“What is hard on you?” demanded Van Hupfeldt; and, had not the girl been so distraught, she would have seen that he had the semblance more of a murderer than of a lover. “What proofs do you want beyond my word? The man said that there were certificates, did he not? Well, let him produce them. The fact that he can’t is a proof that there were none.”
“Not quite. No—there is a doubt. He should have the benefit of the doubt. A man should not be condemned before he is tried, after all. If Miss L’Estrange was to say that there were no certificates, that would be proof. You must know her address—give it to me, and let me go straight to her—”
“Certainly, I have her address,” said Van Hupfeldt, his eyes winking a little with crafty thought, “but not, of course, in my head. You shall have it in a day or two. You can then write and question her from Rigsworth, and she will tell you that no certificate ever fell out of any picture.” He thought to himself: “for I shall see that she tells you what I wish, if she has any love of money.”
“But couldn’t you give me the address to-day?” asked Violet. “That would settle everything at once.”
“To-day I’m afraid it is out of the question,” answered Van Hupfeldt. “I have it put away in some drawer of some bureau. It may take a day or two; but find it I will, and, meantime, is it much to expect that my angel will believe in her one best and eternal friend? Assure me now that you will not see this undesirable person this evening.”
“I do not mean to at this moment, but I do not decide. I said that I would. He pretends he has something to say to me—”
“He has nothing! He is merely impudent. Where were you to see him? At the grave, I think? At the grave?”
Violet blushed and made no answer. Mrs. Mordaunt came in. “So, mother,” said Violet to her, “we go home to-morrow?”
“I have thought that it might be well, dear,” answered her mother, “in which case we shall have enough to do between now and then.”
“But why the sudden decision?”
“We are not at all moments our own masters and mistresses, dear. This at present seems the indicated course, and we must follow it.”
“May I have the pleasure to come with you, if only for a day or two?” asked Van Hupfeldt.
“Of course, we are always glad of your company, Mr. Van Hupfeldt,” answered Mrs. Mordaunt; “but it is such a trying journey, and it may affect your injury.”
“Not trying to me where Violet is,” said Van Hupfeldt.
“Violet should be a happy girl to have so much devotion lavished upon her, I am sure,” said Mrs. Mordaunt, with a fond smile at her daughter. “I do hope that she is duly grateful to you, and to the Giver of all our good.”
Violet said nothing. In her gloomy eyes, if one had looked, dwelt a rather hunted look. She presently left Van Hupfeldt and her mother, and in her own room lay on a couch thinking out her problem. “To go to the grave, or not to go?”
She had promised: but how if David Harcourt was truly the thing which he was said to be? Her maiden mind shrank and shuddered. It was possibly false, but, then, it was possibly true—all men seemed to be liars. She had better wait and first hear the truth from Miss L’Estrange. If Miss L’Estrange proved him false, she, Violet, would give herself one luxury, the writing to him of one note—such a note! stinging, crushing, killing! After which she would forget once and forever that such a being had ever lived, and seemed nice, and been detestable. Meantime, it would be too unmaidenly rash to see him. It could not be done; however much he drew her with his strong magnetism, she should not, and would not. Why could he not have been good, and grand, and high, and everything that is noble and wonderful, as a man should be? In that case, ah, then! As it was, how could she? It was his own fault, and she hated him. Still, she had promised, and one should keep one’s word unless the keeping becomes impossible. Moreover, since she was to leave London on the morrow, she should dearly like to see the grave once more. The new wreath must be already on its way from the florist’s. She would like to go, dearly, dearly, if only it were not for the lack of dignity and reserve.
Thinking such thoughts, she lay so long that Van Hupfeldt went away without seeing her again; but he had no intention of leaving it to chance whether she saw David that evening or not. Certain that the rendezvous was at the grave, his cautious mind proceeded to take due precautions, and by three o’clock the eyes of his spy, a young woman rather overdressed, were upon the grave in the Kensal Green cemetery, while Van Hupfeldt himself was sitting patient in the smoking-room of a near hotel, ready to be called the moment a sign of Violet should be seen.
Violet, however, did not go to the grave. About four o’clock one of the servants of 60A, Porchester Gardens, arrived at the cemetery in a cab, went to the grave, put the new wreath on it, and on the wreath put an envelope directed to “David Harcourt, Esq,” and went away. The moment she was gone, Van Hupfeldt’s spy had the envelope, and with it hurried to him in the hotel. Breaking it open without hesitation, he read the words: “Miss Mordaunt regrets that she is unable to visit her sister’s grave to-day, as she hoped, and from to-morrow morning she will be in the country; but if Mr. Harcourt really has anything of importance to communicate to her, he may write, and she will reply. Her address is Dale Manor, Rigsworth, near Kenilworth, Warwickshire.”
“What do you think of this handwriting?” Van Hupfeldt asked of his she-attendant, showing her the note. “Do you think you could imitate it?”
“It is big and bold enough; it doesn’t look difficult to imitate,” was the critical estimate.
“Just have a try, and let me see your skill. Write—”
He dictated to her the words: “Miss Mordaunt has duly received from her fiancé, Mr. Van Hupfeldt, the certificates of which Mr. Harcourt spoke to her, so that all necessity for any communication between Mr. Harcourt and Miss Mordaunt is now at an end. Miss Mordaunt leaves London to-day.”
The scribe, after several rewritings, at last shaped the note into something really like Violet’s writing. It was then directed to “David Harcourt.” The young woman took it to the grave, and it was placed on the wreath of violets where the purloined note had lain.
Twenty minutes later, David, full of anticipation and hope, the diary in his hand, drew near to Kensal Green. For some time he did not go quite to the grave, but stood at the bend of the path, whence he should be able to see her feet coming, and the blooming beneath them of the March daisies in the turf. But she did not come. The minutes went draggingly by. Strolling presently nearer the grave, he noticed the fresh wreath, and the letter laid on it.
