brief examination, fully expecting to hear from her husband by the next mail. Instead there came to her the tragic information of his death from swamp fever.

“She was left—needless to elaborate the reasons—in such restricted circumstances that it became necessary for her to realize on her every stick of property, and to retire into obscurity. The parcel of skins was included in the sale, and it found a purchaser. Such was the sum total of her testimony. She had no reason for assuming that the parcel had contained anything extraordinary, and, interested as she was in my view of the case, she was inclined to the belief, I fancy, that it would lead me to no more than the discovery of a beautiful mare’s-nest. Questioned about the contents of the bale, she admitted that, to the best of her memory, it had contained a single skin of the sort described; but she could not in the least recollect if that especial skin had been included in the lot sold by auction. She had, however, no reason for supposing otherwise.

“Well, here was something more gained, if a little less than suggestive. I had, of course, already minutely examined my purchase. It included no rose-ring, and yielded no solution. My next step was to return to the broker’s shop, to enquire if any previous customer had overhauled the packet that I had bought. Judge of my gratification when I learned that a week or two before, a man, answering in every description to my friend of Lower Marsh, had considered, and, after a careful scrutiny, had declined, the purchase. From that moment I saw the connection proved, and knew that it needed no more than tact and persistence to bring me to the heart of the mystery.

“Now it occurred to me that the bonnet shop in the Borough—known as Mélanies’—which had acquired from the broker the bulk of the lot purchased by him, should form my next subject for enquiry, and thither I bent my steps one morning about mid-day. As I reached the place, by a truly extraordinary chance the hands were trooping out to dinner, and amongst them I saw and recognised at once the figure of the girl whom I had seen issuing from the empty shop in Lower Marsh. Fortunately I passed unobserved by her, or she might have suspected something. But it came to me in a flash that she was in league with Jenniver, or whatever the man’s name might be, to trace the rose-ring to some customer of the firm, and that since she had been presumably unsuccessful, the rose-ring could not figure among the stock at Mélanies’, and therefore it was useless my pursuing my enquiries further in that direction. Really, I think, Miss Halifax, I was inspired in all this.”

“I am sure you were, Mr Balm. What was your next step?”

“Why, to induce Mrs Barclay Rivers to come with me to see if by any chance she could identify the man Jenniver himself. It was just possible, and it might explain everything.”

“And did she?”

“She came, with great reluctance. But I was by then, I am afraid, so eager in the quest that I would have abducted her had she refused. My intention was to introduce her to the man as one of those fashionable acquaintances whose custom he had desired; but he saved me the trouble. As we approached the shop he himself, accompanied by the identical young woman of my former acquaintance, issued from it, and the two, unconscious of our presence (it was raining, and our umbrellas were up), went down the street before us. ‘There he is,’ I whispered; ‘and the very girl I told you about with him. Quick! Do you recognize either?’ ‘Both, I am sure,’ answered Mrs Rivers, much agitated. ‘The girl, I am certain, is Annie Milner, a former maid of mine, whom I had to send away for misconduct; and he—wait—I seem to know him; but I’m so flustered.’ At that moment the two stopped at a door, and the man knocked—a double rap. ‘O!’ said my companion on the instant. ‘I know him: He was a postman in our district.’ I started; I turned her swiftly about. I almost ran her from the neighbourhood—for she had given me in those few words the clue I desired, and from that moment everything was clear to me.”

“Mr Balm! How? O, please go on!”

“One moment. I went straight, after seeing her home, to Scotland Yard, and, by virtue of those same credentials, secured an examination of the portraits of convicted criminals. The man of Lower Marsh figured amongst them. ‘Who is he?’ I asked. ‘George Lightfoot’ was the answer; ‘a Kennington postman sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for letter-stealing, and discharged, after serving his term, within the last few weeks.’ There, Miss Halifax!”

“O! but I’m not there, indeed.”

“Why, you see, Captain Barclay Rivers had written a letter to his wife, telling her that he was forwarding the bale of skins, and mentioning a secret connected with one of them; and that letter Lightfoot had stolen amongst others. But, before he could formulate any plan for acting upon the information contained in it, he was trapped and arrested on another charge and sent to prison, only to find upon his release that the lady had been made a widow, and the bale sold and its contents scattered during his confinement. Hence his advertisement, and, generally, his determined efforts to trace the several items of the parcel; hence, moreover, his subornation and ruin of the unhappy girl at Mélanies’, whom he had known and courted when he was a postman and she a maid at Mrs Rivers’s, and whom he had, since his release, tracked to the shop in the Borough, and won to his nefarious purposes.”

“And you saw through it all in that single instant?”

“I will not go so far. But I had at least a vision of the truth. Still there remained to discover the nature of the secret, and the whereabouts of the lost skin—for by now I was convinced that the rose-ring, and the rose-ring alone, the one specimen of its kind which, it would seem, the parcel contained, held the solution of the mystery. Well, I discovered it; but at a fatal moment for one poor creature.”

“O, don’t stop!”

“I must hurry rather. There is much ground to cover in a few words. You will take for granted, Miss Halifax, the tedious process of inquiry they represent. In brief, I questioned Mrs Rivers as to her former ménage, and learned that in the time of Annie Milner there had been but one other servant in the house, namely a cook, Bessie Cotton by name. It was just possible that she might know something about the lost rose-ring.

“I traced this girl to the situation she had procured through her former mistress, from that situation to another; finally, to small lodgings she was occupying in the neighbourhood of Newington Butts. I found her at home, and opened upon her at once on the subject of the rose-ring. To my amazement she broke into a passion of tears and half coherent protestations, denouncing, as I understood, her former fellow-servant Annie Milner for having brought the law on her—as she supposed, in my person. It was long before I could convince her that I was not a plain-clothes constable, long before I could quiet and reassure her; but I succeeded at length, and persuaded her little by little to make a full confession to me of the truth. And what do you think it was?”

“It was she who had stolen the rose-ring?”

“It was she—a mere impulsive misdemeanour—a mere sin of vanity, committed for the purpose of adorning a cherished hat—which hat still survived so adorned. Seeing the parcel of bright skins so little regarded she had succumbed one day to the temptation of the rose-ring, attracted by its eyes and its singularity, and had appropriated it to herself.

“But now observe the irony of circumstance—or was it, perhaps, an instance of subconscious telepathy, of simultaneous suggestion? Anyhow, it appeared, Annie Milner and I had conceived at the same moment the same hypothesis about this girl her former fellow-servant; only—Annie had been an hour or so beforehand with me in giving practical effect to her hypothesis. In short, she had paid a visit that very morning to Bessie Cotton during her dinner hour, had wormed the truth out of her, and had demanded the hat itself as the price of her silence. And Bessie had yielded up her plunder intact, and Annie had carried it away—whither?

“For a moment, as you may imagine, I felt completely nonplussed. And then it occurred to me that Annie, having already sacrificed her dinner time to this quest, would for certain postpone carrying her prize to Lower Marsh until after business hours. I acted promptly upon that conjecture—which fortunately proved the correct one—you shall hear with what result.”

Gilead then related to his absorbed listeners the adventure with which we are already acquainted.

“We cannot gather,” he said at the end, “whether the villain had predetermined upon murdering his victim, with a view to silencing an untrustworthy confederate, or whether, as he himself declares, she drove him to madness at the last by coquetting with him, witholding her capture, and threatening to give the whole thing away unless he agreed to her extravagant terms. The fact that he made a jealous preserve of the premises—which he was renting for a few weeks at a few shillings a week from a local landlord—the fact of the spade and mattock in the cellar—these are at least subjects for grave suspicion. But likely enough we shall never know the truth.”

“And the mystery, Mr Balm. O, Mr Balm—please!”

Gilead laughed at the impatient young lady, as he raised the parrakeet-skin from the table.

“I told you,” he said, “that there was but one missing link needed to complete the chain of evidence. That missing link was, of course, Captain Barclay Rivers’s letter, which was found on Lightfoot. It told, in brief, of the Captain’s startling discovery, among the ruins of a temple of Kandy in Ceylon, of an almost priceless gem; of his apprehensions that this treasure might be lost or stolen from him in his varied wanderings, and of his final determination to send it home in a parcel of the skins of birds shot by him, concealed within the head of a rose-ringed parrakeet, the only specimen of its kind, he was careful to explain—with an elaborate description of the bird for his wife’s instruction—that the bundle contained.”

With these words Gilead, lowering the skin for the eager scrutiny of his two guests, laid open the body, and showed them how the whole cavity of the skull was filled with a single dark stone, which, projecting to the sockets, seemed to form the eyes. Then, delicately inserting a finger and thumb, he produced the gem for their inspection.

“It is an incomparable sapphire,” he said—“in a fine state always one of the most precious of precious stones. This example may be pronounced, in bulk and depth of colour, no less than superlative.”

As he spoke, his man entered the room.

“What is it, David?” he exclaimed.

“A lady to see you, sir.”

“What name, man? Why don’t you show her in?”

“Hearing you had visitors, sir, she begged if you would come to her instead.”

He proffered a card.

“It is Mrs Barclay Rivers herself,” said Gilead, turning gleefully to his guests. “I had half-expected her. Excuse me a moment.”

As he left the room, Miss Halifax, with a heart-felt sigh, turned to the secretary.

“Damn!” said that young gentleman laconically.

“I’m convinced she’s young and beautiful and romantic,” murmured the amanuensis unhappily. “Did you notice how shyly he referred to their confidences? A designing creature! Visitors, indeed! I’ve a presentiment we’re going to have our poor little noses put out of joint, Herbert.”

“Hush!” he whispered.

Voices were audible in the passage, and the next moment Gilead laughingly re-entered the room, ushering in his visitor. Miss Halifax rose with a frigid demeanour and a cold feeling at her heart—and encountered the figure of a buxom red-faced woman of sixty, waddling in like a jovial duck.

“Well, I’m blessed!” said Mrs Barclay Rivers, “if this ain’t like a scene out of Dickens, and the conspirators all met together in old Joe’s rag shop! What a pretty frock, my dear!”

Miss Halifax, with a delicious laugh, ran to take the hand offered.

CHAPTER VII.

THE QUEST OF THE WAX HAND

IT was not to be supposed that the Agency, so catholic, so philanthropic, so disinterested in its labours, and withal so boundlessly endowed, would long escape the notice of those social powers, which, through all changes of creed and government, work steadily on in the cause of the human decencies. With these Gilead’s name was soon to become an almost apostolic one, and gradually, as he proceeded on his way, the executive, the police, the Home Office itself became his informal allies. A latitude was permitted him in the matter of technical infringements of the law, and he was made secure against official and officious interference. In his clean and fearless spirit of Knight-errantry, he probably realized little of the indulgence granted him, and, in cases where his way was made inexplicably smooth, accounted the fact to nothing more than the inherent rightness of things. On more than one occasion, indeed, Scotland Yard flagrantly abetted him in acts which, strictly speaking, were illegal. But then, if it had withheld its support, a scoundrelism or so would have prospered. It is true that Gilead was accustomed to give practical expression to his admiration of the force in princely gifts to its charities and awards to individual merit; but I for one will not believe that such generosity would, if construed into bribery, have induced it to condone for a moment a real offence in him. The police favoured him because he contributed, and contributed largely, to their power for good.

One morning the following advertisement, thumb-marked by the Secretary for his consideration, engaged Gilead’s attention:—

“In despair. A young man, in urgent need of £50, asks the help of the rich and benevolent to save him from complete ruin. No repayment; but will give services in any capacity required.”

The usual reference number followed. Gilead thought a moment, then looked up.

“This, Nestle,” said he, “is hardly out of the common.”

“Hardly, sir,” replied the secretary. “Only the offer of services guarantees it as genuine. But if you would rather it went through the ordinary channels—”

“No,” said Gilead. “If you have nothing better to offer, I will take it. Romance, after all, must walk sometimes on the highway, if we have the eyes to distinguish her. I will undertake this, Nestle.”

He requested Miss Halifax to make an appointment with the advertiser to call on the morning next but one, and there left the matter for the time being.

At the hour specified the expected visitor arrived, and was shut in to his interview with the head, Miss Halifax, as usual, being present. Gilead’s ready sympathy was awakened on his first sight of the young man, who, in addition to a nervous white complexion and troubled eyes, was disfigured by the loss of his right hand, the place of which was supplied by a stump and hook.

The calm eyes of the young plutocrat would yield at first, however, no ground to sentiment. Enough experience had taught him to safeguard his emotions.

“You advertised for help,” he said. “May I ask, in the first instance, your name?”

“Dobell, sir,” answered the stranger, in a low voice—“Felix Dobell.”

He hung his head. He was patently in great mental suffering. His age appeared to be about that of his questioner’s; but some illness of life had lined his face prematurely. In appearance he might have stood—on that line of social demarcation which divides the accepted from the not quite acceptable—for a clerk on the lower grade. But his speech was educated and his dress quiet.

“And your vocation?” asked Gilead.

“I was cashier, sir, to a firm of law stationers.”

“Was?”

He noticed and emphasised the past tense.

“I was forced to leave, sir,” said the visitor scarce audibly.

“Forced?”

Again he accentuated the word, quietly, but significantly.

“No, not in that way, sir,” answered the other—“not, indeed. It was because I feared to be tempted to it that I left. I come to you with clean hands so far; indeed I do, sir.”

He put out his arms with an instinctive movement, and withdrew them as quickly. Miss Halifax, leaning over her table, shaded her eyes with her palm. But Gilead sat, to all appearance, as cold as judgment.

“You will forgive me,” he said; “it is necessary. You proposed, if I remember rightly, some indiscriminate form of service in return for this loan?”

“I have trained my left hand, sir,” answered the visitor eagerly, “to do the work of my right, and better. Anything in my power I will do gladly.”

“Fifty pounds is a large sum. For what purpose do you require it?”

“To pay a debt.”

Again the answer was hardly audible.

“Very well,” said Gilead—“and if I accept your terms, and require you, in exchange for the gift, to pick a man’s pocket for me?”

Miss Halifax rose in soft amazement. The stranger rose too.

“I have come to the wrong place,” he said. “It is only a judgment, I suppose; but—O, let me go, sir! let me go before I make a fool of myself.”

“You won’t do it?”

“No.”

The amanuensis forestalled him at the door.

“Mr Balm!” she whispered, in a voice from which every expression but wonder was gone.

Gilead rose, with a smile, and crossing the room swiftly, put a firm detaining hand on the young man’s shoulder.

“Come,” he said, “tell us all about it from beginning to end.”

His tone was unmistakable. With one amazed look at him, the young fellow dropped his face into his single palm, and bowed his shoulders as if quite broken with grief.

“Come,” said Gilead a second time; “it was a test, no more. Don’t you know us, man?”

It was evident that he did not. In a few sweet sympathetic words Miss Halifax informed him of the nature of the harbour of refuge into which he had drifted—in despair, it appeared; almost without a hope. Even when he realized at last his happy fortune, it was minutes before they could restore him to a frame of mind meet for explanations. But at length, abashed, grateful, half stunned in the prospect of help, he faltered out a desire to be questioned—and condemned, if need be.

“That is very well, then,” said Gilead. “You must tell us, if you will, as much about your life and circumstances as is necessary to an elucidation of the matter.”

“If you will only begin by questioning me, sir,” answered the visitor, evidently greatly overcome, as he seated himself diffidently on the chair to which he was motioned. “I think—I believe that I should find it easier to answer than explain. There is so much that is bewildering, as well as so much that is shameful in my story. But I will speak the whole truth; I will leave out nothing. Only question me.”

Gilead, seated opposite, nodded his assent reassuringly.

“I am sure you will,” he said. “Tell me, in the first place, who you are.”

“My father,” answered the young man, “was a respectable print-seller and frame-maker in Southampton Row. He gave me a good education. My mother, who died young, I never knew.”

“And yourself?” asked Gilead.

“When I was twenty-one,” said the young man, a sudden pink suffusing his wan features, “my father procured me a situation in the studio of Mr Auguste Lerroux, who dealt with him.”

He appeared to have prepared himself for the slight start which his words evoked. He looked up quickly, and dropped his eyes again, a deadly pallor replacing the momentary flush on his cheeks.

“The well-known artist and sculptor?” asked Gilead, resolutely commanding himself. “Well?”

“My father,” went on the visitor, in a low voice, “over-estimated some small ability which I possessed, and persuaded Mr Lerroux to take me on as his assistant, with a view to better things. I had not been with Mr Lerroux a year when my father died.”

He paused, in painful embarrassment, and again Gilead encouraged him to proceed.

“My father,” continued the young man, with evident difficulty, “was always, I fear, improvident and unpractical. It was deemed necessary after his death to sell the stock and goodwill of the business in order to discharge the debts with which it was encumbered. They proved greater than expected, and, for nett result, I found myself thrown virtually penniless upon the world. It was then that I succumbed to temptation.”

“Ah!” said Gilead, in a tone which he strove to make appear unconcerned. “And now we come to it, Mr Dobell.”

“Yes, sir,” said the visitor. He looked up, his eyes shining; but there was a piteous tremor about his lips. “I succumbed, sir,” he said, “and to my everlasting shame. I want to put it before you quite plainly, without extenuation or self-defence. It was this way. Mr Lerroux had engaged to pay me a certain small salary, but, as a matter of fact, he did not keep to his promise, or only so scantily and fitfully that, at the time of my father’s death, I had been able to put by no more than a pound or two, which represented my entire savings. There was a reason for this, as I knew. My employer figured large before the world of critics, but he was not a popular artist, and his patrons were few. He was generally hard-pressed for cash, and I knew, and know now most bitterly to my cost, that he had recourse to the money-lenders. At the time of which I speak he was in a desperate state, and I must believe that he had no choice but to discharge me. Anyhow he did discharge me, I thought harshly and cruelly, and at twenty-two I found myself cast adrift without means or prospects.”

He paused. “Come,” said Gilead, “we are no Pharisees here.”

“At first,” said the young man, lowering his eyes, “I hardly realised my position. I was strong and hopeful, and foresaw no great difficulty in procuring a situation. I did not understand that, without especial attainments, my chance was almost nothing in the struggle for existence. But I was quickly disillusioned. In a few weeks’ time I was utterly destitute, and at my wits’ end to know what to do or where to turn.”

“I was used to frequent a free library in the district where I lodged, to read the advertisements in the papers and answer such of them as I thought promising. One day the devil put it into my head that the walls of this room offered a resource to a starved and desperate man. There were hung on them a number of Japanese prints” (Gilead stirred and drew in his breath), “the gift of an eccentric patron, some of which my knowledge gained under Mr Lerroux told me were of considerable market value. What loss, moral or material, would their removal entail upon the frequenters of such a place? Christmas cartoons, I thought, would prove infinitely more to their taste. I dismissed the temptation, but it returned again and again, and each time more formidable. Presently, half involuntarily, I satisfied myself of the ease with which the room could be entered at night from the back, which abutted upon an empty yard. And then—and, then, sir, at last, I fell.”

Trembling all over, he took from his breast a pocket-book, and from the book a number of papers, one of which he selected and, rising, carried across to Gilead.

“Will you please to read it sir?” he said. “It is a damning witness, but a reminder and a warning which I can never make up my mind to part with.”

He stood with bowed head, while Gilead accepted and examined the slip presented to him. It was merely a printed paragraph, a cutting of a newspaper report, and it ran as follows. Gilead read it out in a low voice, that Miss Halifax might hear:—

“Late on Wednesday night the B... Free Library was broken into, and an attempt made to steal a number of Japanese colour prints from the walls of the reading-room. The thief procured an entrance through a window easy of access from an unoccupied yard at the back of the premises, and was in the act of removing the prints from their frames for the purpose of making an inconspicuous parcel of them, when he was alarmed, it is conjectured, by the movements of the caretaker above, and decamped, leaving his spoil behind him. The prominence lately given, through the Happer and other sales, to the commercial value of these works of art, was no doubt accountable for the attempt, which should prove instructive to the librarian. The police have a clue, it is said, in some finger-marks, and in one thumb mark in particular, left by the burglar upon the wet plaster of a wall in the window embrasure, which that very day had undergone some repairs.”

Gilead looked up with a reassuring smile.

“Let him that is without sin among us cast the first stone,” he said.

The young fellow gave an irrepressible gasp.

“God bless you!” he said; “God bless you, sir, for that! But there is worse to follow—something infinitely more horrible and distressing.”

His listener’s brow darkened a little.

“Some later crime?” he asked softly.

“I will not—I must not say another word,” answered the visitor in agony, “until you have gone through this also. It is dated only three days later.”

Half dreading what was to come, Gilead accepted a second newspaper cutting from his hand, and, bending with compressed lips, read it out as he had the former:—

“It is our painful duty to record the death—whether by his own hand or that of another it remains to prove—of the well-known artist and sculptor Mr Auguste Lerroux. Mr Lerroux occupied a maisonette and studio in Edwards Square off the Kensington Road, and, upon entering the latter apartment at seven o’clock yesterday morning to light the fire, the maid servant discovered to her horror her master lying dead upon the floor with a bullet wound through his head. The weapon, an air-pistol, with which the injury had been inflicted lay beside the body, and the shot from it had apparently penetrated the brain through the right eye. No adequate cause can be assigned for the unfortunate gentleman’s suicide, and at present the affair remains a mystery. The police, who were summoned at once, are very reticent in the matter; but it is hinted that they are in possession of a certain clue which in some mysterious way associates the crime, if crime it be, with an attempted theft of Japanese prints from the B ... Free Library, as reported in our columns some days ago.”

Gilead looked up from his perusal of the paper without a word.

“No, sir,” cried the young man—“before God I am guiltless. You must believe it, or there is an end of all hope for me.”

“I believe it, Mr Dobell,” said the soft clear voice of Miss Halifax.

Gilead smiled.

“You have your advocate, you see, sir,” he said. “And now, if you please, you will give us your true version of this affair, the main particulars of which are of course known to me. It will spare you pain, perhaps, if I recall them. My Lerroux was known to have possessed a pistol of this description, he was known to be in embarrassed, even in desperate circumstances, and he had been heard to threaten self-destruction. At the same time, the mere fact of his possessing the pistol was held to be no necessary proof of his having used it against himself, and the hint of a second party in the studio gave an ugly complexion to the affair. The evidence as to Mr Lerroux’s habits was inconclusive, the medical testimony was inconclusive, and in the end, if I remember rightly, the Coroner’s Jury brought in a open verdict.”

“They did, sir,” said the young man in great emotion; “but, for detective purposes, all reference to the clue which the police possessed had been withheld from them. But I knew what it was—I knew. I knew that I had touched blood, and printed with it upon the doorpost the very damning sign that had already once marked me down.”

“Sign!” exclaimed Gilead.

“I had,” said the other, hardly able to articulate, “a cross-cut, an old wound, upon the thumb of my right hand which, once detected, could not fail to betray me.”

“Your right hand!” Miss Halifax, standing a little apart, breathed out the words between pity and amazement.

The young man fought to command himself, and presently continued in a stronger voice: “Listen to me, sir—only listen to me, and, God helping, I will win your belief and pity. I tried to rob the library—it is all true—and at the last moment my courage failed me. I got home, got to bed, the most abased cowering reptile on God’s earth. Rising the next day to the full horror of my fall, I read in the evening paper of my own mad attempt and of the clue I had left behind me—a thumb-mark on the wall. From that moment hell seemed to have opened. I pretended to have cut myself, and enclosed my thumb in a stall. While in the very act a thought like a stab struck into my heart. I might take what precautions I might: there was another witness to that tell-tale scar in the studio of Mr Lerroux. If the police were to secure it before I could, my doom was sealed. I threw away the useless stall—I was mad by then with shame and apprehension, incapable of judging the extreme improbability of their alighting on this remote piece of evidence. At first I thought I would call on Mr Lerroux and implore him to give me the thing I needed; but the terror of exciting suspicion thereby, and so defeating my own ends, was a sufficient deterrent. Then in a moment my acquaintance with his house and way of life rushed upon me. He lived alone, somewhat freely, and was careless of precautions. I knew that after dinner he never went near his studio, and that to enter it from the back, where a door gave upon a strip of garden, should be a very easy matter. I ask you to believe, sir, that I was by then in a state of mind beyond the reach of reason. Moreover I only intended to appropriate what was already in a manner my own. About ten o’clock I crept round the studio side, treading upon flower-beds, and found, as I had expected, the door unlocked. I listened a moment, and then opened it with infinite caution. All was silent and dark within, save for a red gleam from the stove which stood to one side a little away from the wall. I knew where the thing I had come to seek was deposited; but, fearful of stumbling over some obstruction, I decided to kindle momentarily a spill of paper in order to take my bearings. Stealing to the stove on tiptoe, I saw an envelope or wrapper lying handy, and stooped to secure it. My fingers came up wet and sticky, and, as I kindled the paper, and turned with it in my hand, I saw—O, my God!—my old master lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood.”

Grey as ashes, the narrator, unable longer to support himself, sank back into the chair from which he had risen. His listeners hurried to sustain and reassure him.

“Say no more, my poor fellow,” said Gilead. “It is all plain, and you shall spare yourself. It was like this, was it not? In the midst of your horror, the awful responsibility, the awful peril you had incurred smote you out of stupefaction, and, without giving another thought to your purpose, you turned and fled, leaving that tragic thumb-mark for a clue to your pursuers?”

The young man thanked him with a look full of pathos and gratitude.

“I thought I should die, mercifully die,” he whispered, “when I heard what I had done. It must have been on the door-post, which I clutched to save myself from falling. Somehow I got home unobserved, and washed my hands; and then—O, my God, the cruel irony of Fate!—I found a letter awaiting me, offering me a post in a big law-printers and stationers to whom I had applied. If it had only come a week earlier!”

Miss Halifax, with a motion of infinite pity, touched his mutilated arm. Her intuition had already guessed the truth. He looked up at her with a faint smile.

“Yes, Miss,” he said—“the day that I began work, I was standing by a printing machine, when I heard one of my companions read out that very description of the suicide I showed you, and learnt for the first time of the clue I had left. I was again wearing my thumb-stall, and, not out of courage, but in a simple impulsive frenzy, I thrust my hand among the moving machinery, and the next moment fainted. When I came definitely to my senses, it was to find myself—with joy and relief—secure for ever from the witness I most feared. But, heaven help me, it was only a respite.

“The firm were very good to me, and kept me on, as having been injured, accidentally as it was supposed, in their service. And I tried to repay them by devotion to my work. In time the capacities of my two hands seemed all concentrated in the one left, and I became expert with it as I had never been with my right. Months past, and nothing happening to alarm me further, I grew by degrees to a certain confidence, and to a hope that the police had ceased to interest themselves in the matter of the thumb-marks. And then one day, all in an instant, my silly self-delusion was scattered to the winds. I received a visit in my lodgings from an enemy I had never conceived or dreamed of.”