He stood a long while by the Iona cross over the violets, while the dusk deepened to a gloom like that of his mind. How empty seemed London now! And all life, how scantless and stale now, without the purple and perfume of her! For she was gone, and “all necessity for any communication between her and him was now at an end.” He went away from the cemetery whistling a tune, with a jaunty step, in order to persuade himself that his heart was not hollow, nor his mind black with care.
For some time after this disappearance of Violet, David needed the focusing of all his manhood to set himself to work. His feeling was that nothing is worth while. He wished to sit in his easy-chair, stare, and be vaguely conscious of the coming and going of his charwoman. An old Londoner now, he no longer heard the roar, nor stifled at the smoke of that torrent that goes up forever. He could have sat over his fire in a sort of abstract state, without thought, hope, or care, for days. If he took up the pen he groaned; but he did take it up, and it proved medicinal. Little by little he acquired tone.
Meantime, he would often re-read the note which had had so powerful an effect on him, until one day, in the ripening of his mind, the thought rose in him: “There’s something queer here. She must have been very agitated when she wrote this!”
Then he began to think that it was not quite like Violet’s writing. Presently hope, energy, action burst into blossom afresh within him. Suppose, he thought, that the whole business was somehow a trick of that man? Suppose that she was in London all the time? He wrote to her at Porchester Gardens that day, but received no answer. Van Hupfeldt had given orders that all letters for the Mordaunts should be sent to him, nor did he send on David’s letter to Violet, for he knew David’s writing. Moreover, he had warned the proprietors at Porchester Gardens that a certain man, who was likely to make himself troublesome to the Mordaunts, might present himself there in the hope of learning their address in the country, in view of which they had better give the address to no one.
Now, at David’s only meeting with Violet at the grave, she had mentioned to him her country address, but, having heard it only once and that heedlessly, when his brain was full of new notions, it had so far passed out of his mind in the course of time that all that he could remember of it was that it was in Warwickshire. Nor could any racking of his brains bring back more of it than the name of the county. After some days he betook himself to Porchester Gardens.
“Is Mrs. Mordaunt at home?” he asked.
“No,” was the answer, “she isn’t staying here now. She is in the country.”
That much, then, of the note found on the grave was true.
“When did she go?” he asked.
“Last Tuesday week,” was the answer.
The note was true!
“I have written Miss Mordaunt a letter,” said David, “telling her that I have in my possession something which I know that she would like to have, and have received no answer. I suppose you forward her letters on to her?”
“Yes; we send them to a gentleman who forwards them on.”
“Ah? What gentleman is that?”
“A Mr. Van Hupfeldt.”
“I see. But can you give me Mrs. Mordaunt’s address?”
“We are not to give it; but any letters will be sent on.”
“Through Mr. Van Hupfeldt?”
“Yes.”
“But suppose I send you one with a cross on the envelope, would you do me the special favor to send that one on direct, not through Mr. Van Hupfeldt?”
“We have instructions as to the Mordaunts’ letters,” said the landlady, “and, of course, we follow them.”
“Well, but you seem very inflexible, especially as I tell you—”
“Can’t help that, sir. We were told that you would be turning up, and I give you the answer which I was directed to give. It is quite useless to come here making any request as to the Mordaunts.”
David went away discomforted. There remained to him one hope—Dibbin. He ran round to Dibbin’s and asked for the address.
“I’m afraid I’m hardly authorized to do that,” answered the agent, to whom such appeals were matters of every-day business.
“Do be reasonable,” urged David. “Miss Mordaunt herself gave me her address, only I have let it slip out of my mind.”
Dibbin shook his head like an emblem of doubt. “Of course,” he said, “I shall be happy to send on anything which you commit to me.”
“Direct?” asked David, “or through Van Hupfeldt?”
“Direct, of course,” answered Dibbin. “I have no sort of instructions with respect to Mr. Van Hupfeldt.”
“Have you ever seen him, Dibbin?”
“Never.”
“Don’t happen to know his address?”
“No; I merely knew his name quite lately by repute as that of a man of wealth about town, and as an acquaintance of the Mordaunts.”
“‘Acquaintance’ is good, as a phrase,” David could not help blurting out. “Well, I have something belonging to Miss Mordaunt, and will send you a letter to forward.”
That day the letter was written and sent, a stiff-stark little missive, informing Miss Mordaunt that Mr. Harcourt had duly received the note left on the grave, and had once before written her to say so, as well as to tell her that he had in his possession a book which he believed to be the diary of her sister. He did not care to send it her through another, but would at once forward it on receiving a line from her.
After two days came an answer: Miss Mordaunt thanked Mr. Harcourt extremely for his pains, and would be glad to receive the book to which he referred at “the above address,” that address being: “The Cedars, Birdlip, Gloucestershire.”
David actually had the diary wrapped up to send to this address. Then he paused. The handwriting of the note was not quite like that of the note in which she had made the appointment with him at the grave. It was rather like the writing of the note which he had found with the wreath—not quite, perhaps, the same. And then again the address which she had given him by word of mouth that first evening at Kensal Green was in Warwickshire. He remembered that much, beyond doubt. Was she, then, spending some time with friends at “The Cedars” in—Gloucestershire? He thought that it might be a good thing, before sending the diary, if he took a run down into Gloucestershire to make sure that she was really there.
This he did the next day, and found that “The Cedars” was a mansion two miles from the village of Birdlip, old, somewhat dismantled, shut up, occupied only by a few retainers. No Violet was there.
He learned at one of the village taverns that the place was the property of Van Hupfeldt. He took the diary back to London with him that same night.
What seemed certain to him now was that Van Hupfeldt himself or some agent of Van Hupfeldt’s must be in the Mordaunts’ house, and that this letter sent through Dibbin had never reached Violet. So again he was cut off from her. Not one word could he speak to her. He craved only for one small word. When that marriage of hers with Van Hupfeldt was to take place he did not know; but he felt that it might be soon. He had taken upon himself to say to her that it should never be, and not one word could he utter to prevent it. He had forgotten, and his brain would not give up its dead. He beat his brow upon his dining-room table where his head had dropped wearily on his coming home that early morning from the country.
To go to her, to tell her all, to stop the indecent marriage, to cast himself at her feet, and call upon her pity for his passionate youth—this impulse drove him; but he could not stir a step. A great “No” bewitched him. His straining was against ropes of steel. Half-thoughts, half-inventions of every impossible kind passed like smoke through his mind, and went away, and came wearily again. The only one of any likelihood was the thought of kneeling to Dibbin, of telling him that Van Hupfeldt was probably Strauss, and beseeching him for the Mordaunts’ sake to give the address. But he had not the least faith in the success of such a thing. To that dried man, fossilized all through, incrusted in agency, anything that implied a new departure, a new point of view, was a thing impossible. His shake of the head was as stubborn a fact in nature as any Andes. There was only the diary left—the diary might contain the address!
David did not wish to open those locked thoughts. He had hardly the right, but, after a whole day spent in eying the book, he laughed wildly and decided. It was a question of life, of several lives. He put the book to his lips, with a kiss of desperation, inhaling its faded scent of violets.
At once he rushed out with it to a tradesman skilled in locks, and was surprised at the ease with which the man shot back the tiny lever with a bit of twisted wire.
“I can make you a key by the morning,” said the man, squinting into the lock, and listening to its action as he turned the wire in his fingers. “It is a simple mechanism with two wards. Meantime, here it is, opened.”
He refused even to be paid for “so slight a thing.” David handed him a cigar—and ran; and was soon deep in it. The first passage thrilled him as with solemn music:
O silent one, I must tell my sweets and bitters to you, since I mayn’t to others. You will treasure each syllable, and speak of me as I am, “nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice.”
But please, as you are good, bring not upon me any further declamation of the unhappy Moor! Pray Heaven you may not have to record the “unlucky deeds” of “one that lov’d, not wisely, but too well,” nor your pallid cheeks reveal your grief because my “subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their med’cinable gum!”
I was married last Tuesday. As the carriage rolled back along the sea front, and my darling husband’s arm clasped my waist as tightly as a silver arm clasps you, little book, the old jingle came into my head: “Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday the best day of all.” The nasty things predicted for the other days of the week do not matter a jot, do they? Well, thank God, I am healthy enough, and Harry says that we shall have plenty of money by and by. Given health and wealth, there remains but happiness, and that is of our own contriving. And I am happy. Of that there can be no manner of doubt. Of course, I should have enjoyed the pomp and circumstance of marriage in the parish church with its joy-bells, its laughing tears, its nice speeches, while the dear old rector beamed on me, and the good folk of R—— set their eyes a-goggle to see how I looked and how Harry carried himself.
I flatter myself I should have made a pretty bride, and, as for Harry, even under the chilling influences of a registrar’s office he had the air of a man who knows his own mind. How often, tittering at my thoughts, have I pictured my wedding-day long before Prince Charming hove in sight! And how different it all has been to the conceits of girlhood! When he did come, he hoisted an unknown flag and bore me off like any pirate.
Then references to life in a hotel, not named, and the good-natured scrutiny of strangers “who knew us at once as a newly-married couple, though we tried to be offhand to each other.”
Later she described the beginning of housekeeping in London, “where all is so strange”; then a few phrases which sighed.
I have come to hate the word “Miss.” It is a constant reminder of the compact. Harry says it will not be long now before our marriage can be proclaimed; but meantime I always catch myself smiling graciously when a shop-walker hails me as “madam.” There is a recognition in the word! “Miss” is only a trifle less endurable than the “my dear” of the theater, which I heard to-day for the first time.
After some days there was a darker mood:
It has given me a shock to find myself described as “domesticated.” I came home to an empty house, after to-day’s rehearsal, tired and a bit peevish, perhaps. It is so slow, this novitiate. Harry says that his influence will quickly bring me to the front, that I must have patience, that the theatrical world is so compact, yet so split up into cliques, that, were our relationship suspected, I should encounter hostility instead of the indifference which I now resent. So, in unamiable mood, I began to rate my charlady about the dust which gives its brown tone to London interiors. Thinking that a display of energy might prove a tonic, I cleared out the dining-room and made things shine. My help raised her eyebrows and a duster in astonishment. “Lor’, miss,” she said, “you are domesticated! You must have had a good mother?” A good mother! She didn’t know how that word felt.
How odiously some of the men speak, gaze. If a woman is attractive, they ogle her; if she is passée, she is less than nothing. Men did not talk and leer in that way at R. Did they think so? I cannot say. Even Harry laughed when I lost my temper in describing the impudence of a young fop who had bought his way into the chorus. “You must get used to that sort of thing in town!” he said. Then: “Bear with it a little while, sweetheart. Soon the pretense will be ended, and I shall be only too happy if you have lost the glamour of the footlights by that time. It was no wish of mine that you should become an actress.” That is quite, quite true. But I wish now—no, I don’t. I am silly and miserable. Please, diary, don’t be angry if I weep over you, and if I write foolish things.
Then, some four months after marriage:
Harry away a whole week now. Telegram from Paris: “Cannot leave Mrs. S. for some time yet.” He is glad that I have decided to give up the stage without delay. So soon, so soon! I am glad, too, for some reasons, and sorry for others. Is not that life in a few words?...
Créature d’un jour qui t’agites une heure,
De quoi viens-tu te plaindre et que te fait gémir?
Ton âme t’inquiète et tu crois qu’elle pleure:
Ton âme est immortelle, et tes pleurs vont tarur.