He passed a hand across his damp forehead. Gilead patted his shoulder reassuringly.

“You remember, sir,” continued the young man, “my reference to money-lenders? There was one of these, a Mr Raphael Colfox, of Great Queen Street, who was often with my employer Mr Lerroux. I think he not only bled him pretty freely, but, with an eye to future possibilities, was in the habit of acquiring from him at nominal prices works of his. Among those that had passed into his possession was, it appeared, that very piece which I had risked my soul to obtain. He had come to tell me so, with the intimation that his late appearance in the matter was due to nothing more than the difficulty he had found hitherto in running me to earth. He had seen, he said, the thumb-mark on the post, and had at once identified it with another in his possession; and he offered me his silence at a price. All my explanations and protests were in vain, and he ended by convincing me that he held my life in his hands.”

The narrator, whose voice had sunk lower and lower, gave a little choke here, and stopped.

“I see,” said Gilead, “I am beginning to see very clearly. Tell me only, if you can, what was this article you desired so much to get into your own possession.”

“It was a cast of my right hand, palm uppermost, sir, that Mr Lerroux had taken most beautifully in wax. And my name was on it.”

There followed a short silence; and then Gilead spoke in the soft ominous voice that it always thrilled Miss Halifax to hear.

“This is all quite plain, Mr Dobell, and I thank you for coming to us in your difficulty. I should like to ask you a final question or so. This first visit of Mr Colfox’s—when did it occur?”

“About six months ago, sir.”

“And he has been—we won’t mince matters—blackmailing you ever since?”

“He forced me to accept a promissory note, sir, for an imaginary accommodation, and he has been—yes, he has been bleeding me on it ever since. I owe him fifty pounds at this moment, and he is pressing for its payment under threat of exposure. I had to leave my situation a month ago, or I don’t know what would have happened. I am not strong, and this constant misfortune and persecution seem to unbalance my reason. It was his own suggestion that I should advertise as I did in the Daily Post.”

“Exactly. You are convinced, of course, that he actually possesses the wax cast?”

“I have seen it, sir.”

“Where?”

“He keeps it in a safe in his office.”

“Does he, do you know, sleep on the premises?”

“No, I am sure he does not, sir. I know his private address.”

“Very well, Mr Dobell. And now I am going to place you in the hands of my secretary, Mr Nestle, who will make himself responsible for your present custody and well-being. Be assured that you have nothing to fear and everything to hope; that this nightmare shall not be permitted to demoralise you much longer. Come.”

The young man tried to articulate his thanks, but, utterly failing, Gilead took him gently by the arm and led him from the room.

Half an hour later Mr Balm presented himself at Scotland Yard, and, requesting an interview with the Chief Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department, was immediately shown in to that weighty official.

“Mr Ingram,” said the visitor, “I want you to introduce to me an extremely expert burglar.”

The Superintendent laughed, and, leaning his elbows on his desk and propping his chin on his clasped hands, regarded the other humorously.

“Come, Mr Balm,” he said; “what’s your latest little game?”

Their interview was a long one, and its termination left the Superintendent immensely interested and surprised. He whistled reflectively to himself more than once.

“So,” said he, “this is the explanation of the thumb-marks—as odd a coincidence as I’ve known, sir.”

“How about my burglar?” asked Gilead.

The Superintendent slapped his hand softly on the desk.

“Mr Balm,” he said, “you’re an odd one—upon my word you’re an odd one, sir. But I like your idea. What’s the harm, now? Nothing interfered with and nothing taken. I think I may say you may look to us in the matter. Of course, if the thing remained, and the man chose to produce it, your prodigy might have a devil of a business to clear himself. And we should be forced to take action, with what result the Lord only knows. But this alternative, if you can carry it through, ends the matter, and without loss to anyone but the skunk that deserves the worst. Go and see him, sir, and make sure, if you can; and then come back and report to me. In the meantime there’s a man—Jerry Trimmer’s his name—well, it’s my opinion that if you were to lock up that man nekked in a safe, he’d find means to bore his way out somehow. I’ll make enquiries about him.”

Mr Raphael Colfox had his offices in a dull stuccoed block of building that neighboured on the north-east corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here, high up, he laid his web for the hard-pressed flies that always came buzzing in plenty about that legal honey-pot. Gilead, being brought in to him by way of a dismal little ante-den, smelling of damp ledgers and having a shrewd anæmic child in it for clerk, found his gentleman a genial strong-voiced figure of sixty or so, with stubby white eyebrows, stubby white moustache, and white hair brushed forward of his ears at the temples. He wore a full grass-green bow at his neck, his frock coat bulged a little in the waist, and the only spot of colour in his face was supplied by his nose, which was somewhat shapeless and inflamed and sown with short white hairs.

“And now, sir,” said he, after some brief preliminaries, “what can we do for you?”

Gilead’s natural repugnance for the fellow made him a little short in his answers. His own clear candour never took such offence as it did at those who, experience told him, would be ready to flout him unknown, and to lick his plutocratic boots were he to reveal himself. He had no mercy on such toadeaters, and found any dissimulation, even for the best ends, difficult in their presence.

“That remains to see, sir,” he said. “Nothing, I may premise, in the way of loans or accommodations.”

“Not?”

Mr Colfox, sitting back at his ease, raised his eyebrows and nothing else.

“I will come to the point at once,” said Gilead. “I am something of a collector, a virtuoso, and I am told that you possess works, which you may not be unwilling to sell, by the late Auguste Lerroux.”

The moneylender pricked up his ears. Here, for the first time, was shadowing itself out a justification of his foresight. His nerve of cupidity thrilled. He must make the best of this chance.

He nodded his head agreeably.

“You are told,” he said. “May I ask by whom?”

“I employ an Art agent and adviser,” said Gilead, frowning over even that harmless prevarication. “I asked you a question, sir. It is immaterial who or what prompted it.”

The moneylender recognized an imperious client; he recognized also a patently affluent one. His manner became propitiatory.

“Well, it is true,” he said. “I speculate a trifle sometimes in this form of property; but it is hardly worth my while—the profits are so small. However, as it happens, I have a little bust by the master in that safe now, if you would care to look at it. I acquired it only a short time before his death, and it represents, I may say, his finished style. A few other, more important works, are in my possession, if—”

“I will look at the bust,” said Gilead, rising. His veins were pulsing with excitement, but he allowed no sign of it to appear on his face. There was a safe in the room set upon a stand in one corner; but it was not to that, sleek in green and brass, that the moneylender had referred. He went to a panel in the wall which he unbuttoned, and revealed a second safe—plain black iron and of a much older and smaller pattern—which was sunk into the brickwork. Gilead, looking over his shoulder as he unlocked this, was aware of a little throng of bijoutry within, of the bust in question, and, quite unmistakably, of a cast of a hand in wax. His fingers itched to pluck out the witness and cast it into the fire.

Mr Colfox, unsuspecting as an infant, withdrew the bust and held it to the light for the visitor’s inspection.

“Not much wrong with that, sir, I think,” said he.

Gilead gave a diplomatic interval to its examination.

“And your price?” he enquired, looking up.

“It is an exquisite thing,” said the moneylender—“Lerroux quite at his best. It wouldn’t be worth my while to part with it under a hundred.”

Gilead handed back the treasure.

“Nor mine to give it,” he said. “I will call again; and in the meantime think of fifty. Good morning.”

He was out and clattering down the stairs before the other could interpose. As he dropped, he heard the voice of the moneylender fading above him in plaintive remonstrance. His heart was stern with anger and resolve and a heat of triumph. It would be glorious to catch this scoundrel in his own springe.

A few hours later saw him closeted at the Agency with Superintendent Ingram, and an extremely small man of a somewhat aggrieved and fretful cast. This latter sat upon the edge of his chair, his knees together, his hands fingering his cap on them, and his little legs tucked under. He was a mere shred of a creature, with a thin shaved face, a cross mouth and eyes, and a dyspeptic cough. He wore a suit of ginger-coloured dittos, and a scarf round his neck of a chess-board pattern.

“Well, Trimmer?” said the Superintendent.

The little man jumped.

“There!” he said, “I wish you wouldn’t take me so sudden, Mr Ingram. I’m bilious, that’s what I am. These late hours play old Harry with a man of my constitution. You make me nervous.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” said the Superintendent. “It was thoughtless of me. You were at a party last night, no doubt. You should take more care of yourself at your age, you know. One of these days you’ll be laid up for good and all, Trimmer.”

A ghost of a smile twitched Mr Trimmer’s lips.

“It’s a question with me between a sanatorium and a monastery, Mr Ingram,” he said; “but I must finish my little bit of a fling first.”

“Well,” said the Superintendent; “this is without prejudice to your choice, you know. Do you think you can do it?”

“Think I can do it!” The little man winked at Gilead. “Ask a card-sharper if he thinks he could play ‘Old maid’.”

“You know what you’ve got to do, and leave no sign?”

“You,” said Mr Trimmer, “play your part, and I’ll play mine. The gentleman, I understand, guarantees the blunt?”

“Fifty for the attempt, and fifty more if you succeed,” said Gilead, smiling. He vastly preferred this sort of rascal to the Colfox.

Mr Trimmer would condescend to no further discussion of his ways and means.

“I was cracking nuts,” he said to the Superintendent, “before you’d got your milk teeth.”

Bribes, says a French proverb, can get in without knocking. That very night a little monkey-like figure of a man, balancing on a window sill which he had reached from an empty suite of chambers next door, forced a latch and dropped softly into that section of the Queen Street building which contained Mr Colfox’s office. By a very curious coincidence, the caretaker was engaged at the moment, at the hall door down below, in a close discussion with a policeman, who had knocked him up to enquire as to his knowledge or observation of some suspicious characters who had been seen lately hanging about the neighbourhood. While they talked, Mr Trimmer had entered, by means known to himself, the private sanctum of the money-lender, and was proceeding, with swift sure touches, about his business.

“A LITTLE MONKEY-LIKE FIGURE OF A MAN, BALANCING ON A WINDOW-SILL.”

The burglar wore a loose overcoat (or wraprascal, shall we call it?) with surprise pockets. From these he produced a dark-lantern, whose light he exposed and concentrated on a certain spot, and a couple of electric coils, with a quantity of wire and fixings attached. An electric lamp stuck from the wall (as he had ascertained from observant Gilead) within close reach of the embedded safe. Removing the bulb, he applied the long end of his wire, already fitted with an attachment, to the place, rested one of the coils on the floor, and, placing the other handy for the safe, which he had exposed, rapidly switched on the current, and, picking up the second coil with a pair of insulated tongs, applied it to the front of the safe. In a few moments a smell of warming iron pervaded the spot; the coil grew from pink to red, and the heat became excessive. The safe was of a crude discarded pattern, and unpainted, or the essay would have been fruitless. As it was the door became soon too hot to touch with the hand, and Mr Trimmer was satisfied. Secure of his confederate, however, he gave the experiment plenty of time, and only desisted when its success was beyond question. Then, removing his apparatus, and readjusting everything to its former state, he pocketed his belongings and returned as he had come, making all secure behind him. It is true that he did linger, in some doubt and chagrin, while his coil was cooling.

“To leave it at that!” he thought, disconsolately regarding the safe. “Why it would be easier than picking periwinkles with a pin.”

However, he remembered the hundred pounds and forbore. Honour among thieves.

Passing the hall-door presently, he saw a policeman in discussion with the porter.

“Well, goodnight,” said that officer to his gossip; “and keep your eyeballs skinned.”

The next day Mr Colfox was both surprised and gratified to receive a second visit from his virtuoso client.

“I thought you’d think better of it, sir,” he said. “These Lerroux’s are not to be picked up for the asking.”

“Let me see the bust again, if you please,” said Gilead. His heart was beating a little as the moneylender approached and exposed the safe. He was concerned and relieved in one to observe that it showed no signs of its baking. Mr Colfox opened the door, uttered a sharp exclamation, and fell back a step. But he was too astute a rascal to betray the cause of his agitation. The next moment he had produced the bust, and swung to the door upon his secret.

But not quickly enough for the observant eyes that had followed him. In that moment Gilead had seen the hand, or rather what remained of it—and it was sunk into just a shapeless pancake of wax upon the floor of the safe.

Colfox’s face was a little white, and his lips a little shaky, as he placed the bust on the table.

“There it is, sir,” he said, “and the offer stands.”

Gilead, a stern triumphant light in his eyes, faced him.

“I have changed my mind, sir,” he said. “I desire a deal, but in paper, not in marble. Where is the promissory note you hold in the name of Felix Dobell?”

The moneylender turned momentarily as white as the bust itself, but recovered his nerve, and stood staring, between astonishment and anger.

“What’s this?” he exclaimed. “Who the devil are you?”

“My name, sir,” answered the client, “is Gilead Balm.”

“Gilead—!” the man started back; then fawned in the most fulsome spirit of sycophancy. “Mr Balm!—you—you surprise me, sir.”

“I wish for that paper.”

“You shall have it, sir.” He slunk to the other safe, extracted a note, and returned with it. “You shall have it, sir—I’m sure, sir, to oblige Mr Balm—at the price of the accommodation.”

Gilead accepted the draft and tore it into fifty pieces.

“There is your accommodation, sir,” he said. “I give you what you gave for it—nothing.”

He strode to the door and turned. The other, cowering white and speechless, made no attempt to follow him.

“Your villainy, sir,” said Gilead, “is known and recorded against you. Any further attempt on your part to blackmail the unhappy young man, the victim of this your most cowardly method of persecution, will be made very effectively to recoil upon your own head. All my wealth, sir, all the influence I possess should be devoted to the destruction of a reptile so noisome. You can produce your proofs if you will; they will avail nothing against the truth which has been very clearly exposed in their despite. Think it enough if they serve to defend you in the charge of felony which will most certainly follow your least endeavour to re-set the toils which have been broken. The law, sir, the law is already acquainted with your practices.”

He flung out of the room so violently that he literally floored the anæmic boy, who had been listening at the keyhole. For some minutes after he had gone, the moneylender stood, in a state of semi-stupefaction, looking from one safe to the other. Then, with an explosive sigh, he tottered to the smaller.

“Everything intact,” he whispered; “not a sign of its having been tampered with. It was certainly very warm yesterday, but—damme!” he screamed, “it must have been the ghost of that hot-tempered devil Lerroux himself!”

CHAPTER VIII.

THE QUEST OF THE RED-MOROCCO HANDBAG

“A YOUNG lady asks immediate assistance from some benevolent capitalist to enable her to recover property of considerable value. Address D. L. 078542 Daily Post.”

Gilead looked up from a perusal of the above advertisement with a twinkle in his eye.

“A young lady again?” said he. “Upon my word I don’t know if I dare to risk the bait a second time.”

“You mean the implied invitation?” answered Miss Halifax, with a smile. “I mustn’t venture to advise, Mr Balm. Your judgments put us all to shame.”

“That’s just it,” he said. “I don’t want to spoil the reputation I made over that Marble Statuette affair. Supposing we divide the responsibility, and invite the advertiser to an interview, at which we will both be present, in this room? We can form our independent opinions, then, and act upon them as each thinks fit. If we differ, the result shall justify the better. Do you agree?”

“O! yes, indeed,” said Miss Halifax. “Nothing could please me more.”

She meant it sincerely, and was gratified by the compromise from every point of view. The glow of pleasure was in the face she raised to Herbert Nestle, who came in at that moment with some correspondence for her. Gilead bent to his desk with a conscious smile. He fancied—recently enlightened as he supposed himself to be—that he could frequently now detect an interchange, between the secretary and amanuensis, of looks of a particular meaning and intelligence. Signs of a closer familiarity in their intercourse than he had hitherto observed often occurred to him, and he had to put force upon himself to avoid the appearance of watching for them. He only awaited, indeed, some definite confirmation of his suspicions, to bestow his official blessing upon the pair. He was prepared to do it, and anxious to end a somewhat invidious situation; yet it was a fact that, reason with himself as he might about the ideal nature of the union, the prospect of it always made him feel a little lonely and outcast.

Now, having answered the advertisement as arranged, he dismissed the matter from his mind.

He was engaged the next morning with Miss Halifax over divers matters of moment, when Nestle brought him a message that his correspondent had answered his letter in person, and was soliciting an interview. He carried with him a card, on which was engraved the name of Miss Daisy Limner, and, being instructed, in a few moments ushered in the lady herself, whom he left with his principal and the amanuensis.

Gilead invited his visitor to a seat, which she accepted with shyness, and disposed herself in with self-possession. She was slight, of an engaging figure, and most becomingly dressed in a slim high-waisted frock of a dove colour, and a beehive hat of not exaggerated proportions. Her eyes were limpid and appealing, and her age obviously justified its claim. A touch of powder on her cheek, of scarlet on her lip, emphasised nothing more than the irreclaimable tendency of her sex to paint the lily. But, indeed, it was so delicately done that it completely imposed upon Gilead.

“I am at your service, Madam,” said he. “You can bestow, if you will, your confidence upon us with perfect security.”

The young lady, at the plural pronoun, glanced askance, with an appearance of surprise, at the amanuensis.

“You can trust,” said Gilead, “in Miss Halifax as in me. Miss Halifax is my fiduciary and adviser in the most private business of the office.”

The stranger bowed slightly, but it was to be remarked that, in the interview which followed, she was at pains to ignore entirely the presence of the beautiful confidante.

“You make it, sir, I understand,” she said, nervously shifting as she spoke, and twining her fingers in her lap, “your interest to succour the wronged and afflicted?”

Her voice in itself was musical and caressing; but its pronunciation was curiously deliberate, suggesting the meticulous caution of one who was feeling her way through the many snares of the parts of speech.

“That is so,” said Gilead. “It is for what we exist.”

“I owe my information,” said the visitor, “to the lady in whose humble abode I have taken a temporary refuge.”

“May I ask her name?” said Gilead. “I should be glad to recall the occasion and the nature of the services which procured us this testimony.”

“With favour, sir,” said the young lady, “I would rather not reveal it at present, even to you. I have reason to believe I may be followed and spied, and the apprehension makes me nervous. I would rather not, if you see no objection.”

“None whatever,” said Gilead.

“Whoever she is,” continued Miss Limner, “she spoke in that way of you that I saw at once I could do no better than confide to your hands, if you would accept of it, the very delicate business about which I have come to consult you.”

“If you will acquaint me of its nature,” said Gilead, “I can the better estimate our capacities for dealing with it.”

The young lady sighed.

“I am sure you are very good,” she said. “I had better begin at the beginning, hadn’t I, and tell you who I am?”

“If you please,” said Gilead.

“My father,” said the visitor, looking down, and appearing to deliberate her phrases, “was once a distinguished financier in the City. Somewhat late in life he married, for his second wife, a lady connected with the stage. She was extremely beautiful, and I was the only pledge of their union. It has always been a grief to me to be told I took after her; for indeed, though I say it as shouldn’t, she disgraced herself as a lady by eloping with her husband’s best friend. My father never got over the blow, but retired from business and to the Continent, taking me with him who was then no more than a child of nine. We lived at Flushing, where I grew up. One day a gentleman called, and had a private interview with my father; and from that moment everything went wrong with us. He had discovered, as I know now, something umbrageous about my dear father’s transactions in the past, and, though as a fact my father had only been victimized by a sneak, he used the knowledge to get money out of him. He was a terrible man, and his name, which was like himself, was Dark. Presently he quartered himself on us, and, to cut a long story short, ended by getting my father completely under his thumb. He controlled all our expenses, ran the household as he liked, and, worst of all, compelled me, at the price of silence, to listen to his hateful addresses. Sometimes my father, in a wild effort to escape from his clutches, would flame up and defy him; but these convulsions of his were always succeeded by a state of prostration, which enabled our enemy to rivet more firmly than ever the chains in which he held us. And then at last came the crash. One day, after a terrible scene between them, my father had a stroke.”

The young lady, pausing, and taking a little silken sachet from her skirt, touched her pretty cheeks with it, as if to dry from them any suggestion of emotion.

“That,” she continued after a little, “quieted things for a time, but I could not believe that the end was more than postponed. In this dreadful situation I was sitting one morning with my poor father, when he suddenly turned to me, and in a low eager voice told me to give him all my ears. Naturally startled, I looked at him. His face was as white as a tea-cup, but a new resolution had come to it. ‘Hush!’ he said; ‘hush, my little innocent Daisy. I am much better; but I do not wish it to be suspected. We have reached a crisis, and must either dare or perish. Mr Dark has gone away for a few days, leaving me, as he thinks, helpless. We must seize the opportunity to secure to ourselves what remnant of our fortune remains. There are my first wife’s jewels, the existence of which I have concealed from you, and which a natural sentiment has hitherto prevented me from turning into capital. Now at last they must be used to provide for us in our extremities. I am innocent, my sweet child, though appearances are made by that villain to tell against me—’ and he informed me for the first time of the nature of the wicked hold on him, which I will not wrong him by mentioning, for, if the truth were told, it was something greatly to his credit. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘the plan I have formed to baffle him is this: You must cross, at once and by yourself, to England, taking with you the jewels and what cash I can provide. You must go straight to London, to a certain humble lodging I will tell you, where you must wait for me in hiding until I am recovered enough to follow. In the meantime I will tell Dark when he returns that you have heard of a situation across the water that required your immediate application, and so will hope to keep him quiet until I am in a condition to give him the slip and join you. Heaven, my darling child, prosper us in this venture, which seems to be our last resource in the vortex of gloom and despair into which we are plunged. Go, and if all is well, expect to welcome me to your arms in the course of a few days.’”

The young lady, greatly agitated, rose to her feet at this point, and faced her attentive listener.

“Startled, overcome as I was,” she said in a low voice, “by the suddenness of the proposal, a short reflection convinced me that my dear father was right. After a little hesitation, a few natural tears, I obeyed his wishes, and, carrying the jewels with me in a red morocco handbag, hurried down to the quay, and took my passage for Queenboro’ in the boat which, fortunately or unfortunately, was on the point of starting. Followed by a thousand apprehensions, faced by as many of the strange unknown life that lay before me, my journey was not, as you may suppose, a happy one. But Fate had worse in store for me. Near Sheerness we ran into a thick fog, and, colliding with another vessel, our own was sunk in a few minutes.”

Gilead rose in his turn.

“Great heaven!” he cried—“the Prinz Karl? Were you a passenger by her? But she foundered in shallow water, and all on board escaped in time?”

“I believe every one,” said the visitor. “I was in the ladies’ saloon at the moment, and, distracted with fear, rushed on deck, leaving all my little belongings on the seat which I had occupied. I forgot everything in the terror of the shock. It was only when we had been hurriedly transferred to the vessel which had struck us, and had backed from the sinking steamer, that I came slowly to realize how our fortune had gone down in her, and that this was the news with which I had to greet my father.”

Gilead drew a relieved breath, and smiled.

“She will be raised, of course,” said he. “It is only a question of time before you recover your property.”

“O, no, indeed!” cried the young in an agonized voice. “It is a question of much more—of life or death for us. Time is our worst enemy. It is that very delay and publicity which will give our persecutor the clue to our whereabouts for which he will be seeking.”

“In what way?” asked Gilead.

“This happened,” answered the visitor, “three days ago. At any moment now I may expect my father. His flight, you may be sure, will not be long unsuspected by Mr Dark, who will see in this our double desertion a ruse to outwit him. He will follow instantly, with nose and ears open to every scent and rumour. If we claim our property, he will be down on us in a moment; if we do not, we are ruined.”

Gilead considered a little.

“Well, madam,” he said presently, “you have, if I am not mistaken, a suggestion to make?”

The young lady advanced an impulsive step towards him, with clasped hands and burning eyes.

“If only,” she said—“O! if only I could recover the jewels before my father’s arrival, and so forestall our persecutor! It was for that purpose I advertised; it is to implore that assistance that I now stand before you, a very helpless, very unhappy girl.”

Gilead, never deaf to an emotional appeal, glanced across at Miss Halifax.

She sat, with a pen between her red lips, arranging some typescript in a very calm and business-like way. She ignored his look, though she was quite conscious of it.

“I conclude,” he said, looking down, and frowning very slightly, “that their recovery is practicable?”

“I understand, perfectly,” answered the young lady. “The funnel-heads of the Prinz Karl are almost visible at low tide, and all that is wanted is a diver. The company, to whom I have applied, admit the fact, but decline to make a speciality of my case. They refer me to the salvage operations, which would mean a delay, as I have explained, fatal to our interests. I am nearly penniless, sir, and quite incapable of undertaking the cost, which would be considerable, on my own account. If only you would bear it for me, claiming, if you would, your share—”

Gilead lifted a majestic hand.

“We are not a commission agency, madam,” he said, in a tone so grave that the young lady started, and lifted appealing eyes to him.

“O!” she whispered, in a drowned voice, “I did not mean to offend you. But I did not know—I am so young and inexperienced.”

He smiled reassuringly.

“You could not advance a better claim on the Agency,” he said. “Well, I will make, in justice both to yourself and us, such inquiries as are necessary to the case, and report the result to you together with our decision.”

“When?” she entreated, hardly able to articulate.

“If you will call the first thing to-morrow morning,” he said—“the office opens at ten o’clock—I shall hope to be in a position to afford you the assistance you desire. The company must be consulted, your claim admitted, permission given. You understand?”

She looked at him intently a little, with large haunting eyes; then, whispering that she would trust in him implicitly, that she placed her destiny in his hands, withdrew without another word. Having to pass near Miss Halifax on her way out, she gathered her skirts, with a scarce perceptible movement, from contact with that young lady.

“Well?” said Gilead, the moment that she was gone, appealing to his amanuensis.

Miss Halifax went on writing, but with a slight flush on her cheek.

“Does anything strike you?” he said, persisting.

“Only, perhaps,” she answered softly, “that for an ingénue, she showed considerable resourcefulness and self-possession.”

“H’m!” said Gilead. He reseated himself and, leaning back, tapped his fingers together, between doubt and a small sense of irritation: “We must remember her Continental training, perhaps. As to her father, and her father’s friends, I must confess to some sort of suspicion; but the quality of the graft, Miss Halifax, is not to be judged by the briar. I see no reason to question the main truth of her story; but anyhow it is easily put to the proof. The steamer was certainly sunk as she described. If she was a passenger by it, and the company, being questioned, admits her claim, that surely is all that is necessary to our taking action in the matter. Do you not agree with me?”

For the first time the young lady glanced across at him in an agitated way.

“I must,” she said low, “on the face of things. It is only the—the guilefulness of my own sex, its plausibility, and its imaginative readiness in concocting fables to—to delude the noble and the generous, that make me sceptical. I can’t help comparing this story with some others we have heard; but I daresay my experiences have robbed me of some delusions about women—indeed I am sure they have, and as much to my shame as to my good.”

He looked at her with a sudden light of remorse in his eyes.

“I never thought of that in my self-centred blindness,” he said—“that you might suffer from contact with vice.”

“Indeed, no,” she answered very earnestly. “I suffer, but it is the fires of purification. I am a better woman, I hope, than I was. Please do what you think right in this case, Mr Balm. Your judgments, as I said before, put us constantly to shame.”

He was not satisfied; but he let the subject drop, and went out to make the enquiries he had promised at the offices of the shipping company.

“I can discover nothing,” he said when he returned, “to justify any disbelief in the young woman’s statement. The manager, who treated me with extreme courtesy, acknowledges her name and claim, and is perfectly willing that an attempt should be made to recover the red morocco handbag, stipulating only that an inventory of its contents shall be placed in the hands of their representative, who will accompany us, that all expenses shall be borne by me, and that I will hold myself personally responsible for the good faith of the transaction. He has telephoned to Sheerness, to put a diver employed by the company especially at my service; and, in short, the attempt is to be made as early as practicable to-morrow morning.”

She smiled.

“How prompt and resourceful you are. I do hope, most sincerely, that success in every way will reward you.”

Miss Daisy Limner came punctually to her appointment. The office doors were scarcely open before she applied at them. When she heard the gratifying news, her joy and relief almost overcame her.

“You are a good sort!” she said, blinking away a genuine tear or two, with a heartiness which a little staggered Gilead.

They caught the earliest train available from Victoria, where they took up the agent of the company, who, in his turn, took down, en route, the list, supplied very readily by Miss Limner, of jewels contained in the red morocco handbag. It made quite a goodly show, and impressed Gilead with a proper sense of the disaster implied in their loss. Mr Limner, he thought, must have exhibited an extraordinary fondness and delicacy of feeling in forbearing to realize on them until the last moment, since they appeared to represent, on their face value, a quite handsome investment. It bettered his opinion of the hard-pressed gentleman, and made him feel more kindly disposed towards him; especially as a number of the stones being unset, no very personal sentiment could be assumed to attach to them.

All the journey down the young lady, having relieved her mind, seemed given over to the highest spirits. Now and again, even, a topical allusion, a spice of slang would come to garnish her discourse, and give Gilead a painful idea of the nature of the company which her young destiny had ruled her. She chaffed the shipping clerk demurely, and plied him with her eyes in a way which dreadfully embarrassed that susceptible youth, who was obviously torn between his admiration for so much beauty and liveliness and an almost irresistible desire to respond in kind, and his respectful awe of the young plutocrat whose steps he attended. Gilead, in short, was glad when the journey had come to an end, and they stepped out upon the platform at Sheerness.

The barge which was to convey them to the sunken vessel was already in waiting by the hard, with a couple of men in her in addition to the diver, who, fully apparelled but for his helmet, sat beside the apparatus which was to supply him with air. They put off at once, for the flow was running strong, and a pull of a mile was needed to carry them to the spot where a lighter, flying a danger signal, was moored above the invisible Prinz Karl. It was a lovely glowing day. Mist and water blended in that luminous haze which seems to obliterate the boundaries between death and existence, and to drug the soul in Lethe. Swimming within that neutral commingling of elements, air melting into liquid and liquid into air, the boat drifted like a bubble; all sense of gravity appeared lost. The world was a remote thing; the town they had left a mirage; all sounds coming from it were subdued to a soft humming and tinkling like noises in a dream. They only jarring note, to Gilead at least, was supplied by Miss Limner. The young lady did not somehow seem to fit into the picture.

He could hardly believe that this was the identical artless Daisy that had blinked her dewy lashes at him in his office a few hours earlier. She sparkled, but it was more now with the sweet sting of champagne. In the exhilaration of the trip, and its assumed happy termination, her speech threw off more and more its trammels of formality. She was sportive with the stolid mariners. She coquetted her way to their deeply-embedded hearts, and smiling on the shipping-clerk, who had turned green with jealousy, asked him not to feel bound to her if he would rather look another way. Even the majestic diver himself did not escape her; but was questioned as to the aggravation he must feel when he came across mermaids and was unable to kiss them. She made a toy of every detail of his harness; and when at last they had anchored, and the ladder was hung over the barge-side, and the helmet was screwed into place and the air-pump got into position, she actually did, with a chirrup of laughter, drop a butterfly kiss on the glass plate through which his face looked, and bid the grotesque figure, as it valued her favour, return with the bag or not return at all. And, after that, the silence of nervous suspense which came to reign was a relief to one person.

The diver had his minute instructions as to where to find the red morocco handbag, and his essay was to be confined solely to that item of treasure-trove. Many anxious minutes passed, however—while the pump squeaked and thumped monotonously and the gear was spasmodically paid out—before a rising swirl in the water indicated the return of the submerged venturer. But when at last his head and arms did appear over the side, the young lady gave a scream which “shivered to the stars.”

“THE YOUNG LADY GAVE A SCREAM WHICH ‘SHIVERED TO THE STARS.’”

“O—O! you sweet, you duck, you beauty!”

He laid the red morocco bag at her feet.

And so the object of the mission was accomplished.

Gilead, satisfied so far, had been nursing secret designs of sending Miss Limner and the shipping-clerk back to London together, while he followed by a later train. Finding, however, to his discomfiture that the clerk, after formally identifying the property (which was packed away thrillingly among natty little articles of ornament and attire) had instructions to remain at Sheerness, his gallantry would leave him no alternative but to escort the lady back to town himself. A further coup de la fortune consigned them to a compartment in the train of which they remained the sole undisturbed possessors.

Miss Limner, a very new expression on her face, half insolence, half exultation, lolled back against the cushions, regarding the young man with an eye of saucy self-possession. She did not open her mouth, however, until they were well started on their return journey; and then she spoke suddenly, and to disturbing effect.

“You have been very kind to me,” she said. “Would you like to kiss me?”

The momentary shock of which Gilead was conscious did not escape her observation. She laughed musically.

“O!” she said; “it was only a try, but a pretty forlorn one. You are satisfied with virtue for its own sake, aren’t you? The worse for the girls, for you are a jolly good-looking fellow.”

“Am I, my dear?” he said drily. He used the term without design. It was simply an involuntary expression of his estimate of her value, and she recognized it as such.

“I’m not in the least offended,” she answered. “I meant to pay you back a trifle of what I owed you, that was all; and you’re quite right to refuse to compromise with a penny in the pound. What does it feel like to respect yourself? I wish you’d tell me.”

“I don’t know that I can,” he said. “I can only answer in a negative way by thinking what I should feel like if I didn’t.”

“Like what?”

“Like you, perhaps.”

“O!” she said, “you devil! But I don’t mind. It takes all sorts to make a world.”

She settled herself comfortably, putting out her little feet and crossing her ankles.

“Tell me,” she said, “what sort of a woman do you admire? That lady-clerk of yours?”

“I will answer again,” said Gilead, “negatively. I don’t admire you.”

“Why not? I’m pretty.”

Gilead shrugged his shoulders.

“O!” she said, “I’ve mental gifts too—don’t you ever doubt it”—and then she added, seemingly irrelevantly: “I hate that lady-clerk.”

Gilead saw that he had to conciliate a perversity, and he lent himself to the task with all the humour and tact of which he was capable. One could regard life from Flushing, he perceived, with as much worldly acumen as from London. He talked and talked about momentous nothings, until he had won her to a train of interests outside their individual selves; nevertheless he felt curiously abashed and humiliated all the time. He shied instinctively from any allusion to her story, or comment on her proposed future proceedings; and he welcomed the lights of Victoria Station, when at length they ran into them, with a sigh of most heartfelt relief.

He was a moment or two in following her out of the carriage—and then he perceived that she was standing impassively in the custody of a couple of plain-clothes constables, one of whom was known to him.

“Nicked,” she said, “and no mistake. I wonder if that lady-clerk of yours had a hand in this.”

“It’s all right, Mr Balm,” said the detective—he held the red morocco bag secure in his hand—“you didn’t know what you were doing, sir, but we’re obliged to you none the less. We guessed you would return by this train, and we’ve been looking out for you.”

“What’s in the bag?” said Gilead, recovering himself with a gasp.

“Why,” said the detective, “that’s it. Just the proceeds, sir, of the great jewellery robbery from Kruier’s shop in Brussels. We’d been wondering where they’d gone; and now we know. Come along, Miss Topsy. We’ll let you hear further about it by and by, Mr Balm.”

She turned, and blew a kiss over her shoulder to Gilead.

“Tell her,” she cried, “I’ll be her first bridesmaid at the wedding. I’ll remember you to papa and Mr Dark!” and she went off jauntily with a laugh.

Standing a minute in stupefaction, Gilead turned at last and, hailing a cab, drove to the office, and, finding it closed, went on to Miss Halifax’s flat. The young lady met him with a blush, and a deprecating look in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry, Mr Balm. Has she been arrested? But I see by your face that she has. Please forgive me.”

“For what?” he asked.

“I could not believe in her,” she said, lowering her lids; “I simply could not. The strange similarity of her story to others—I seemed to recognize the breed, and—and I simply could not. The moment you were gone, I went to visit Chief Superintendent Ingram at Scotland Yard—he’s a great friend of mine, you know—and I asked him to let me see the photographs of people wanted, and she was amongst them. I could not be mistaken—her name is Topsy London, and she was suspected of being mixed up in this affair. All her story about the wreck must have been quite true; but nothing else was. Anyhow they thought it worth their while to be at the station, and I see that it was. It was the Inspector’s opinion, and I believe him right, that she had heard of the Agency, and had put the advertisement into the Daily Post with the express intention of drawing you.”

A smile flickered on Gilead’s lips.

“The bait!” he murmured.

She flushed, and answered in a curiously distressed voice:—

“Don’t—please don’t! But don’t you think it likely? And the principals, the actual burglars, did not of course, dare, to appear in the matter. Tell me you aren’t offended with me.”

Gilead caught at the warm young hand drooped limp before him.

“Offended!” he said kindly. “It is you who put my judgments to shame. I will never again trust myself away from your apron-strings; I—” He checked himself suddenly, sighed, and added: “but that’s nonsense. I must learn some time to walk alone.”

CHAPTER IX.

THE QUEST OF THE REGISTERED PARCEL

THE typical Agony Column of the Daily Post was built up in courses which varied in little but their diurnal degree of thickness. Starting from a plinth, say, of Dancing and Gymnastics, it would rise by successive stages, through Cast-off Clothes, Skin-beautifiers and Superfluous-hair Removers, Patent-medicines and Special-cure Treatments, Detective Agencies, Paying-Guest and Social Introduction offers, to Personal Appeals, whence soaring through Club-fixtures and Lost Property advertisements, it would flower at length into a capital of the true ‘agonizings,’ crowned sometimes, at irregular intervals, by an apocalyptic warning to the worldly and thoughtless to set their houses in order.

Gilead, from mere force of habit, was wont to run his eye down these successive courses from top to base—though his proper business lay with the Personal Appeal section alone—which was the reason why the following brief supplication momentarily arrested his attention on a certain November day:—

“Jennett. Return and all will be forgiven.”

It was just the commonplace cry, prescriptively uttered; yet, though potential of any possible tragedy, and full in implication of sorrow and significance, it lay off the track of his questing, and he would hardly have given it a thought had it not been for the oddness of the title-name. Janet, Jeannette, Jenny—these were familiar forms; but, Jennett! Evidently anglicised from the Gallic, the confidence shown by the advertiser in the exclusiveness of its appeal witnessed to the unusualness of the spelling. If Jennett was the only Jennett in England and Jennett saw, Jennett must understand. Then Gilead passed on to other matters, and forgot all about it.

Now one of the penalties imposed upon the growing reputation of the Agency consisted in the increasing number of unsolicited applications for its help. Originally designed for the purpose of voluntarily enquiring into the merits of advertised appeals, greed and hypocrisy had quickly discovered the wideness of its operations and the munificence displayed in its dealings, and were not slow in endeavouring to take advantage of them. So complete by this time, however, was the machinery of the Bureau that very little base coin was permitted to pass it undetected; but the greater surveillance rendered necessary thereby threw such an amount of additional work on the staff that Gilead was obliged at length to rule that the cachet of an advertisement was obligatory before a case could be considered; and to that rule he rigidly adhered, allowing no exceptions.

One day Herbert Nestle, during his morning consultation with his chief, ventured to draw his attention to an advertisement in the day’s paper:—

“Help earnestly solicited. Mrs B.”

“Did you notice it, sir?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered Gilead, with a smile. “I noticed it and wondered. It reminded me of an article on Dead Letters that I read years ago. Specimen addresses were quoted, one of which ran, ‘Mrs’—I forget the name—‘Behind the Church, England’.”

The secretary laughed.

“This advertisement was put in at my instance, sir. It was merely a ‘draw,’ inserted to comply with your rule. Mrs B., or Mrs Baxter, applied to me personally, and thinking her case a reasonable one, I advised her to approach us according to form.”

“You did very right, Nestle. Who is Mrs Baxter?”

“Her son, sir, was a postman in the South-West District. I don’t know if you happened to notice the case. He was convicted of stealing a registered letter, and was condemned at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions last week to eighteen months hard labour.”

“No, I did not. Well?”

“There was nothing, I confess, very out-of-the-way about the affair, unless it was the recklessness of the deed in the face of sure detection.”

Gilead shook his head. “That is the commonest of criminologic problems,” he said.

“But, pardon me, sir,” answered the secretary; “does its commonness compel one to jump to the common conclusion? Say that A, a criminal, is reckless, must B, therefore, who is reckless, equal A?”

“I stand corrected, Nestle. What was in the registered packet?”

“Diamonds, sir. They had been forwarded from a dealer in Hatton Garden to an address in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, and the parcel was registered up to four hundred pounds.”

“And it was not delivered?”

“It was accounted for as far as Baxter, and Baxter could produce no receipt for its delivery by him. Compensation was claimed by Mr Hamlin, the dealer; the Post Office had to pay up, and Baxter went to prison.”

“What was his defence?”

“O, innocence, complete and childlike! He swore he had been given the receipt; the addressee swore he had not received the parcel—there was virtually no defence.”

“Had he ever been in trouble before?”

“That was the damning part of it. He had once been convicted of pledging unpaid-for goods, and had been bound over as a first offender. There was a girl in the case then, I believe, and no doubt he had wanted to pose before her as the monied gentleman.”

“Well, Nestle, well,” said Gilead after a short pause. “You have your reasons, no doubt, for encouraging Mrs Baxter. You have given me none so far for meddling with a case which appears to have been decided equitably on its merits. It would be the grossest abuse of privilege, as of course you are aware, for the Agency to interfere in the clear processes of justice, save on some exceptionally plausible assumption of their miscarriage.”

“I have my reasons certainly, Mr Balm, or I should not have ventured to approach you on the matter. I do so now with extreme diffidence. Your clear candour of soul—I am speaking purely officially—is pre-eminent amongst us in the recognition of truth. There may be miscarriage of justice here, or there may not be. I ask you only to take the responsibility of deciding out of my hands, lest helpless innocence should suffer. I am not going to prejudice the case by a word; and I should take it as a great kindness, sir, if you would yourself see and interrogate Mrs Baxter.”

“She is here—at this moment?”

“She is here, sir, awaiting your decision.”

“Very well; I will see her.”

He called softly after the secretary as the latter was leaving the room.

“Nestle!”

“Yes, Mr Balm?”

“You are a good fellow, Nestle.”

The secretary bowed gravely and disappeared.

He returned in a few moments, ushering in a little worn woman, dressed in decent black, and neither common nor pretentious in appearance. Her age might have been fifty, but the wrinkles of a hundred years lined her forehead, and the very tragedy of death in life haunted her dim eyes. Gilead, always sensitive to sorrow, rose and, motioning Nestle to leave them alone together, placed a chair for the visitor and seated himself where he could best command without embarrassing her.

“Am I right, Mrs Baxter,” he said, “in assuming that you are a nurse?”

Something neatly formal in her habit may have suggested the hypothesis. It was a correct one in any case.

“Yes, sir,” she answered, with a faint expression of surprise.

“Ah!” he said. “That is to establish at the outset a claim upon one’s sympathies. Now I am acquainted with the bare facts of this unhappy story, Mrs Baxter. What have you to say to qualify them? I ask you to speak to me with perfect confidence and freedom.”

“Thank you, sir, from my heart. I know the value of conciseness, and I will not say a word more than I must.”

“Very well. You are convinced of your son’s innocence?”

“Charlie is innocent, sir.”

“Just so. Now, as to the proofs?”

“If such there were, sir, I need not have troubled you.”

“To be sure you need not. Let us say, then, the admissible likelihoods?”

“It would have been the act of a madman, would it not, knowing that he must be found out?”

“Yes?—very well. I do not propose to comment for the moment.”

“Secure of such wealth, sir, and having yielded to the temptation, is it likely he would have returned straight to the office, with the property upon him, to risk discovery at the very beginning?”

“Now, Mrs Baxter, you must understand that what I say is said with the view to make clear to myself the pros and cons of this business, and is without prejudice to the real truth of the case. I do not know what is the procedure of the Post Office in such matters; but in the event, say, of your son not having been called upon, in the hurry of business, to produce his receipt, until the complaints of the sender of the packet made its production imperative, he would have had plenty of time, would he not, to dispose of the goods?”

“He was never, sir, a penny the richer by it.”

“I am afraid that proves nothing; and no doubt all these assumptions were taken into consideration at the trial.”

The visitor’s small face flushed, and for the first time she bit her lip to keep back the tears.

“It was hard, sir,” she said, “that his very innocence should have been used to witness against him, and that his sentence was made the severer because he would not confess to the whereabouts of things he had never stolen.”

She was staunch to her fine belief. Gilead felt very pitifully towards the broken little soul.

“And then,” she cried, “to bring up that old affair against him, when it had proved the very making of his character! The error of a boy, sir, ignorant of what he was doing, though I don’t defend it; but he had pledged things for his father when alive, and he knew nothing of the law. It was a girl egged him on to it, and Charlie never could resist a pretty face. But it was a lesson and a warning that he never forgot—no not, as the dear God shall witness, when he walked on that last round that ruined him.”

She blinked away the tears that would come.

“It is very sad,” said Gilead—“horribly sad indeed.”

“Yes, sir,” she answered, “it is sad; but I did not come to urge the feelings of a mother, or her love and faith in her boy. All that could be said was said, as you concluded, at the trial; and, appearances being what they were, no other verdict could have been expected. I remember my promise to you, and I am not going to suppose that what was argued in his defence, without avail, by a clever lawyer can be put more convincingly by me. What I founded the only hope I possess on is what brought me to pray Mr Nestle to procure me, if possible, this interview with you. I want to know, sir, what part the girl Jennett had in my son’s ruin.”

Gilead had been looking down. He raised his head with a start.

“Who did you say?” he asked quickly: “Jennett?”

The little visitor had been groping in her pocket, from which she now produced a paper which she unfolded and brought across to him. It was a front page of the Daily Post, dated some days back, and marked round in red ink was the very advertisement which had excited the young man’s curiosity. He looked up, in surprised enquiry.

“Is it not an uncommon name, sir?” she said.

“A most uncommon one, I should think,” he answered. “I saw and remarked upon it at the time.”

“The person that advertised it must have been so sure of its uncommonness,” she said, “that he felt nothing more was needed to explain the who to and where from.”

Gilead nodded. The little shrewd well-spoken woman had echoed his own thoughts. She bent, and touched his arm, softly, impressively.

“Jennett, sir,” she said, “was the name of the servant-girl that took the packet from my son’s hand at the door, and went away and returned with the signed receipt, and afterwards swore at the trial that she had never taken the packet and never given a receipt.”

Gilead had risen, and was listening attentively, with a wondering look on his face.

“Who’s advertising for her,” said the visitor, “and what has she done to need forgiveness? That should be my son’s business, I think. Her treachery was what cut him to the heart. He knew her and had often exchanged jokes with her at the door during the short time she was in the house. I told you, sir, that he loved a pretty face. This girl was pretty, and in an impudent lively way, he told me—but indeed I was able to see for myself; and though a mother’s eyes are prejudiced, I am not going to deny her an attraction of a sort.”

“She gave the receipt to your son, you say—or he says?”

“He told me, sir, that he was never so shocked and horrified in his life as when, returning from his round, he found it missing.”

“But if she gave it to him?”

“That is so, sir.” She put a hand momentarily to her eyes. “I must speak the whole truth,” she said in a low troubled voice. “Charlie was reticent about that morning. I felt that he was hiding something from me—not his guilt; no, sir, no. But I believe that, as a fact, he was courting the girl, and I can’t help thinking that his silence about particulars was designed in some way to screen her.”

“What has become of her? Have you tried to see her since?”

“She has left her situation, sir; which makes me the more certain that this advertisement refers to her.”

“Softly, Mrs Baxter! We mustn’t jump too surely to conclusions. There may be other Jennetts in the world.”

“There may be, sir; or there may have been once. There’s a tombstone in Hampshire, I’m told, with the name on it spelt that way. But not in London. Local wants would be advertised in local papers.” She had evidently considered the case in all its bearings. “I should like,” she said, “to have a word with Jennett’s employer.”

“Well, why not?” asked Gilead.

“Because, sir, he too has shut up his house and gone,” she answered.

“Now, let me think out things a bit,” said Gilead. He paced the room for some minutes, deeply absorbed. Presently, with a sigh, he stopped before his visitor.

“You must kindly leave your address with my secretary, Mrs Baxter,” he said. “I can promise you nothing but that I will look into this business—with what result you shall be informed no later than to-morrow morning. Any comments of mine on it at this stage would be superfluous and cruel.”

She just gazed at him a moment with shining eyes. “Charlie is innocent,” she said. “God bless you, sir”—and she went hurriedly from the room.

A little later saw Gilead closeted with Chief Superintendent Ingram of Scotland Yard.

“No, Mr Balm,” the officer was saying: “I’m afraid you’ll make nothing of it. The case was as plain as the nose on your face, and as well-shaped, if you’ll excuse my saying it, from a professional point of view.” He laughed. “It seems you’re fated,” he said, “to be involved in these Post Office affairs; but you won’t come out of this one, I greatly fear, with such credit to yourself as you did out of the last.”

“Very well, Ingram,” answered Gilead. “But it’s justice I desire, not credit.”

“Justice, you may take my word for it, sir, was properly dealt.”

“Do you know anything about this Mr Hamlin?”

“Nothing to his harm certainly. He’s one of the ‘Garden’ lot, not amongst the swells, but substantial so far as I know. Do you?”

“Nothing whatever. And the other—the addressee in the case?”

“Valkenburg? He is a Hollander by birth—a bona-fide dealer.”

“In diamonds?”

“In diamonds.”

“And known of course to Mr Hamlin?”

“Naturally. The enclosure in question was forwarded by Hamlin to him in the ordinary course of business.”

“But why by post? Hatton Garden and the Vauxhall Bridge Road—it was there this Valkenburg lived, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, number 41, B.”

“Well, they aren’t such leagues apart.”

The Superintendent shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s quite a common custom of the trade,” he said. “One can conceive a dozen reasons for it in the press of business. Really, Mr Balm, such an act affords no grounds whatever for suspicion.”

“Do you know that Valkenburg has shut up his house since the trial and gone away?”

“Has he? To South Africa like enough. It’s quite probable.”

“And that the girl, his servant, who denied having received the parcel, has gone too?”

“To South Africa?”

“No. I mean she has left her situation.”

“Well, now, he wouldn’t want to leave her shut up in the empty house, would he?” He sniggered, his hairy face creasing all over. “No, Mr Balm,” he said. “I see what you’re driving at; but it won’t wash, sir. There was never a hint of collusion between the two. Of course if he had bolted and taken the girl with him, there might have been some shadow of a reason for suspicion. But I believe, upon my word, sir, that you’re taking away the man’s character. You must remember that if anyone was to profit by such a fraud, it would not be Valkenburg but Hamlin.”

Gilead rose.

“Well, yes, it would seem so,” he said.

“Seem so!” The Chief Superintendent rose too. “I don’t know what’s got into your head about this business, Mr Balm,” he said; “but unless you’ve something up your sleeve—” he paused, in sudden wonder. “Have you?” he asked—“something unguessed at by us here?”

“Good morning, Ingram,” said Gilead. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’ve got a vaccination mark up my sleeve. Don’t say anything about it.”

The Superintendent stood some moments frowning after he was left alone.

“I wonder if he has,” he mused darkly. “It wouldn’t, in my opinion, be quite playing the game; but, there, angels like him must claim their privileges, I suppose.”

But, indeed, Gilead’s sleeve was innocent of the least suggestion of a hidden trump, and he was playing the game squarely and with the slightest of prospects of scoring anything out of it. He could not honestly convince himself that any real significance was to be extracted from the coincidence of the names, and what urged him alone to persevere, perhaps, was the inspired conviction of the little mother as to her son’s innocence. In any case he was pledged to her to sift the matter to its grounds, and in truth to himself he would not shirk that undertaking.

Calm and fearless in his sense of right, he bent his steps straightway to Hatton Garden and sought the office of Mr Abel Hamlin. He was fortunate in finding that gentleman at home in a tiny dark room on the second floor of a pile of offices so mouldy and decrepit that it seemed they must have fallen but for the sturdy support of the warehouses on either side. There were a pedestal desk in this cabin, a safe and some rows of littered shelves along the walls, and a table in a corner at which a young woman sat type-writing. She turned as the visitor entered, and revealed an extremely pretty face, but saucy in suggestion and over-dressed as to its hair, which was golden and plentiful. Mr Hamlin himself, rising from the desk, displayed the figure of a neat youngish gentleman, olive-complexioned, and dark-eyed, with thick brows and a little close moustache of strongest black. He spoke with the suspicion of a foreign accent, challenging the visitor with a “Yes, sir?”

Gilead accepted his surroundings with a glance of some surprise. Was it from dens like this that priceless gems were to be unearthed.

“I must apologize for intruding, Mr Hamlin,” he said, “especially as my motive is an unprofessional one. Permit me to introduce myself.”

The dealer glanced at the card offered him, started a little, smiled, and bowed.

“It is possible,” said Gilead, “that you may know me by name?”

“It is very possible, sir.”

“And the character of the Agency I represent?”

“That, sir, is also not of the unlikeliest.”

“I am interested in the case of the young man, Charles Baxter, Mr Hamlin.”

“Indeed, Mr Balm?”

“In your opinion has this advertisement, which appeared recently in the columns of the Daily Post, any connection with, or bearing upon, the issues of that trial?”