It is strange that I should regret the passing of the stage, now that it becomes a necessity. There I found companionship, of a sort. I shall be so lonely. But not for long. Harry returns next week, “on the 10th” his second message says, and then I think really that I must begin to insist upon seeing my mother. He can hardly refuse now. To meet her again! though our eyes will be flooded with tears. And Vi! dear, dear Vi! Will she be eager to hear all about it? But the reproach in her eyes! What did she think when she opened that letter of mine? How she would weep over her old flighty Gwen! Oh, darling mother, and sweet, ever-forgiving sister, how I long to hold you in my arms! If Harry only knew you he would surely trust you, and then I would not care if the publication of the marriage was delayed another year.
Hour after hour David read on, dead to all things in the world but to the soul in pain in that book and to his hope that, if only once, she had written the name of her home. Every time he came upon that letter R (by which she meant Rigsworth) he groaned; and anon he looked with eyes of despair and something of fond reproach at her face over the mantelpiece.
He read of her leaving the stage, because of the necessity that was now upon her, and then of the months of heaviness and tears. The worst trial of all in her lot seemed to be the constant separations, due to the tyranny of one “Mrs. S.,” who ever drew her husband from her. She wrote:
I actually should be jealous, if she wasn’t old! From Paris to Homburg, from Homburg to Siena: and everywhere poor Harry dragged at her chariot-wheels! I should like to have one peep at her in the flesh, just to see what she is really like. Her photographs show a fat, cross-looking old thing, but she can’t be quite like that, with her really good affectionate heart. Has she not been the best of mothers to Harry? From the time she adopted him, he says, when he was a quite poor boy of fifteen, she has never been able to live a month without seeing him, even when he was at Heidelburg University. I must be content only to share him with her, but just now I think I have the stronger claim, unless she is really so very ill. I have heard that tale before of her “dying state,” but that sort of old things don’t die so easily. I believe that I write as if I wished her to! God forbid! I don’t allow all Harry’s dreams of the grandeurs to be enjoyed after her death to excite me much. I hope that I shall take it as coldly as doing up my hair when the letter comes, “Mrs. S. is dead! you are a millionaire.”
Mercenariness is not one of my faults, anyway. It is true that since I have ceased to earn anything, I do sometimes feel a wee pinch of scarcity, and wish that he could send me even a few shillings a week more. But if that was only all of my trouble! No, Mrs. S., may you live as long as Heaven wills. If I thought that in any part of me there lurked one little longing to hear of that good woman’s death, I should never forgive myself. Still, I don’t think it right of her to play the despot over Harry to the extent to which she carries it. A man thirty-eight years old has surely the right to marry, if he wishes to. If it hadn’t been for her, my marriage could have been made public from the first, and all that woe at R. would have been spared. Harry says that she hates the very word “marriage,” and that if she was to get the least scent of his marriage, she would cut him off with a shilling.
He has run a risk, poor old Hal, for my sake, and if now and again he can’t help longing to be rich and free, it is hard to blame him. The day he is rich and free there will be a spree, Gwen! It is wrong to anticipate it, but see if I don’t make the street of R. glow, if not with the wine of France, at least with beer, and if I don’t teach a certain staid Miss Violet Mordaunt how to do the high-kick, girls! I wonder if all will be over by then, and if I shall go back to dear old R. not only a wife but a mother?
Then again, a month later:
What a thing! to be a mother! Sometimes the thought hits me suddenly between the eyes, and I can’t believe it is I myself—that same powerlessness to recognize myself which I had for fully a week after the marriage. But this is greater still, to have something which will be to me what I have been to my own mother. Gwen, Gwen, how exquisitely droll! How one grows into something else quite different, without at all noticing how and when! But will it never be over? It is like heaving a sigh a century long. Won’t it be nice to dance again, and fling one’s limbs? But meantime, such a weight of care, strange fears, gazings into I don’t know what abyss, and never a day without its flood of tears. I want my mother. It is no good; I want to go back to where I was born. I am not strong enough to bear this. But after Tuesday’s promise to him, what can I do? I have said now that I won’t write until after, and I won’t if God gives me strength.
For two months there was no entry, and then came joy that a son was born; but from the time of that birth, the diary which had before been profuse and daily became short and broken.
A deadlock seemed to have arisen. “Harry” allowed one letter to be written home to tell of the birth; but would not permit any direct statement as to the marriage, nor any meeting, nor any further letter, until “Mrs. S.,” who was now “near her end,” should be dead. She wrote:
To-day is six weeks since I have seen him, and altogether he has seen baby only twice. Yesterday’s letter was divided into “heads,” like a sermon, giving the reason why I may not go to him in Paris, why I may not write home, even without giving my address, and why he cannot come back yet. But it is a year now, and I have a mother and a sister. There is no certainty that Mrs. S. may not live ten years longer; and in last night’s letter I said that on the 4th of July, one month from now, if nothing has then happened to change the situation, I shall be compelled to risk displeasing him, and I shall go to R. That’s crossing the Rubicon, Gwen, and I’m awfully frightened now. He will call it defiance, and rave, I know. “Be bold, be bold, be not too bold.” But, then, I can always tame the monster with one Delilah kiss. I think I know my man, and can conquer my conqueror, and it is time now to begin to assert myself a little. . . .
Isn’t there something queerish in his relation with “Mrs. S.”? He stands in such mortal fear of her! I don’t think it is quite pretty for a man to have such tremors for any earthly reason. One day I asked him why he could not introduce me to her as—a friend? She might take a fancy to me, I said, since I am generally popular. He looked quite frightened at the mere suggestion of such a thing. . . .
That last night, coming home from the theater, he said something about “Anna.” I asked him who Anna was. He said: “I mean Mrs. S.,” looking, it seemed to me, rather put out. I had never heard him call her Anna before. . . .