He produced and handed over the extract given him by Mrs Baxter. The dealer accepted it courteously.

“Miss Barnes,” he said, after a glance at the paper; “you can go to your dinner if you will be so good.”

He turned away, shifting some letters on his desk, during the few moments occupied by the girl in putting on her hat and jacket. She passed Gilead with a stare of curiosity and a little pert jerk of her chin. As the sound of her footsteps receded, Mr Hamlin came about again, an engaging smile on his lips. He was a handsome, rather swarthy young fellow, and his teeth looked glaringly white.

“I am quite at a loss for your meaning, sir,” he said. “For me I can see no connection, not in the least.”

“You will recall,” said Gilead, “that Mr Valkenburg’s servant gave evidence at the trial—evidence damning to the prisoner. Her name was Jennett, and spelt in this peculiar way.”

“Yes?” Mr Hamlin’s voice and manner expressed some obvious bewilderment.

“I may say,” continued Gilead, “in this very peculiar, and perhaps unique way.”

“Ah! That is so? And what then, Mr Balm?”

What then, in very truth? All in one amazed instant Gilead seemed to recognize the preposterous character of his mission. Even supposing the Jennett of the trial were the Jennett of the advertisement, what then? Exactly. A sudden consciousness of absurdity bubbled up in him—an inclination to hysterical laughter.

“Upon my word I don’t know,” he said, with a little gasp.

A sense of reciprocal humour seemed to tickle the dealer. His cheeks rounded, his teeth showed dazzlingly.

“O, this is too ridiculous!” said Gilead, steadying himself. “I don’t know why I’m here; I don’t know what to say next. There’s nothing for it now but unqualified frankness.”

He then explained to the dealer the rather forlorn promise which had been extracted from him by his recent visitor, and the shadowy justification it had seemed to possess in the advertisement.

“And that justification is gone somehow,” he said. “I don’t know what’s become of it. There must be a hole in my mind, and it’s slipped through; and now only a sense of empty impertinence remains.”

He was winningly apologetic. Mr Hamlin smiled and nodded at him, staring in his face, but he hardly spoke a word in reply. Finally, Gilead, turning to go, paused to put a question.

“I feel,” he said, “that I owe Mr Valkenburg a like explanation; but I understand that he has left his house?”

“Yes, yes,” said the dealer. “He is gone, O, yes!—to Kimberley. He would be much amused.”

“He is a friend of yours? And no doubt a gentleman of the highest reputation. I don’t know how to excuse my visit; it was unpardonable.”

“I do not understand,” answered the other. “You have said nothing to give offence. For Valkenburg, he would appreciate your excellent intentions as I do, and, were he at home, would give you, I am sure, all the information you desire. That Lamb’s Agency has the claim to much privilege, Mr Balm.”

There seemed no conscious irony in his voice or in his fixed smile.

“It is good of you to put it in that way,” said Gilead. “I can only repeat my apologies. Good morning, Mr Hamlin.”

“Good-morning,” answered the dealer, without moving from where he stood.

As Gilead ran down the stairs he met a telegraph boy coming up. In his hurry he collided with the youth and almost bowled him over.

“That illustrates my fatuity,” he thought, as he went on his way. “In trying to put one Postal official on his legs I knock down another.”

He felt considerably depressed—a state of mind to which the weather in its especial degree contributed. The day had opened with a brooding menace of fog—a threat amply justified in the sequel. Hour by hour, as the morning wore on, the squalid cloud had drooped and thickened, until now, at one o’clock in the afternoon, the street lamps were all alight and the shops blazing like dull furnaces. So motionless and so heavy grew the atmosphere that to breathe became a physical consciousness, and one almost felt the process going on in one’s lungs of selection and rejection, with a gasp now and again over a mistaken choice. If all the world, according to the poet, had been a stage, nature could not have come more equal to the occasion with a mise-en-scène of cloud-castles and a ‘make-up’ pencil better adapted to paint every eye with a sooty rim.

For some reason—for which he neither accounted, nor troubled to account to himself—the discomfited and vaguely uneasy young gentleman turned his steps towards the Vauxhall Bridge Road. Perhaps he still entertained a forlorn hope of somehow justifying himself, to himself and to Mrs Baxter, in his venture; perhaps a mere morbid desire, common enough in its attraction, to visit the spot of a murdered delusion impelled him. He felt sore, and at the same time unaccountably troubled. It seemed to him now that he had allowed himself to be convinced over readily. In any case it was his instinct to fulfil a promise to the letter, or to what his chivalrous conscience chose to consider the letter.

At the corner of Dorset Street, after what appeared to him an interminable groping down a murky sewer, he found the house he sought. The fog was so thick, that, peering over the area railings, he could distinguish few of its details; but he could just make out that it was a corner house of a long row, and superficially in nowise superior to its neighbours in general dullness and unattractiveness. Why should it be indeed? And then suddenly he observed that a bill was pasted within one of its shuttered windows.

He found the gate, opened it, and entered to read.

“To be let. Furnished. Apply etc.”

The name of a local house-agent was given at the foot.

Now what prompted him to the act Gilead never knew; but in a moment he had decided to procure the key of the house and enter to make an examination. On his difficult way to the address given he ran across a friend, who particularly desired a talk with him.

“One minute,” said Gilead, and, running in to the agent’s stated his wishes. “I am in a hurry,” he said. “Would it trouble you to send the key on to my office?”

His name asked and given, the agent was all smiles.

“Certainly, Mr Balm—O, most certainly, sir! Would you wish our representative to accompany you?”

“No, no. Send the key, and I will choose my own time.”

He was bowed out, and the rest of the afternoon he spent over business matters. It was not till nearly six o’clock that, set free, he bethought himself of his purposed exploration and of his definite promise to Mrs Baxter, and started a second time for the Vauxhall Bridge Road.

The fog had so deepened during the interval that walking proved a difficulty and in some ways a danger. However, Gilead was naturally well acquainted with the locality, and the perils of no more than a single crossing were there to beset him. He reached the house at last after a calculated progress, and, mounting the shallow flight of steps to the door, paused a moment before fitting in the latchkey.

He was feeling suddenly odd, and disenchanted with his quest, conscious of a strong reluctance to leave even that turbid street—with its running links, and flares of sudden omnibuses, and boom of life however obscured—and enter into the darkness and mysticism of the empty house. He had ascertained that its owner desired to let it furnished during the period of his temporary absence abroad; and what then? He himself did not want to take it; neither was it possible for him in this murk and at this time of the evening to conduct any investigation worth the name.

“What an ass I am,” he thought. “Haven’t I had enough of empty houses?”

And at that, and the flush of sudden shame the memory evoked, he ran the key resolutely in, opened the door, entered, and clicked to the latch behind him.

Tingling in every vein, as he stood there in the numb, half paralyzing darkness, he felt for his electric torch and switched on the little friendly spark. It’s tiny light only seemed to make the gloom more terrific. He advanced a step or two—and a host of shadows seemed to scatter and fly noiselessly before him. They sped up the stairs, they disappeared round open doors; things ticked and scuttled, stealing into corners and squatting to whisper. Looking over his shoulder in a panic, he saw a white face watching him, and almost dropped the torch in the start he gave.

The rumble of a passing omnibus came like a rally to his nerves. He turned resolutely, though his hands were wet—and saw that the face was the pictured face of an old gentleman hanging upon the wall.

Again he turned, reassured—and felt that the painted eyes were following him. He stopped.

“It’s no good,” he thought; “and worse than useless. I’ll just make a cursory examination and come again to-morrow.”

Stepping on tiptoe, as though fearful of attracting secret attentions, he turned from the hall into the first of the two rooms that opened from it to his right, and flashed his little torch to and fro. So far as he could gather, it was merely like the hall, commonplace. From the usual oil-cloth, and the usual marbled paper, he had passed to the usual lace curtains, cheap plush chairs, rickety tripod tables, antimacassars, and an ebony over-mantel painted with birds and adorned with tawdry glass vases from the sixpenny-halfpenny shop. Its unimaginative philistinism was so utter as to convey a certain comfort; no ghost of the past could possibly walk in such an atmosphere of raw newness. Gilead breathed out a little easing sigh, and turned to go.

His foot was on the threshold, when he heard a sound that brought him to a stop, instant and startled. Someone outside was softly fitting a latchkey into the hall door!

He backed into the room, clicking off his light, and, half-closing the door, stood motionless behind it. The act had been instinctive, unreflecting, but, being done, must abide its own consequences.

In the meantime, hardly breathing, he was conscious that some human presence was in the hall; and the next moment he heard the front door softly closed.

“Ah!” said a voice, subdued but perfectly clear: “that is well done so far. What a good luck that you had the thought to secure Valkenburg’s key.”

Hamlin’s voice—the voice whose intonation still hung familiarly in his ear! Gilead’s nerves, in this sudden stress of danger, felt but undefined, tightened like bow-strings.

“I think of things. Perhaps you’ll get to understand that and do me justice in time.” It was a girl who answered, low and distinct. “What are you doing with that match-box?” she said.

“What does one generally do with a match-box?”

“Well, don’t do it. It might attract a neighbour or a policeman. I know the place well enough to find my way about it in the dark.”

“You’re a clever girl, Jennett” (Gilead gave ever so slight a start). “You can find your way to everything. I hardly expected you would turn up to your appointment in this fog. How long had you been waiting?”

“I got here when I told you in my wire that I should.”

“And with the key and all? By why here? Why not in the old place?”

“What a cur you are, Tizzy. Don’t you understand? Because she’s polluted it for me. If you want me back you must find me another place than that. You might have got through that little time of separation, I think, without filling it in with a fresh fancy.”

“Ah, there! You were the most unreasonably jealous, my darling.”

“Was I? You are lying, you know. What a d——d fool you must take me for. Well, just assure me, please, that your answer to my wire was God’s truth. You have got rid of her?”

“Yes, on my honour, Jennett, she is gone.”

“That’s well for you.”

“It is? You don’t mean to tell me you would really have gone those lengths in revenge?”

“Wouldn’t I? And further.”

“After all that I’d trusted to you?”

“What did I trust to you? I played my part faithfully, didn’t I—did the housemaid proper; goosed the poor postman—his face is before me now, with its sick, gone look, as I palmed the receipt that I pretended to put with a kiss into his pouch. Why Valkenburg made proposals to me, too, and handsome ones. I never told you that. But he did; and I was true to you; and all the time you were filling my place with that Barnes devil. I wonder I didn’t murder you both; but luckily I had a safer and a surer means to pay you out—the dummy parcel itself, which I hadn’t destroyed as you wanted me to, but had kept and hidden against accidents. You know that now, don’t you, and are willing to do anything to save your beastly skin?”

“Ah! You are very hard and cruel. What have you done with it?”

“All in good time. You thought you had got me safe enough, didn’t you, when I perjured my soul, for your sake, to ruin that miserable young fellow? I hadn’t found out about you then; but knowing you, I had had the wit to keep my piece of evidence as a precaution. My word would have gone for nothing by itself; but with that to back it you were dished and done for, Tizzy. I got just a fragment of pleasure out of the thought of your face when you received my letter, without an address, telling you what I’d kept and had in my power to use.”

“Did you? That is very well. I tell you it almost breaks the heart that loves you so much. Such cruel treachery!”

“Well, it was lucky for you I saw your advertisement. And now just tell me what you meant by talking about forgiveness in it.”

“It seems so base of you, little girl. You had chosen to misunderstand. My connection with Miss Barnes was one of sympathy and mutual assistance in a difficulty. You were never once forgotten by me—no, never; and I had to have a type-writer.”

“I’m a fool, Tizzy. I despise you and I mistrust you; but, God help me, I love you. I shall know why someday, I daresay. I don’t now; but I can’t help it. Do you know why I wired you to meet me here?”

“How can I?”

“It is hidden in this house, where I knew I could get it when I wanted it, having Valkenburg’s key. I didn’t fancy the risk of keeping it about me.”

“Where, Jennett, little darling?”

“Shall I tell you at last?”

“If you want to save your poor unhappy lover. Jennett, it is just time. There are suspicions awakened. Only to-day I had a visit from that stupid interfering ass, Balm of Lamb’s Agency, who came to enquire about things on behalf of the postman’s old mother.”

“It is hidden behind that picture on the wall.”

“Ah! My God! What a rash place! Valkenburg’s old father. Let me go, while I fetch it.”

“Tizzy!” The girl by her voice was crying hysterically. “Not for a moment. Think what I have done for your sake! Tizzy, I’m going to drop. Take me into the back room—there is a sofa there.”

Gilead, the skin of his scalp prickling, heard the two move slowly along the hall and enter the room beyond. His face was white and stern. The Providence which had brought him acquainted with the details of this infernal plot to ruin an innocent man would surely not stultify its own design at the last. The girl was still sobbing. Bracing every nerve to his task, he lost not an instant, but, treading like a cat, stole out into the hall, and reaching the picture, felt behind it unavailingly.

The sobs ceased suddenly. Desperate, he switched on his torch, saw a little white packet stuck between frame and canvas, seized his prize and made for the door. Even as he lifted the latch, there came a rush from the room behind him, a mad oath, a flash and slam, and a bullet splintered the panel close by his head. In another moment he was out and plunging for the steps. Something took his hat with a plop, and then the merciful fog received him, and he was running—running bareheaded for his life. A sense of uproar, of crackling fires seemed to goad him on and wing his steps; instinctively he had turned the corner out of the main road and was flying along Dorset Street; and then, all in a moment, he became conscious that his own racing heart was his sole company, and, recovering his reason, he slowed down and began to consider his bearings.

* * * * * * *

Mr Abel Hamlin ran straight into the arms of a contiguous police officer, who had been attracted by the sound of the shots. The revolver still being clutched in his hand, and his explanation failing to give satisfaction, he was incarcerated pending enquiries. These resulted—Gilead in the meantime having found his way by desperate courses to Scotland Yard—in his indefinite detention on the twin charges of conspiracy to defraud and attempted murder.

It was a heartless business, as it came to be revealed. Hamlin, Superintendent Ingram to the contrary, had really been in a ruinous financial fix; he was a creature all selfishness and sensuality, and the scheme, cleverly worked, seemed fairly safe from detection. The girl Jennett, his mistress and decoy, an actress and prestidigitateur by profession, had imposed herself as a servant upon Valkenburg to whom she was unknown. The Dutchman, though perfectly innocent of any share in the plot, was susceptible, the girl pretty and the bait took. Valkenburg, a traveller in diamonds, was led to expect the receipt of a parcel of stones from Hamlin, with whom he had had some past dealings; the parcel, as he was able to swear, was never delivered; Hamlin wrote to enquire as to the non-acknowledgment of its receipt, and so the conspiracy was launched. The decoy in the meantime had been plying the unhappy young postman with her coquetries; he took fire readily; on the morning of the delivery of the registered packet, she pretended to procure her master’s signature to the receipt, which, in the course of some playful passages under the mistletoe—it was Christmas time—she feigned to return with her own fair fingers to Baxter’s pocket-book, sending her victim on his way to doom and disgrace with a bounding heart and a mind wholly absorbed in its own amorous raptures. To the last the poor dupe had believed in her affection, and had hoped against hope, that she would exonerate him.

But Miss Jennett, when once he was disposed of, had discovered a more personal call upon her interests in the infidelity of her confederate, and the means he had taken to kill time during the weeks of their enforced separation. Promptly she had disappeared, and, from some unknown address, written to upbraid the delinquent with his treachery, and to inform him as to her precautionary preservation of the registered packet (it was found, when opened by Gilead in the presence of Superintendent Ingram, to contain a few fragments of coal, addressed, of course, to Valkenburg in Hamlin’s writing) and of her intention to use it for the purpose of revenging herself on him. The advertisement in the Agony Column had resulted, and finally, after a struggle with herself, she had telegraphed to her scoundrel to meet her outside the house in the Vauxhall Bridge Road—with what result here witnesseth.

The villain in chief received an exemplary sentence, and Baxter his Majesty’s gracious pardon for being innocent. But the Post Office, naturally enough, would not employ him again, and Gilead, great to the end, found a situation for him. As to Miss Jennett, she simply repeated her former tactics, and disappeared.

CHAPTER X.

THE QUEST OF THE SHADOW

THERE came a certain September evening whose memory was destined to imprint itself ineffaceably on the souls of the three most intimately associated in the conduct of the Agency.

Gilead had left the office betimes to attend a meeting convened for the purpose of discussing the Arts Education Bill, a measure which it was proposed to bring before Parliament, and for whose actual initiation he himself was more than anyone responsible. Its main purpose was to reform and direct popular taste in all matters which met the eye; to prevent the disfigurement of the land; to see that desirable sites were ennobled with suitable erections; to control the abuse of advertisements; to lead the common view by the ways of beauty and fitness to an appreciation of both. The promoters of the bill, men of a rare educational foresight, founded their propaganda on the truth that, while learning is subjective, taste is objective, and that it is of little use thinking to conduct towards a millennium of good taste through groves of architectural and other abominations which outrage every principle of it. Their idea was that, as oxygen enters by the mouth to purify the living blood, so taste must be taken in at the eyes to illuminate and refine the intellectual process, and that forcibly to educate the community to an understanding of good things, while confronting and environing it with the very opposite, is to be likened to putting a man into a lazaretto for a rest-cure. In short, they believed that the era of universal gentlehood which we all desire, and can only at present see squalidly foreshadowed in the cheap presumption engendered of compulsory education, is to be approached through the eyes rather than the intellect, and that every desecrated site, every wanton outrage on nature, every vulgar, tasteless and pretentious edifice allowed to be erected is by so much a set-back to the progress of race-refinement. Wherefore they proposed in the first instance the establishment of a Governmental Board of Callaesthetics, or Beauty-Science, whose expenses should be met by a levy on the local rates, and whose business it should be to consider the external plans of every building, public and private, it was proposed to alter or erect, and to approve or, if offensive to the cultivated eye, reject the same (the control of structural details was to remain in the hands of Municipal and local bodies, since these were business matters fit for men of business and demanding only practical qualifications).

The scheme, a very fond one to Gilead’s heart, need not here be discussed in detail. It aimed generally at the overthrow of the tyranny of the vulgarian; embodied a central Committee of art-experts, with official representatives in every capital town, and was immensely far-reaching in its purposes. And, if it was doomed to failure, it was not so doomed on practical grounds, but on the unquestionable liberty of the subject to make himself as offensive as he likes within the law.

On the night in question Gilead, after attending the meeting, had dined en famille with a Cabinet Minister in sympathy with its objects. He left early, purposing to pay a visit to the Agency—long-closed, of course—in order to consult some papers bearing on the matter. As, nodding to the porter who admitted him, he climbed the long stairs to his private room, a queer sense of something accompanying seized upon him all in an instant. It was a quite odd and unusual feeling, breaking into a preoccupation which had been profound. He looked right and left in a curious way, stopped, considered a minute—then, with a little laugh moved on and up. The feeling had gone: perhaps, he thought, it had outstripped him in that momentary pause. The little shock and throb of nerve evoked by the thought stopped him a second time. He gave a self-conscious look, first upwards then backwards, saw the hall empty and the porter gone, laughed once more, but uneasily, and turned the corner of the stairs that mounted to his room. Certainly he did pause in a quick trepidation as he fitted in the key. His breath fluttered uncomfortably; a sense of enormous isolation in those attics of swimming night gripped and astounded him; he began to think of the things that might come bubbling up from the wells of gloom beneath. But his courage was always the master of his imagination, potent as that was; and the next instant he had turned the key and entered. As he switched on the electric light, he saw a young woman standing above the desk by the blinded window.

In the first moment of discovery he would not doubt but that the figure was that of Miss Halifax herself, either remaining, or returned after hours, to get through some arrears of work. He would not doubt, I say, though he had never yet known the amanuensis moved to such a course; but in reality he was fighting for nerve and resolution to meet a shock which he foresaw to be inevitable. And the next instant it came. The figure turned, revealing itself that of a stranger, seemed to look at him intently, and in the very fact was gone.

For minutes Gilead remained perfectly motionless where he stood. Heroes, like monarchs, should meet death erect; and so had not he met and overcome it? He thought that if he had moved in the first shudder of the blow, he would have fallen and died. The realization that he—he himself—had seen an apparition, had endured that mortal experience from whose fear all take refuge in scepticism, was like a sudden shocking revelation of a friend’s treachery. Reason alone could surmount the horror, and he waited rigidly for reason to return.

When it did, he was surprised to find what emotions swept in with it. He had looked into the eyes of a tragedy deep beyond sounding. What it meant he could not know; yet some intimacy engendered of that soul-searching had awakened in him a pity profound beyond terror. His face was very pale, but his lips were firmly set, as he went about his business of investigating.

He found, and expected to find, nothing to explain the appearance. The room was empty of all but its customary appointments. Having satisfied himself—even as to the absurdest, most attenuated lurking-places—he switched off the light, locked the door deliberately behind him, and, descending the stairs, summoned the porter. He had just a single question to ask the man; he put it to him as nonchalantly as possible: he supposed, in short, that no lady had come to request an interview with him after closing-time, or had been invited to await his possible return. The answer was uncompromising, indignantly self-righteous, reassuring for the best of its worth. The porter knew his duty better; he was not to be bought or wheedled into such an abuse of trust. Gilead congratulated him, and went out into the night.

Its familiar commonplaces both comforted and jarred upon him. He felt like a convalescent from some near-mortal illness, welcoming back life while half-regretting his balked escape from it. But the direction he instinctively took brought solace to him with every step. It was over Miss Halifax’s desk that the apparition had bent; it was to Miss Halifax that he turned for reassurance and explanation.

Would she have gone to bed? He put on agitated pace with the thought. The flat was close by, and he was not long in reaching it. Finding the lift-porter absent, he ran up the stairs in his impatience, and came upon the gentleman himself in whispering colloquy with the maid at the young lady’s door. The two were full of confusion; he put it and them pleasantly by, intimating that he would announce himself. A sound of music came from the drawing-room, and, without ceremony in his urgency, he opened the door softly and entered. Miss Halifax was seated at the piano, and over her, his arm familiarly wreathed about her neck, stood Herbert Nestle.

They both started, and, turning on the instant, the girl rose to her feet.

“Mr Balm!” she whispered. The colour fled from her face as he looked at her; the secretary stood, as he had stepped suddenly back, hanging his head sheepishly. Without a moment’s hesitation, and with a smile on his lips, Gilead shut the door and hurried forward.

“O! you must forgive me,” he said. “It is quite undesigned—quite. But, being so, let us all congratulate ourselves on this accident. I have long suspected this, believe me, and I wish you both happiness with all my heart. But why would you never tell me? Be assured I should have honoured and rejoiced in the confidence.”

Vera’s lips moved, but no sound came from them. She glanced at the secretary; he lifted his head and cleared his throat in a sudden spasm. His face was as pale as the young lady’s; his eyes, seen through his glasses, expressed even a magnified perturbation.

“I—I was on the point of going, sir,” he said. “You—you imply—you anticipate, at least.”

“I hope not; I am sure not,” answered Gilead gravely. “You must balance the significance of your words, Nestle. You should know me sufficiently by this time to trust in the fullness of my sympathy. There is no reason in the world why this should longer be kept a secret; and if you ever had any doubts as to my personal approval, so far as it is in question, rest convinced that I could imagine no union more ideally conceived. You will not consider yourselves,” he said, his voice quivering a little, “when wedded and because wedded, the less wedded to our joint interests, I am certain.”

With tears springing to her eyes, the young lady took an impulsive step forward.

“Mr Balm,” she began—“this mistake—”

He interrupted her, gently but peremptorily:—

“Was diffidence ever so perverse! It is no mistake; it must be none. I have not failed to observe, I say; nor must Herbert fail to understand the dishonour his shyness does you by implication. Well, if it is a fact that he was on the point of going—”

“Absolutely, sir,” said the secretary.

“Then,” said Gilead, with a smile, “I will beg you, Nestle, to entrust this rare possession to me for a few minutes. I had come, in fact, in an emergency, to consult Miss Halifax; and hence my intrusion—I will not call it mistimed.”

There was no gainsaying his ruling. He himself saw the secretary to the door, and parted with him with a squeeze of the hand.

“For her sake, Nestle,” he said, “your engagement must not go longer unacknowledged.”

Returning to the room, he found the girl toying with some music at the piano, her back turned to him. He stood silent a moment; and then he exclaimed, with a scarce perceptible sigh:—

“I can say no more in honour now than God bless you both. Miss Halifax—”

A little to his surprise she faced round on him on the instant, her cheeks like sunset roses. Her eyes were sparkling; a psychologist might have read in their expression an impatience of his intolerable stupidity—or chivalry. But in the very act a consciousness of something unusual in his look startled and checked her; and the shadow, as it were, of a desperate word on her lips faded and passed.

“Mr Balm,” she said—her breath came quick—“what is it? What is the matter?”

He looked straight into her eyes.

“I have seen a ghost,” he said.

She was the last from being feminine in the foolish sense. She searched his face a moment; then, her own very white, seated herself on the music-stool, and looked up at him steadily.

“Whose?” she said.

“Ah!” he answered—“I thought perhaps you could tell me.”

“I!” she exclaimed.

“I had a reason for returning to the office to-night,” he said. “That was only a few minutes ago. As I mounted the stairs it seemed to me that something went beside me, and, when I paused, passed on and up. I was in a deep abstraction at the time, and—”

“The condition most favourable, they say, to ghost-seeing.”

“Yes, I can understand it—when the consciousness of externals falls away. I felt odd—vaguely, indescribably expectant of something; and, when I opened the door, it was there—the figure of a young woman.”

Her eyes never left his face; but her lips, though they moved, uttered no sound.

“It stood,” he said, “in the corner by the window, leaning over your desk. As I regarded it, it turned, looked at me, and was gone.” He paused a moment, before he went on. “I was calm on the whole; I searched the room thoroughly; there was no explanation. Some might say, perhaps, that the very nature of our business invites its visitations. If you feel nervous—that spot, henceforth, and its associations—”

She rose hurriedly, interrupting him. Seeing her so white, he instinctively advanced an arm to her support. She caught and held to it, more in her secret heart from emotion than weakness.

“I would not surrender it—the place where I sit—for the world,” she said, in a low full voice—“the least if I thought that any troubled soul had sought it for help and counsel.”

“Now, before God,” said Gilead, “that is to regard it in the gentle light—not Christian but Christlike. Yes, some troubled soul. You shame me out of fear.”

“Tell me,” she said, looking in his face—“did you see this apparition plainly?”

“For the moment,” he answered, “as plainly as I see you now.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Yes, I can describe it. It bore the appearance of—no, it was a young woman, very young and in a way attractive. There was an expression on her face—how can I explain it? Can you imagine a spoilt child, its tearful pettishness corrected for the first time in its life by a heavy blow? The shock, the amazement, the rising flood of self-pity—they seemed all there in suspense. I am putting it very badly, I know, but that is the impression it conveyed to me. As to distinctive features, there was a very definite vertical line between the eyebrows, apparent even in repose, and quite peculiar in so pretty a face. That, and the protruding very scarlet lower lip—but, after all, I am no more than generalizing; and it was vivid—ineffaceable. Does it suggest anything whatever to you?”

“I cannot be quite sure—the general impression—tell me, how was she dressed?”

“Ah! dressed? I am not certain I can remember. She was slight; she wore a large black mushroom-shaped hat with cherries in it; I noticed that her neck was white, because her frock was cut rather low about it, and that her arms were bare from the elbow. And I noticed—yes, I noticed that she had on a wedding-ring, for her closed left hand was lifted to the light.”

“It was not a wedding-ring. It was a little common turquoise thing, the stones turned inwards to her palm to deceive.”

“Miss Halifax! Good God! You know who it was?”

“Yes, I know,” she answered, hardly above a whisper—“I am sure I know. The hat—yes, and the description. She was to have come to me again in her need, poor wretched importunate child, if all else failed—and it has failed.”

She was so patently agitated, that he turned away during the minute in which she fought to recover herself.

“Now,” she said, “let us talk it over, please. You have described, I haven’t a doubt, poor Cicely Fleming. She was one, if not of the submerged tenth, of those that buoy themselves on scraps of driftwood and float on for a little—a typist, trained in an office, and afterwards seeking to make herself an independence through a small private connection. I need not dwell upon her story. So many of them, lacking the essential fibre, go under. Passionate, wrong-headed, persistent only in her claim to more consideration than she deserved, she fell an easy prey to flattery. A little better luck—for her—and she might have become a good man’s vixen; as it was, a villain found and used her. He came in the guise of a client—she confessed it all to me—and when sin called for its wages, he left her alone to bear the penalty, and disappeared.

“You will understand, Mr Balm, will you not? The girl was only one of the many whose misery is my province. In her despair she advertised for a little loan of fifteen pounds to tide her over a trouble. I understood, of course, and had her here. That was a week ago, perhaps. She was ready with her poor story—was married, of course, in all but the name. She would not give me his. She still had hopes that his desertion was only temporary—easy of explanation; and she would not yield his name to scandal. He had promised her before he went that he would let her know where to follow him; and she had promised for her part to be loyal and silent. Only the weeks had gone on, and he had made no sign; and at length, driven to desperation—”

“Yes, yes—she advertised.”

“She could not work; her rent was in arrears; I made her—I hope you will justify me, Mr Balm; she so clung to me; so opened her poor little bursting heart, with all its load of passion and vanity—I made her an advance provisionally, with a promise of further help if she should need and apply to me again.”

“I justify you? I bless you and congratulate myself.”

The girl rose to her feet, greatly overcome.

“She is only one,” she said; “and there are so many. Why, of all, is it she to return and haunt us? What has happened? What does it presage?”

“Hush!” said Gilead. “You must not give way. That is for me to discover. Tell me—did she ever give you her address?”

“O, yes! It is in the York Road, not far from Waterloo Station. I have it written down. I will fetch it for you.”

He glanced about him when he was left alone. This room, so warm and fragrant and quiet! Its intimacy was to count henceforth among the ghosts of lost and vanished things. He had been haunted and doubly haunted this night; but the spectre of a hopeless passion—he recognized it now, had come to realize it in a moment—was the spirit potent above all others to possess and absorb a man. In its shadow all lesser visitations sank into insignificance.

“Are you not frightened?” said the girl, as, returning, she put the address into his hand.

“No,” he said, with a smile. “There is nothing necessarily terrifying in this. Psychists will tell you that intense desire may, and often does, manifest itself in bodily shape to its object. What more likely than that Miss Fleming, being seized with an ungovernable wish to consult you, flew astrally to the one spot she associated with your presence?”

“O! I hope so,” she answered earnestly. “I hope it is nothing worse than that. You are not going there to-night?”

“Yes, to-night.”

“But—”

“It would be unadvisable, cruel, to delay. I had better see her, if possible, at once—at least learn what I can of her movements.”

She stopped him an instant to say: “You never rest or spare yourself where help may be given”—and thereafter the look in her eyes alone haunted him.

He went like a soul exalted through some great renunciation; his flesh knew no tremors nor his spirit weakness. It was but a few minutes’ drive, at top speed, to his destination; it seemed to him a sparrow flight from kerb to kerb.

Big Ben was booming out eleven as he mounted three or four steps to a dingy door in the York Road. The house to which it belonged was of the typical low-London pattern. It was one of a row—one of a black, sooty wall of houses, so like its neighbours and its neighbours’ neighbours inside and out, that, if Cogia Hassan had come in the night and played general post with the numbers of them all, the life of the terrace would probably have continued with as little sense of dislocation as if number ten’s letters were not being delivered at number fourteen, or number twelve’s lodger had not come home at midnight to sup on number eight’s bread and cheese. Gilead looked down into the squalid area and up at the dirty fanlight over the door, where a card, warped and bleared with age, bent curiously to canvas the unlikely likelihood of his applying for the apartments it advertised; and he wondered if the mines, the docks, Princetown itself, were not preferable to existence in such a place, so dreary, so colourless, so uneventful.

He had time to consider, and was indeed beginning to judge his mission fruitless for that night, when the door opened suddenly, and a large man with a candle in his hand appeared standing in the opening.

“O!” said Gilead. “Good evening to you. Are you the landlord?”

At the acceptable word, the individual backed heavily, motioning him to enter. Gilead had been prepared for the typical lodging-house shrew, tart, hungry, aggressive; instead, he saw before him a substantial churchy gentleman, like a sanctimonious verger, with a moist lip and side-whiskers. His waistcoat and trousers were black; his coat was off, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow.

“I have come,” said Gilead, “to enquire about a Miss Fleming. Does she live here?”

A certain tentative smile, oily and ineffable, left the man’s lips on the instant.

“Work?” said he. “It’s late to come on business.”

“It’s late, as you say. Is she up?”

“She’s up to too much of this sort of thing to suit my book,” said the landlord, with a disagreeable change of manner. “I don’t keep your kind of shop, mister. No, she’s not up, and she’s not in.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I believe you do.”

“Will you please to get out, now, or shall I call the police?”

“I will save you the trouble,” said Gilead. In fact he had observed the approach on the moment of a constable known to him. “Gregory,” he said, “will you come here a minute. This person is pleased to question my credentials. I only ask you to convince him.”

“O! I’ll convince him sharp enough, Mr Balm, sir,” said the officer.

“I meant no offence,” said the landlord, in an injured voice.

“You have given none,” said Gilead. “On the contrary, I gather some reassurance from your manner. Only you jump too hastily to conclusions, Mr —?”

“Nolan,” said the constable.

“Now, Mr Nolan,” said Gilead, “I ask you, in the presence of this officer, does Miss Fleming live here?”

The man looked from one to the other. His face perspired.

“She did,” he said, “until three days ago.”

“Where has she gone?”

“How am I to know?”

“That is not for me to say. But I intend to find out.”

“I don’t want to prevent you,” said the man—“before God I don’t. She owed me money.”

“She was given money to pay you.”

“She didn’t pay me, then—not in full. What are you driving at? I’ll tell you the truth—every word of it so far as I’m concerned.”

“Observe, Gregory,” said Gilead.

“She’s lodged with me a year and more,” said the landlord. “I don’t know who she was nor where she come from. We can’t afford to be particular here about references. It was enough for me that she kept a typewriter and paid her rent off it. People visited her on business—of course they did. It was no call of mine to enquire into their characters—no, not even when they left late. There was a’many of them, men and women; and I swear I haven’t even my suspicions. She came to be in trouble—it was plain enough to see; and then her customers fell off. She owed me money, I say; and I told her she must go. Humanity’s a luxury for the rich, and I couldn’t afford it. At the last she found me something on account; and at the last of all she came to tell me that it was all right, that he was going to do the handsome thing by her, and that he had written to her to join him. Wild horses wouldn’t drag from her where, or what was the man’s name. She had promised him, she said; and, once arrived, she was going to write to me and settle my account. I saw her off myself from Waterloo. I always liked the girl, in spite of her temper, and I carried down her bag for her, and saw her start by the Windsor train. That was three days ago, and an end of her so far as any message to me is concerned.”

“She went by the Windsor train, you say?”

“That is so, sir—third class single; and, as she had only a fi-pun note left, I lent her a half sovereign to pay for her ticket, and she gave me eight shillings change. It’s the truth. What reason should I have to deceive you?”

“None whatever; and no intention.”

To the landlord’s astonishment, the stranger shook him warmly by the hand.

“You acted according to your lights,” said Gilead; “and they shone on the whole. You have no suspicion where she’s gone?”

“Not a ghost, sir.”

“Or of the man’s name?”

“Even less, if possible.”

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr Nolan. Good-night!”

“Gregory,” said Gilead, as, leaving the petrified householder, he walked away with the constable, “this is all Greek to you, of course. Isn’t there some saying about a nod sufficing for a wise man and a rod for a fool?”

“I daresay there is, Mr Balm.”

“I wonder which I am? Windsor is a terminus on the South Western, isn’t it, and she took the Windsor train, third class single? Her ticket cost two shillings—twenty-four miles at a penny a mile. That ought to tell us what station she was bound for.”

“It ought, sir. I think you’re very clever.”

“O, don’t anticipate! The rod may be in pickle for me yet. Well, it’s too late to put it to the proof. For to-night good-night, Gregory.”

Nevertheless he went to the station, too restless to postpone conclusions altogether. Applying his test to the time-table, he found that the twenty-four mile theory carried him to Datchet—not a mile before or beyond. There was a train that started at ten minutes after midnight. Should he dare everything and go by it?

A taxicab whirled him to his rooms, waited while his whirled together a few necessaries, whirled him back again. At 1.18 A.M. he was hammering, still highly strung, at the door of the solitary inn in Datchet.

Reason and reaction only came with the morning. His prescience and his calculations seemed all ridiculously out of gear. He quite blushed over his coffee and kidney, thinking of the shame of the castigation he had earned for his shoulders. No doubt the two shillings had represented only part of the price of the ticket, the remainder being supplied from Miss Fleming’s own pocket. Or perhaps she had taken but not used the whole of that sum, retaining a few pence for tips. Either way hopelessly threw out his reckoning.

He felt so discomfited all of a sudden, that he was almost on the point of taking the next train back to London. However, he forbore, deciding for his restoration on a balmy day in the country; and, evading, even in thought, all tentative enquiries as to recent arrivals in the village, he set out after breakfast for a walk.

It was a sweet and glowing morning of late September, frank, fresh and life-stirring—the last to associate itself with thoughts of death and apparitions. The whole country seemed enjoying a restful convalescence from the low fever of August; the blatant tripper had fled; blazers of garish hue flowered no longer among the rushed; the sweeping cry of the swallows cut the wide air in place of chaff and banjo. Walking round by the Victoria Bridge, Gilead stopped to lean over the parapet and drink in the quiet beauty of the scene.

To his right stretched the stately tree-haunted swards of the Home Park, the foliage just touched as with healthy sunburn. A royal lodge with a pleasant garden watched the bridge-end. Below, the water sparkled on in a never-ending pageant of ripples. To the left a long withy-bed, bushed with pale-leafed alders, reached away towards the village in a green perspective. Here was favourite mooring-ground for houseboats, since the royal demesne on one side and the osiers on the other kept the place private and unapproachable. In August one might see a dozen of them anchored off the willow-bank—vessels of varying degrees of importance, from the magnificent floating pleasure-house, to the cocky little bomb-ketch with a cuddy for cooking and sleeping-place. Now, however, all were gone but two—a huge hulk of a thing, patently deserted and dismantled, which lay away towards Datchet, and a much smaller affair, moored just clear of a patch of rushes but a long stone’s-throw from the bridge on which he stood.

Gilead wished to find that this boat was abandoned also. There was not a soul to be seen or heard anywhere; he liked to think that the place was utterly given over to Autumn and its fragrant silences. But in that he was to be disappointed. As he leaned, half hypnotised, watching the running water, and conscious of the pale green oblong of the little houseboat coming indistinctly into his field of vision, of a sudden something moving there caught his attention, and he raised his head. A man in grey flannels and a low-brimmed Panama hat was stepping from its side into a rowing skiff, and the next moment he had cast off and was pulling towards the bridge.

As the boat approached, Gilead saw that there was a woman seated in her stern. He had not observed her enter, and was quite startled for the moment. But the next, he reflected that his abstraction might easily account for the mistake, and he smiled over his own befooling.

But the smile, in the very instant of its birth, withered from his lips. The skiff came on fast, urged by muscular, one might have thought furious arms, and as its occupants forged into clear range, he saw bare arms, and a bare neck, and a black mushroom-shaped hat with cherries in it.

His heart seemed to leap so that it left a physical pain. He stood rigid, preparing for the charge; and the next moment the boat had swept under the bridge, carrying with and in it the apparition of last night.

With its vanishing, nerve returned to him. He hurried across the road to see the boat shoot from the further side; yet, quick as he was, the rower’s energy was so great that it was already three times its own length beyond. As he caught at the railing, the man, as if moved by some telepathic instinct, lifted his face and saw him. He stopped on the instant, resting on his sculls.

A minute must have passed thus while they regarded one another, each perfectly still in his place. Neither did the figure of the girl, now with its back to Gilead, make the least movement. The boat, with the way on it, continued to float up-stream; the face of the staring man grew smaller and less distinct; but it was always to Gilead a stiff blotch of yellow, like the face of a rigid corpse.

He could not have said why it struck him thus, but so it did. It was a not uncomely face, of the strong blunt-featured type, in itself. The man had looked young, though past his first youth—a muscular, compact fellow, with curly dark hair and a hint of swagger and vulgarity. The cock of his hat, the brilliant scarf about his waist, confessed the bounder; yet what did a bounder on the river in late-September? Something redeeming, the watcher hoped and prayed. Yet there had seemed little that was human in that face. It had contrasted oddly with the pink and white of the girl’s, just glimpsed in passing. The apparition’s was the reassuring one of the two.

Suddenly, as he looked, the rower resumed his sculls; but he paddled slowly, his eyes on the figure on the bridge all the while. Not until the boat had vanished round a bend were they, Gilead felt, withdrawn, releasing him to his own thoughts.

Those were strange enough in all conscience—compact of wonder and perplexity. It was a certain comfort to him to find his theory vindicated; that he had run his quarry actually to earth—or water. It was a comfort also to find that last night’s case, psychically, was one of those, as he had suggested, of astral visitation, and that his ghost had represented no disembodied spirit. The girl had passed at this moment beneath his eyes alive and in the flesh, which laid all haunting of a worser suspicion. At the same time what intensity of longing had materialized her spirit in Miss Halifax’s place, and how was he, without laying himself open to a charge of insufferable interference, to find out?

He crossed the bridge again, and stared at the pale-green houseboat. It lay very solitary, well off the bank, in a deep pool near the rushes. As far as he could make out, it appeared a luxurious well-fitted craft of moderate size, with an over awning and plenty of bright brass about it; while, swinging at its stern was a smart racing punt. Well, that told him nothing, unless perhaps that its owner was independent and well-to-do. He might discover, maybe, more at Datchet.

Oddly preoccupied, he continued his walk, lunched at Windsor, and leisurely towards evening returned to the village and strolled down upon the hard. The river looked pleasantly inviting, and a thought occurred to him. Averse from exciting too much curiosity, he decided upon hiring a boat and boatman, and, while being pulled up-stream, putting what cautious questions should occur to him. A minute or two later he was afloat.

“I was looking over the bridge this morning,” he said presently. “Who owns that green houseboat near by?”

“The Dragonfly, sir? Name of Dangerfield, sir,” said the man. “He’s said to be an acting gentleman. He took it off of another party for the season.”

“He makes the season a late one, it seems.” The man laughed—significantly, Gilead fancied. “Honeymooning, perhaps?” he continued. “I saw him, as I passed, put off with a lady.”

“Yes, I seen her,” said the man—“we all seen her, and like her looks as little as he seems to. It’s not his first. They comes and goes, and we asks no questions. This one turned up from nowhere three days ago. She was just there; and maybe in a week or so she’ll be gone. O, he’s a caution!”

Gilead bit his lip, considering awhile. “Why don’t you like her looks?” he asked suddenly.

The man paused in his rowing to squeeze his mouth together.

“Why?” he said vacantly. “I shouldn’t fancy her for a mate, that’s all. Mostly temper in a face makes a man hot to look at it, but hers turns one cold. It’s my opinion he’s hooked a fish this time that’s one too many for him. He looks as if he’d like to shake her off, and can’t, and is mortal afeard of being pulled in himself. They’re up and down the river these three days—up and down. She might, for all the love that’s lost between ’em, be in another boat, and he bursting himself trying to pull away from her. Ho-ho! It’s a queer start—and here they come, too!”

Gilead sat up. They had reached the withy-bed, and suddenly round the counter of the big dismantled houseboat shot the skiff with the man and woman in it. It would have moved faster than before in any case going down-stream; but no normal pace appeared sufficient for the rower, who sculled with a fury that seemed to make the planks of the frail craft stretch and gape. From time to time, since his companion sat without movement not steering, he would turn his head to snatch a course; and it was in one of these glances that, when close upon it, he saw the other boat.

As instantly as in the morning he stopped. The skiff sped past and in a moment was twenty astern.

“If he asked my advice I should say a liver-pill,” said the boatman. “Did you see his face, sir?”

Gilead nodded. How could he have failed to—or that other, the face of last night? It had not looked at him; its eyes, he had seen, were fixed unwinkingly on the livid mask before them. But there had been the same expression of startled resentment, the same suggestion of obstinate importunateness, the same frowning vertical line between the brows, the same full lower lip, so full and so scarlet that it might have stood for a vampire’s gorged with blood.

“Hullo!” said the boatman; “he’s turning, by his looks, to come after us!”

He put his back into his work; but sure enough, sturdily as he pulled, the skiff overhauled them. More than half way up the withy-bed it passed, hugging the shore, so that the faces were sunk in shadow.

“Keep it up,” said Gilead. “I want you to take me to the Dragonfly.”

He had made up his mind in that moment. After all, Cicely Fleming had sought the help of the Agency, and was entitled to its advice and, if necessary, its protection. He could not altogether ignore that shadowy appeal. It must have portended something, and it would be base to turn away, leaving it unquestioned.

The boatman bending to his task, the skiff gained so little on them that at the last reach, coming out into the open to avoid the rushes, it was a bare fifty yards ahead as it made straight for the pale-green houseboat lying solitary on the water. But it had kept, and even increased its lead a little as it ran home and the man leapt on board and disappeared into the saloon.

Gilead could not guess why he thus, and so obviously, fled to escape him. He felt his own task to be a gentle and propitiatory one, and he had no intention of imperilling its object by assuming any impertinently censorious attitude. Moreover, how was his intention foreseen—unless, indeed, the girl herself had recognised and explained him? He saw her, just an instant, standing at the door; and then she too vanished.

A score of strokes now, and they were across the intervening space, when, at the moment the boatman unshipped his left scull, to run under the Dragonfly’s counter, sudden and startling a shot slammed out from within. The man, gripping at the gunwale, slipped his hand in the shock, then caught on again and held.

“God of mercy, sir!” he exclaimed. “What’s that?”

He had hardly spoken when Gilead, with a white face, was up and on board. He ran round, and was out of sight in an instant. Immediately a faint cry came to the ears of the waiting man. He hallooed in answer, but shakily, and sat sweating in his place. Suddenly his fare reappeared, but approaching agitated from the further end.

“He’s shot himself through the head,” said Gilead hoarsely. “The revolver’s in his hand. You must fasten on and come up. Good God—the girl! What’s become of her? I’ve been right through the boat.”

The man heaved himself, like a rheumatic creature, to his feet. His cheeks were patched with yellow; he fancied the job the least in the world. But he came, and saw; and was very sick by and by.

“Dead!” he whispered. “A man can’t live without a head.”

“But what’s become of her?”

“She must be hiding—she can’t have got away; or did he—no, there was only one shot.”

They hunted high and low; they ransacked every corner.

“I saw her standing there—at the door—but a moment ago,” said Gilead, gulping.

The boat lay moored in its placid pool; everything around slept quiet and unruffled; not a ripple, not a swaying in the reeds was there to account for the instant disappearance. The punt swung by its painter; the skiff floated as it had been run in, its nose wedged under the counter. Suddenly the man gripped Gilead’s sleeve, and pointed.

“Look, sir,” he said—“them cushions where she sat!”

“‘LOOK, SIR,’ HE SAID—‘THEM CUSHIONS WHERE SHE SAT!’”

They were soft, silken, well-rounded things; and they showed no least impression of anybody having recently rested on them.

“I’m off, sir,” said the man. He went scrambling for the boat, white to the lips. Once secure in his seat he looked up. “I understand now,” he said, “what he was a’trying to escape from. There’s more somewhere here than meets the eye. Come along, sir, in God’s name!”

“No,” said Gilead. “Go you, while I wait, and fetch assistance. Supposing that we both went, and somebody not knowing were to board here and look in?”

Merciful and considerate for others as always, he set himself resolutely to endure his vigil.

* * * *

There was a strange scene at the inquest, which led to its postponement sine die. The body was identified, as many people will remember, and the fact reaffirmed, for all that it is worth, that a first-rate actor may be a tenth-rate man. This man had led the double, the quadruple life—a brutal, worthless creature, whose crowning grace had been his ending it voluntarily. He was married and had children. Fortunately for them he had played, and he died, under a nom-de-théâtre.

But the odd thing at the inquest was the conflict of evidence as to his latest victim. Even local witnesses, when questioned as to her local existence, faltered and contradicted themselves. They fancied that they had seen some one with him, on this day or the other, but, when confronted with the oath, they would not swear. It would have been comical if not so tragical.

It was the great London philanthropist—by then made known and suitably reverenced—who caused the final sensation in the Coroner’s Court. Gilead had risen to account for his presence on the scene; he had described how, in the interests of his Agency, he had traced a very vilely-used young woman to the neighbourhood, with the purpose of redeeming her if possible from the shame, and saving her from the misery to which she appeared committed. And there he had hesitated and stopped. It had been unnecessary and quite useless to quote the supernatural raison d’être of his mission; but how was he going to deal with the illusion, if illusion it were, which had lured him to a pursuit otherwise unjustified? His companion on the occasion had already wavered, like the others, in his evidence: there might have been someone, he had ventured vacantly—he was not sure—the sun in his eyes, and so forth. And then even he, Gilead, had found himself unaccountably wondering if the apparition might not have been after all but a bugbear of the suicide’s own haunted conscience, hypnotically suggested to others. He answered a remark from the coroner, abstractedly looking down:—

“I believe that the young woman in question joined the deceased on the date specified—my information justifies the assumption—” and then he had glanced up, given a very palpable start, and continued mechanically, like one repeating a lesson: “I believe that he met her by appointment, that he took her to the boat, and that during the next two days she was often seen with him, in the flesh, upon the water. I believe that during the night of the third day he murdered her, and sunk her body in the deep pool under the houseboat, and that it lies there now. That is my opinion, sir—I cannot explain why—and I give it to you to act upon as you think fit.”

Exitus acta probat. Here was the sensation, and with every incitement, on the initiative of such a witness, to prosecute it to the end.

That end makes a well-known chapter in criminal history. The inquest was adjourned, the river dragged, and the body of the unfortunate girl actually found as suggested. She had been shot in the breast, lashed firmly to a heavy iron bar, and dropped overboard.

What provocation underlay the desperate horrible deed, whether it had been premeditated or committed in a moment of uncontrollable frenzy, will never be known.

Nor was it known for long, to any but himself and one other, what had inspired Gilead to that tragic statement. The explanation shall be given in his own words, as uttered, in awe and solemnity, to a young lady:—

“I had been trying to argue it out in my own mind; I had fallen into a state of odd moral confusion, when, looking up, I saw her. She stood beside the Coroner facing me, as she had stood that night in the office, and, as her lips moved without sound, I simply took from them and repeated the purport of their message. The moment I had uttered it she was gone.

“I spoke and walked for long afterwards as in a shattering, a tremendous dream. I hope and pray that such an experience can come to a man only once in his lifetime. Her spirit, have you realized, must have sprung to us—to you—for help, on the instant that his intention betrayed itself?”

“And afterwards?” whispered Vera. “That nature of hers, so persistent, so vindictive! O, wicked as he was, my whole soul shudders for him!”

CHAPTER XI.

THE QUEST OF THE VEILED WOMAN

To the benevolent and pitiful. Fifty pounds will save a wretched wife and mother from ruin and disgrace. Help implored: by letter or personal interview. Address, Suppliant, 050271, Daily Post.

No one instituting a philanthropic mission could have been less adequately equipped for it in one way than Gilead himself. Beginning by presuming in all others an integrity as pure as his own, he had from the first to put force upon his nature to cultivate that suspicion of motive, that moral self-guardedness, which are the first essentials of practical benevolence. He had, in short, in recognizing the eternal human duplicities, to learn to distinguish finely between cant and sincerity; and he was not always successful. Practice and experience did much for him; yet there were occasions still when guile found the opportunity to encounter him triumphantly on his emotional side.

Such was the case in the affair which we have entitled as above—a quest which he could never recall without humiliation, and the memory of which made him feel sore for years afterwards. But it is true that he was hit, in its connection, on quite another than the humanitarian side; and it was that wound, no doubt, which most rankled.

He himself saw and interviewed ‘Suppliant’ during the temporary, and unfortunate, absence of Miss Halifax, who, by his desire, had undertaken the case. He entrusted many such to her now, especially where feminine appeals were concerned. It seems slanderous to apply so shrewd a term to those soft and seductive orbs, but indeed the amanuensis had a ‘lynx eye’ for the shams and hypocrisies of her own sex. Without doubt her native perspicacity had saved her employer from the clutches of many a plausible impostor miscalled of the weaker vessel.

‘Suppliant’—she introduced herself hurriedly, diffidently by the name—entered upon Gilead in one of the unguarded moments. He was impressed by her appearance at once; it was all that it should have been under the circumstances—quiet and unaffected, though with a suggestion of strong repressed emotion in the thickly-veiled face. She seemed a young woman, she was certainly a graceful and slender, as her sober frock betrayed. It was of black, and just sufficiently faded to confess long usage. There was a heavy trimming of beads at the skirt hem, which weighed down its folds prettily about the tips of a couple of little shoes, worn but shapely. The long motor veil which embraced her hat and neck was of a heliotrope colour, not so diaphanous as to reveal, yet enough to suggest the entreaty of two large plaintive eyes.