My voice is certainly not what it was, and not through any want of practise, I’m sure. People so hopelessly worried as I am at present can’t sing really well. For the second time yesterday I wrote that I shall really go to mother after the fourth of next month, and I mean it, I do mean it! I owe something to her, too, and to myself, and I still don’t see what harm it can do to Harry. Poor dear, he is awfully frightened! “If you persist in this wild notion, you will compel me to take a step which will be bitter to you and to myself.” I don’t know what step he can mean. That’s only talk. I’ll do it just to see what happens, for one oughtn’t to threaten a woman with penalties which she can’t conceive, or her curiosity will lead her to do the very thing. It was an ill-understood threat that made Eve eat the apple, my Hal. “Thou shalt surely die”; but, not knowing what “to die” was like, she thought to herself: “Well, just to see.” There’s no particularly “bitter step” that he can take, and the time is really come for me to assert myself a little now. Men love a woman better when she is not all milk and honey. . . .
It is near now, Vi! He has her chin, her hands, her dark grave eyes, her very smile. I am on the point at last of seeing him in her arms. How will she look? What will she think of me, the little girl whom she used to guide with her eye, beating her a hundred miles, an old experienced mummie while she is still a maid! I can no more resist it than I could fly! I shall do it! I am going to do it! I told Harry that I should. There’s no danger, and I can’t resist it any longer. I am just back from P. He is looking too sweet now for anything, and can blow the whistle of the rattle. I told Mrs. C. that in three days’ time I shall be taking him from her for at least ten days, perhaps for good. Only three days! Sarah is beginning to get things ready....
Yes, it was “a bitter step” enough, poor Hal! God help you and me, and all the helpless!...
I told poor Sarah just now: “I am not married. You only think that I am; but I am not. I have a child; but I am not married. Sarah, this is no fit place for a girl like you.” She thinks that I am mad, I know, but I keep quite sane and myself. I am only sorry for poor old Hal. He loves me and I loved him when I had a heart....
I thought of seeing the boy once more, but I haven’t the energy. I don’t seem to care. If I should care, or love, or hate, or eat, it wouldn’t be so horrible. But I am only a ghost, a sham. I am really dead. My nature is akin with the grave, and has no appetite but for that with which it is akin. Well, I will soon come. It shall be to-morrow night, just after Sarah is gone. But I must rouse myself first to do that which is my duty. I ought, as a friend, to cover up poor Hal’s traces, and yet I must be just to the boy, too. He ought to know when he grows up that, if his mother was unfortunate, she was not abandoned, and it is my duty to leave for him the proofs of it. But how to do that, and at the same time protect Harry, is the question, for I suppose that the police will search the flat. It is very wearisome. I doubt if my poor head is too clear to-day....
It shall be like this: I’ll hide the things somewhere where the police won’t readily find them. I’ll invent a place. Then I shall write to Vi, not telling her what is going to happen to me, but telling her that if in a few months’ time she will thoroughly search a certain flat in London, she will find what will be good for her and mother and the boy. And I shall give the address; but I won’t tell her exactly where I hide the things; for fear of the police getting hold of the letter and arresting Harry. And I will post it after Sarah is gone to-morrow night, just before I do it. That’s what I shall do. I’m pretty artful, my brain is quite clear and calm. I don’t know yet where I shall hide the things; but I shall find a place, I shall hoodwink them all, and manage everything just nicely. Sarah thinks that I’m mad, but I’m not. It is she who is raving mad, and people who are mad think that every one is, except themselves.
I’ll hide the diary in one place, the certificates in another, and the photograph of the boy’s father in another. That’s what I’ll do. Then I’ll tear up all other papers small. No, I’ll hide as well the letter in which he says that he is Mrs. S.’s husband, and that I’m not his legal wife; for some day I should like Vi to know that I did not take my life for nothing, but was murdered before I killed myself. Then I’ll do it. It isn’t bitter; it’s sweet. Death’s a hole to creep in for shelter for one’s poor head. Harry will be in England in five days’ time, so I’ll write him a letter to the Constitutional to say good-by. He loves me. He didn’t mean to kill me. He only told me in order to stop me from going home. It is such a burden to write to him, but it is my duty to give him one last word of comfort, and I will.
Then, when all this world of business is over and done, I’ll do it. It isn’t bitter; it’s sweet. God, I couldn’t face them! Forgive me! I know that it is wicked; but it is nice, is death. Things are as they are. One can’t fight against the ocean. It is sweet to close one’s eyes, and drown.
That word “drown” was the last. David closed the book with a blackness in his heart and brain.
The reading of it had brought him only grief and little light for practical purposes. That “Mrs. S.” meant “Mrs. Strauss” he had no doubt, nor any doubt that “Harry” meant Henry Van Hupfeldt. Still, there was no formal proof of it. The name of her home, to learn which he had dared to open the diary, appeared only as “R.” The only pieces of knowledge which the reading brought him were, firstly, that there were a photograph and a letter still hidden in the flat—certainly, not in any of the pictures, for he had searched them all; and secondly that “Harry” was a member of the Constitutional Club. As for the child, it was, or had been, at “P.,” in the care of one “Mrs. C.”
The necessity that was now strong upon David was to act, to fight for it. To hunt for the still hidden photograph and letter was far too slow a task in his present mood of turbulence and desperation. The photograph, indeed, would furnish certain proof as to whether Strauss and Van Hupfeldt were one. So might the letter. But of what use would proof of anything whatever be, when he was all shut out from access to the Mordaunts? He thought, however, that if he could come within earshot and striking distance of Van Hupfeldt, then something might result, he was not clear what. He put on his hat and went out, as grim a man as any on the streets of London that afternoon. He did not know where Van Hupfeldt lived, but he turned his steps toward the Constitutional Club.
He meant at least to discover if Van Hupfeldt was a member there, and he might discover more. But he was spared the pains of inquiry, for he was still at a distance of thirty yards from the club when he saw Van Hupfeldt come out and step into a carriage.
David cringed half under a dray, till the carriage began to move, then followed some way behind at his long trot. He thought now that perhaps he was about to track Van Hupfeldt to his house.