But the attractive, the moving thing about her was her voice—so soft, so musical, that, before she had half uttered her prayer, it was granted.

Gilead, as he placed a chair for the visitor, apologized in his courteous way.

“I am so sorry. The lady, Miss Halifax, who has made your case her interest, is unhappily engaged elsewhere for the moment. If you would prefer to await her return—”

The visitor made a little distressed movement.

“I did not know,” she said, hesitating—there was that low huskiness in her voice which seems to caress—“I did not know. Since receiving your letter—I heard, I have been told—are you not Mr Balm?”

“Yes, I am Mr Balm.”

“O, I don’t know what to do!” she whispered. “It is so urgent, and they say about you—”

“Nothing unflattering, I trust,” said Gilead smiling, seeing that she paused for an expression.

“O, no, no!” answered the visitor. “But only that one appealing to you—to you above all—may expect—”

Again she stopped. “Reason, I hope,” said Gilead gently. “I try to practise it. Sympathy and help, unless given in reason, are likely to defeat their own objects, are they not?”

“Yes,” said the visitor forlornly; and she seemed to droop a little.

“Does that discourage you?” asked the young man.

She raised her head.

“Is it in reason,” she said, “to expect one, however merciful, however pitiful, to save another from the just consequences of his own misdeeds?”

“That depends,” said Gilead, “whether or not mercy to the sinner entails a wrong to the sinned against.”

She sighed, and whispered: “I do not know—I do not know. If you will only tell me?”

“You have been informed of us, it seems,” said Gilead. “You will have learnt, in that case, of the inviolately confidential nature of our mission, and of the necessity it is under of demanding truth for its first desideratum. You will answer my questions or not as you please; but you must not be offended when I tell you that it is impossible for us to move in any matter unless in the clear light of understanding. Am I to ask, then?”

“O, if you will!” she murmured.

“Very well,” said Gilead—“your name?”

“It is—Nightingale; Mrs Nightingale.”

He bowed his head gravely. “I have your advertisement in mind. I recall also your allusion to someone’s misdeeds. Was your choice of the male pronoun accidental or intentional?”

“It was intentional.”

“Am I to know to whom it referred?”

“It referred to my husband.”

He was very concerned for her. She appeared to feel acutely the shame of her admission.

“I am sorry,” he said, “sincerely sorry to have to cause you this pain. But the surgical knife, relentless as it seems, is often the shortest cut to convalescence.”

To his distress she uttered a little wincing cry, as if the very edge of his metaphor had touched her.

“O! it was that,” she said—“the knife, the necessity, that was the cause of all.”

He looked at her, pitifully, remorsefully. “I perceive,” he said, “that I have blundered somehow. Will you not say something that will put me right with myself?”

“How could you know!” she answered, pressing an agitated hand to her bosom. “Our Gracie—our one darling! It was to save her, sir—they had to operate at once; and afterwards—the nursing, the change of air—”

She broke off with a little gasp.

“I understand,” said Gilead. “She was your only child, and her dear life was at stake. You incurred expenses—am I right?”

She controlled herself with an effort, sitting erect, clasping and wreathing her hands before her.

“Overwhelming to people in our position,” she answered. “But he said yes—it was to be—he would find the means, though to secure them he must sell his soul to destruction. O! I little guessed what fatal significance lay behind his words. I trusted him; I was in despair; not until three days ago had I ever dared to question—to face, the possible truth. And then he himself struck me dumb with it. To save the little life so dear to us, he had robbed his employer.”

She rose to her feet, seemed to shiver, and dropped back again. Gilead, in the deepest commiseration, had also risen.

“Command yourself,” he said. “Tell me all. You will not find me an unsympathetic confidant.”

She appeared to cast a look at him of the most pathetic gratitude.

“I will,” she said—“O, I will! We had been so happy and so contented—and then the blow—the horror! His position was one of trust; but indeed, indeed, the temptation was overwhelming. He had intended, the emergency once past, to move heaven and earth to restore what he had borrowed—only that. But Fate was always against him. And now, at last—” she rose again, in uncontrollable agitation—“to-morrow morning,” she said, “the accountants are to begin their annual examination of the books, and if before then he has failed to make good the deficit, we are disgraced and ruined for ever.”

A brief silence succeeded her agonized cry, during which Gilead battled with his emotions. It was not so much the anguish, perhaps, as the heart-moving tone of its utterance which stirred the very bowels, so to speak, of his official circumspection. He made but a feeble attempt to assert his independence. This story, on the face of it, seemed to him one of the most pitifully tragic to which he had ever listened. That a man should be so cast down and trampled on in the name of fond humanity appeared to him monstrous. There were some temptations which it was even irreligious to resist. Was not Nature one with God?

“Mrs Nightingale,” he said, “I need affect no hesitation in assuring you that you have my sincerest sympathy in your trouble, and that your case comes directly within our province. If you will kindly leave me your address—”

Something in her attitude—some suggestion of hope but half fulfilled, of resignation setting itself to endure long hours of doubt and fear, overcame him finally. He turned to his desk, sat down, produced a cheque-book, and prepared to write.

“No,” he said. “I will not condemn you to it. The sum was fifty pounds, you say. I will trust you, or never myself again.”

He wrote, rose, and handed a draft to the visitor.

“Take it,” he said—“I have made it payable at the counter—and peace go with you.”

He thought she was about to fall on her knees to him, and he prevented her.

“I am sure this confidence will be as sacred to you as it is to me,” he said. “There is no need to say more, unless it is now to give me your address.”

She murmured it, sobbing, and he took it down from her lips: “Myrtle Villa, Garden Lane, Gospel Oak.” And then, with many passionate, half coherent expressions of gratitude, she left him.

He sat pondering for some little while after she was gone, the glow of his impulsive action slowly cooling. He would not regret it; yet for some reason he felt a nervousness in confessing, as would come to be necessary, its nature to Miss Halifax. He felt quite sure that she, however moved, would have kept the balance of her judgment at the discriminating poise.

During the afternoon he paid a visit to some famous Auction rooms in Wellington Street. A notable sale of Japanese colour prints was advertised, and the precious lots were on show. Gilead’s love for these things was either a weakness or a fine enthusiasm, according to the point of view. He was enraptured with the art, and was a ruinous competitor where he coveted rare examples of it. Still, as yet he was not so bitten but that he could resist—occasionally—temptation at what he considered absurdly inflated prices. The final stage of the disease had not hopelessly overtaken him. This day, very possibly, was to mark the turning point.

It was certainly a demoralizing display. A St Anthony of a virtuosic cast would have had a desperate struggle not to succumb to its seductions. The walls of the big room were bedizened, tapestried with a very profusion of covetable things, all representing the better or best periods of the leading schools. Such a sale, such a chance for the collector, had not yet occurred in London. It was to extend over five days, and included examples of all the notable artists from Kiyonobu to Kuniyoshi.

Gilead spent an absorbed hour or so in the room before leaving instructions as to which delectable nishiki-ye he wished to acquire, if possible. In this matter he desired to temper cupidity with reason; and he put force upon himself—or imagined that he did—in deciding the limits to which he would go. It was no parsimony, of course, which moved him to this caution. It was a reluctance merely to associate himself with that form of plutocracy which, in its greediness to possess at any figure, sets that standard of artificial values which is the despair of the poor but honest collector. An admirable principle in itself, though perhaps, from the seller’s point of view, an admirably one-sided. Nevertheless, a humorist might have observed that the young gentleman was careful, in the case of those prints which he particularly wanted for himself, to leave bids morally calculated to beat any possible competitor out of the field. It seemed the more perverse of him therefore to exhibit an obstinately inelastic spirit before perhaps the finest example of a Haronobu in the room.

It was an exquisite thing, harmonious in tone and composition, perfect in registration, as flawless a specimen of artistic and technical work as was ever produced by this incomparable artist. It represented a young girl being carried on the shoulder of a man to a temple for the meyamairi or naming ceremony, attendants following; and in condition and treatment and the soft intricacies of its colour scheme it fairly baffled criticism.

“There, sir! What do you think of that?”

It was Mr Desmund who spoke, art expert and valuer to a well-known firm of print and book sellers. He had accompanied Gilead round the room, booking his bids—an unwearying resourceful man, with a drooping light moustache, a bright complexion, and pale blue eyes, tired but interested. He wore a loose blue serge suit with a bright tie; his shoulders were bent a trifle beneath their load of specialised knowledge; he was a busy soul, but never too busy for enthusiasm in the right directions or to the right people. What Mr Desmund did not know about Japanese art was not, in the vernacular, worth the knowing.

“There, sir!” he said, confident of the exclamation of delight that was to follow.

It came, but in tempered form.

“Good,” said Gilead. “It is a fine example.”

He was more gratified with the print than he thought it politic to confess.

“Good!” said Mr Desmund. “There’s not another to better, or equal it, in Europe. Look at that background; look at that gauffrage. You should secure it, Mr Balm. You won’t get such an opportunity again.”

“When does it occur for sale?”

“On the first day, sir.”

“That’s to-morrow?”

“Yes, to-morrow.”

“What will it fetch—give me an idea?”

“Fifty pounds—not a penny less.”

“O! that’s absurd.”

The expert tapped his note-book.

“I’ve a commission myself, sir, for forty.”

Gilead hummed and ha’d a little.

“I think it’s preposterous; it’s against all my principles; but—well, I’ll go to forty-five.”

“You’d better leave me a margin—take my advice.”

“No.”

“A pound or two.”

“Not a copper farthing.”

“You’ll lose it.”

“Very well; but I don’t believe I shall.”

“Not a shilling over forty-five pounds, then, Mr Balm?”

“Not a shilling.”

He fancied the thing was a bluff; and in that he wronged both the expert and himself. He really coveted the print grievously; but he hardly doubted that he was safe to secure it. Nevertheless, as time went on, fears began to assail him. Supposing after all, that Desmund were right in his surmise, and that he should come to be outbidden? It would be ridiculous—an insane exaggeration of values, but—

No one who has not lusted after a particular print, book, carving, or any rare and costly work of art, nor felt in himself the processes of that mania which, beginning in a studiously qualified desire for the object, mounts swiftly through growing apprehensions of rival desires to an unqualified and reckless passion to secure it, can possibly enter into his feelings. Those grew acute with the hours; and, as the following morning wore on, neighboured on hysteria. Still he fought for sanity, held himself tight, and when the time came, obliged himself to face the dreary ordeal of lunch. In the midst, the Haronobu suddenly rose before him, stupendous, irresistible, and blocked all his field of moral vision. He must have it, he decided, at any price. He glanced at the clock, rose, snatched his hat, and, palpitating all through, rushed for the Auction room. It was packed, and he could barely gain the door. As he did so, he heard the voice of the auctioneer proclaiming Lot 40—but one step, and that the wrong way, removed from the object of his desire. The immortal print was that moment sold. Whether for rapture or despair his fate was cast.

With that recognition of the inevitable, reason, if only temporary, returned to him, and he to his office. He thought his brief dementia over, and contented himself with despatching a telegram to the expert, asking if he had been so fortunate as to acquire for him the print in question. The answer—it only arrived after an unconscionable interval—completely prostrated him.

“Regret sold at fifty.”

The world was darkened; heaven eclipsed; for the moment life itself seemed hardly worth living. The virtuoso will understand better than I can explain.

Gilead, in a state of profound depression, sought out Mr Desmund the next morning.

“You were right,” he said, “and I was a fool.” (I think he emphasised it)

It comforted him only partially to find that every other one of his bids had been successful. He received the parcel in a gloomy silence. His collection, minus the Haronobu, seemed little better than trash and vanity.

“Who got it—do you know?” he asked drearily.

Mr Desmund shook his head. “It was bought a broker, sir. I daresay I can find out.”

“No,” said Gilead. “No. After all it would only aggravate the sore.”

The sore, however, healed, or nearly, in the process of time. Japanese prints were really only the recreation of a mind devoted to the interests of humanity.

One day, weeks later, Gilead had occasion to motor with a friend to the city. It was a dusty morning, and the two wore goggles. At the Bank of England the car drew up by the kerb while the friend entered the building. He was gone so long that Gilead had ample time to study the endless types of humanity that drifted beside him. They were all intent on business and money-making, and he wondered if there was one in all the confused throng capable of properly appreciating his feelings over his lost Haronobu.

While he gazed, speculative, philosophic and lazy, a figure, two figures, standing by the end of Bartholomew-lane caught and fixed his attention. They were so close by that he fancied they must have that moment emerged, or he would have noticed them sooner. One was of a woman, slender, graceful, dressed in faded black and closely veiled, the other of a little girl, poorly but neatly clad and of a fairy prettiness.

He stirred, oddly smitten with some memory; and in the same instant the woman thrust out a white hand, dumbly proffering to a passer-by a little basketful of matches, and he perceived, with a certain consciousness of shock, that she was begging.

Presently he lay back again and watched the two. They stood all the time he was there at the street-corner, and during that brief space he observed that they reaped quite a small harvest in silver and copper. Mostly people gave, and demanded nothing in return. Now and then one would wisely insist on goods for his money. Men, young glossy cits and sober fathers of families, were moved obviously by the charm of the little face raised to them—and also, it seemed, by something else. Gilead was not long in discovering what that something was. The veiled woman, in addition to the mystery encompassing her, had, whether pleading or returning thanks, the softest, the most musical voice it was possible to imagine.

He looked down at her feet; the black skirt, weighted with a heavy bead trimming, dropped prettily about them. Only the veil was different. Yet he could not doubt for a moment that he saw before him Mrs Nightingale, the pitiful suppliant of Gospel Oak.

Had it, then, for all his timely help, come to this, and was she driven to beg upon the streets, her little Gracie the lure to public charity? He was perplexed, vaguely dissatisfied, at a loss how to act, when he suddenly perceived a friend of his coming round the corner from Throgmorton Street. The young fellow paused a moment to slip a sixpence into the child’s hand before he came on. As he approached, Gilead accosted him, and, after greetings and a commonplace or two, remarked pleasantly:—

“That was mistaken charity, you know, Robson. You should have insisted on your matchbox in exchange.”

The other stared a moment, gathered, and laughed.

“O, that!” he said. “It’s one’s instinctive homage, I suppose, to a lovely face and a soft voice—the two best things in nature.”

“I daresay. And doesn’t she know and trade on it, too.”

“Well, if you put it that way, to quite a respectable tune, I should say. The two are familiar figures at that corner—have been for some time. They catch the drift there, you see, from a dozen golden ways. It’s a good pitch.”

“So I should think. Is anything known about them?”

“Not that I’m aware. It’s the mystery does the business, you see. They’re there as regular as clockwork from ten to four, and then they go. I’ve noticed them a dozen times, and they always move off on the stroke.”

Gilead, after parting with the young gentleman, grew so restless over the non-reappearance of his other friend, that in the end he left a message for him with the chauffeur, and, stopping a taxicab, drove back to the office. Arrived there, he instantly despatched in the same vehicle a member of his staff to Gospel Oak, with directions to the man to make exhaustive enquiries. He was already quite prepared for the result, and expressed no surprise when informed that there was no such place in Gospel Oak as Garden Lane, and consequently no Myrtle Villa, and, by inference, no Mrs Nightingale. Her ‘complaint,’ it was evident, dated from other and less righteous groves. He prepared, very stern and quietly wrathful, to act upon that assumption.

Fortunately for his purpose the weather, though it did not yet rain, was sufficiently threatening to justify a waterproof. He selected one with a very high turn-up collar, in which he muffled the lower part of his face. A cap pulled low down over his eyes completed a sort of disguise which he had no doubt would prove efficient. A quarter to four that same afternoon saw him posted in Threadneedle Street at a point whence, from amidst the hurrying throng, he could easily watch the movements of the woman and child, who were still stationary in their place at the street corner.

At the first stroke of the hour, punctual to his information, the woman took the child’s hand in hers and, moving away, became on the instant one of the unconsidered crowd. Gilead followed, instant but wary, in pursuit. She led him to the Mansion House Station, where, standing behind her, he heard her take tickets for Victoria, whither he journeyed in a neighbouring carriage. Thence, ‘shadowing’ his quarry, he ran her into an omnibus, to the roof of which he himself mounted. It took them by the Queen’s Road and Cheyne Walk to the Albert Bridge and across. He had paid his fare, for security, for the entire route, and was prepared therefore to descend at once when, at the corner of Park Road, the woman and child got out. It was raining by then, and his umbrella afforded him useful cover. The child, as if by established custom, ran away towards the adjacent slums; the woman herself walked southward down the Albert Road. At a block of handsome flats bordering on Battersea Park she turned, and, passing without stopping through the swing doors, mounted the stairs to the second floor. Following at her heels as close as he might venture, he came upon her letting herself in at a certain door with a latchkey; and, even as he reached the place, the door closed and he was alone.

He let some moments pass while he considered the situation. Wrathful suspicion still claimed him hotly, yet he was conscious that at present it amounted to no more, and that it was above all things necessary for him to behave with circumspection. After a minute of deliberation, he tapped resolutely with the brass knocker that hung upon the door. The connoisseur in him observed, as he did so, that the knocker was good and an antique.

After some little delay the door was opened, or half opened, as if the person behind it questioned the character of the visitor, and a woman looked out. She was neat, formal, severe in aspect, suggesting the housekeeper to a greater mansion. She wore an apron, but no cap. Her face was narrow, the lips compressed, her bosom flat, and the hair drawn plainly down her temples.

“Yes?” she said, in a thin harsh voice.

“I wish to see Mrs Nightingale,” said Gilead.

“Who?”

“Mrs Nightingale.”

“She doesn’t live here,” said the woman, and prepared to shut the door. Gilead, quietly but effectively, prevented her.

“Pardon me. I saw her this moment go in,” he said.

“You are mistaken, sir.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Will you take your foot away, sir, or must I call for some one?”

“You may call,” said Gilead. “I don’t think it would be wise. She may not be Mrs Nightingale—nothing more likely—and yet fear exposure.”

To his surprise, the woman opened the door wide, beckoned him in and closed it upon them.

“What are you saying?” she whispered fiercely. Her eyes sparkled in their gloomy rings. “Why do you speak like that on the public stair?”

“Why do you force me to?” said Gilead.

She stared at him a moment. Then, “Come,” she said, and led the way into a pretty room beyond.

Its windows faced upon the park; the polished floor was spread with Eastern rugs; chairs, little tables, what-nots, a bookcase, a dainty bureau, a daintier corner-cupboard, all of rare old Chippendale and loaded where they might be with bijoutry, silver, and exquisite scraps of china, made up the furniture. And on the walls, all framed in slender white, hung many beautiful specimens of Japanese colour prints, among them, in a place of honour, the very Haronobu which Gilead had coveted. Looking round and round in amazement, his eyes suddenly fixed themselves on the prize; and there they remained riveted, while he endeavoured to take in the stupendous situation.

The truth dawned, grew plain, grew monstrous to him as he gazed. She had played that trick upon him, had invented that lying story with the sole purpose of acquiring its possession; and out of his humanity, his—yes, his damned credulity—he had come to be defrauded and desolated. He could not doubt it. He pointed at the print speechless.

“Yes,” said the woman; “these things are a fancy—a craze—of my sister’s—I don’t hold by them myself—and that is her latest. She values it above everything.”

He turned upon her, goaded to frenzy.

“Your sister!” he cried—“she is your sister? And she values it, does she? Will you, I wonder, when I tell you that she procured from me by fraud the money with which to pay for it?”

“I told you,” said the woman, cold and passionless, “that personally I didn’t hold by them. This one, I know, was beyond our means.”

“Do you know what story she invented to augment those means?”

“No, sir, I don’t; nor do I intend to ask. I take it that you were her victim in some way. She is a woman of the most resourceful imagination.”

“You look upon it in that light? Then I presume, of course, that you are her partner and abettor in the other fraud?”

“What fraud?”

“Why, this,” said Gilead, with a comprehensive, disdainful gesture—“all the fruits, I am to conclude, of begging at street corners?”

“Why is that a fraud?” said the woman. “Not merit but natural qualifications are the key to all success. It is the taking, not the good person, who gets on in the world. If the public likes to pay toll to a lovely face, a sweet voice, why should we disappoint it and starve? We have no other alternative, believe me?”

“The child,” said Gilead, still sternly—“is that hers?”

“No,” answered the woman; “she hires it. We have neither of us been married, and children as children are hateful to us. I do not think any man could be got to marry my sister Emile. The face behind her veil is ravaged—unsightly. She owes no debt of gratitude to man or God; we neither of us do; they are our enemies. Is that a fraud—the mystery of her veil? Let him answer for it who wove its meshes. She had been beautiful once. Only her voice lives and pleads in a dead land; and with it and through it she obtains these means to the amelioration of her bitter lot—these little toys and graces which her soul loves, and to surround herself with which she suffers and wearies through each livelong day. Call it a fraud if you will. In this inhuman world our souls have ceased to count with us.”

Sick at heart, Gilead turned to the door.

“Are you going to expose her,” said the woman—“to tear her veil away?”

“No,” he answered. “I want fresh air, that’s all.”

CHAPTER XII.

THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN

NOTHING short of the direct interposition of Providence can be held to explain the premature chancing into Gilead’s hands one morning of an ex-official copy of the Daily Post. The thing might have happened on any other morning in the year and signified nothing; it happened, as it happened, on the one and only morning on which it could signify a great deal. He invariably read the Times at breakfast, and the other paper, or Nestle’s report on it, on his arrival at the office. Providence, desiring his independent notice of this particular issue, found occasion therefore to slip under his nose a copy of it, brought in, and forgotten, by some casual acquaintance who had sought him for a moment on a personal matter.

He might not have looked at it even then, had he not chanced—chanced, mark you—in rising to reach for the marmalade, to tread on an iron tack.

Now there was no reason, other than a providential one, why the tack should have been there; no reason why it should have stood up awkwardly on its head; none why its point should have penetrated the only thin place in the young gentleman’s pump. That all these things happened, with the result that, in the start and clutch he gave, he knocked over the Daily Post and stooped to pick it up again, can be ascribed to supernatural design and to that alone.

As he sat down, shin over thigh, to pluck the obtrusive nail from his sole, his eye was caught by an advertisement prominent in the Agony Column of the paper he held in his left hand:—

“To Psychisis. Old gentleman suffering from obesity desires disintegration and reconstitution on normal lines. Superfluous flesh given away to the needy. No Shylocks need apply.”

Gilead, having extracted the nail, read the advertisement again, and chuckled. It was of the order Facetiæ, of course. Wags not infrequently would thus parody the incredible absurdities of cults and cranks, or even invent wilder ones in a mere frolic of animal spirits. He had come across quite a number of such hoaxes in his long experience of the paper. There had been, for instance, the two ladies who, studying the endurance of physical pain, desired the co-operation of another in arranging for a series of private experiments on human subjects; there had been the duet of lone bachelors, depressed by London Sundays, who invited suggestions as to how best to pass their time in any agreeable way not involving energy, and those other two who, being without the capacity to work, invited some wealthy philanthropist to provide them with annuities and a cottage in the country meet to their leisured tastes. There had been the despairing gentleman who coveted a society and a friendship unfranked by whiskies and sodas, which disagreed with him, and the practising barrister who had offered an equitable mortgage of his body (heart excepted) in return for an accommodation. Finally there had been the demand for a man willing to demonstrate his personal pliability on an old English rack, Star Chamber pattern, and who had been recommended, by an admirable touch, to be ‘short to start with.’

Of such palpably was the obese gentleman, with his superfluous flesh, and Gilead was on the point of laying him aside, with a parting grin, when his gaze was caught and riveted on an advertisement which appeared just under the one in question:—

“Middle-aged gentleman, recommended to chop wood for obesity two hours daily, seeks cheerful refined companion to work beside him away from home. Honorarium by arrangement. Address Winsom Wyllie: 048391 Daily Post.”

Now we all must have observed how advertisements, though of an exceptional and esoteric cast, are gregarious in character. That is to say, if some strange want appears advertised on a particular day, there will be sure to be others of its kind in company, and that without any editorial provision, and despite the fact that nothing of its sort, maybe, has occurred for weeks. Here one obese gentleman led to another, and undesignedly, one might feel sure. It was simply that adiposity was in the air, like a germ, and affected not individuals but communities. It made no difference that an obvious sincerity spoke from the second advertisement—no difference to the principle, I mean. As to its effect upon one reader, it was simply for the moment paralysing.

WINSOM WYLLIE! Those who have followed the career of our young philanthropist will not have forgotten the name of that detestable scoundrel, the persecutor of the beautiful amanuensis. It was peculiar, one must admit—a name not likely to be borne by more than a single person in the world. So thought Gilead, as, with a deep sigh, he struggled out of his stupefaction and reread the lines.

Winsom Wyllie! So the brazen wretch had confessed himself, and unblushingly, at the last. It was well. If unlimited wealth, if a soul of righteous indignation, were of any avail against the forces of malignancy, he should be hounded surely to his doom. The means were here; the way alone was the question.

It must not be supposed that during all these long months Gilead had been content to relegate this matter to the shelf of discarded things. Quietly and unobtrusively he had kept it alive in his mind, had prosecuted cautious enquiries, had caused a persistent watch to be kept on the little house on Knight’s Hill; and, if all his efforts had proved in vain, he had been at least able to find comfort in the conviction that the villain, true to his name, had scented danger and studied discretion by obliterating himself. And now here he was come out into the light of day, and boldly affirming his existence in the face of any whom it might concern. The advertisement was nothing less than a challenge and a defiance. Well, the gage, he should find, would be taken up.

But it was necessary, of course, to move with the extremest caution and circumspection. Nothing, in the first place, must be said about the matter to Miss Halifax, lest the shock should bring on again one of those cataleptic seizures with which it was associated; nor could he think himself justified in revealing, unauthorized, to her fiancé the details of so delicate and painful a story. No, alone and single-handed he must encounter the man on his own ground, betraying nothing of his purpose until that purpose was accomplished. The villain must be overthrown, disposed of for good and all, ere ever the girl should learn of the shadow that had finally been removed from her life.

He finished his breakfast in a very thoughtful mood, and by the end of it had come to a definite resolve. These two must get married with as little delay as possible. There could be no better means for disposing once and for all of Mr Winsom Wyllie and his unwelcome attentions. He himself might discover and expose the scoundrel; to provide Vera with a legitimate protector was to render him innocuous for ever more. Yes, it must be done and at once; there was no reason in the world for delaying a consummation so sensible and so happy.