The carriage drove straight to Baker-St. Station, into which Van Hupfeldt went, and took a ticket. David, listening outside the outer entrance to the small booking-office, could not catch the name of his destination, but when Van Hupfeldt had gone down into the gloom and fume, David, half-way down the flight of stairs, stood watching. He had no little finesse in tracking, and ferreting, and remaining invisible, and when Van Hupfeldt had taken his seat, David was in another compartment of the same train.
The dusk of evening was thickening when their train stopped at the townlet of Pangley, twenty-five miles from London, where Van Hupfeldt alighted.
David saw him well out of the little station before he himself leaped, as the train began to move. He then took the precaution to ascertain the times of the next up-trains. There would be one at quarter past eight and another at ten P.M. While he asked as to the trains, and paid the fare of some excess charge, he kept his eye on the back of Van Hupfeldt, walking down the rather steep street. And, when it was safe, he followed.
At the bottom of the street they crossed a bridge, and thenceforward walked up a road with heath on both sides. David was angry with his luck, for the road was straight and long, and there was little cover in the heath, where he walked some distance from the road. Once Van Hupfeldt turned, and seemed to admire the last traces of color in the western sky, whereat David, as if shot, dropped into gorse and bracken. He hoped that Van Hupfeldt, being a man of cities and civilization, was unconscious of him; but he felt that he in Van Hupfeldt’s place would have known all, and he had a fear. The light was fast failing, but he could clearly see Van Hupfeldt, who swung a parcel in his hand; and he thought that if he could see Van Hupfeldt well, then Van Hupfeldt might have seen him dimly. Van Hupfeldt, however, gave no sign of it.
David saw him go into the gateway of a pretty dwelling, and a big hearty countrywoman ran out to meet him, her face beaming with good cheer. Carrying a child in her arms, she escorted Van Hupfeldt into the house with, it was clear, no lack of welcome, and, when they had disappeared, David, vaulting over a hedge into the orchard, crept nearer the house and hid behind a shed in which he saw a white calf. He waited there for a long time, how long he did not know, for once, when he peered at his watch, he could see nothing. The night had come moonless and black. The place where he lurked was in the shadow of trees.
Meantime, within the house, Van Hupfeldt sat with the child on his knee. He was so pale that Mrs. Carter, the child’s foster-mother, asked if he was well. Some purpose, some fear or hope, agitated him. Once, when the countrywoman left the room to fetch a glass of milk, the moment he was alone he put down the child, sped like a thief to the grandfather’s clock ticking in its old nook by the settee, opened it, put the minute-hand back twenty minutes, and was seated again when the milk came in.
These visits of his to the child, of which he paid one every week, always lasted half an hour. This time he stayed so much longer that Mrs. Carter glanced at the clock, only to be taken aback by the earliness of the hour.
“Bless us!” she cried. “I thought it was later ’n that. You still have plenty of time to catch the quarter past eight, sir.”
But Van Hupfeldt stood up, saying that he would go. Putting on his coat, he added: “Mrs. Carter, I have been followed from London by a man who, I fancy, will present himself here presently when I am gone. He wishes to know more about my affairs than he has a right to know. If he comes, I have a reason for wishing you to receive him politely, and to keep him in talk as long as he will stay. But, of course, you won’t satisfy his curiosity in anything that concerns me. In particular, be very careful not to give him any hint that my name was Strauss during my wife’s lifetime.”
“You may rely on me,” said Mrs. Carter, in the secret voice of an accomplice.
“Now, little one, to bed,” said Van Hupfeldt, a thin and lanky figure in his long overcoat, as he bent with kisses over the boy in Mrs. Carter’s arms.
Five minutes after he was gone David was at the farmhouse door. He, too, would like a glass of milk.
“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Carter. “Step inside.”
His first glance was at the clock, for he did not wish to lose the quarter past eight train, since that would mean the losing of his present chance of tracking Van Hupfeldt to his address. But the clock reassured him. He indolently took it for granted that it was more or less near the mark, and it pointed to twenty minutes to eight. He would thus have time to strike up an acquaintance with Mrs. Carter, as a preliminary to closer relations in the future.
“And where is baby?” he asked.
“Oh, you know about him?” said Mrs. Carter. “He’s in bed, to be sure.”
“I saw him in your arms as I was passing up the road half an hour ago.”
“What, you passed along here? I didn’t notice you.”
“I came up from the station. Now, this is something like good milk. You have a nice little farm here, too. Do you manage it yourself?”
“Yes; my husband died a twelvemonth come May.”
“It must be hard work with baby, too, as well, especially if you’ve got any youngsters of your own.”
“How can you know that this baby isn’t my own?”
“Oh, as to that, I’m not quite so much in the dark about things. Why, I’m living in the very flat which its poor mother occupied. I know its aunt, I know its father—”
“Oh, well, you seem to know a lot. What more do you want?”
“I only know the father by sight—that is, if he was the father who was in here just now. I take it he was.”
“Ah, there, now, you’re asking.”
“Oh, there’s no secret, Mrs. Carter. Mr. Johann Strauss is a well-known man.”
“Is that his name—Strauss? Well, well, live and learn.”
“That’s his name, and that’s his writing, Mrs. Carter!”—words which David uttered almost with a shout, as he caught an envelope out of the coal scuttle, and laid it on the table, pointing fixedly at it.
Mrs. Carter was startled by his sudden vehemence. The envelope was one directed to her in the same flourishing writing which Dibbin had long since shown David as that of Strauss.
“You are bound to admit,” said David, imperatively, “that this envelope was directed to you by the gentleman who was just here.”
“Well, so it was; what of that?” asked Mrs. Carter, in a maze as to what the row was about.
“That’s all right, then,” said David, quieting down. “I only wanted to be sure.”