Before starting for the office Gilead took up the paper yet once more to study the advertisement, and this time with a fine ironic laughter. He recalled very well, he believed, certain descriptive epithets applied by the young lady to her persecutor. He had been “unusual and sinister”; he had been “endowed with a demoniac energy”; he had been “a dangerous man,” affecting piratic emblems. And here he was after all grown fat, confessed of middle age, and recommended by his doctor to chop wood in order to reduce his bulk! O, to what base passes would not constitution bring us! Picturesqueness, romance, attractiveness, even, of the diabolic cast—we were each one of us in such matters at the mercy of our stomachs. No doubt this same spider, indolently watchful in his web, had waxed plump and round through too much feeding and too little exercise.

Agreeable to his steadfast purpose, Gilead found both the secretary and amanuensis in his room when he reached the Agency. Somewhat high-strung as he was and sensitive to impressions, he seemed conscious of an atmosphere as it were of strain, expectancy, anxiety—he knew not what to call it, but attributed it, whatever it was, to his own suppressed emotions. However, sitting down with the best air of detachment he could muster, he called upon Nestle for his report.

“I have run down the column, sir,” answered the secretary. “There is nothing whatever in it to detain or interest you.”

Did his own feelings mislead him, or was there a hint of tremor in the young man’s voice, a flush of increased colour on his cheek, which belied the easy assurance of his words? He decided, at once and definitely, that the suspicion was born of nothing but his own excited fancy. For the rest he was reassured to find that Miss Halifax herself had evidently passed by the advertisement unnoticing. Had her eyes encountered it, all his chivalrous intent would have been balked at the outset.

“O! very well, Nestle,” he said. “There is, as it happens, a certain advertisement—but you could not have been expected to attach any importance to it from our point of view. Only, as it chanced, I saw a copy of the Daily Post this morning before I reached the office, and—” He broke off, lay back in his chair, drew and emitted a long breath, smiled, and addressed himself resolutely to the two before him. “That is all nothing,” he said, “to the case which is just now most prominently in my mind. It affects our mutual relations, as it does my most earnest wishes. I want you two to eschew diffidence, to eschew formality, to allow me to speak with the freedom engendered of our long and happy intercourse, and to suggest your arranging a date for your marriage with as little delay as possible.”

Having got it out, he rose to his feet. Miss Halifax at the same moment rose hurriedly to hers. Her face was white; her beautiful eyes seemed to have gathered in an instant dark shadows about them.

“Our marriage!” she whispered; and then her breath caught.

Gilead laughed, half protestingly, half melancholy.

“Is it such an appalling prospect?” he said. “You must not allow yourselves to doubt that, for my poor practical part, I will soften its acerbities to you by the best means in my power. Our intimacy, my long debt to you both, will rob that assurance of any suggestion of impertinence or ostentation. I want to see you both settled and happy; I am impatient for the end; and, if I have my reasons, they can hardly be less trenchant ones than your own. I ask you to marry, and to marry soon. If you consider any part of this obligation yours, and desire to liquidate it, there are the means most calculated to give me delight in the settlement. Now I am going to leave you alone to talk the matter over; nor do I intend to refer to it again until invited by yourselves—with the assurance, I shall trust, that you have decided to conform to my wishes.”

He took up his hat, crossed the room, patted the secretary kindly and cheerily on the shoulder, bowed to Miss Halifax and went out.

For minutes after he had left, the two stood silent and transfixed. At length the secretary raised his face with a groan.

“He saw it—the advertisement,” he said. “My God, what a fatality!”

She began to laugh in a mirthless unnatural way, and stopped as suddenly.

“Yes, he must have seen it,” she said. “What does it mean? What will he do? We oughtn’t to doubt, I suppose, unless he is going to be untrue to himself for the first time in his life. But he won’t, of course; and then—what will come of it all?”

She gasped, and then laughed again hysterically.

“And our marriage! O, it is too ridiculous! Herbert, for pity’s sake say something in reason!”

“Reason or no reason spells nothing but our ruin,” he answered dejectedly. “His resolution is set, and it must give us away. I understand its purpose well enough; he thinks our marrying will put that—that other finally out of court.”

“But what other?” she said. “In heaven’s name, what other?”

He laughed, even more hollowly than she had.

“God knows!” he said. “The devil has hoist us with our own petard.”

She passed her hand across her eyes in great grief and misery.

“Well,” she said, with a quivering sigh, “we can’t complain; and I don’t. It is not often a woman is given such an education for the natural evil in her. I think it teaches me to welcome the punishment I have striven so hard to avoid. I shall be clean at last in my shame. Let me be the one to confess it to him, that I may drink the cup to its dregs. My suffering after all is worse than yours.”

“Is it? Why?”

“Cannot you guess? Because I have learned to love him, Herbert, with all my heart and soul, and because I must kill before his eyes the thing he has honoured.”

“Kill! you don’t mean—”

“O, don’t look so scared! That would be a hateful, a selfish return for all his gentleness and nobility—to curse my love with a heritage of undeserved remorse. But I must kill his trust for ever—O, my dear, I must, I must!”

In sudden uncontrollable anguish she threw herself into her chair, and flinging her arms over the desk, buried her face in them.

In the meantime Gilead, returning to his chambers, set himself to concoct an epistle, at once guarded and alluring, to the obese one. It was a delicate task, and one or two trials were needed before he could satisfy himself as to the suitable form. This, finally, was the answer he despatched:—

“Mr George Barnwell” (the name occurred to him somehow, without suggesting any associations) “presents his compliments to Mr Winsom Wyllie, and, having noticed that gentleman’s advertisement in the Daily Post, begs to offer himself as a candidate for the post in question. Mr G. B. thinks that he may lay claim to the qualifications desired. He has been well educated; he has seen something of life; he has learnt from his Montaigne that Silence and Modesty are qualities very serviceable in conversation. Finally, he may boast, he believes, of being capable of his hands, and he is quite willing to refer the question of the honorarium to the test of his capacities.”

He gave his address poste-restante at the nearest office, and settled down to await in some trepidation, the possible reply.

Likely enough none would arrive. A berth which, though only temporary, offered itself so easy and so uncompromising, must attract hundreds of those poor out-at-elbows gentilities who were for ever prowling in search of such occupations as their respectable inexpertness could stomach. It shamed Gilead to think of his seeking to take the bread out of the mouth of any poverty so mean and forlorn; only his sense of desperate necessity urged him into competition with it. It were surely better that one pride should hunger than that a villain should go unmasked, a problematic murderer be allowed to pursue his nefarious course with impunity.

Still his application might, probably would, be unsuccessful; and in that case, what then? There would be nothing for it—an undesirable alternative—but to put the police on the track of the advertiser.

For that day and the next he lay close, not going near the Agency; and, on the third morning, there was a telegram awaiting him at the post-office. He opened it, somewhat nervously, and read:—

“Offer accepted provisionally. Be ten to-morrow morning at Church Army Home, Unemployed Yard, Coldbath Lane, Brixton. W.W.”

So, after all, he was chosen! Fervently he hoped that he would not be found wanting. And that thought had its necessary corollary in another. What was he going to do when he met Mr Winsom Wyllie face to face? Why, apparently, a thing which he had never done in his life before—chop wood.

It seemed quite paralysing, astounding. He had never until this moment thought out his course of action, and here was the problem actually squaring up to him. He had to chop wood—that was the only fact immediately plain to his comprehension. True the man had behaved vilely in intention to an unhappy young woman dependent on him; true that same young woman had, by her own confession, accused him of coercing her father into making a testament in his favour, and of afterwards tempting that parent opportunely to his doom. But that was all conjecture, and however morally irrefutable, not a particle of legal evidence existed to substantiate the charge. Legally, indeed, the heir’s position seemed unassailable. He had been left the property conditionally, and the conditions had resulted in his favour. By the provisions of the will, since the young lady had failed to marry him within the year, he was become the sole and indisputable beneficiary. And what else?

Nothing else. Vague surmises, shadowy charges—what was there in them all? Gilead was worldling enough to know that there was never yet a disappointed legatee who did not hint darkly of undue influences or mental irresponsibility. That a testator did not do what was expected of him was no ground for action in the eye of the law.

Did this chivalrous spirit, therefore, shrink at the last from its self-imposed Quest? Not for a moment. The Law to Gilead was nothing but a sifter of evidence. It took no cognizance of obscure motives, but decided on the facts before it, with which facts any clever counsel could juggle as with balls or handkerchiefs. Mr Winsom Wyllie might, legally, be altogether unassailable; the fact remained that he was enjoying a small fortune to the possession of which another was by every moral right entitled. That was enough for the Paladin.

Or was he so enjoying it? That same afternoon Gilead paid another visit to Somerset House—only to find that the will, so far as he could discover, remained yet unproved. He was puzzled; but on the whole reassured. Surely this delay argued some remorse, at least some hesitation, on the part of the legatee? Or did it imply a reluctance in him to take that step which must put his coveted victim for ever beyond the reach of his arts and solicitations? Whichever way, nothing but advantage could accrue from his ascertaining that wealth, and the power which it bestows were engaged, and sternly, on the side of the young lady. The warning, for the best of its value, should not be thrown away upon such a man, so audacious and yet so wary.

Ten o’clock the following morning found Gilead punctual to his appointment in Coldbath Lane, Brixton. It was not a prepossessing neighbourhood, nor was the day exhilarating. Under a cloudy sky brooded an atmosphere of sticky humidity. The squalor of a deep-London slum was represented by everything in the way of dreariness but its swarming life. Here were the dull dwelling-houses, the tawdry shops, the costers’ barrows, the stench of fish frying in rancid grease. Only the human congestion was less—nothing in comparison. A postman, with a flaccid bag, suggestive of a lean correspondence, over his shoulder, directed him to the yard for the unemployed—directed him dubiously, too, knowing that want often strutted in strange guises. Gilead knocked on the closed gates, and waited.

An asthmatic sound of sawing, which had been audible within, ceased, resumed itself like an arrested cough, stopped again, and, after an interval, a slow heavy footstep approached.

“Who’s there?” asked a weary voice.

“George Barnwell,” answered Gilead. “I have come punctual to your appointment, sir.”

A clock, indeed, at the moment sounded the hour. It took the strokes deliberately, yet not so deliberately as the unseen stranger took Gilead’s statement. He appeared to ponder it exhaustively. Gilead could hear him through the keyhole breathing like a man asleep and gently snoring.

“Well,” said the voice at last. “I suppose I had better let you in.”

The alternative had occurred to Gilead, but he thought it politic to remain silent. There was the sound of a bar clanking down, of a laboured sigh, and one side of the gate opened, just a jealous aperture, through which the applicant caught glimpse of a doleful yard, with a woodshed at its further end, a block or two for chopping on, as many three-legged stools, a sawyer’s trestle, and everywhere in littered confusion chips, billets and indiscriminate debris of timber.

“Come in, can’t you,” said the voice, peevishly, and Gilead, slipping through, found himself face to face with Mr Winsom Wyllie.

He was in an undress of grey flannel. His braces were discarded; his shirt, open and collarless, drooped in moist folds; his trousers sagged down over his boots, almost concealing them. Behind, he bore a much greater resemblance to an exhausted elephant than to any sinister figure of melodrama. Nor was his obverse prepossessing. A lugubrious, ponderous man, who took his fleshiness badly; a man who might have figured for an over-blown clown, seeing how his grizzled hair stood up from his scalp and his whiskers out from his jaws; a man with a ridiculous lachrymose mouth, a man whose voice had suety tears in it, a man who seemed to pity himself profoundly—such was the general impression conveyed to Gilead. The creature’s adiposity, he was no less convinced, was no local rising. It was a general upheaval, and nothing short of a change of constitution would suffice to reduce it.

The stranger, Gilead once entered, closed the gate with a fretful slam and put up the bar. Then he turned to regard his visitor—the visitor thought morosely.

“H’m!” he said at last, wearily mopping his brow. “I have committed myself, and I must go through with it, I suppose. Do you know, young man, what decided my choice of you out of—my God, I don’t dare recall the number!—myriads?”

Gilead disclaimed any consciousness of exclusive merit.

“It was the Montaigne,” said the stranger. “I want cheering, I want sympathy, I want self-forgetfulness; I do not want irresponsible chatter. The possession, in a refined mind, of qualities suitable to my needs seemed to speak from your reply, and from your reply alone. Can you chop wood?”

“I must not say I cannot,” said Gilead modestly; “because I have never tried.”

“No matter,” said the stranger dispiritedly. “So long as your presence and example stimulate me to exertion, my purpose is served. I will be frank with you. The weight upon my bones exactly symbolises another upon my conscience” (Gilead’s lips tightened). “The two are so associated, in fact, that, with every ounce of flesh I may lose, my conscience will be correspondingly and automatically lightened. A return to reasonable proportions would make me a happy man.”

Gilead regarded the speaker steadily. What despicable villainy was this, to be so cowed and humbled under the superstition that his personal bulk was directly attributable to his crimes! So he read the implication; and he could have laughed, in another mood, over the retributions exacted by self-indulgence. But that Winsom Wyllie, the sinister, the demoniac, the masterful, should have resolved himself into this! Well, all wickedness was vanity, but he had not thought to encounter a vanity quite so abject.

The stranger turned heavily, and, motioning Gilead to accompany him, slouched towards the rearward shed.

“Yes,” he said, “my thoughts weigh me down; they are too much for my single endurance; that was why I wanted a companion to distract me from them—to take me out of myself.”

There were a couple of blocks and stools standing ready, with bill-hooks and a plentiful supply of logs waiting to be split. The stranger took his seat, and Gilead, divesting himself of his coat, followed his example. The other observed him with a doleful curiosity.

“This is new to you,” he said. “I daresay you are wondering how I come to have the run of the place. It is closed, as a matter of fact, from lack of patronage by the unemployed, who nevertheless themselves declare that they are as numerous and deserving as ever. I hired it for a week, stipulating that my personal labour should be set against the rent. If you want to spare your fingers, don’t hold your billet like that. Watch me.”

For several minutes he hewed and laboured in a perfect frenzy of energy, and only desisted when he was streaming from every pore.

“Ha!” he said. “I lard the lean earth, like—like whom?”

“Falstaff, I think,” said Gilead.

The stranger looked at him with a slightly stimulated but still rueful curiosity.

“You are a reader,” he said; “you answer to your own description in other respects. Why do you call yourself George Barnwell?”

“Why not?” said Gilead stiffly.

“A common thief and highwayman?”

“I never thought of that,” said Gilead unguardedly.

“Didn’t you?” said the stranger languidly—“a pseudonym, as I thought, and not a very well-chosen one. Now, would you mind telling me—?”

“Assumed, I confess,” said Gilead.

“The guess was mine,” said the stranger. “Your clothes, your bearing—ah, well! You conceal something?”

“My name.”

“Anything else?”

“My object, perhaps.”

“Indeed? Is not this frankness, now, to be mutual?”

“It was partly,” said Gilead, “that I wished to investigate a very curious affair. I am a seeker after the truth, a—if I may so put it, a practical psychologist. My sole scruple was that, in applying for the post, I risked deposing a more deserving, because a more needy, candidate.”

“The money was no object to you then?”

“None whatever.”

The other nodded with some melancholy gratification.

“The indifference shall be reciprocal,” he said. “It shall be none to me. Indeed I could no longer think of insulting your psychology by any suggestion of payment.”

“Very well,” said Gilead. “I have no wish to tax your conscience in a fresh matter. What its sensitiveness decrees is sure to be right.”

He spoke with fathomless irony; but, at the word conscience, the stranger seized his bill-hook and set to chopping again with a violence that was simply destructive.

“‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt!’” he gasped presently, pausing in a state of semi-collapse.

He groaned, wrung his brow, and squatting, sunk upon himself like an unbaked cottage loaf, heaved a dismal sigh and looked up.

“Since we are established on these very intimate and confidential terms,” he said, “tell me frankly, how does my size strike you?”

“All of a heap,” said Gilead shortly.

The other moaned.

“But less of a heap than when you first entered—O, yes! be candid and admit it.”

“Why, surely,” began Gilead, with some indignation, “you are not expecting—”

“When one is excruciatingly conscious of his every ounce avoirdupois,” interrupted Mr Wyllie miserably, “he knows, if it is no more than a button that has burst off his waistcoat. Something, however insignificant, has gone. The question is, how long will it take to run off the whole?”

“More than a week,” said Gilead. “You’ll have to hire another yard—several yards; or else adopt other means.”

“It is strange,” said Mr Wyllie, almost weeping, “that the canker of a corroding conscience should, instead of devouring, blow some men out!”

“It’s the case with the oak-gall,” said Gilead. “Irony is absurd in commenting on the ways of Nature.”

The stranger glanced at him rather balefully, and resumed his chopping but languidly.

“I don’t know, after all, that you’ll suit me,” he said.

“Never mind about that at present,” said Gilead. “The business of the honorarium being waived, this becomes a mere friendly accommodation.”

“But it’s just the friendliness I question,” answered the stranger, aggrieved.

He laboured for a little in a sullen silence, while Gilead, totally forgetful of his own inactivity, watched him, pursuing his thoughts the while.

“Brixton,” he said abstractedly, “is not Norwood; but it neighbours on it.”

“I perceive,” snapped the other, “that you are quite a traveller.”

Gilead hardly heard him. He was speculating as to how he could most tellingly introduce the subject of his mission.

“There are butterflies,” he said suddenly and firmly, “in the Zermatt Valley.”

“There are also, I believe,” said Mr Wyllie, “owls in Athens and coals at Newcastle.”

He paused in his labour, and glooming round, in a dismally sarcastic spirit, encountered the eyes of the young man fixed keenly on him.

“Well, sir,” he said; “what then?”

“If wood-chopping failed to reduce your fat,” said Gilead distinctly, “you might try butterfly hunting.”

“O! might I?”

“And mountain-climbing.”

“Indeed?”

“The pursuit of unprotected females is also, doubtless, conducive to an active state of body.”

“This may be pleasantry—”

“While a murderous assault or so on a few trusting old gentlemen might help to take something out of you.”

Mr Wyllie uttered an exclamation, half rose, and sank down again with a flabby smile.

“I would merely suggest St. Niklaus in the Zermatt Valley as a suitable headquarters to such operations,” said Gilead. “Do you know the place at all?”

His companion shook his head.

“This humour, young gentleman,” he said, “is, I presume, of the new order. I confess it is beyond my perhaps old-fashioned understanding.”

His tone was extremely lofty and courteous, but he appeared, in spite of it, to wax suddenly very wroth.

“What did you mean, sir,” he cried, “by your allusion to unprotected females?”

“I refer you to your own conscience, sir,” answered Gilead, as loftily.

“My conscience, sir,” said the stranger, “acquits me of any but the most consistently chivalrous attitude, the most respectful, the most diffident even towards the sex.”

“Then to what,” said Gilead, aghast before this enormous dissembling, “do you attribute its burden, which corresponds, by your own confession, with that upon your bones?”

“Now is this depravity or innocence,” cried the stranger, apostrophising space, “that can discover no pretext for self-reproach in any courses but those of libertinism?” He faced about on his stool, puffing and gasping: “I owe it to myself; I owe it more to the spotless fame of another,” he said, “that this gross slander should not pass unrefuted. You appear to be a reader, sir. Tell me, have you ever read ‘Night-Lights’?”

“No,” said Gilead, astonished.

“‘The Glow-worm in the Grass’?”

“No.”

“‘The Evanescence of Evadne’?”

“No.”

The stranger, with a supreme effort, sat up.

“A reader!” he exclaimed scornfully—“a reader! And you will be telling me next, I suppose, that you have never even heard of Cornelia Cox!”

“I am bound to confess that I never have,” said Gilead.

The stranger smacked his bill-hook into the block before him, and, with a mighty struggle, got to his feet.

“What?” he cried hoarsely: “Cornelia, the one, the peerless, the incomparable, the first novelist of her age—and he does not even know her name! O, in what nethermost depths of darkness is not the philistine of our generation capable of enclosing himself! Not to have heard of Cornelia Cox!”

“Sir,” said Gilead, rising, nettled, in his turn, and moved to an instant resolution. “I am sorry that my ignorance offends you. But though I am uninformed as to the lady’s name and works, I can claim some knowledge of another romancer which may both startle and disturb you. I allude, sir, to Mr Winsom Wyllie.”

“Well,” said the stranger, for the first time coolly—“what of him? I did not write the book, nor, I trust, are you presuming to attribute its authorship to Miss Cox?”

“Book? Authorship?” cried Gilead, staring.

“Certainly,” said the other. “You did not guess? But your ignorance was excusable in that case. Yes, sir, I confess, reciprocating your confidence, that my name also was assumed. I had particular reasons—as who would not have—for concealing my own in a public advertisement of such a character, and I signed with the first that occurred to my memory. It was taken from a popular feuilleton which I had observed in the hands of a young lady by whom I happened to sit months ago in the twopenny tube. ‘Winsom Wyllie, Ladykiller’—that was, if I remember rightly, the title of the tale, and I borrowed it haphazard in my emergency.”

Gilead, like one in a dream, put his hand to his brow.

“Would you—would you mind telling me,” he said, “what is your real name?”

“I have no reason to be ashamed of it, sir,” said the stranger. “It is Bundy—Emmanuel Bundy.”

CHAPTER XIII.

THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN (continued)

UTTERLY dumfoundered as he was for the moment, Gilead very quickly rallied from his stupefaction, and, summoning all his native urbanity to his aid, advanced a step and seized the stranger’s right hand in both of his own.

“Mr Bundy,” he said, “I apologise to you with all my heart.”

His tone was so unmistakably sincere, that the obese gentleman descended, figuratively, from the stilts on which he was mounted and involuntarily returned the pressure of his fingers, only gasping a little in a slow and cod-like manner.

“The sarcasm, the innuendo,” said Gilead, “of which I cannot pretend to hold myself guiltless, must have appeared to you as pointless as they were impertinent. My sole excuse is that I took you for someone else.”

“O, indeed!” said Mr Bundy, heavily perplexed.

“Yes,” said Gilead—“I cannot, I must not say for whom, lest I further endanger a confidence which my rashness has already sufficiently imperilled. But when I tell you, sir, in the sole attempt at self-justification which exists to me, and in response to the noble candour which has made me acquainted with your real name, that mine is Gilead Balm—”

“What! Of Lamb’s Agency?” exclaimed the stranger.

“I entreat you, sir,” continued Gilead, “to believe that I am actuated by no spirit of empty vaunting, but, on the contrary, by one of humiliation that the business of my office should have been committed to so unintelligent a representative as myself. I can plead, sir, nothing but the excuse of good intentions. I believed you, as I say, to be someone else, and, acting upon that assumption, I answered, under a fictitious name, your advertisement, and was so happy, or so unfortunate, as to find myself engaged. My explanation can go no farther, nor be offered less lamely. Will you be generously content with it, with my reiterated apologies, and with the assurance that whatever confidences I may have surprised will remain absolutely sacred to me?”

His candour, his winning manner, not to speak of his self-revelation, won him at once and as always complete absolution. Mr Bundy, with a supreme effort to throw off the lowness of spirit into which he had again sunk, responded, as heartily as possible, in kind.

“Say no more, sir,” he said; “say no more. I congratulate myself, I positively do, on this accident.”

“We have been talking at cross-purposes,” said Gilead.

“We will do so no longer,” cried the other. “I should know, sir, of the lofty motives which actuate your Agency; and, more, of the personal reputation of its founder. I should take it as an honour, sir, if you would permit me to make bare to Mr Balm the bosom which has already, perchance unwittingly, half revealed itself to a stranger.”

“I shall be delighted,” said Gilead gravely. “You heap coals of fire on my head.”

“Then, sir,” said Mr Bundy, with a gleam of real brightness, “do me the favour—the morning is well advanced—to share with me my luncheon, which lies ready for us yonder.”

He led the way to the shed, where lay a basket well packed with pâté de foie gras sandwiches under a napkin, some Bath buns and cream cakes, a syphon of soda-water, a tumbler, and a flask of whisky.

“Sit, sir, sit,” said the stranger; “and, while we eat, I will, with your permission, make known to you that part of my story which turns upon the fortuity which has made you my honoured confidant. It is soon told.”

He offered Gilead a sandwich, took a clump of three himself, devoured two with a falling visage, and, waving the other in his hand, began:—

“My name, sir, is as I told you Emmanuel Bundy; my residence is situate in the Leigham Court Road, Streatham; my business is that of a hide-merchant, in the pursuit of which, I may say, I have amassed a considerable fortune. I am fifty-four years of age. That odious vanity which would falsify the accounts of Nature has never been mine. Years, as they accumulate gold, accumulate wisdom. Why should we boast of the lesser gain and repudiate the greater? Amongst all the possessions which they have brought to me I account none more priceless than my acquaintance with Cornelia Cox.”

He paused a moment to devour his sandwich and to help himself to three more.

“Ah, Mr Balm!” he said, “you must forgive my astonishment over your confession of ignorance as to that transcendent, that incomparable woman. Yet, in truth, my own acquaintance with her dates but from two years back.” (He took half of the three sandwiches at a bite, before he continued):—“I had always found a refuge in books from the monotony of my sordid, and none too savoury occupation. It was left to that moment to reveal to me the full inner heart and significance of literature. Such eloquence, such fire, such an intimate understanding of the deep workings of the human soul! The melting passion of ‘Night-Lights,’ the exquisite je ne sais quoi of ‘Evadne,’ the sensuous luminosity of the ‘Glow-worm’! Here was a woman, I felt, who had tasted the cup of life to its golden depths.”

He sighed, drew himself on a full tumbler of whisky and soda, drained it, sighed again profoundly, and continued, taking another handful of sandwiches:—

“I am a bachelor, sir. I had never until that gracious moment encountered a soul capable of understanding and responding to the deep sentiments within my own. Every profound expression of her feeling seemed to find an echo in my breast. Truths that I had conceived, but had failed to find utterance for, she could crystallize in a phrase. The insensate world of criticism accused her of platitude: jackasses, whose pachydermatous hides were insensible to the fine point of satire, were dull to the blows of anything less than a bludgeon. But I recognized; I understood.

“One day I came across her portrait in an illustrated paper. I will not dwell upon my emotions. It was a face—haunting, ethereal—which exactly embodied my conception of the writer. Looking into its eyes, I could fathom at a glance the unmistakable source of ‘Night-Lights’; the very ‘Evanescence of Evadne’ spoke in that ductile form. From that moment my existence became little more than a devouring hunger, a prolonged swoon of passion.”

He finished the sandwiches and started on a cream tart before he spoke again.

“One day, after a struggle with myself, I did a desperate thing—I wrote, through her publishers, to Miss Cornelia Cox. I wrote palpitating, in a delicious tremor; I pronounced myself the most faithful, the most adoring of her disciples; my pen travelled on the wings of intoxication. To my rapture she answered me.”

He stopped to take a second tumbler of whisky and soda.