This, then, settled it. Van Hupfeldt was Strauss. David kept the envelope, sipped his milk, and for some time talked with Mrs. Carter about her cows, her fruit, and whether the white calf was to be sold or kept. When it was ten minutes to eight by the big parlor clock he rose to go, said that he hoped to see baby next time, if he might call again, and shook hands. But in going out, from force of habit, he glanced at his watch, and now saw that it was really ten minutes past eight.
“Great goodness!” he exclaimed, “your clock is all wrong!”
“No, sir—” began Mrs. Carter.
David was gone. He had five minutes in which to run a good deal over a mile, and he ran with all his speed; but some distance from the station he saw the train steaming out, and pulled up short.
At that moment Van Hupfeldt in the train was thinking: “It has worked well. He is late, and there is no other train till ten—an hour and three quarters. He has only a charwoman. She will not be in the flat at this hour. No one will be there. Will it be my luck that the diary is not under lock and key?”
As a matter of fact, the diary was lying openly on the dining-room table in the flat, caution of that sort being hardly the uppermost quality in David’s character.
David strolled about Pangley, looked into the tiny shop-windows, dined on fruit, wished that he had not been born some new variety of a fool, and found that hour and three quarters as long as a week. Not much given to suspicions of meanness and cunning, it did not even now come into his head that he was where he was by a trick. He blamed only destiny for imposing upon him such penal inactivity in the little town that night when a thousand spurs were urging him to action. But at last ten o’clock came, and when he stepped into the train he asked himself why he had been so impatient, since probably nothing could be done that evening. He reached London before eleven, and drove home weary of himself and of his cares.
It was too late then, he thought, to go hunting after Van Hupfeldt. On the morrow morning he would again try at the Constitutional. Meantime, he lit himself a fire, and sat over it brooding, cudgeling his brains for some plan of action. Then the diary drew him. He would re-read that tragedy throughout. He put out his arm, half-turning from over the fire to get the book.
It was no longer on the table.
He stood up and stared at the table. No diary was there. Yet he seemed to remember—He set to work to search the flat.
Suddenly, in the midst of his work, a flood of light broke in upon him. He thought that, if the letter which he had written to Violet, telling her that he had the diary, had already fallen into Van Hupfeldt’s hands, then Van Hupfeldt knew that he had the diary; in which case, it was Van Hupfeldt who had put back the clock’s hand in the farmhouse at Pangley! Van Hupfeldt knew all the time that David was shadowing him, had put back the clock, and now held the diary, for which both he and David would have given all that they were worth, and all is everything, whether ten pounds or a million.
“Is that it?” thought David to himself. “Oh, is that it? All right, let it be like that.”
He lost not two minutes in thought, but with a lowering brow went out into the streets, high-strung, his fingers cramped together.
An hour before this he had said to himself that the hour was too late for action. Now, an hour later, such a thought did not occur to him in the high pitch of his soul. That night, and not any other night or day, he would have it out with Van Hupfeldt.
He jumped into a cab, and drove to the flat in King-St., Chelsea.
“But what on earth can the man mean,” said Miss L’Estrange, peeping through the slit of her slightly-opened door, “coming to a lady’s flat at this hour of the morning?”
In reality it was about half-past twelve.
“No, it’s no use talking,” said David, “you must let me in. I know you have a right good heart, and I rely upon its action when I tell you that it is a matter of life and death this time.”
“But I’m alone.”
“So much the better.”
“Well, I like your cheek!”
“You like the whole of me; so you may as well own up to it, and be done.”
“Rats! You only come here when you want something done. It isn’t me you come to see.”
“I’ll come to see you some other time. Just throw something on, and let me in.”
“‘Throw something on,’ indeed! I’ll throw something on you, and that’ll be hot water, the next time you come bothering about at this hour. Oh, well, never mind; you’re not a bad sort. Come in.”
The door opened, Miss L’Estrange fled, and David went into the drawing-room, where he waited some minutes till she reappeared, looking fresh and washed from the night’s stage-paint, with something voluminous wrapped about her.
“Now, what is it?” said she. “Straight to the point—that’s me.”
“You must give me Strauss’s address,” said David.
“That I sha’n’t,” said she. “What do you take me for? I promised the man that I wouldn’t. I have told you once that he isn’t a thousand miles from Piccadilly, and that’s about all you’ll get from me.”
“Good! I understand your position,” said David. “But before you refuse out and out, hear what I have to say. This man Strauss is a man who induced Gwendoline Barnes, whom you know, to leave her home, married her while his first wife was alive, and so caused her to make away with herself. And now this same man, under the name of Van Hupfeldt, is about to marry her sister, without telling her that he even knew the girl whom he has murdered. I don’t know what the sister’s motive for marrying him is—quite possibly there’s some trick about it—but I know that the motive is not love. Now, just think a moment, and tell me if this is fair to your woman’s mind.”
“Oh, that’s how it is!” exclaimed Ermyn L’Estrange.
“All the facts which I have mentioned I know for certain,” said David.
“Then, that explains—”
“Explains what?”
“I’ll tell you; but this is between us, mind. Some time ago Strauss comes to me, and he says: ‘I have given your address to a young lady—a Miss Violet Mordaunt—who is about to write you a letter asking whether you did or did not find any certificates in a picture in the Eddystone Mansions flat; and I want you in answer to deny to her for my sake that any certificates were ever found.’”
“And you did?” cried David with deep reproach.
“Now, no preaching, or I never tell you anything again,” shrilled Miss L’Estrange. “Here’s gratitude in man! Of course I did! He said it was only an innocent fib which could do no harm to anybody, and if you saw the bracelet I got for it, my boy—”
“You wrote to say that no certificates were ever found!”
“I did.”
“Then what can she think of me?” he cried with a face of pain. “I told her—”
“Ah, you are after her, too? I see now how it is,” said Miss L’Estrange.
“But she might at least have given me a chance of clearing myself!” groaned David. “She might have written to me to say that she had found me out in a lie.”
Violet had, indeed, promised herself the luxury of writing one “stinging, crushing, killing” note to David in the event of Miss L’Estrange proving him false. And, in fact, not one but many such notes had been written down at Dale Manor. But none of them had ever been sent—her deep disdain had kept her silent.
“But,” cried David, at the spur of a sudden glad thought, “since Miss Mordaunt wrote to you, and you to her, you know her address, and can give it me!”
“No, I don’t know her address,” answered Miss L’Estrange. “I believe now that Strauss may have been afraid that if I knew it I might give it to you, so he must have prevented her from putting it on her letter. There was no address on it, I don’t think, for when I wrote back to her I gave my letter to Strauss to send.”
“Ah, he’s a cautious beast!” said David, bitterly. “Still—I’ll have him—not to-morrow, but to-night. Quick, now—his address.”
“Well, I promised not to tell it to any one,” vowed Miss L’Estrange in her best soubrette manner, “and I’ll be as good as my word, since I never break a promise when my word is once passed. I’ll just write it down on a piece of paper, and drop it on the floor by accident, and then if anybody should happen to notice it and pick it up without my seeing, that will be no business of mine.”
She rose, walked to a desk, and went through this pantomime in all seriousness. The address was dropped on the carpet, and David “happening” to notice it, picked it up behind Miss Ermyn L’Estrange’s unconscious back. It had on it the number of a house near Hanover Square; and in another moment David had pressed the lady’s hand, and was gone, crying: “I’ll come again!”
“Not even a word of thanks,” said Miss L’Estrange to herself, as she looked after his flying back: “‘Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind.’”
David leaped into his waiting cab, and was off across London.
Light was still in Van Hupfeldt’s quarters, and Van Hupfeldt himself, at the moment when David rang, was poring over the last words of the diary of her who had been part of his life. He was livid with fear at the knowledge just learned for certain from the written words, that there were still hidden in the flat a photograph of him, and his last letter to Gwendoline, when he heard an altercation between his man Neil and another voice outside. A moment later he heard Neil cry out sharply, and then he was aware of a hurried step coming in upon him. The first thought of his secretive nature was the diary, and, with the trepidations of a miser surprised in counting his gold, he hustled it into a secret recess of the bureau near which he had been reading. He had hardly done this when he stood face to face with David.
At that moment Van Hupfeldt’s face seemed lit with a lunacy of affright, surprise, and rage. David, with his hat rather drawn over his eyes, and with a frowning severity, said: “I want four things of you—the diary, the key of my flat which you have in your possession, those certificates, and Mrs. Mordaunt’s address.”
A scream went out from Van Hupfeldt: “Neil! the police!”
“Quite so,” said David; “but before the police come, do as I say, or I shall kill you.”
Van Hupfeldt could hardly catch his breath sufficiently to speak. A man so wholly in the grip of terror it was painful to see. David understood him to say: “Man, I warn you, my heart is weak.”
“Heart weak?” growled David. “That’s what you say? Well, then, keep cool, and let me have my way. We must wrangle it out now somehow. You have the police on your side for the moment, and I stand alone—”
Now the outer door was heard to slam; for Neil had run out to summon help.
“I’m not acting on my own behalf,” said David, “but for the sake of a girl whose life, I feel sure, you are going to make bitter. She cares nothing for you—”
“How dare you!” came in a hoarseness of concentrated passion from Van Hupfeldt’s bosom.
“No, she cares nothing for you—”
“You interloper!”
“And even if she did, she is sure to find out sooner or later that you are Strauss—”
“Oh! had I but guessed!”
“Which would be the death of her—”
“I never dreamed of this.”
“So, on her behalf, I’ll just make a hurried search before the police comes. The things are not yours. If your heart wasn’t weak, I’d maul you till you were willing to hand them over of your own accord.”
With that David made a move toward the bureau, whereupon Van Hupfeldt uttered a scream and flew upon him like a cat-o’-mountain, but David flung him away to the other end of the room.
Scattered over the bureau were a number of letters in their envelopes ready for the post, and the first of these upon which David’s eye fell was directed to “Miss Violet Mordaunt.”
Here was luck! Even as his heart bounded, before even he had seen a word of the address, he was in darkness—Van Hupfeldt had switched off the light.
And now once again David felt himself outdone by the cunning of this man. The room was large, crowded with objects of luxury, and the switch a needle in a bundle of hay. In which direction to grope for it David did not know. He ran to where he had flung Van Hupfeldt, to compel him by main force to turn on the light. But Van Hupfeldt was no longer there. The suddenness of the darkness made it black to the eyes. David could not find the switch, and fearing lest Van Hupfeldt might snatch away the letter to Violet in the dark, he flew back to the bureau, over-setting first a chair, and then colliding upon Van Hupfeldt a little distance from the bureau. Again he flung Van Hupfeldt far, and, keeping near the bureau, groped along the beading of the wall, to see if he could encounter another switch.
In the midst of this search, his ears detected the sound of a key in the outer door, and understanding that help had arrived for the enemy, instantly he took his decision, felt for the eight or ten envelopes on the bureau, slipped them all into his pocket, and was gone. In the hall, coming inward he met Neil and an officer, but, as if making a deep bow to the majesty of the law, he slipped as easily as a wave under the officer’s hand, and disappeared through the wide-open door. The officer ran after him. This was simple. From the moment when David pitched through the house-door below the stairs, he was never more seen by that particular officer to the day of his death.
Under a lamp in Oxford-St., when he stopped running, he took out Strauss’s letters from his pocket with a hand that shook, for in his heart was the thought: “Suppose I have left hers behind!”
But no; that fifth one was hers: “Miss Violet Mordaunt, Dale Manor, Rigsworth, near Kenilworth.” Remembrance came to him with an ache of rapture. Within twenty-four hours he would see her. He was so pleased that he was at the pains to throw Strauss’s other letters into the first pillar-box. What did it matter now that the diary, certificates, anything or everything, had been filched from him? To-morrow, no, that day, he would see Violet.