“She answered me,” he said, gasping; “and I answered her answer. She wrote again. By degrees a regular correspondence was established between us. I tasted her soul in periodic budgets—a delirious experience; but those sacred, those melodious groves must remain undesecrated of the outer throng. You will understand and excuse me, Mr Balm.”

“Certainly,” said Gilead.

“O!” cried the obese gentleman, “why had I not, in those exquisite first days, the courage of my convictions! I desired, and always desired a still more intimate union of souls, and I delayed until delay became fatal. I was not then by many degrees what you see me now. Though constitutionally of a full habit of body, it had remained for the sun of passion, it appeared, to develop in me this extreme fruitiness. For two years now we have corresponded, and I have been swelling all the time; and during all the time, Mr Balm, we have never yet once met.”

“Not?” said Gilead. “Well, what then? For all Miss Cox knows, your present proportions may have been your first.”

While he spoke, Mr Bundy had finished the last of the buns and cream-cakes. He now struck his breast, and gazed up to heaven with a very full look.

“Impossible,” he said; “for—the truth must be confessed—we have latterly exchanged photographs, and the one of myself that I sent her was taken years ago when I was slim and comely.”

He rose with difficulty, and, feeling in the pocket of his coat which hung near, produced two photographs in a folding frame which he offered to Gilead.

“Look, sir,” he said hoarsely, “and consider the measure of retribution exacted for one moment of unthinking vanity. Yet surely—the views we had exchanged had been in themselves so fine, so shapely, had been uttered in so exalted a strain of poetry—the little imposition, amounting to no more than a harmless anachronism, might have been thought natural and excusable? And in succumbing to the temptation I had no thought but to resume, as quickly and as effectually as possible, the contours of the photograph. Alas! in compounding with one’s conscience Destiny always chooses the inconvenient moment for exposure. Judge of my feelings when I tell you that circumstances ruled, all in one instant, that the too-long-delayed meeting between us should be fixed, at last and inevitably, for the middle of next week!”

He stood by, quite sagging with dejection, while Gilead, with a profound face, examined the pictures. That of the lady presented a half-length in book-muslin, a little posée, the visage a little spare, but sentimental and interesting. Turning to the other, he found it hard to repress a smile. It had certainly been taken, by inference, years ago. Mr Bundy appeared in it as a comparatively slim gentleman of sedate, but not mature age, with queer clownish hair and a relatively distinguished mien. Gravely he returned the articles to their owner.

“You have honoured me, sir,” he said, “with your confidence. My advice, without presumption, is at your service.”

“I ask it; I entreat it,” cried Mr Bundy.

“Then, sir,” said Gilead, “believe me that vanity never yet cured vanity, but that truth is the universal panacea. You, and presumably the lady, genuinely desire this union?”

“A union on her part,” said the sufferer miserably, “with the subject of the photograph? I believe I can answer for her so far. As for myself, should I take such steps otherwise to make it possible? You comprehend now, Mr Balm, my position; my desperate essay, on my doctor’s advice, to abate—at a moment’s notice, so to speak—my figure; the torture of conscience which drove me to seek, in the distraction of cheerful companionship, some forgetfulness of the purpose with which I wrought, and the deceit which had necessitated it.”

“You might, with as much hope of success,” said Gilead, “seek to reduce an egg by boiling.” He spoke with a certain sternness. “No, Mr Bundy,” he said, “the proportions of the picture will not be yours within a week. How can you expect it when—I must speak plainly—you pamper your stomach with one hand while you reduce it with the other?”

Mr Bundy, with a self-conscious look, glanced down at the luncheon-basket.

“I am afraid,” he murmured, “that you have made a poor meal.”

“I have had one sandwich, sir,” answered Gilead: “and I could wish, for your sake, that I had had all. But what can it matter to you? The spiritual communion for which you crave is hardly concerned with things of the flesh.”

“It must suffer, its lustre must sink diminished in the shadow of the moral falsehood,” cried Mr Bundy, abashed and despairing.

“Then, sir,” said Gilead, “apply truth for a remedy. It is the only one. Come, be a man, Mr Bundy, and own up and ask absolution.”

“I dare not,” answered the obese gentleman, almost weeping—“I dare not. Her sensitiveness—the shock—my tongue-tied confusion! She does not even know my vocation. Sooner or later she would have to, and then—the double disillusionment!”

“I would not wrong her,” said Gilead; “but wealth, with the best of us, is a flattering recommendation.”

The other looked at him meltingly.

“Ah!” he sighed, “if I could only find one, cultured, diplomatic, who would consent to be my deputy for the truth!”

Gilead drew himself up.

“You mean me,” he said.

“I know you represent it,” faltered Mr Bundy—and stopped, casting down his eyes.

The young man considered a little.

“Very well, sir,” he said suddenly. “I owe you a certain reparation. I will undertake this delicate business, on condition that you give me a note of introduction to the lady.”

The obese gentleman laughed with glee.

“Come,” he said—“come home with me at once, and I will write it.”

THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN (continued)

At three o’clock that same afternoon Gilead found himself on the door-step of a bijou residence in Maida Vale. He was very grave, and for more than a present reason. One having the power to examine into his mind would have discovered there a steadfast purpose of loyalty, a determination to ignore the slanderous whisperings of certain dark spirits which were seeking to undermine in him a rooted faith, to destroy a cherished ideal. One would have found there, also, perhaps, a little pathetic unaccountable sense of weariness, a shadowy emotion—the first in his life—of self-pity. If he had, he would have seen them dismissed as soon as realised. The emotion was essentially feminine, and Gilead had surely despised himself for even succumbing to it. He could not be such a woman as to pet a grievance before it was justified. There was no grievance at all to justify itself; with his eyes set to the truth he told himself so, and he had the will to believe it. Suspicion was a germ that once admitted destroyed the reason; only that strong will had power to keep it out.

A slattern servant admitted him into the bijou hall, and there kept him standing while she delivered the note to her mistress. She came back shortly and, breathing heavily, showed him into the bijou drawing-room and there left him. Glancing around, Gilead saw torn lace curtains, a piano with candle brackets run with grease, a dirty table-cloth, and on it the debris of a meal of biscuits and soda-water scattered among many papers. The whole house looked as if it habitually woke too late to tidy up the confusion of yesterday.

A step at the door brought him to attention, and he bowed with a feeling between chivalry and wonder. The incomparable one stood before him, and he had to admit to himself that she was gaunt, fade, and presumably in the over-prime of life. Certainly there was a resemblance to the portrait, but as certainly it was the resemblance of an unflattering copy. Miss Cox was in a negligée of soiled white serge or flannel; there was an air of transcendental slipshoddiness about her; her hair fell in unconsidered loops; her thinness amounted to emaciation; her complexion had once no doubt been ethereal, but had materialized in the course of time, mellowing to the tone of antique parchment. But the expression was all there, spiritual, ineffable—and languishing, for the utmost of its passionate soul, through a couple of large burning eyes.

“Mr Balm?” she exclaimed introductorily, in a deep agitated voice.

He bowed a second time; and she entered, closed the door, and sank into a chair. She was patently nervous and overcome—a lady whose sensitive organization was not proof against unforeseen demands upon it. In one lean long hand she held the accrediting letter; in the other a handkerchief, none too spotless, with which she perpetually fanned herself.

“I trust, Madam,” said Gilead gently, “that, in consenting to act as an intermediary in a matter of so delicate a nature, I convey with me your correspondent’s intimation as to the reasons which induced him to the choice of his representative. Let me assure you that I undertake the confidence with the profoundest sympathy with and respect for its nature. He describes me—”

She raised an entreating hand, interrupting him. “He describes you, sir,” she said, in faintly hollow tones, “as his deputy for the truth. O, believe me, I understand fully! I have long dreaded this moment.”

“Madam,” exclaimed Gilead, startled.

She leaned forward, agonised, intense.

“He has discovered it, then,” she said, “and the romance of my life is blighted in its vernal prime. The photograph—”

“I have had the privilege of seeing it,” said Gilead at a loss, observing that she stopped.

To his horror the lady, on that admission, sank back in her seat, sobbing amphorically.

“Deliver your blow, sir, in swiftest mercy,” she said. “Strike and spare not. Return to your principal and denounce the fond impostor, who sought, by an ardent subterfuge, to draw out for yet a little the linked sweetness of a correspondence which had come to form the romance and solace of her loveless days. Your mission is the truth. Speak it unpityingly. Compare for his disenchantment the portrait with the original; say that you found me spare, unattractive if you will, past my first youth; assert, what it is useless to deny, that, with the desperate purpose to retain his admiration, to evoke even a warmer, a more ecstatic communion of soul, I did that, succumbed to a temptation, whose fruits could only realise themselves in dust and vanity. Yes, sir, I confess it; the photograph represents the Cornelia of many years ago; and even if, as some say—Mr Balm! What is it!”

He was stretching up his arms, standing on his toes, in a sort of moral elevation.

“As his photograph represents the Emmanuel of many years ago!” he cried, and came flat down on his soles.

She rose, she uttered a little scream in a deep way.

“What is that you say!” she cried.

“Madam,” he said, “nothing can be gained by evasion. The Mr Bundy of the photograph was interesting and slim; the Mr Bundy of to-day is interesting and fat. It was to acquaint you of that fact—of a trifling misrepresentation, common, it appears, to you both—that I accepted my commission.”

Miss Cox rose, she clasped her hands exquisitely and craned her lean neck.

“Fat!” she whispered.

“I cannot qualify the term,” said Gilead firmly. “As fat, Madam, as butter. What then? Napoleon was fat, Horace was fat; Johnson, Boswell, Gibbon, Luther, Handel were all fat. Mr Bundy cannot be blamed for emulating the example of those great men; and if—”

“Fat!” repeated the lady, closing her eyes, and in a voice of thrilled ecstasy: “I doat, simply doat on a fat man!”

“You do?” responded Gilead, with an air of delighted relief. “Then, Madam, a fat man doats on you, and nothing remains to me but to congratulate you both on this most happy termination to a misunderstanding.”

He bowed, as if he felt his mission accomplished.

“O, stay, sir!” cried Miss Cox. She took a quick step forward; she pressed her handkerchief to her bosom. “My Bundy!” she murmured—“My own Bundy! And was it apprehension over his little roguish deceit that moved him to this step? But I fear, I shudder over my own. Will he forgive it? Will he credit that the waste, the decline—O, we starve on despond: hope is so filling! Tell him that his message has put new life into me; tell him that, repossessing him, I am already twice the woman I was. To meet him half-way, I will absorb the sustenance naturally repugnant to me—gross meats and aliments, in place of the fruits and spring water most sufficing to my needs. Tell him that, given a little time—”

She paused, breathless. “It is what he himself most craves,” said Gilead. A certain perplexity overcame him. “I confess, Madam,” he said, “that what puzzles me is the sudden inevitability of this meeting so long delayed.”

“It was due to myself,” answered the lady; and, panting, continued, with an hysterical incoherence: “A recent snap-shot—horrible, libellous, revolting—appeared in a weekly paper—I feared he would see it—urged by desperation—a travesty of the truth—reality less disenchanting—recoil from worst to something comparatively reassuring—resolved in despair to risk all—force conclusions for bliss or damnation—insisted on meeting, and having written would have withdrawn, but too late. And now—” she broke off with a gasp, and then continued: “O, sir! your appearance—the letter—I believed that he had seen, and that you—his agent—the messenger of my doom—!”

She stopped, gazing at her hearer in liquid emotion.

“You wrong me,” said Gilead gravely, “in deeming me capable of so unchivalrous a deed. No, Madam; my mission—it is unnecessary and would be unadvisable to explain how and where undertaken—was one of appeal on behalf of Mr Bundy’s conscious disabilities. That mission being now accomplished, I trust to the satisfaction of all parties, I shall beg permission to take my leave, only first charging myself with such answer as you shall deem it expedient to return to your richly endowed suitor.”

THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN (concluded)

Gilead walked back to the Agency with a firm step, and that steadfast purpose of loyalty burning unquenched in his heart. On the way he stopped at a famous jeweller’s in Bond Street to make a purchase, having accomplished which he continued his journey to the office.

Something unwonted in the aspect of his private room struck him the instant he entered it. It was very orderly, like a newly-trimmed grave, and the amanuensis, though it was not yet five o’clock, was absent. He sat down at his desk a moment, and buried his face in his hands. Then suddenly he rose, and walked across to the table in the window. The typewriter was closed; the papers relating to all business, past and to come, were neatly docketed and arranged in accessible sheaves. After a moment’s strange observation he turned away, and, stepping to the bell, with a somewhat pale face, summoned a favoured employé.

“Mr Nestle,” he said, when the man appeared: “is he in?”

“Mr Nestle and Miss Halifax, sir,” was the answer, “were both unavoidably summoned away. Miss Halifax left a message begging, as a great favour, that you would call at the flat, sir, if you desired for any reason to see her.”

Gilead nodded.

“Thank you, Clement,” he said. “I think I will go round.”

He did not hesitate; he did not pause a moment to question the immutability of his faith; there and then he went forth and walked direct to his destination. The little maid at the door admitted him, smiling but abashed. She remembered, if he did not, the contretemps with the lift-porter a few nights earlier. A consciousness of concern, moreover, as to the meaning of this visit repeated at an inopportune moment, fluttered, no doubt, the heart under her spruce bib. She introduced him into the drawing-room in a scarce audible voice, and shut the door upon him hurriedly.

Gilead, parcel in hand, walked across the room, a stiff little smile on his lips. Both the secretary and the amanuensis were present before him, as he had expected to find them. The girl stood with her right arm resting on the piano-top, as if for support. Her face was very white; but she neither moved nor spoke. The man stood back, as if slunk into the shadow of the window curtains. He was by far the more dumbfoundered of the two.

“I was told I might find you both here,” said Gilead quietly, “and I accept the occasion gladly for a little private talk. I have been away these two or three days on a wild-goose chase, Miss Halifax. After whom, do you suppose? Why, an old friend of yours with an odd name. Perhaps it is right—stop me if you object—that Herbert should be made acquainted at last with the circumstances of that iniquitous persecution. Do you recall that late occasion in the office, when I spoke of an advertisement which you had overlooked?”

“I had not overlooked it, Mr Balm.”

She spoke in a steady toneless voice.

“Not?” said Gilead, with a faint effort at surprise; but his lips twitched.

“No,” she said. “Only I had not wished to call your attention to it—naturally.”

“That was wrong,” he answered, “however generously your reticence was designed to spare me; still, as it happens, the quest was a fruitless one. The advertiser was not the person I sought; and so we remain as far as ever from a solution of that problem. Yet the coincidence of the name was so strange a one as to seem to justify me in the pursuit. And, after all, it appears that he adopted it from a newspaper story which he once chanced to observe in the hands of a young lady sitting next him in the train.”

“Of mine,” said Miss Halifax, in the same unlifted voice. “So that is how it happened, is it?”

Nestle, in his shadows, uttered a little stifled ejaculation, which Gilead heard but disregarded. He had to make an effort; but he made it courageously, and, unwrapping his parcel, displayed a jewel case, which, being opened, revealed a fine pearl necklace with a diamond clasp.

“Indeed?” he said, with a show of unconcern. “Then the name is not so remarkable a one as we supposed? Or is it possible that the romancer himself adopted it from the living fact? Well, in any case, my quest having resulted in barrenness need not be discussed further. Let us turn to a more profitable matter. I am not intending to break my promise, and I will not be the first to speak. At the same time I am going to ask you, Miss Halifax, to accept provisionally this little token of my most grateful regard.”

She came away quite steadily from her support, and took the case gently from his hand. Her lips were brilliant; the lids of her eyes were flushed; she bore her shame like a fallen goddess.

“They are lovely,” she said. “How generous, how loyal, how noble you are! But you will take this away with you when you go, and keep it for someone worthier of your faith.”

“Vera!” cried Nestle hoarsely.

She took no notice of him, but, placing the jewels softly on the table, came and stood before her employer. And then he knew that the shadow he had dreaded and resisted so long was about to fall and overwhelm him.

“How can you still pretend to believe in us?” she said, in a low even voice. “How can you bear to remain so staunch against your own inner conviction? From the moment I knew that you had seen that advertisement and the name, I knew that the end was come. And it is come, though still not, in your unswerving chivalry, at your instance. The sentence shall be mine. Your great heart shall not suffer any longer this torture of a trust that dies so hard. I will tear it out with my own hands—I daresay because its pain hurts me too, and not from any moral heroism. Mr Balm, there is no such person as Winsom Wyllie; there never was such a person, except in the silly story from which I borrowed the name for my own purposes, never dreaming that the haphazard choice would recoil upon my head like this. He, and that scientific father, and the butterfly-hunting, and the will and the persecution were all pure concoctions from beginning to end. I have been in Switzerland, but only with my brother Herbert here. Yes, he is my brother, and we are liars and impostors from first to last.”

He stirred, with a suggestion of unsteadiness, and stiffening himself, walked to the window and stood looking out of it, his back turned to her. She put a hand one moment to her eyes, and, following, spoke on in her resolute self-abasement:—

“If you will listen, it is right that you should be told all. I plead, and am going to plead nothing whatever in extenuation, save that when I elaborated that wicked lie, my education of the heart had not even been begun. I have learnt much, travelled far since then. A whole continent seems to lie between my present and my past understandings, and looking across it I see the track of bleeding feet, multitudes of them, wandering this way, and I shiver and hide my face to think how, of all the deceits and hypocrisies they include, my own vile shadow, far off over the waste, figures for the first and worst.”

She put a hand to her bosom, panting a little. Her brother came creeping out of the darkness, and, standing near her, spoke for the first time.

“Not hers alone, sir. I am as much to blame, and more.”

Gilead made a movement, as if impatient of the interruption, and he shrank back.

“My own shadow,” continued the girl—“and I have no choice but to admit it. If I dare to claim that it no longer represents me, there are my footsteps among the others reaching to this very moment to give me the lie. I am what I am, not through any independent purpose of my own, but because, in common with the common impostors on that long journey, I have found my soul in the heaven of chivalry which it revealed to me. I ask you only in charity to believe the word of an adventuress that, during all these months of my redemption, my punishment has most lain in my own shameful consciousness of the lie I had doomed myself to live. To have been honoured by you, to have shared your confidence, to have acquiesced in moral condemnations, and to have known all the time that I was utterly unworthy of your trust—more guileful than the pretenders I helped to expose.”

Her voice faltered and ceased, and for a while there ensued a profound silence. But in a little she took up again, with a scarce audible sigh, the burden of her confession:—

“I ask you to believe that, and I ask you to believe that I am even less wretched in my voluntary self-exposure than I have long been in my deceit. I have learned to value the truth, and I can speak it at last.

“Mr Balm, at the time when you engaged my brother, giving him the chance of his life, we had both long been orphans. We lived together, and I was wholly dependent on him. He had been educated to the law, and was a man of brilliant, if undisciplined, talents. He was ambitious for us both; and with both of us, I think, imagination was wont to run ahead of discretion. Unfortunately for him the morale of the firm by whom he was employed, and to whom he acted as head conveyancing clerk, was none of the best. It confessed itself in speculative enterprises, which ultimately led to the collapse and bankruptcy of Broker & Borrodaile. My brother, though morally innocent, suffered through the disrepute which the firm in its transactions had brought upon itself. He found it difficult to obtain a new situation, and before very long we were in a desperate state. It was then that Mr Plover—who had always believed in Herbert and sympathised with our misfortunes—came to our assistance, and was the means of procuring my brother a post such as he had never dreamed of possessing.

“I think that its magnitude, its possibilities, the apparent ease with which he had secured it, turned both our heads. We began to imagine all sorts of brilliant sequels to that beginning—fairy-tales at first, but by and by the prospect of actually realizing on them in some daring way began to haunt us. The world of romance had always appealed to our minds, and no doubt the atmosphere of adventure in which we had both long been living had served to vitiate our moral outlook. What if we could so take advantage of golden circumstance as to assure ourselves a lasting share in the enormous interests with which Herbert was connected! What if my brother’s employer could be inveigled into—into marrying my brother’s sister!”

She had been speaking rapidly latterly; and now she stopped in an instant, as if she had surmounted at a leap the worst of the task she had set herself. And presently, breathing like one after a race, she began again:—

“It was what I had to say, and I have said it; and I am sure—yes, I am sure you will understand my purpose in saying it.

“The plot shaped itself by degrees; I think in its manufacture the mere romantic intricacies of it quite obsessed and fascinated us. Commonplace creatures as we were, without position or recommendation, we were never so presumptuous as to suppose that you could be brought to take an interest in your secretary’s sister merely for your secretary’s sake. Some story of innocence persecuted and in distress must be invented to draw your attention and captivate your imagination. Then, lured into belief, I was to take my own magnificent measures with you to bring you to my feet. It was our double misfortune that my brother had an unqualified belief in my capacity for the task.”

She paused another moment, before she went on:—

“After all it was a desperate venture, and might have miscarried at the outset. I will not even say that I wish it had, since, humiliated though I am, I would not for all the world exchange my new for my old self. But the prize to be won seemed so inestimable, the hazard so thrilling. I do not believe the hateful ingratitude of the thing even struck us. We were born storytellers, and even as children were used to write endless romances together. We have played at life since, I think; I think we have never really grown up. Among the many stories associated with my brother’s office, we thought that this might pass muster without detection. But it was first necessary for us, of course, to separate. Under the pretext of a visit to the country I left our lodgings and repaired, as privately arranged, to Norwood, where, in an assumed name, I hired by the month the little house you will recall. In the meantime, as a precaution against possible enquiries, my brother had changed his lodgings for others at a distance. And then, having prepared our ground, we opened the game. The bogus advertisement was inserted; my brother craftily engaged your interest to it, and, when he saw that the bait had been taken, despatched to me that telegram which you saw, and which was to serve its two purposes, the one to acquaint me of your soon arrival, the other to furnish imaginary proof of the persecution under which I suffered.

“I need not say more. Carried away by the dramatic character of my part, I played it with a fervour which almost made me believe in it myself, and which I sometimes found it difficult afterwards to maintain. The miserable fraud succeeded even beyond our expectations in one way. It procured me a generous means of livelihood; and if it procured me also—”

Her voice thickened and stopped; but she cleared her throat resolutely, and continued:—

“Mr Balm, you must take what measures you will for our exposure and punishment. I beg you with all my soul not to spare us. The meanness of the fraud, the ingratitude, the thoughtlessness as to its moral effect upon you to whom we owed everything—O, nothing that I can say may palliate our guilt, or express the sickness of remorse which came to us when we grew to see ourselves as we were in the light of your true nobility. Only in atonement can we ever again find relief from a misery and self-contempt which have grown to be unbearable. When I speak for myself I speak for my brother. What we have experienced, what we have learnt of you—O, the shame is killing! But don’t, don’t think that in one way we have taken the least, the most shadowy advantage of your trust. You will find everything in the most scrupulous order; and if—if in committing us to the fate we deserve, you can only find it in your heart to say once that you forgive us—”

He stopped her on the instant, facing about.

“Nestle,” he said in a commanding voice, “you will oblige me by going back to the office. I wish to have a word alone with your sister.”

The secretary started, turned, and without a word left the room.

For minutes after he was gone Gilead stood steadfastly regarding the tragic young figure before him. And at last he spoke.

“Supposing you had been successful in your purpose—what then? Were you to live the lie for ever—you, as my wife?”

She stood, the strain relaxed, mute and drooping by the little table. Once and once only had she glanced up at his face; and it had thrilled her with pride to see how the manliness, the nobility in it had suffered no disillusionment to affect them. If sorrow had entered there, will had not surrendered.

“I don’t know,” she whispered scarce audibly. “We had not—I think—got as far as considering that.”

He gave a little odd laugh.

“Typical romancers,” he said—“to end with the wedding bells!”

She put her hand upon the table for support. There a little sharp crack, and an involuntary cry from her lips. He hurried to her. The glass of a miniature on which her hand had rested had broken and scratched the ball of her thumb.

“Blood!” he said—“I must staunch it—” and he lifted the limb, though she strove to resist, and put the soft pink palm to his lips.

She gave a miserable cry—and on the instant he had his arms about her.

“Atonement!” he said hoarsely—“you speak of atonement? It must be in giving yourself to the man you have so shamefully deceived. Nothing short of your devoting your life to him can atone.”

“No, no,” she whispered; and for the first time the tears came thick to her eyes—“No—no—no—” she seemed incapable of any but that one heart-rent ejaculation.

He held her prisoner—fiercely, as though he dreaded that she would escape him.

“Do you know,” he said, “to what I was listening all the time the little miserable confession was being uttered? Why, to the chiming of the bells, the singing of the birds, the murmuring of the happy wind, that all began together the moment I heard that Herbert was your brother.”

[The End]

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

I’ve included all the interior images despite the poor quality of the source material. If you can provide better copies please contact Project Gutenberg Support.

Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. dumbfoundered/dumfoundered, frock-coat/frock coat, moneylender/money-lender, etc.) have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

Add illustrator’s name to title page.

Silently correct a few punctuation errors (quotation mark pairings, missing periods, etc.)

Images were moved to be nearer the scene they depict.

[Chapter I]

Change (she said, “sinct I come here.”) to since.

[Chapter VII]

“and gradually, as he proceded on his way” to proceeded.

(“You wont do it?”) to won’t.

[Chapter VIII]

“be made to recover the red morrocco handbag” to morocco.

“and had put the advertisement into the Daily Post” italicize Daily Post.

[Chapter IX]

“Was I? You are lieing, you know.” to lying.

[Chapter X]

“The Dragon-fly, sir? Name of Dangerfield,” to Dragonfly.

[Chapter XI]

(“The child,” said Gilead, still sternly—“is that her’s?”) to hers.

“it was evident, dated from other and lest righteous groves” to less.

[End of text]

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GILEAD BALM, KNIGHT ERRANT ***

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Table of Contents

GILEAD BALM, KNIGHT ERRANT

[COPYRIGHT]

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

GILEAD BALM

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I. THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

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

CHAPTER III. THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

CHAPTER IV. THE QUEST OF THE DOG

CHAPTER V. THE QUEST OF THE MARBLE STATUETTE

CHAPTER VI. THE QUEST OF THE ROSE-RING

I.

II.

III.

CHAPTER VII. THE QUEST OF THE WAX HAND

CHAPTER VIII. THE QUEST OF THE RED-MOROCCO HANDBAG

CHAPTER IX. THE QUEST OF THE REGISTERED PARCEL

CHAPTER X. THE QUEST OF THE SHADOW

CHAPTER XI. THE QUEST OF THE VEILED WOMAN

CHAPTER XII. THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN

CHAPTER XIII. THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN (continued)

THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN (continued)

THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN (concluded)

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE