When I Was Dead and Other Tales of the Macabre
Date: 1895-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Horror; Murder
Description: Tales of visitations by the dead and the demonic; tales of obsession, madness, and murder — 13 tales to disturb your peace of mind.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

WHEN I WAS DEAD

AND OTHER TALES
OF THE MACABRE

VINCENT  O’SULLIVAN

MobileRead Edition
2021

Vincent O’Sullivan (November 28, 1868 – July 18, 1940) was an American-born author, poet, and critic who lived and wrote in London and in Paris. He was a friend of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and other fin-de-siècle figures. His works dealt with the morbid and decadent.

The O’Sullivan family was ruined financially in 1909; Vincent was destitute for the remaining years of his life, and ended in a pauper’s grave in Paris.

Compilation by ECM. Contents were originally published 1896 ~ 1921. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+80” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- When I Was Dead
- The Burned House
- The Interval
- The Business of Madame Jahn
- Master of Fallen Years
- The Bargain of Rupert Orange
- Will
- The Abigail Sheriff Memorial
- The End of a Family
- Original Sin
- My Enemy and Myself
- A Study in Murder
- Hugo Raven’s Hand

WHEN I WAS DEAD

“And yet my heart

Will not confess he owes the malady

That doth my life besiege.”

– All’s Well that Ends Well

That was the worst of Ravenel Hall. The passages were long and gloomy, the rooms were musty and dull, even the pictures were sombre and their subjects dire. On an autumn evening, when the wind soughed and wailed through the trees in the park, and the dead leaves whistled and chattered, while the rain clamoured at the windows, small wonder that folks with gentle nerves went a-straying in their wits! An acute nervous system is a grievous burden on the deck of a yacht under sunlit skies: at Ravenel the chain of nerves was prone to clash and jangle a funeral march. Nerves must be pampered in a tea-drinking community; and the ghost that your grandfather, with a skinful of port, could face and never tremble, sets you, in your sobriety, sweating and shivering; or, becoming scared (poor ghost!) of your bulged eyes and dropping jaw, he quenches expectation by not appearing at all. So I am left to conclude that it was tea which made my acquaintance afraid to stay at Ravenel. Even Wilvern gave over; and as he is in the Guards, and a polo player his nerves ought to be strong enough. On the night before he went I was explaining to him my theory, that if you place some drops of human blood near you, and then concentrate your thoughts, you will after a while see before you a man or a woman who will stay with you during long hours of the night, and even meet you at unexpected places during the day. I was explaining this theory, I repeat, when he interrupted me with words, senseless enough, which sent me fencing and parrying strangers – on my guard.

“I say, Alistair, my dear chap!” he began, “you ought to get out of this place and go up to Town and knock about a bit – you really ought, you know.”

“Yes,” I replied, “and get poisoned at the hotels by bad food and at the clubs by bad talk, I suppose. No, thank you: and let me say that your care for my health enervates me.”

“Well, you can do as you like,” says he, rapping with his feet on the floor. “I’m hanged if I stay here after tomorrow – I’ll be staring mad if I do!”

He was my last visitor. Some weeks after his departure I was sitting in the library with my drops of blood by me. I had got my theory nearly perfect by this time; but there was one difficulty.

The figure which I had ever before me was the figure of an old woman with her hair divided in the middle, and her hair fell to her shoulders, white on one side and black on the other. She was a very complete old woman; but, alas! she was eyeless, and when I tried to construct the eyes she would shrivel and rot in my sight. But tonight I was thinking, thinking, as I had never thought before, and the eyes were just creeping into the head when I heard a terrible crash outside as if some heavy substance had fallen. Of a sudden the door was flung open and two maidservants entered. They glanced at the rug under my chair, and at that they turned a sick white, cried on God, and huddled out.

“How dare you enter the library in this manner?” I demanded sternly. No answer came back from them, so I started in pursuit. I found all the servants in the house gathered in a knot at the end of the passage.

“Mrs Pebble,” I said smartly, to the housekeeper, “I want those two women discharged tomorrow. It’s an outrage! You ought to be more careful.”

But she was not attending to me. Her face was distorted with terror.

“Ah dear, ah dear!” she went. “We had better all go to the library together,” says she to the others.

“Am I master of my own house, Mrs Pebble?” I enquired, bringing my knuckles down with a bang on the table.

None of them seemed to see me or hear me: I might as well have been shrieking in a desert. I followed them down the passage, and forbade them with strong words to enter the library. But they trooped past me, and stood with a clutter round the hearthrug. Then three or four of them began dragging and lifting, as if they were lifting a helpless body, and stumbled with their imaginary burden over to a sofa. Old Soames, the butler, stood near.

“Poor young gentleman!” he said with a sob. “I’e knowed him since he was a baby. And to think of him being dead like this – and so young, too!”

I crossed the room. “What’s all this, Soames?” I cried, shaking him roughly by the shoulders. “I’m not dead. I’m here – here!” As he did not stir I got a little scared. “Soames, old friend!” I called, “don’t you know me? Don’t you know the little boy you used to play with? Say I’m not dead, Soames, please, Soames!”

He stooped down and kissed the sofa. “I think one of the men ought to ride over to the village for the doctor, Mr Soames,” says Mrs Pebble; and he shuffled out to give the order.

Now, this doctor was an ignorant dog, whom I had been forced to exclude from the house because he went about proclaiming his belief in a saving God, at the same time that he proclaimed himself a man of science. He, I was resolved, should never cross my threshold, and I followed Mrs Pebble through the house, screaming out prohibition. But I did not catch even a groan from her, not a nod of the head, nor a cast of the eye, to show that she had heard.

I met the doctor at the door of the library. “Well,” I sneered, throwing my hand in his face, “have you come to teach me some new prayers?”

He brushed by me as if he had not felt the blow, and knelt down by the sofa.

“Rupture of a vessel on the brain, I think,” he says to Soames and Mrs Pebble after a short moment. “He has been dead some hours. Poor fellow! You had better telegraph for his sister, and I will send up the undertaker to arrange the body.”

“You liar!” I yelled. “You whining liar! How have you the insolence to tell my servants that I am dead, when you see me here face to face?”

He was far in the passage, with Soames and Mrs Pebble at his heels, ere I had ended, and not one of the three turned round.

All that night I sat in the library. Strangely enough, I had no wish to sleep nor during the time that followed, had I any craving to eat. In the morning the men came, and although I ordered them out, they proceeded to minister about something I could not see. So all day I stayed in the library or wandered about the house, and at night the men came again bringing with them a coffin. Then, in my humour, thinking it shame that so fine a coffin should be empty I lay the night in it and slept a soft dreamless sleep – the softest sleep I have ever slept. And when the men came the next day I rested still, and the undertaker shaved me. A strange valet!

On the evening after that, I was coming downstairs, when I noted some luggage in the hall, and so learned that my sister had arrived. I had not seen this woman since her marriage, and I loathed her more than I loathed any creature in this ill-organized world. She was very beautiful, I think – tall, and dark, and straight as a ramrod – and she had an unruly passion for scandal and dress. I suppose the reason I disliked her so intensely was, that she had a habit of making one aware of her presence when she was several yards off At half-past nine o’clock my sister came down to the library in a very charming wrap and I soon found that she was as insensible to my presence as the others. I trembled with rage to see her kneel down by the coffin – my coffin; but when she bent over to kiss the pillow I threw away control.

A knife which had been used to cut string was lying upon a table: I seized it and drove it into her neck. She fled from the room screaming.

“Come! come!” she cried, her voice quivering with anguish. “The corpse is bleeding from the nose.”

Then I cursed her.

On the morning of the third day there was a heavy fall of snow. About eleven o’clock I observed that the house was filled with blacks and mutes and folk of the county, who came for the obsequies. I went into the library and sat still, and waited. Soon came the men, and they closed the lid of the coffin and bore it out on their shoulders. And yet I sat, feeling rather sadly that something of mine had been taken away: I could not quite think what. For half-an-hour perhaps – dreaming, dreaming: and then I glided to the hall door. There was no trace left of the funeral; but after a while I sighted a black thread winding slowly across the white plain.

“I’m not dead!” I moaned, and rubbed my face in the pure snow and tossed it on my neck and hair. “Sweet God, I am not dead.”

THE BURNED HOUSE

One night at the end of dinner, the last time I crossed the Atlantic, somebody in our group remarked that we were just passing over the spot where the Lusitania had gone down. Whether this were the case or not, the thought of it was enough to make us rather grave, and we dropped into some more or less serious discussion about the emotions of men and women who see all hope gone, and realise that they are going to sink with the vessel.

From that the talk wandered to the fate of the drowned. Was not theirs, after all, a fortunate end? Somebody related details from the narratives of those who had been all but drowned in the accident of the war. A Scotch lady inquired fancifully if the ghosts of those who are lost at sea ever appear above the waters and come aboard ships. Would there be danger of seeing one when the light was turned out in her cabin? This put an end to all seriousness, and most of us laughed. But a little, tight-faced man, bleak and iron-grey, who had been listening attentively, did not laugh. The lady noticed his decorum, and appealed to him for support.

“You are like me – you believe in ghosts!” she asked lightly.

He hesitated, thinking it over.

“In ghosts?” he repeated slowly. “N-no, I don’t know as I do. I’ve never had any personal experience that way. I’ve never seen the ghost of anyone I knew. Has anybody here?”

No one replied. Instead, most of us laughed again – a little uneasily, perhaps.

“All the same, strange enough things happen in life,” resumed the man, “even if you leave out ghosts, that you can’t clear up by laughing. You laugh till you’ve had some experience big enough to shock you, and then you don’t laugh any more. It’s like being thrown out of a car—”

At this moment there was a blast on the whistle, and everybody rushed up on deck. As it turned out, we had only entered into a belt of fog. On the upper deck I fell in again with the little man, smoking a cigar and walking up and down. We took a few turns together, and he referred to the conversation at dinner. Our laughter evidently rankled in his mind.

“So many strange things happen in life that you can’t account for,” he protested. “You go on laughing at faith-healing, and at dreams, and this and that, and then something comes along that you just can’t explain. You have got to throw up your hands and allow that it doesn’t answer to any tests our experience has provided us with. Now, I’m as matter-of-fact a man as any of those folks down there; but once I had an experience which I had to conclude was out of the ordinary. Whether other people believe it or not, or whether they think they can explain it, don’t matter. It happened to me, and I could no more doubt it than I could doubt having had a tooth pulled after the dentist had done it. If you will sit down here with me in this corner, out of the wind, I’ll tell you how it was.

•   •   •   •   •

Some years ago I had to be for several months in the North of England. I was before the courts; it does not signify now what for, and it is all forgotten by this time. But it was a long and worrying case, and it aged me by twenty years. Well, sir, all through the trial, in that grimy Manchester courtroom, I kept thinking and thinking of a fresh little place I knew in the Lake district, and I helped to get through the hours by thinking that if things went well with me I’d go there at once. And so it was that on the very next morning after I was acquitted I boarded the north-bound train.

It was the early autumn; the days were closing in, and it was night and cold when I arrived. The village was very dark and deserted; they don’t go out much after dark in those parts, anyhow, and the keen mountain wind was enough to quell any lingering desire. The hotel was not one of those modern places which are equipped and upholstered like the great city hotels. It was one of the real old-fashioned taverns, about as uncomfortable places as there are on earth, where the idea is to show the traveller that travelling is a penitential state, and that, morally and physically, the best place for him is home. The landlord brought me a kind of supper, with his hat on and a pipe in his mouth. The room was chilly, but when I asked for a fire, he said he guessed he couldn’t go out to the woodshed till morning. There was nothing else to do, when I had eaten my supper, but to go outside, both to get the smell of the lamp out of my nose and to warm myself by a short walk.

As I did not know the country well, I did not mean to go far. But although it was an overcast night, with a high north-east wind and an occasional flurry of rain, the moon was up, and, even concealed by clouds as it was, it yet lit the night with a kind of twilight grey – not vivid, like the open moonlight, but good enough to see some distance. On account of this, I prolonged my stroll, and kept walking on and on till I was a considerable way from the village, and in a region as lonely as anywhere ha the country. Great trees and shrubs bordered the road, and many feet below was a mountain stream. What with the passion of the wind pouring through the high trees and the shout of the water racing among the boulders, it seemed to me sometimes like the noise of a crowd of people. Sometimes the branches of the trees became so thick that I was walking as if in a black pit, unable to see my hand close to my face. Then, coming out from the tunnel of branches, I would step once more into a grey clearness which opened the road and surrounding country a good way on all sides.

I suppose it might be some three-quarters of an hour I had been walking when I came to a fork of the road. One branch ran downward, getting almost on a level with the bed of the torrent; the other mounted in a steep hill, and this, after a little idle debating, I decided to follow. After I had climbed for more than half a mile, thinking that if I should happen to lose track of one of the landmarks I should be very badly lost, the path – for it was now no more than that – curved, and I came out on a broad plateau. There, to my astonishment, I saw a house. It was a good-sized house, three storeys high, with a verandah round two sides of it, and from the elevation on which it stood it commanded a far stretch of country.

There were a few great trees at a little distance from the house, and behind it, a stone’s-throw away, was a clump of bushes. Still, it looked lonely and stark, offering its four sides unprotected to the winds. For all that, I was very glad to see it. “It does not matter now,” I thought, “whether I have lost my way or not. The people in the house will set me right.”

But when I came up to it I found that it was, to all appearance, uninhabited. The shutters were closed on all the windows; there was not a spark of light anywhere. There was something about it, something sinister and barren, that gave me the kind of shiver you have at the door of a room where you know that a dead man lies inside, or if you get thinking hard about dropping over the rail into that black waste of waters out there. This feeling, you know, isn’t altogether unpleasant; you relish all the better your present security. It was the same with me standing before that house. I was not really frightened. I was alone up there, miles from any kind of help, at the mercy of whoever might be lurking behind the shutters of that sullen house; but I felt that by all the chances I was perfectly alone and safe. My sensation of the uncanny was due to the effect on the nerves produced by wild scenery and the unexpected sight of a house in such a very lonely situation. Thus I reasoned, and, instead of following the road farther, I walked over the grass till I came to a stone wall, perhaps two hundred and fifty yards in front of the house, and rested my arms on it, looking forth at the scene.

On the crests of the hills far away a strange light lingered, like the first touch of dawn in the sky on a rainy morning or the last glimpse of twilight before night comes. Between me and the hills was a wide stretch of open country. On my right hand was an apple orchard, and I observed that a stile had been made in the wall of piled stones to enable the house people to go back and forth.

Now, after I had been there leaning on the wall some considerable time, I saw a man coming towards me through the orchard. He was walking with a good, free stride, and as he drew nearer I could see that he was a tall, sinewy fellow between twenty-five and thirty, with a shaven face, wearing a slouch hat, a dark woollen shirt, and gaiters. When he reached the stile and began climbing over it I bade him goodnight in neighbourly fashion. He made no reply, but he looked me straight in the face, and the look gave me a qualm. Not that it was an evil face, mind you – it was a handsome, serious face – but it was ravaged by some terrible passion: stealth was on it, ruthlessness, and a deadly resolution, and at the same time such a look as a man driven by some uncontrollable power might throw on surrounding things, asking for comprehension and mercy. It was impossible for me to resent his churlishness, his thoughts were so certainly elsewhere. I doubt if he even saw me.

He could not have gone by more than a quarter of a minute when I turned to look after him. He had disappeared. The plateau lay bare before me, and it seemed impossible that, even if he had sprinted like an athlete, he could have got inside the house in so little time. But I have always made it a rule to attribute what I cannot understand to natural causes that I have failed to observe. I said to myself that no doubt the man had gone back into the orchard by some other opening in the wall lower down, or there might be some flaw in my vision owing to the uncertain and distorting light.

But even as I continued to look towards the house, leaning my back now against the wall, I noticed that there were lights springing tip in the windows behind the shutters. They were flickering lights, now bright – now dim, and had a ruddy glow like firelight. Before I had looked long I became convinced that it was indeed firelight – the house was on fire. Black smoke began to pour from the roof, the red sparks flew in the wind. Then at a window above the roof of the verandah the shutters were thrown open, and I heard a woman shriek. I ran towards the house as hard as I could, and when I drew near I could see her plainly.

She was a young woman; her hair fell in disorder over her white nightgown. She stretched out her bare arms, screaming. I saw a man come behind and seize her. But they were caught in a trap. The flames were licking round the windows, and the smoke was killing them. Even now the part of the house where they stood was caving in.

Appalled by this horrible tragedy which had thus suddenly risen before me, I made my way still nearer the house, thinking that if the two could struggle to the side of the house not bounded by the verandah they might jump, and I might break the fall. I was shouting this at them; I was right up close to the fire; and then I was struck by – I noticed for the first time an astonishing thing – the flames had no heat in them!

I was standing near enough to the fire to be singed by it, and yet I felt no heat. The sparks were flying about my head; some fell on my hands, and they did not burn. And now I perceived that, although the smoke was rolling in columns, I was not choked by the smoke, and that there had been no smell of smoke since the fire broke out. Neither was there any glare against the sky.

As I stood there stupefied, wondering how these things could be, the whole house was swept by a very tornado of flame, and crashed down in a red ruin.

Stricken to the heart by this abominable catastrophe, I made my way uncertainly down the hill, shouting for help. As I came to a little wooden bridge spanning the torrent, just beyond where the roads forked, I saw what appeared to be a rope in loose coils lying there. I saw that part of it was fastened to the railing of the bridge and hung outside, and I looked over. There was a man’s body swinging by the neck between the road and the stream. I leaned over still farther, and then I recognised him as the man I had seen coming out of the orchard. His hat had fallen off, and the toes of his boots just touched the water.

It seemed hardly possible, and yet it was certain. That was the man, and he was hanging there. I scrambled down at the side of the bridge, and put out my hand to seize the body, so that I might lift it up and relieve the weight on the rope. I succeeded in clutching hold of his loose shirt, and for a second I thought that it had come away in my hand. Then I found that my hand had closed on nothing, I had clutched nothing but air. And yet the figure swung by the neck before my eyes!

I was suffocated with such horror that I feared for a moment I must lose consciousness. The next minute I was running and stumbling along that dark road in mortal anxiety, my one idea being to rouse the town, and bring men to the bridge. That, I say, was my intention; but the fact is that when I came at last in sight of the village I slowed down instinctively and began to reflect. After all, I was unknown there; I had just gone through a disagreeable trial in Manchester, and rural people were notoriously given to groundless suspicion. I had had enough of the law, and of arrests without sufficient evidence. The wisest thing would be to drop a hint or two before the landlord, and judge by his demeanour whether to proceed.

I found him sitting where I had left him, smoking, in his shirtsleeves, with his hat on.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I didn’t know where you had got to.”

I told him I had been taking a walk. I went on to mention casually the fork in the road, the hill, and the plateau.

“And who lives in that house?” I asked with a good show of indifference, “on top of the hill?”

He stared.

“House? There ain’t no house up there,” he said positively. “Old Joe Snedeker, who owns the land, says he’s going to build a house up there for his son to live in when he gets married; but he ain’t begun yet, and some folks reckon he never will.”

“I feel sure I saw a house,” I protested feebly. But I was thinking – no heat in the fire, no substance in the body. I had not the courage to dispute.

The landlord looked at me not unkindly. “You seem sort of done up,” he remarked. “What you want is to go to bed.”

•   •   •   •   •

The man who was telling me the story paused, and for a moment we sat silent, listening to the pant of the machinery, the thrumming of the wind in the wire stays, and the lash of the sea. Some voices were singing on the deck below. I considered him with the shade of contemptuous superiority we feel, as a rule, towards those who tell us their dreams or what some fortune-teller has predicted.

“Hallucinations,” I said at last, with reassuring indulgence. “Trick of the vision, toxic opthalmia. After the long strain of your trial, your nerves were shattered.”

“That’s what I thought myself,” he replied shortly, “especially after I had been out to the plateau the next morning, and saw no sign that a house had ever stood there.”

“And no corpse at the bridge?” I said; and laughed.

“And no corpse at the bridge.”

He tried to get a light for another cigar. This took him some little time, and when at last he managed it, he got out of his chair and stood looking down at me.

•   •   •   •   •

Now listen. I told you that the thing happened several years ago. I’d got almost to forget it; if you can only persuade yourself that a thing is a freak of imagination, it pretty soon gets dim inside your head. Delusions have no staying power once it is realised that they are delusions. Whenever it did come back to me, I used to think how near I had once been to going out of my mind. That was all.

Well, last year, being up north, I went up to that village again. I went to the same hotel, and found the same landlord. He remembered me at once as “the feller who stayed with him and thought he saw a house.” “I believe you had the jim-jams,” he said.

We laughed, and the landlord went on:

“There’s been a house there since, though.”

“Has there?”

“Yes; an’ it ha’ been as well if there never had been. Old Snedeker built it for his son, a fine big house with a verandah on two sides. The son, young Joe, got courting Mabel Elting from Windermere. She’d gone down to work in a shop somewhere in Liverpool. Well, sir, she used to get carrying on with another young feller ’bout here, Jim Travers, and Jim was wild about her; used to save up his wages to go down to see her. But she chucked him in the end, and married Joe; I suppose because Joe had the house, and the old man’s money to expect. Well, poor Jim must ha’ gone quite mad. What do you think he did? The very first night the new-wed pair spent in that house he burned it down. Burned the two of them in their bed, and he was as nice and quiet a feller as you want to see. He may ha’ been full of whisky at the time.”

“No, he wasn’t,” I said.

The landlord looked surprised. “You’ve heard about it?”

“No; go on.”

“Yes, sir, he burned them in their bed. And then what do you think he did? He hung himself at the little bridge half a mile below. Do you remember where the road divides? Well, it was there. I saw his body hanging there myself the next morning. The toes of his boots were just touching the water.”

THE INTERVAL

Mrs. Wilton passed through a little alley leading from one of the gates which are around Regent’s Park, and came out on the wide and quiet street. She walked along slowly, peering anxiously front side to side so as not to overlook the number. She pulled her furs closer round her; after her years in India this London damp seemed very harsh. Still, it was not a fog today. A dense haze, grey and tinged ruddy, lay between the houses, sometimes blowing with a little wet kiss against the face. Mrs. Wilton’s hair and eyelashes and her furs were powdered with tiny drops. But there was nothing in the weather to blur the sight; she could see the faces of people some distance off and read the signs on the shops.

Before the door of a dealer in antiques and second-hand furniture she paused and looked through the shabby uncleaned window at an unassorted heap of things, many of them of great value. She read the Polish name fastened on the pane in white letters.

“Yes; this is the place.”

She opened the door, which met her entrance with an ill-tempered jangle. From somewhere in the black depths of the shop the dealer came forward. He had a clammy white face, with a sparse black beard, and wore a skull cap and spectacles. Mrs. Wilton spoke to him in a low voice.

A look of complicity, of cunning, perhaps of irony, passed through the dealer’s cynical and sad eyes. But he bowed gravely and respectfully.

“Yes, she is here, madam. Whether she will see you or not I do not know. She is not always well she has her moods. And then, we have to be so careful. The police – Not that they would touch a lady like you. But the poor alien has not much chance these days.”

Mrs. Wilton followed him to the back of the shop, where there was a winding staircase. She knocked over a few things in her passage and stooped to pick them up, but the dealer kept muttering, “It does not matter – surely it does not matter.” He lit a candle.

“You must go up these stairs. They are very dark; be careful. When you come to a door, open it and go straight in.”

He stood at the foot of the stairs holding the light high above his head as she ascended.

•   •   •   •   •

The room was not very large, and it seemed very ordinary. There were some flimsy, uncomfortable chairs in gilt and red. Two large palms were in corners. Under a glass cover on the table was a view of Rome. The room had not a businesslike look, thought Mrs. Wilton; there was no suggestion of the office or waiting-room where people came and went all day; yet you would not say that it was a private room which was lived in. There were no books or papers about; every chair was in the place it had been placed when the room was last swept; there was no fire and it was very cold.

To the right of the window was a door covered with a plush curtain. Mrs. Wilton sat down near the table and watched this door. She thought it must be through it that the soothsayer would come forth. She laid her hands listlessly one on top of the other on the table. This must be the tenth seer she had consulted since Hugh had been killed. She thought them over. No, this must be the eleventh. She had forgotten that frightening man in Paris who said he had been a priest. Yet of them all it was only he who had told her anything definite. But even he could do no more than tell the past. He told of her marriage; he even had the duration of it right – twenty-one months, he told too of their time in India – at least, he knew that her husband had been a soldier, and said he had been on service in the “colonies.” On the whole, though, he had been as unsatisfactory as the others. None of them had given her the consolation she sought. She did not want to be told of the past. If Hugh was gone forever, then with him had gone all her love of living, her courage, all her better self. She wanted to be lifted out of the despair, the dazed aimless drifting from day to day, longing at night for the morning, and in the morning for the fall of night, which had been her life since his death. If somebody could assure her that it was not all over, that he was somewhere, not too far away, unchanged from what he had been here, with his crisp hair and rather slow smile and lean brown face, that he saw her sometimes, that he had not forgotten her….

“Oh, Hugh, darling!”

When she looked up again the woman was sitting there before her. Mrs. Wilton had not heard her come in. With her experience, wide enough now, of seers and fortune-tellers of all kinds, she saw at once that this woman was different from the others. She was used to the quick appraising look, the attempts, sometimes clumsy, but often cleverly disguised, to collect some fragments of information whereupon to erect a plausible vision. But this woman looked as if she took it out of herself.

Not that her appearance suggested intercourse with the spiritual world more than the others had done; it suggested that, in fact, considerably less. Some of the others were frail, yearning, evaporated creatures, and the ex-priest in Paris had something terrible and condemned in his look. He might well sup with the devil, that man, and probably did in some way or other.

But this was a little fat, weary-faced woman about fifty, who only did not look like a cook because she looked more like a sempstress. Her black dress was all covered with white threads. Mrs. Wilton looked at her with some embarrassment. It seemed more reasonable to be asking a woman like this about altering a gown than about intercourse with the dead. That seemed even absurd in such a very commonplace presence. The woman seemed timid and oppressed; she breathed heavily and kept rubbing her dingy hands, which looked moist, one over the other; she was always wetting her lips, and coughed with a little dry cough. But in her these signs of nervous exhaustion suggested overwork in a close atmosphere, bending too close over the sewing-machine. Her uninteresting hair, like a rat’s pelt, was eked out with a false addition of another colour. Some threads had got into her hair too.

Her harried, uneasy look caused Mrs. Wilton to ask compassionately: “Are you much worried by the police?”

“Oh, the police! Why don’t they leave us alone? You never know who comes to see you. Why don’t they leave me alone? I’m a good woman. I only think. What I do is no harm to anyone….”

She continued in an uneven querulous voice, always rubbing her hands together nervously. She seemed to the visitor to be talking at random, just gabbling, like children do sometimes before they fail asleep.

“I wanted to explain—” hesitated Mrs. Wilton.

But the woman, with her head pressed close against the back of the chair, was staring beyond her at the wall. Her face had lost whatever little expression it had; it was blank and stupid. When she spoke it was very slowly and her voice was guttural.

“Can’t you see him? It seems strange to me that you can’t see him. He is so near you. He is passing his arm round your shoulders.”

This was a frequent gesture of Hugh’s. And indeed at that moment she felt that somebody was very near her, bending over her. She was enveloped in tenderness. Only a very thin veil, she felt, prevented her from seeing. But the woman saw. She was describing Hugh minutely, even the little things like the burn on his right hand.

“Is he happy? Oh, ask him does he love me?”

The result was so far beyond anything she had hoped for that she was stunned. She could only stammer the first thing that came into her head. “Does he love me?”

“He loves you. He won’t answer, but he loves you. He wants me to make you see him; he is disappointed, I think, because I can’t. But I can’t unless you do it yourself.”

After a while she said:

“I think you will see him again. You think of nothing else. He is very close to us now.”

Then she collapsed, and fell into a heavy sleep and lay there motionless, hardly breathing. Mrs. Wilton put some notes on the table and stole out on tiptoe.

•   •   •   •   •

She seemed to remember that downstairs in the dark shop, the dealer with the waxen face detained her to show some old silver and jewellery and such like. But she did not come to herself, she had no precise recollection of anything, till she found herself entering a church near Portland Place. It was an unlikely act in her normal moments. Why did she go in there? She acted like one walking in her sleep.

The church was old and dim, with high black pews. There was nobody there. Mrs. Wilton sat down in one of the pews and bent forward with her face in her hands.

After a few minutes she saw that a soldier had come in noiselessly and placed himself about half-a-dozen rows ahead of her. He never turned round; but presently she was struck by something familiar in the figure. First she thought vaguely that the soldier looked like her Hugh. Then, when he put up his hand, she saw who it was.

She hurried out of the pew and ran towards him. “Oh, Hugh, Hugh, have you come back?”

He looked round with a smile. He had not been killed. It was all a mistake. He was going to speak….

Footsteps sounded hollow in the empty church. She turned and glanced down the dim aisle.

It was an old sexton or verger who approached. “I thought I heard you call,” he said.

“I was speaking to my husband.” But Hugh was nowhere to be seen.

“He was here a moment ago.” She looked about in anguish. “He must have gone to the door.”

“There’s nobody here,” said the old man gently. “Only you and me. Ladies are often taken funny since the war. There was one in here yesterday afternoon said she was married in this church and her husband had promised to meet her here. Perhaps you were married here?”

“No,” said Mrs. Wilton, desolately. “I was married in India.”

•   •   •   •   •

It might have been two or three days after that, when she went into a small Italian restaurant in the Bayswater district. She often went out for her meals now: she had developed an exhausting cough, and she found that it somehow became less troublesome when she was in a public place looking at strange faces. In her flat there were all the things that Hugh had used; the trunks and bags still had his name on them with the labels of places where they had been together. They were like stabs. In the restaurant, people came and went, many soldiers too among them, just glancing at her in her corner.

This day, as it chanced, she was rather late and there was nobody there. She was very tired. She nibbled at the food they brought her. She could almost have cried from tiredness and loneliness and the ache in her heart.

Then suddenly he was before her, sitting there opposite at the table. It was as it was in the days of their engagement, when they used sometimes to hunch at restaurants. He was not in uniform. He smiled at her and urged her to eat, just as he used in those days….

•   •   •   •   •

I met her that afternoon as she was crossing Kensington Gardens, and she told me about it.

“I have been with Hugh.” She seemed most happy.

“Did he say anything?”

“N-no. Yes. I think he did, but I could not quite hear. My head was so very tired. The next time—”

•   •   •   •   •

I did not see her for some time after that. She found, I think, that by going to places where she had once seen him – the old church, the little restaurant – she was more certain to see him again. She never saw him at home. But in the street or the park he would often walk along beside her. Once he saved her from being run over. She said she actually felt his hand grabbing her arm, suddenly, when the car was nearly upon her.

She had given me the address of the clairvoyant; and it is through that strange woman that I know – or seem to know – what followed.

Mrs. Wilton was not exactly ill last winter, not so ill, at least, as to keep to her bedroom. But she was very thin, and her great handsome eyes always seemed to be staring at some point beyond, searching. There was a look in them that seamen’s eyes sometimes have when they are drawing on a coast of which they are not very certain. She lived almost in solitude: she hardly ever saw anybody except when they sought her out. To those who were anxious about her she laughed and said she was very well.

One sunny morning she was lying awake, waiting for the maid to bring her tea. The shy London sunlight peeped through the blinds. The room had a fresh and happy look.

When she heard the door open she thought that the maid had come in. Then she saw that Hugh was standing at the foot of the bed. He was in uniform this time, and looked as he had looked the day he went away.

“Oh, Hugh, speak to me! Will you not say just one word?”

He smiled and threw back his head, just as he used to in the old days at her mother’s house when he wanted to call her out of the room without attracting the attention of the others. He moved towards the door, still signing to her to follow him. He picked up her slippers on his way and held them out to her as if he wanted her to put them on. She slipped out of bed hastily….

•   •   •   •   •

It is strange that when they came to look through her things after her death the slippers could never be found.

THE BUSINESS
OF MADAME JAHN

How we all stared, how frightened we all were, how we passed opinions, on that morning when Gustave Herbout was found swinging by the neck from the ceiling of his bedroom! The whole Faubourg, even the ancient folk who had not felt a street under them for years, turned out and stood gaping at the house with amazement and loud conjecture. For why should Gustave Herbout, of all men, take to the rope? Only last week he had inherited all the money of his aunt, Madame Jahn, together with her house and the shop with the five assistants, and life looked fair enough for him. No; clearly it was not wise of Gustave to hang himself!

Besides, his aunt’s death had happened at a time when Gustave was in sore straits for money. To be sure, he had his salary from the bank in which he worked; but what is a mere salary to one who (like Gustave) threw off the clerkly habit when working hours were over to assume the dress and lounge of the accustomed boulevardier: while he would relate to obsequious friends vague but satisfactory stories of a Russian Prince who was his uncle, and of an extremely rich English lady to whose death he looked forward with hope. Alas! with a clerk’s salary one cannot make much of a figure in Paris. It took all of that, and more, to maintain the renown he had gained among his acquaintance of having to his own a certain little lady with yellow hair who danced divinely. So he was forced to depend on the presents which Madame Jahn gave him from time to time; and for those presents he had to pay his aunt a most sedulous and irksome attention. At times, when he was almost sick from his craving for the boulevard, the café, the theatre, he would have to repair as the day grew to an end, to our Faubourg, and the house behind the shop, where he would sit to an old-fashioned supper with his aunt, and listen with a sort of dull impatience while she asked him when he had last been at Confession, and told him long dreary stories of his dead father and mother. Punctually at nine o’clock the deaf servant, who was the only person besides Madame Jahn that lived in the house, would let in the fat old priest, who came for his game of dominoes, and betake herself to bed. Then the dominoes would begin, and with them the old man’s prattle which Gustave knew so well: about his daily work, about the uselessness of all things here on earth, and the happiness and glory of the Kingdom of Heaven; and, of course, our boulevardier noticed, with the usual cheap sneer of the modern, that whilst the priest talked of the Kingdom of Heaven he yet showed the greatest anxiety if he had symptoms of a cold, or any other petty malady. However, Gustave would sit there with a hypocrite’s grin and inwardly raging, till the clock chimed eleven. At that hour Madame Jahn would rise, and, if she was pleased with her nephew, would go over to her writing-desk and give him, with a rather pretty air of concealment from the priest, perhaps fifty or a hundred francs. Whereupon Gustave would bid her a manifestly affectionate goodnight! and depart in the company of the priest. As soon as he could get rid of the priest, he would hasten to his favourite cafés, to discover that all the people worth seeing had long since grown tired of wailing and had departed on their own affairs. The money, indeed, was a kind of consolation; but then there were nights when he did not get a sou. Ah! they amuse themselves in Paris, but not in this way – this is not amusing.

One cannot live a proper life upon a salary and an occasional gift of fifty or a hundred francs. And it is not entertaining to tell men that your uncle, the Prince at Moscow, is in a sorry case, and even now lies a-dying, or that the rich English lady is in the grip of a vile consumption and is momently expected to succumb, if these men only shove up their shoulders, wink at one another, and continue to present their bills. Further, the little Mademoiselle with yellow hair had lately shown signs of a very pretty temper, because her usual flowers and bonbons were not apparent. So, since things were come to this dismal pass, Gustave fell to attending the race-meetings at Chantilly. During the first week Gustave won largely, for that is sometimes the way with ignorant men during that week, too, the little Mademoiselle was charming, for she had her bouquets and boxes of bonbons. But the next week Gustave lost heavily, for that is also very often the way with ignorant men: and he was thrown into the blackest despair, when one night at a place where he used to sup, Mademoiselle took the arm of a great fellow whom he much suspected to be a German, and tossed him a scornful nod as she went off.

On the evening after this happened, he was standing between five and six o’clock, in the Place de la Madeleine, blowing on his fingers and trying to plan his next move, when he heard his name called by a familiar voice, and turned to face his aunt’s adviser, the priest.

“Ah, Gustave, my friend, I have just been to see a colleague of mine here!” cried the old man, pointing to the great church. “And are you going to your good aunt tonight?” he added, with a look at Gustave’s neat dress.

Gustave was in a flame that the priest should have detected him in his gay clothes, for he always made a point of appearing at Madame Jahn’s clad staidly in black; but he answered pleasantly enough:

“No, my Father, I’m afraid I can’t tonight. You see I’m a little behind with my office work, and I have to stay at home and catch up.”

“Well, well!” said the priest, with half a sigh, “I suppose young men will always be the same. I myself can only be with her till nine o’clock tonight because I must see a sick parishioner. But let me give you one bit of advice, my friend,” he went on, taking hold of a button on Gustave’s coat “Don’t neglect your aunt; for, mark my words, one day everything of Madame Jahn’s will be yours!” And the omnibus he was waiting for happening to swing by at that moment, he departed without another word.

Gustave strolled along the Boulevard des Capucines in a study. Yes; it was certain that the house, and the shop with the five assistants, would one day be his; for the priest knew all his aunt’s affairs. But how soon would they be his? Madame Jahn was now hardly sixty; her mother had lived to be ninety; when she was ninety he would be – And meanwhile, what about the numerous bills; what (above all!) about the little lady with yellow hair? He paused and struck his heel on the pavement with such force, that two men passing nudged one another and smiled. Then he made certain purchases, and set about wasting his time till nine o’clock.

It is curious to consider, that although when he started out at nine o’clock, Gustave was perfectly clear as to what he meant to do, yet he was chiefly troubled by the fear that the priest had told his aunt about his fine clothes. But when he had passed through the deserted Faubourg, and had come to the house behind the shop, he found his aunt only very pleased to see him, and a little surprised. So he sat with her, and listened to her gentle, homely stories, and told lies about himself and his manner of life, till the clock struck eleven. Then he rose, and Madame Jahn rose too and went to her writing-desk and opened a small drawer.

“You have been very kind to a lonely old woman tonight, my Gustave,” said Madame Jahn, smiling.

“How sweet of you to say that, dearest aunt!” replied Gustave. He went over and passed his arm caressingly across her shoulders, and stabbed her in the heart.

For a full five minutes after the murder he stood still; as men often do in a great crisis when they know that any movement means decisive action. Then he started, laid hold of his hat, and made for the door. But there the stinging knowledge of his crime came to him for the first time; and he turned back into the room. Madame Jahn’s bedroom candle was on a table: he lit it, and passed through a door which led from the house into the shop. Crouching below the counters covered with white sheets, lest a streak of light on the windows might attract the observation of some passenger, he proceeded to a side entrance to the shop, unbarred and unlocked the door and put the key in his pocket. Then, in the same crouching way, he returned to the room, and started to ransack the small drawer. The notes he scattered about the floor; but two small bags of coin went into his coat. Then he took the candle and dropped some wax on the face and hands and dress of the corpse; he spilt wax, too, over the carpet, and then he broke the candle and ground it under his foot. He even tore with long nervous fingers at the dead woman’s bodice until her breasts lay exposed; and plucked out a handful of her hair and threw it on the floor to stick to the wax. When all these things had been accomplished he went to the house door and listened. The Fausbourg is always very quiet about twelve o’clock, and a single footstep falls on the night with a great sound. He could not hear the least noise; so he darted out and ran lightly until he came to a turning. There he fell into a sauntering walk, lit a cigarette, and, hailing a passing fiacre, directed the man to drive to the Pont Saint-Michel. At the bridge he alighted, and noting that he was not eyed, he threw the key of the shop into the river. Then assuming the swagger and assurance of a half-drunken man, he marched up the Boulevard and entered the Café d’Harcourt.

The place was filled with the usual crowd of men and women of the Quartier Latin. Gustave looked round, and observing a young student with a flushed face who was talking eagerly about the rights of man, he sat down by him. It was his part to act quickly: so before the student had quite finished a sentence for his ear, the murderer gave him the lie. The student, however, was not so ready for a fight as Gustave had supposed; and when he began to argue again, Gustave seized a glass full of brandy and water and threw the stuff in his face. Then indeed there was a row, till the gendarmes interfered, and haled Gustave to the station. At the police-station he bitterly lamented his misdeed, which he attributed to an extra glass of absinthe, and he begged the authorities to carry word of his plight to his good aunt, Madame Jahn, in our Faubourg. So to the house behind the shop they went, and there they found her – sitting with her breasts hanging out, her poor head clotted with blood, and a knife in her heart.

The next morning, Gustave was set free. A man and a woman, two of the five assistants in the shop, had been charged with the murder. The woman had been severely reprimanded by Madame Jahn on the day before, and the man was known to be the girl’s paramour. It was the duty of the man to close at night all the entrances into the shop, save the main entrance, which was closed by Madame Jahn and her deaf servant; and the police had formed a theory (worked out with the amazing zeal and skill which cause the Paris police so often to overreach themselves!) that the man had failed to bolt one of the side doors, and had, by his subtlety, got possession of the key whereby he and his accomplice re-entered the place about midnight. Working on this theory, the police had woven a web round the two unfortunates with threads of steel; and there was little doubt that both of them would stretch their necks under the guillotine, with full consent of Press and public. At least, this was Gustave’s opinion; and Gustave’s opinion now went for a great deal in the Faubourg. Of course there were a few who murmured that it was a good thing poor Madame Jahn had not lived to see her nephew arrested for a drunken brawler; but with full remembrance of who owned the house and shop we were most of us inclined to say, after the priest: That if the brave Gustave had been with his aunt, the shocking affair could never have occurred. And, indeed, what had we more inspiring than the inconsolable grief he showed? Why! on the day of the funeral, when he heard the earth clatter down on the coffin-lid in Père la Chaise, he even swooned to the ground, and had to be carried out in the midst of the mourners. “Oh, yes,” (quoth the gossips), “Gustave Herbout loved his aunt passing well!”

On the night after the funeral, Gustave was sitting alone before the fire in Madame Jahn’s room, smoking and making his plans. He thought, that when all this wretched mock grief and pretence of decorum was over, he would again visit the cafés which he greatly savoured, and the little Mademoiselle with yellow hair would once more smile on him delicious smiles with a gleaming regard. Thus he was thinking when the clock on the mantelpiece tinkled eleven; and at that moment a very singular thing happened. The door was suddenly opened: a girl came in, and walked straight over to the writing-desk, pulled out the small drawer, and then sat staring at the man by the fire. She was distinctly beautiful; although there was a certain old-fashioned-ness in her peculiar silken dress, and the manner of wearing her hair. Not once did it occur to Gustave, as he gazed in terror, that he was gazing on a mortal woman: the doors were too well bolted to allow anyone from outside to enter, and besides, there was a strange baffling familiarity in the face and mien of the intruder. It might have been an hour as he sat there; and then, the silence becoming too horrible, by a supreme effort of his wonderful courage he rushed out of the room and upstairs to get his hat. There in his murdered aunt’s bedroom, – there, smiling at him from the wall – was a vivid presentment of the dread vision that sat below: a portrait of Madame Jahn as a girl. He fled into the street, and walked, perhaps two miles, before he thought at all. But when he did think, he found that he was drawn against his will back to the house to see if It was still there: just as the police here believe a murderer is drawn to the Morgue to view the body of his victim. Yes; the girl was there still, with her great reproachless eyes; and throughout that solemn night Gustave, haggard and mute, sat glaring at her. Towards dawn he fell into an uneasy doze; and when he awoke with a scream, he found that the girl was gone.

At noon the next day Gustave, heartened by several glasses of brandy, and cheered by the sunshine in the Champs-Elysées, endeavoured to make light of the affair. He would gladly have arranged not to go back to the house: but then people would talk so much, and he could not afford to lose any custom out of the shop. Moreover, the whole matter was only an hallucination – the effect of jaded nerves. He dined well, and went to see a musical comedy; and so contrived, that he did not return to the house until after two o’clock. There was someone waiting for him, sitting at the desk with the small drawer open; not the girl of last night, but a somewhat older woman – and the same reproachless eyes. So great was the fascination of those eyes, that, although he left the house at once with an iron resolution not to go back, he found himself drawn under them again, and he sat through the night as he had sat through the night before, sobbing and stupidly and all the night till eleven o’clock; and then a figure of his aunt glaring. And all day long he crouched by the fire shuddering; came to him again, but always a little older and more withered. And this went on for five days; the figure that sat with him becoming older and older as the days ran, till on the sixth night he gazed through the hours at his aunt as she was on the night he killed her. On these nights he was used sometimes to start up and make for the street, swearing never to return; but always he would be dragged back to the eyes. The policemen came to know him from these night walks, and people began to notice his bad looks: these could not spring from grief, folk said, and so they thought he was leading a wild life.

On the seventh night there was a delay of about five minutes after the clock had rung eleven, before the door opened. And then – then, merciful God! The body of a woman in grave-clothes came into the room, as if borne by unseen men, and lay in the air across the writing-desk, while the small drawer flew open of its own accord. Yes; there was the shroud and the brown scapular, the prim white cap, the hands folded on the shrunken breast. Grey from slimy horror, Gustave raised himself up, and went over to look for the eyes. When he saw them pressed down with pennies, he reeled back and vomited into the grate. And blind, and sick, and loathing, he stumbled upstairs.

But as he passed by Madame Jahn’s bedroom, the corpse came out to meet him, with the eyes closed and the pennies pressing them down. Then, at last, reeking and dabbled with sweat, with his tongue lolling out, and the spittle running down his beard, Gustave breathed:

“Are you alive?”

“No, no!” wailed the thing, with a burst of awful weeping; “I have been dead many days.”

MASTER
OF FALLEN YEARS

Several years ago, I was intimately acquainted with a young man named Augustus Barber. He was employed in a paper-box manufacturer’s business in the city of London. I never heard what his father was. His mother was a widow and lived, I think, at Godalming; but of this I am not sure. It is odd enough that I should have forgotten where she lived, for my friend was always talking about her. Sometimes he seemed immensely fond of her; at other times almost to hate her; but whichever it was, he never left her long out of his conversation. I believe the reason I forget is that he talked so much about her that I failed at last to pay attention to what he said.

He was a stocky young man, with light-coloured hair and a pale, rather blotchy complexion. There was nothing at all extraordinary about him on either the material or spiritual side. He had rather a weakness for gaudy ties and socks and jewellery. His manners were a little boisterous; his conversation, altogether personal. He had received some training at a commercial school. He read little else than the newspapers. The only book I ever knew him to read was a novel of Stevenson’s, which he said was “too hot for blisters.”

Where, then, in this very commonplace young man, were hidden the elements of the extraordinary actions and happenings I am about to relate? Various theories offer; it is hard to decide. Doctors, psychologists whom I have consulted, have given different opinions; but upon one point they have all agreed – that I am not able to supply enough information about his ancestry. And, in fact, I know hardly anything about that.

This is not, either, because he was uncommunicative. As I say, he used to talk a lot about his mother. But he did not really inspire enough interest for anybody to take an interest in his affairs. He was there; he was a pleasant enough fellow; but when he had gone you were finished with him till the next time. If he did not look you up, it would never occur to you to go and see him. And as to what became of him when he was out of sight, or how he lived – all that, somehow, never troubled our heads.

What illustrates this is that when he had a severe illness a few years after I came to know him, so little impression did it make on anyone that I cannot now say, and nobody else seems able to remember, what the nature of the illness was. But I remember that he was very ill indeed; and one day, meeting one of his fellow clerks in Cheapside, he told me that Barber’s death was only a question of hours. But he recovered, after being, as I heard, for a long time in a state of lethargy which looked mortal.

It was when he was out again that I – and not only myself but others – noticed for the first time that his character was changing. He had always been a laughing, undecided sort of person; he had a facile laugh for everything; he would meet you and begin laughing before there was anything to laugh at. This was certainly harmless, and he had a deserved reputation for good humour.

But his manners now became subject to strange fluctuations, which were very objectionable while they lasted. He would be overtaken with fits of sullenness in company; at times he was violent. He took to rambling in strange places at night, and more than once he appeared at his office in a very battered condition. It is difficult not to think that he provoked the rows he got into himself. One good thing was that the impulses which drove him to do such actions were violent rather than enduring; in fact, I often thought that if the force and emotion of these bouts ever came to last longer, he would be a very dangerous character. This was not only my opinion; it was the opinion of a number of respectable people who knew him as well as I did.

I recollect that one evening, as three or four of us were coming out of a music ball, Barber offered some freedom to a lady which the gentleman with her – a member of Parliament, I was told – thought fit to resent. He turned fiercely on Barber with his hand raised – and then suddenly grew troubled, stepped back, lost countenance. This could not have been physical fear, for he was a strongly built, handsome man – a giant compared to the insignificant Barber. But Barber was looking at him, and there was something not only in his face, but, so to speak, encompassing him – I can’t well describe it – a sort of abstract right – an uncontrolled power – a command of the issues of life and death, which made one quail.

Everybody standing near felt it; I could see that from their looks. Only for a moment it lasted, and then the spell was broken – really as if some formidable spectacle had been swept away from before cur eyes; and there was Barber, a most ordinary looking young man, quiet and respectable, and so dazed that he scarcely heeded the cuff which the gentleman managed to get in before we could drag our friend off….

It was about this time that he began to show occasionally the strangest interest in questions of art – I mean, strange in him whom we had never known interested in anything of the kind. I am told, however, that this is not so very remarkable, since not a few cases have been observed of men and women, after some shock or illness, developing hitherto unsuspected aptitude for painting or poetry or music. But in such cases the impulse lasts continuously for a year or two, and now and then for life.

With Barber the crisis was just momentary, never lasting more than half an hour, often much less. In the midst of his emphatic and pretentious talk, he would break off suddenly, remain for a minute lost and dreaming, and then, after spying at us suspiciously to see if we had noticed anything strange, he would give an undecided laugh and repeat a joke he had read in some comic paper.

His talk on these art subjects was without sense or connection, so far as I could discover. Sometimes he spoke of painting, but when we put to him the names of famous painters, he had never heard of them, and I don’t believe he had ever been in an art gallery in his life. More often he spoke of theatrical matters. Coming back from a theatre, he would sometimes fall to abusing the actors, and show the strongest jealousy, pointing out how the parts should have been played, and claiming roundly that he could have played them better. Of course, there were other times – most times – when he was alike indifferent to plays and players, or summed them up like the rest of us, as just “ripping” or “rotten.” It was only when the play had much excited him that he became critical, and at such times none of us seemed willing to dispute with him, though we hardly ever agreed with what he was saying.

Sometimes, too, he would talk of his travels, telling obvious lies, for we all knew well enough that he had never been outside the home counties, except once on a weekend trip to Boulogne-Sur-Mer. On one occasion he put me to some confusion and annoyed me considerably before a gentleman whom I had thoughtlessly brought him with me to visit. This gentleman had long resided in Rome as agent for an English hosiery firm, and he and his wife were kindly showing us some photographs, picture postcards, and the like, when, at the sight of a certain view, Barber bent over the picture and became absorbed

“I have been there,” he said.

The others looked at him with polite curiosity and a little wonder. To pass it off I began to mock.

“No,” he persisted, “I have seen it.”

“Yes, at the moving-pictures.”

But he began to talk rapidly and explain. I could see that the gentleman and his wife were interested and quite puzzled. It would seem that the place he described – Naples, I think it was – resembled broadly the place they knew, but with so many differences of detail as to be almost unrecognizable. It was, as Mrs. W. said afterward, “like a city perceived in a dream – all the topsy-turvydom, all the mingling of fantasy and reality”….

After outbursts of this kind, he was generally ill – at least he kept his bed and slept much. As a consequence, he was often away from the office; and whenever I thought of him in those days, I used to wonder how he managed to keep his employment.

II

One foggy evening in January, about eight o’clock, I happened to be walking with Barber in the West End. We passed before a concert hall, brilliantly lighted, with a great crowd of people gathered about the doors, and I read on a poster that a concert of classical music was forward at which certain renowned artists were to appear. I really cannot give any sort of reason why I took it into my head to go in. I am rather fond of music, even of the kind which requires a distinct intellectual effort; but I was not anxious to hear music that night, and in any case, Barber was about the last man in the world I should have chosen to hear it with. When I proposed that we should take tickets, he strongly objected.

“Just look me over,” he said. “I ain’t done anything to you that you want to take my life, have I? I know the kind of merry-go-round that goes on in there, and I’m not having any.”

I suppose it was his opposition which made me stick to the project, for I could not genuinely have cared very much, and there was nothing to be gained by dragging Barber to a concert against his will. Finally, seeing I was determined, he yielded, though most ungraciously.

“It’ll be the chance of a lifetime for an hour’s nap,” he said as we took our seats, “if they only keep the trombone quiet.”

I repeat his trivial sayings to show how little there was about him in manner or speech to prepare me for what followed.

I remember that the first number on the programme was Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. This work, as is well known, is rather long, and so, at the end of the third movement, I turned and looked at Barber to see if he was asleep. But his eyes were wide open, feverish, almost glaring; he was twining and untwining his fingers and muttering excitedly. Throughout the fourth movement he continued to talk incoherently,

“Shut up!” I whispered fiercely. “Just see if you can’t keep quiet, or we shall be put out.”

I was indeed very much annoyed, and some people nearby were turning in their chairs and frowning….

I do not know whether he heard what I said: I had no chance to talk to him. The applause had hardly died away at the end of the symphony when a singer appeared on the stage. Who he was, or what music he sang, I am utterly unable to say; but if he is still alive it is impossible that he should have forgotten what I relate. If I do not remember him, it is because all else is swallowed up for me in that extraordinary event.

Scarcely had the orchestra ceased preluding and the singer brought out the first notes of his song, than Barber slowly rose from his seat.

“That man is not an artist,” he said in a loud and perfectly final voice, “ I will sing myself.”

“Sit down, for God’s sake! – The management – the police—”

Some words like these I gasped, foreseeing the terrible scandal which would ensue, and I caught him by the arm. But he shook himself free without any difficulty, without even a glance at me, and walked up the aisle and across the front of the house toward the little stairs at the side which led up to the platform. By this time the entire audience was aware that something untoward was happening. There were a few cries of “Sit down! Put him out!” An usher hastened up as Barber was about to mount the steps.

Then a strange thing happened.

As the usher drew near, crying out angrily, I saw Barber turn and look at him. It was not, as I remember, a fixed look or a determined look; it was the kind of untroubled careless glance a man might cast over his shoulder who heard a dog bark. I saw the usher pause, grow pale and shamefaced like a servant who has made a mistake; he made a profound bow and then – yes, he actually dropped on his knees. All the people saw that. They saw Barber mount the platform, the musicians cease, the singer and the conductor give way before him. But never a word was said – there was a perfect hush. And yet, so far as my stunned senses would allow me to perceive, the people were not wrathful or even curious; they were just silent and collected as people generally are at some solemn ceremonial. Nobody but me seemed to realize the outrageousness and monstrosity of the vulgar-looking, insignificant Barber there on the platform, holding up the show, stopping the excellent music we had all paid to hear.

And in truth I myself was rapidly falling into the strangest confusion. For a certain time – I cannot quite say how long – I lost my hold on realities. The London concert hall, with its staid, rather sad-looking audience, vanished, and I was in a great white place inundated with sun – some vast luminous scene. Under a wide caressing blue sky, in the dry and limpid atmosphere, the white marble of the buildings and the white-clad people appeared as against a background of an immense blue veil shot with silver. It was the hour just before twilight, that rapid hour when the colours of the air have a supreme brilliance and serenity, and a whole people, impelled by some indisputable social obligation, seemed to be reverently witnessing the performance of one magnificent man of uncontrollable power, of high and solitary grandeur…

Barber began to sing.

Of what he sang I can give no account. The words seemed to me here and there to be Greek, but I do not know Greek well, and in such words as I thought I recognized, his pronunciation was so different from what I had been taught that I may well have been mistaken.

I was so muddled, and, as it were, transported, that I cannot say even if he sang well. Criticism did not occur to me; he was there singing and we were bound to listen. As I try to hear it, now, it was a carefully trained voice. A sound of harps seemed to accompany the singing; perhaps the harpists in the orchestra touched their intruments…

How long did it last? I have no idea. But it did not appear long before all began to waver. The spell began to break; the power by which he was compelling us to listen to him was giving out. It was exactly as if something, a mantle or the like, was falling from Barber.

The absurdity of the whole thing began to dawn on me. There was Barber, an obscure little Londoner, daring to interrupt a great musical performance so that the audience might listen to him instead! Probably because I was the only one on the spot personally acquainted with Barber, I was perceiving the trick put upon us sooner than the rest of the audience; but they, too, were becoming a little restless, and it would not be long ere they fully awoke. One thing I saw with perfect clearness and some terror, and that was that Barber himself realized that his power was dying within him. He appeared to be dwindling, shrinking down; in his eyes were suffering and a terrible panic – the distress of a beaten man appealing for mercy. The catastrophe must fall in a minute…

With some difficulty I rose from my place and made for the nearest exit. My difficulty came, not from the crowd or anything like that, but from an inexplicable sensation that I was committing some crime by stirring while Barber was on the stage, and even risking my life.

Outside it was raining.

I walked away rapidly, for although I was, to a certain extent, under the influence of the impression I have just described, some remains of common sense urged me to put a long distance between myself and the concert hail as soon as possible. I knew that the hoots and yells of fury and derision had already broken loose back there. Perhaps Barber would be taken to the police station. I did not want to be mixed up in the affair….

But suddenly I heard the steps of one running behind me. As I say, it was a wet night, and at that hour the street was pretty empty. Barber ran up against me and caught my arm. He was panting and trembling violently.

“You fool!” I cried furiously. “Oh, you fool!” I shook myself free of his hold. “How did you get out?”

“I don’t know,” he panted. “They let me go… that is, as soon as I saw that I was standing up there before them all, I jumped off the stage and bolted. Whatever made me do it? My God, what made me do it? I heard a shout. I think they are after me.”

I hailed a passing cab and shoved Barber inside, and then got in myself. I gave the cabman a fictitious address in Kensington.

“Yes,” I said fiercely. “What made you do it?” He was bunched in a corner of the cab, shuddering like a man who has just had some great shock, or who has been acting under the influence of a drug which has evaporated and left him helpless. His words came in gasps.

“If you can tell me that! – God, I’m frightened! I’m frightened! I must be crazy. Whatever made me do it? If they hear of it at the office I’ll lose my job.”

“They’ll hear of it right enough, my boy,” I sneered, “and a good many other people too. You can’t do these little games with impunity.”

I caught sight of the clock at Hyde Park corner. It was near a quarter to ten.

“Why,” I said, “you must have been up there over twenty minutes. Think of that!”

“Don’t be so hard on me,” said Barber miserably. “I couldn’t help it.”

And he added in a low voice: “It was the Other.”

I paid off the cab, and we took a bus which passed by the street where Barber lived. All the way I continued to reproach him. It was not enough for him to play the fool on his own account, but he must get me into a mess, too. I might lose my work through him.

I walked with him to his door. He looked extremely ill. His hand trembled so badly that he could not fit his latchkey. I opened the door for him.

“Come up and sit with a fellow,” he ventured.

“Why?”

“I’m frightened….”

“I believe,” I said roughly, “ that you’ve been drinking – or drugging.”

I shoved him inside the house, pulled the door closed, and walked away down the street. I was very angry and disturbed, but I felt also the need to treat Barber with contempt so as to keep myself alive to the fact that be was really a mere nothing, a little scum on the surface of London, of no more importance than a piece of paper on the pavement. For – shall I confess it? – I was even yet so much under the emotion of the scene back there in the concert hall that I could not help regarding him still with some mixture of respect and – yes, absurd as it may sound, of fear.

III

It was nearly a year before I saw Barber again. I heard that he had lost his place at his office. The cashier there, who told me this, said that although the young man was generally docile and a fair worker, he had in the last year become very irregular, and was often quarrelsome and impudent. He added that Barber could now and then influence the management – “when he was not himself,” as the cashier put it – or they would not have tolerated him so long.

“But this was only momentary,” said the cashier. “He was more often weak and feeble, and they took a good opportunity to get rid of him. He was uncanny,” ended the cashier significantly.

I cannot imagine how Barber existed after he lost his place. Perhaps his mother was able to help a little. On the day I met him, by mere chance in the street, he looked sick and miserable; his sallow face was more blotchy than ever. Whether he saw me or not I don’t know, but he was certainly making as if to go by when I stopped him. I told him he looked weak and unwell.

“Trust you to pass a cheery remark!” And he continued irritably: “How can you expect a chap to look well if he has something inside him stronger than himself forcing him to do the silliest things? It must wear him out. I never know when it will take me next. I’m here in London looking for a job today, but even if I find one, I’m sure to do some tom-fool thing that will get me the sack.” He passed his hand across his face. “I’d rather not think about it.”

I took pity on him, he looked so harassed, and I asked him to come on to a Lyons restaurant with me and have a bit of lunch. As we walked through the streets, we fell in with a great crowd, and then I remembered that some royal visitors were to proceed in great state to the Mansion House. I proposed to Barber that we should go and look at the procession, and he agreed more readily than I expected.

In fact, after a while, the crowd, and the rumour, and the stirring of troops as they fell into position, evidently wrought on him to a remarkable degree. He began to talk loud and rather haughtily, to study his gestures; there was infinite superiority and disdain in the looks be cast on the people. He attracted the attention and, I thought, the derision of those close to us, and I became rather ashamed and impatient of those ridiculous airs. Yet I could not help feeling sorry for him. The poor creature evidently suffered from megalomania – that was the only way to account for his pretentious notions of his own importance, seeing that he was just a needy little clerk out of work….

The place from which we were watching the procession was a corner of Piccadilly Circus. The street lay before our eyes bleached in the sun, wide and empty, looking about three times as large as usual, bordered with a line of soldiers and mounted police, and the black crowd massed behind. In a few minutes the procession of princes would sweep by. There was a hush over all the people.

What followed happened so quickly that I can hardly separate the progressive steps. Barber continued to talk excitedly, but all my attention being on the scene before me, I took no heed of what he said. Neither could I hear him very plainly. But it must have been the ceasing of his voice which made me look around, when I saw he was no longer by my side.

How he managed, at that moment, to get out there I never knew, but suddenly in the broad vacant space, fringed by police and soldiery, I saw Barber walking alone in the sight of all the people.

I was thunderstruck. What a madman! I expected to hear the crowd roar at him, to see the police ride up and drag him away.

But nobody moved; there was a great stillness; and before I knew it my own feelings blended with the crowd’s. It seemed to me that Barber was in his right place there: this mean shabby man, walking solitary, was what we had all come to see. For his passage the street had been cleared, the guards deployed, the houses decked.

It all sounds wild, I know, but the whole scene made so deep an impression on my mind that I am perfectly certain as to what I felt while Barber was walking there. He walked slowly, with no trace of his usual shuffling uncertain gait, but with a balanced cadenced step, and as he turned his head calmly from side to side his face seemed transfigured. It was the face of a genius, an evil genius, unjust and ruthless – a brutal god. I felt, and no doubt everyone in the crowd felt, that between us and that lonely man there was some immense difference and distance of outlook and will and desire.

I could follow his progress for several yards. Then I lost sight of him. Almost immediately afterward I heard a tumult – shouts and uproar—

Then the royal procession swept by.

IV

I said to Mr. G. M., “Whether he was arrested that day, or knocked down by the cavalry and taken to a hospital, I don’t know. I have not seen or heard of him till I got that letter on Wednesday.”

Mr. G. M., who is now one of the managers of a well-known tobacconist firm, had been in the same office as Barber, and notwithstanding the disparity of age and position, had always shown a kindly interest in him and befriended him when he could. Accordingly, when I received a letter from Barber begging in very lamentable terms to visit him at an address in Kent, I thought it prudent to consult this gentleman before sending any reply. He proposed very amiably that we should meet at Charing Cross Station on the following Saturday afternoon and travel in to Kent together. In the train we discussed Barber’s case. I related all I knew of the young man and we compared our observations.

“Certainly,” said Mr. G. M., “what you tell me is rather astonishing. But the explanation is simple as far as poor Barber is concerned. You say he has been often ill lately? Naturally, this has affected his brain and spirits. What is a little more difficult to explain is the impression left by his acts on you and other spectators. But the anger you always experienced may have clouded your faculties for the time being. Have you inquired of anybody else who was present on these occasions?”

I replied that I had not. I had shrunk from being identified in any way with Barber. I had to think of my wife and children. I could not afford to lose my post.

“No,” rejoined Mr. G. M, “I can quite understand that. I should probably have acted myself as you did. Still, the effect his performances have had on you, and apparently on others, is the strangest element in Barber’s case. Otherwise, I don’t see that it offers anything inexplicable. You say that Barber acts against his will – against his better judgment. We all do that. All men and women who look back over their lives must perceive the number of things they have done which they had no intention of doing. We obey some secret command; we sail under sealed orders. We pass by without noticing it some tiny fact which, years later, perhaps, influences the rest of our lives. And for all our thinking, we seldom can trace this tiny fact. I myself cannot tell to this day why I did not become a Baptist minister. It seems to me I always intended to do this, but one fine afternoon I found I had ended my first day’s work in a house of business.

“Much of our life is unconscious; even the most wide-awake of us pass much of our lives in dreams. Several hours out of every twenty-four we pass in a dream state we cannot help carrying some of those happy or sinister adventures into our waking hours. It is really as much our habit to dream as to be awake. Perhaps we are always dreaming. Haven’t you ever for a moment, under some powerful exterior shock, become half conscious that you should be doing something else from what you are actually doing? But with us this does not last; and as life goes on such intimations become dimmer and dimmer. With subjects like Barber, on the other hand, the intimations become stronger and stronger, till at last they attempt to carry their dreams into action. That is the way I explain this case.”

“Perhaps you are right.”

V

The house where Barber was lodging stood high up on the side of a hill. We reached it after a rather breathless climb in the rain. It was a shepherd’s cottage, standing quite lonely. Far down below the village could be seen with the smoke above the red roofs.

The woman told us that Barber was in, but she thought he might be asleep. He slept a lot.

“I don’t know how he lives,” she said. “He pays us scarce anything. We can’t keep him much longer.”

He was fast asleep, lying back in a chair with his mouth half open, wrapped in a shabby overcoat. He looked very mean; and when he awoke it was only one long wail on his hard luck. He couldn’t get any work. People had a prejudice against him; they looked at him askance. He had a great desire for sleep – couldn’t somehow keep awake.

“If I could tell you the dreams I have!” he cried fretfully. “Silliest rotten stuff. I try to tell ’em to the woman here or her husband sometimes, but they won’t listen. Shouldn’t be surprised if they think I’m a bit off. They say I’m always talking to myself. I’m sure I’m not… I wish I could get out of here. Can’t you get me a job?” he asked, turning to Mr. G. M.

“Well, Gus, I’ll see. I’ll do my best.”

“Lummy!” exclaimed Barber excitedly, “you ought to see the things I dream. I can’t think where the bloomin’ pictures come from. And yet I’ve seen it all before. I know all those faces. They are not all white. Some are brown like Egyptians, and some are quite black. I’ve seen them somewhere. Those long terraces and statues and fountains and marble courts, and the blue sky and the sun, and those dancing girls with the nails of their hands and feet stained red, and the boy in whose hair I wipe my fingers, and the slave I struck dead last night—”

His eyes were delirious, terrible to see.

“Ah,” he cried hoarsely, “I am stifling here. Let us go into the air.”

And indeed he was changing so much – not essentially in his person, though his face had become broader, intolerant, domineering and cruel – but there was pouring from him so great an emanation of power that it seemed to crack and break down the poor little room. Mr. G. M. and myself had no desire to thwart him, and it never occurred to us to do so. We should as soon have thought of stopping a thunderstorm. We followed him outside on to the space of level ground before the house and listened humbly while he spoke.

As well as I can recollect, he was lamenting some hindrance to his impulses, some flaw in his power. “To have the instincts of the ruler and no slaves to carry out my will. To wish to reward and punish and to be deprived of the means. To be the master of the world, but only in my own breast – Oh, fury! The ploughboy there is happy, for he has no longings outside of his simple round life. While I – if I had the earth in my hand, I should want a star. Misery! Misery!”

He leaned upon a low stone wall and looked down on the town, over the pastures blurred with rain.

“And those wretches down there,” he pronounced slowly, “who jeer at me when I pass and insult me with impunity, whose beads should be struck off, and I cannot strike them off! I loathe that town. How ugly it is! It offends my eyes.”

He turned and looked us full in the face and our hearts became as water.

“Burn it,” he said.

Then he turned away again and bowed his head in his arms on the wall.

VI

I don’t remember anything clearly till a long time afterward, when I found myself walking with Mr. G. M. in the wet night on a deserted road on the outskirts of the town. We were carrying some inflammable things, flax, tar, matches, etc., which we must have purchased.

Mr. G. M. stopped and looked at me. It was exactly like coming out of a fainting fit.

“What are we doing with this gear?” he said in a low voice.

“I don’t know.”

“Better chuck it over a hedge….”

We made our way to the station in silence. I was thinking of that desolate figure up there on the hill, leaning over the wall in the dark and the rain.

We caught the last train to London. In the carnage Mr. G. M. began to shiver as though he were cold.

“Brrr! that fellow got on my nerves,” he said; and we made no further allusion to the matter.

But as the train, moving slowly, passed a gap which brought us again in sight of the town, we saw a tongue of flame stream into the sky.

THE BARGAIN
OF RUPERT ORANGE

The marvel is, that the memory of Rupert Orange, whose name was a signal for chatter amongst people both in Europe and America not many years ago, has now almost died out. Even in New York where he was born, and where the facts of his secret and mysterious life were most discussed, he is quite forgotten. At times, indeed, some old lady will whisper to you at dinner, that a certain young man reminds her of Rupert Orange, only he is not so handsome; but she is one of those who keep the mere incidents of their past much more brightly polished than the important things of their present. The men who worshipped him, who copied his clothes, his walk, his mode of pronouncing words, and his manner of saying things, stare vaguely when he is mentioned. And the other day at a well-known club I was having some general talk with a man whose black hair is shot with white, when he exclaimed somewhat suddenly: “How little one hears about Rupert Orange now!” and then added: “I wonder what became of him?” As to the first part of this speech I kept my mouth resolutely shut; for how could I deny his saying, since I had lately seen a weed-covered grave with the early moss growing into the letters on the headstone? As to the second part, it is now my business to set forth the answer to that: and I think when the fire begins to blaze it will lighten certain recollections which have become dark. Of course, there are numberless people who never heard the story of Rupert Orange; but there are also crowds of men and women who followed his brilliant life with intense interest, while his shameful death will be in many a one’s remembrance.

The knowledge of this case I got over a year ago; and I would have written then, had my hands been free. But there has recently died at Vienna the Countess de Volnay, whose notorious connection with Orange was at one time the subject of every man’s bruit. Her I met two years since in Paris, where she was living like a work-woman. I learned that she had sold her house, and her goods she had given to the poor. She was still a remarkable woman, though her great beauty had faded, and despite a restless, terrified manner, which gave one the monstrous idea that she always felt the devil looking over her shoulder. Her hair was white as paper, and yet she was far from the age when women cease to grin in ballrooms. A great fear seemed to have sprung to her face and been paralysed there: a fear which could be detected in her shaking voice. It was from her that I learned certain primary facts of this narration; and she cried to me not to publish them till I heard of her death – as a man on the gallows sometimes asks the hangman not to adjust the noose too tight round his neck. I am altogether sure that what Orange himself told her, he never told anyone else. I wish I had her running tongue instead of my slow pen, and then I would not be writing slovenly and clumsily, doubtless, for the relation; vainly, I am afraid, for the moral.

Now Rupert Orange lived with his aunt in New York till he was twenty-four years old, and when she died, leaving her entire estate to him, a furious contest arose over the will. Principal in the contest was Mrs. Annice, the wife of a discarded nephew; and she prosecuted the cause with the pertinacity and virulence which we often find in women of thirty. So good a pursuivant did she prove, that she and her husband leaped suddenly from indigence to great wealth for the Court declared that the old lady had died lunatic; that she had been unduly influenced; and, that consequently her testament was void. But this decision, which raised them up, brought Rupert to the ground. There is no worse fall than the fall of a man from opulence to poverty; and Rupert, after his luxurious rearing, had to undergo this fall. Yet he had the vigour and confidence of the young. His little verses and sonnets had been praised when he was an amateur; now he undertook to make his pen a breadwinner – with the direst results. At first, nothing would do him but the great magazines; and from these, week after week, he received back his really clever articles, accompanied by cold refusals. Then for months he hung about the offices of every outcast paper, waiting for the editor. When at length the editor did come, he generally told Rupert that he had promised all his outlying work to some bar-room acquaintance. So push by push he was brought to his knees; and finally he dared not walk out till nightfall, for fear some of those who knew him in prosperity might witness his destitution.

One night early in December, about six o’clock, he left the mean flat-house on the west side of the city in which he occupied one room, and started (as they say in New York) “up town.” The snow had frozen in lumps, and the gas lamps gleamed warmly on it for the man who had not seen a fire in months. When he reached Fifty-ninth Street, he turned east and skirted Central Park till he came to the Fifth Avenue. And here a sudden fancy seized him to walk this street, which shame and pride had kept him off since his downfall. He had not proceeded far, when he was stopped by an old man.

“Can you tell me, sir,” says the old man, politely, “if this street runs on further than Central Park?”

“Oh, yes,” answered Rupert, scraping at his throat; for he had not spoken to a soul for five days, and the phlegm had gathered. “It goes up a considerable distance from here.”

“You’ll forgive me asking you,” went on the ancient. “I am only passing through the city, and I want to find out all I can.”

“You’re quite welcome,” said Orange, “That,” he added, pointing, “is St. Luke’s Hospital.”

They spoke a few more sentences, then as the stranger turned “down-town,” Rupert fell in with his walk. He did this partly because he was craving for fellowship; partly, too, from that feeling which certain men have – men who have never done anything for themselves in this world, and never will do anything – that distant relations, and even total strangers, are apt at any moment to fling fortunes into their hands. As they proceeded along the avenue, Orange turned to survey his companion. A shrewd wind was blowing, and it tossed the old gentleman’s long beard over his shoulder, and ruffled the white hair under his soft hat. His clothes were plain, even shabby; and he had an odd trick of planting his feet on the ground without bending his knees, as though his legs were broomsticks. Orange thought, bitterly enough! how short a time had passed since the days when he would have taken poison as an alternative to walking down the Fifth Avenue with such an associate. Now, they were equal: or indeed the old man was the better off of the two: for if he wore impossible broad-toed boots, Orange had to stamp his feet to keep the cold from striking through his worn-out shoes. What cared he for the criticism of the smart, well-fed “Society” now, when numbers of that far greater society, of which he was one, were starving in garrets! As he thought these things a late afternoon reception began to pour out its crowds, and a young man and a girl, who had known Rupert in the days of his prosperity, came forth and glared with contempt at the two mean passengers. Not a muscle in Rupert’s face quivered he even afforded those two the tribute of a sneer.

When the pair of walkers reached Thirty-fourth Street they switched into Broadway. A silence had fallen between them, and it was in silence they paraded the thoroughfare. Here all was garish light and glare: carriages darted to and fro, restaurants were thronged, theatres ablaze, women smiling: everything told of a great city starting a night of pleasure. Besides the love of pleasure which was his main characteristic, Orange was distinctly gregarious; and the sight of all this joy, which he had once revelled in himself, struck like a knife into his hungry, lonely heart. At that moment he thought he would give his very soul to get some money.

“All these people seem happy,” says the old man, suddenly.

“Yes,” replied Orange. “They are happy enough!”

The old man caught the reply, and noticed the sour twang in it. He looked up quickly and saw that Rupert’s eyes watered

“Why, man,” he exclaimed, “I believe you’re crying! or perhaps you’re cold! Come in here, come right in to the Hoffman House!” he went on, tugging at Rupert’s coat.

Rupert hesitated. The sensitiveness of one who had never taken a favour which he could not repay, held him back. But the desire for warmth and sympathy prevailed, so he entered. The usual crowd of loafers was about the bar, and those who composed it looked scoffingly at Orange’s shiny overcoat and time-eaten trousers. Believe me, the man in rags is not half so pitiable as the poor creature who tries to maintain the appearance of a gentleman: the man who inks seams by night which grow all white by day; who keeps his fingers close pressed to his palm lest the rents in his glove be seen; who walks with his arm across his breast for fear his coat should fly open and proclaim its lack of buttons. Even the waiters looked disparagingly at Orange; and a waiter’s jibes, or any flunkey’s, are, perhaps, the sorest of all. But the old man, without noticing, sat down at a table and ordered a bottle of champagne. When the wine was brought, the two sat together some time in a muse. Then, of a sudden, the greybeard broke out.

“Wealth!” he cried, staring into Rupert’s eyes, “wealth is the only thing worth striving for in this world! Your tub-philosophers may laugh at it, but they only laugh to keep away from themselves a cankering envy and desire which would be more bitter than their present lack. Let any man whom you call a genius arrive at this hotel tonight, and let a millionaire arrive at the same moment, and I’ll bet you the millionaire gets the attention every time! A millionaire travels round the earth, and he gets respect everywhere he goes – why? Because he buys it. That’s the way to get respect in the nineteenth century – buy it! Do the fine works of art which are sold each year go to the pauper student who worships them? No, sir, they go to the man who has the money, and who shells out the biggest price. I repeat, my young friend, that what’s there” (and he slapped his pocket) “is what counts in the struggle of life.”

“I agree with you,” answered Orange, “that money counts for a great deal.”

“A great deal!” repeated the other, scornfully, being now, perhaps somewhat warmed with wine. “A great deal what have you to offer instead? Religion? Ministers are the parasites of rich men. Art? Go into the studio of any friend of yours tomorrow, and see whom he’ll speak to first – you, or the man with a cheque in his hand. Why, if a poor man had the brains of Shakespeare, or our Emerson, and was mud-splashed by the carriage wheels of a wealthy woman, the only answer to his protests would be a policeman’s ‘move on!’”

“I know it! I know it!” cried Orange, in anguish. “I know it fifty times better than you do! I tell you I would sell my whole life now, for one year’s perfect enjoyment of riches.”

“Not one year,” said the greybeard, leaning over the table and speaking so intensely that Rupert could hardly follow him. His old face had become ghastly and looked livid in contrast to the white hair. “Not one year, my boy, but five years! Think, only think, of the gloriousness of it all! This evening a despised pauper, tomorrow a rich man! Take courage, make up your mind to yield your life at the end of five years, and in return I will promise you, pledge you, that tomorrow morning you shall be in as sound a financial position as any man in New York.”

Now it is strange that this outrageous proposal, made in the bar-room of an hotel situate in one of the most prosaic cities in the world, did not strike Rupert Orange as at all preposterous.

Probably on account of his mystical, dreaming mind, he never took thought to doubt the speaker’s sincereness, but at once fell to balancing the advantages and drawbacks of the scheme.

Five years before his young eyes they stretched out like fifty years. It did not occur to him (it rarely occurs to any young man) to hark back to the five preceding years and note how few and swift were the strides which brought him over them to this very day he was living. Five years! They lay before him all silver with sunshine, as he looked out from his present want and darkness. This was his point of view; and let us never forget this point of view when we arc passing judgment on him. No doubt, if the matter had been placed before a man of wealth, he would have denied it even momentary consideration: but the smell of cooking is only disgusting to one who has dined; it is the vagrant who sniffs eagerly the air of the kitchen through the iron grating on the street. For Rupert, at this moment, money meant all the world. He was a man who hated to face the bitter things of life: and money included release from insolent creditors, from snubs and flouts, from a small, cold, dark room, and, chief of all! release from that horror which he saw drawing nearer and nearer: the gaol.

“There is one more word to be said,” observed the old man, smoothly. “Leaving aside the contingency of your starving to death – which, by the way, I think very likely – there is a chance of your being run over by a cart when you leave this hotel. There is an even chance of your contracting some disease during the winter. How would you like to die in a pauper hospital, where the nurses sing as they close a dead man’s eyes? Now, what I propose is, that you shall be free from any physical pain for five years.”

“If I should accept,” said Orange, swirling the wine round in his glass till it creamed and foamed, “I’d desire some slight ills to take the very sweetness out of life.” Probably he meant, for fear that when his time came he should hate to die.

He thought again. He was like to a man who arrives suddenly at a mountain village on the feast of the Blessed Sacrament, and loitering in the street with his eyes enchanted by the tawdry decorations and festoons of the houses, forgets to look beyond at the awful mountain standing against the sky, with menacing thunder clouds about its breast. Before Orange’s mind a gay and tempting pageant defiled. He thought of the travels he would be able to make, of luxurious palaces, of exquisite banquets, of priceless wines, of laughing, rapturous women. He thought, too, for he was far from being a merely sensuous man, of the first editions he could buy, of the rare gems, of dainty bindings. Sweetest of all were the thoughts, that he would be at his ease to do the best work that it was in him to do, and that he would be powerful enough to wreak his vengeance on his enemies very slowly, inch by inch. With that, like the crack of a rifle shot, came the thought of Mrs. Annice.

He sprang to his feet. “Listen!” he cried, in such a voice that the idlers at the bar turned round for a moment; but observing that no row was in progress to divert them, they fell once more to their drinking. “Listen!” cried Rupert Orange again, gripping the side of the table with one hand and pointing a shaking finger at the old man. “There is one woman alive in this city tonight who has brought me to the degradation which you witness now. She flung me to the ground, she covered me with dust, she crushed me beneath her merciless heel! Give her to me that I may lower her pride! let me see her as abject and despised as the poorest trull that walks the streets, and I swear by God Most High to make the bargain!”

The old man grasped Rupert’s cold hand, and pressed it between his own feverishly hot palms. “It is an unusual taste,” he murmured, glancing into Rupert’s eyes, and smiling faintly.

II

Orange started “up town” with a song in his heart. Curiously enough, he had not the slightest doubt about the genuineness of the contract, nor had he the least sorrow for what he had done. It mattered little about snubs and side looks tonight: tomorrow men and women would joyfully begin pawing him and fawning. So happy was he, his blood danced through his veins so merrily, that he ran for three or four blocks; and once he laughed a loud laugh, which caused a policeman to menace him with a club. But this only brought him more merriment; tomorrow, if he liked, he could laugh from Central Park to Madison Square without molestation.

When he reached the mean flat-house on the west side, there was, as usual, no light in the entrance, and he saw a postman groping among the bells.

“Say, young feller!” began the postman, “do you know if anyone by the name of Orange is kickin’ around this blamed house?”

“I am he,” said Rupert Orange, and held out his hand for the letter.

“Yes, you are!” answered the postman, derisively. “Now then, come off the roof and show us the bell.”

Rupert indicated the place, and, as soon as the postman had dropped the letter, he whipped out his key, and to the postman’s surprise unlocked the box and put the letter in his pocket.

“Well! you see my business is to deliver letters, not to give them away,” said the postman, making an official distinction. “When you said you was the man, how was I to know you wasn’t givin’ me a steer?”

“Oh, that’s all right!” replied Rupert. “Good night, my friend.”

He went upstairs to his freezing little room, and sat down to think. He would not open the letter yet: his mind was too crowded to admit any new emotion. So for two hours he remain dreaming brilliant and fantastic dreams. Then he tore open the envelope. He was so poor that the gas had been turned off from his room, but by the light of a match he read a communication from Messrs. Daroll and Kettel, the lawyers, setting forth that a distant relative of his had recently died in a town in one of the Southern States, and had left him a fortune of nearly a million dollars. But Rupert knew that this million dollars was only nominal, that money would remain with him as long as he could call life his own.

The charwoman who came into his room next morning, found him asleep in the chair, with the letter open on his knee, and a smile lighting his face. But he was only a pauper, in arrears for his rent, so she struck him smartly between the shoulders with her broom.

“I believe I’ve been asleep,” said Rupert, starting and rubbing his eyes. The woman looked at him sourly, thinking that he would have to take his next sleep in one of the parks. She began to sweep the dust in his direction till he coughed violently.

“You have been very good to me since I’ve been here, Mrs. Spill,” Rupert continued; and, I think, without irony: he had not much idea of irony. He took from his pocket the last five-dollar bill he had in the world and gave it to her. “Please take that for your trouble.”

The woman stared at him, as she would have stared had he cut his throat before her eyes. But Orange clapped on his hat and rushed out. He had not even the five cents necessary to travel down-town in a horse-car, so he walked the distance to the office of Messrs. Daroll and Kettel, in Pine Street. He approached a fat clerk (who, decked as he was with doubtful jewellery, looked as if he were honouring the office by being in it at all), and asked if Mr. Kettel was within. Now it is something worthy of note, that I have often called on men occupied with difficult texts; or painting pictures; or writing novels; and each one had been able to let go his work at once: while, on the other hand, it is your part to await the pleasure of a clerk, till he has finished his enthralling occupation. True to his breed, the fat man kept Rupert standing before him for about three minutes, till he had elaborately finished a copy of a bill of details; and then looking up, and seeing only a shabby fellow, he asked sharply—

“Eh? What do you say?”

Rupert repeated his question.

“Yes, I guess he’s in, but this is his busy day. You just sit right down there, young man, and he’ll see you when he gets good and ready.”

The hard knocks which Rupert had received in his contest with the world had taken out of him the self-assertion that goes with wealth: so he sat for half an hour, knowing well, meanwhile, that his clothes were a cause for laughter to the underbred and badly trained clerks. At length he somewhat timidly went over to the desk again.

“Perhaps if you would be kind enough to take my name into Mr. Kettel—”

“Oh, look here, you make me tired!” exclaimed the fat clerk, irritably. “Didn’t I tell you that he was busy? Now, I don’t want to see you monkeying round this desk any more! If you don’t want to wait, why the walking’s pretty good! – This young man says he wants to see you,” he added, as Mr. Kettel came out of his private room.

“Well, sir, what do you want today?” asked Mr. Kettel, with that most offensive tone and air which sonic misguided men imagine will impress the spectator as a manner for the man of great affairs. “You had better call round some other time; we’re not able to attend—” he was going on, when he happened to look narrowly into Rupert’s face, and his manner changed in a second. “Why, my dear boy, how are you! it’s so long since I’ve seen you, that I didn’t know you at first. And, how you’ve changed!” he went on, and could not help a glance at Rupert’s shabby dress; for he was quite ignoble. Then this remark seeming of questionable taste even to him, he cried heartily: “But come into my private room, and we can have a good long chat!” And in he went, with Rupert at his heels, leaving the fat clerk at gaze.

In a week Rupert was once more dawdling about clubs, and attending those social functions which go to make up what is called “a Season.” Above all, he was listening to an appalling variety of apologetic lies. To the average man who said “We didn’t know when on earth you were coming back from Europe, my dear fellow; how did you like it over there?” he could answer with a grave face; but the women were different. One particular afternoon he was at a reception, when he heard a lady near him remark in clear accents to her friend: “You can’t think how we missed that dear Mr. Orange while he was away in Africa!” and this struck Rupert as so grotesque that he apparently laughed. Amid this social intercourse, however, he avoided sedulously a meeting with Mrs. Annice; he had decided not to see her for a while. Indeed, it was not till an evening late in February, after dinner, that he took a cab to her house near Washington Square. He found her at home, and had not waited a minute before she came into the room. She was a tall woman, and wonderfully handsome by gaslight; but she had that tiresome habit, which many women have, of talking intensely – in italics, as it were: a habit found generally in women ill brought up – women without control of their feelings, or command of the expression of them.

“My dear, dear Rupert, how glad I am to see you,” she exclaimed, throwing a white fluffy cloak off her bare shoulders, and holding out both hands as she glided towards him. “It is so long, that I really thought we were never going to see you again. But I am so glad. And how very fortunate that legacy was for you – just when I suppose you were working fearfully hard. I was quite delighted when I heard of it, and my husband too. He would have been so pleased to have seen you, but he is dining out tonight.”

There was a tone of too much hypocrisy about all this, and Rupert made full allowance for it. He chatted in his easy way about his good fortune, and recited some details.

“I suppose there is not the slightest possibility of a flaw in the will?” says Mrs. Annice, regarding him keenly. The lines round her mouth hind become hard, but she kept on smiling: she had some traits like Macbeth’s wife.

Orange laughed his bright, merry laugh which so few could resist. “Oh no, I think it’s all right this time!” he said, and looked at her steadfastly with his fine eyes.

Mrs. Annice suddenly flushed, and then shuddered. Her heart began to throb, her head to whirl. What was the matter with her? What was this cursed sensation which was mastering her? She, with her self-poise, her deliberateness, her calculation, was, in the flash of an eye, brought to feel towards this man, whom but a moment ago she had hated more than anyone in the world, as she had never felt towards man before. It was not love, this wretched thraldom, it was not even admiration; it was a wild desire to abnegate herself, annihilate herself, in this man’s personality; to become his bond-woman, the slave of his controlling will. She drove the nails into her palms, and crushed her lips between her teeth, as she rose to her feet and made one desperate try for victory.

“I was just going to the opera when you came in, Rupert,” she said; “won’t you come in my box?” – and her voice had so changed, there was such a note of tenderness and desire in it, that it seemed as if she had exposed her soul. But even in her disorganised state she was conscious that there would be a certain distinction in appearing at the opera with the re-edified Rupert Orange.

Rupert murmured something about the opera being such a bore, and at that moment the footman announced the carriage.

“Won’t you come?” asked Mrs. Annice, standing with her white hand resting on the back of a chair.

“I think not,” answered Rupert, with a smile.

She dismissed the carriage. As soon as the servant had gone she tried to make some trivial remark, and, half turning, looked at Orange, who rose. For an instant those two stood gazing into each other’s eyes with God knows what hell in their hearts, and then, with a little cry, that was half a sob, she flung her arms about his neck, and pressed her kisses on his lips.

III

Yesterday afternoon I took from amongst my books a novel of Rupert Orange, and as I turned over the leaves, I fell to pondering how difficult it is to obtain any of his works today, while but a few years ago all the world was reading them; and to lose myself in amaze at our former rapturous and enthusiastic admiration of his literary art, his wit, his pathos. For in truth his art is a very tawdry art to my present liking; his wit is rather stale, his pathos a little vulgar. And the charm has likewise gone out of his poetry: even his “Chaunt of the Storm-Witch,” which we were used to think so melodious and sonorous, now fails to please. To explain the precise effect which his poetry has upon me now, I am forced to resort to a somewhat unhappy figure; I am forced to say that his poetry has an effect on me like sifted ashes! I cannot in the least explain this figure; and if it fails to convey any idea to the reader, I am afraid the failure must be set down to my clumsy writing. And yet what praise we all bestowed on these works of Rupert Orange! How eagerly we watched for them to appear; how we prized them; with what zeal we studied the newspapers for details of his interesting and successful life!

A particular account of that brilliant and successful life it would ill become me to chronicle, even if I were so minded: it was with no purpose of relating his social and literary triumphs, his continual victories during five years in the two fields he had chosen to conquer, that I started to write. But in dwelling on his life, we must not forget to take account of these triumphs. They were very rare, very proud, very precious triumphs, both in Europe and in the United States; triumphs that few men ever enjoy; triumphs which were potent enough to deaden the pallid thought of the curious limits of his life, except on three sombre occasions.

It was on the first night of a new opera at Covent Garden. Orange was in a box with a notable company, and was on the point of leaning over to whisper something amusing to the beautiful Countess of Heston, when of a sudden he shot white, and the smile left his face as if he had received a blow. On the stage a chorus had commenced in a very low tone of passionate entreaty by degrees it swelled louder and louder, till it burst forth into a tremendous agonised prayer for pity and pardon. As Orange listened, such a dreary sense of the littleness of life, such an awful fear of death, sang through his brain, that he grew sick, and shivered in a cold sweat.

“Why, I’m afraid Mr. Orange is ill!” exclaimed the Countess.

“No, no” muttered Orange, groping for his hat. “Only a little faint; want some air! – I tell you I want some air!” he broke out in a voice that was like a frightened cry, as he fumbled with the door of the box.

A certain man with a kind heart followed him into the foyer.

“Can I do anything for you, old chap?”

“Yes; in the name of God leave me alone!” replied Orange; and he said it in such a tone, and with a face so frightfully contorted, that those standing about fell back feeling queer, and the questioner returned to the box very gravely, and thought on his soul for the rest of the evening.

But Orange rushed out, and he hailed a hansom, and he drove till the cabman refused to drive any more; and then he walked and it was not till he found himself on Putney Heath in his evening dress, at half-past twelve the next day, that the devil left him.

About two years after this occurrence he was wandering one Sunday evening in Chelsea, and hearing a church bell ring for the usual service, he decided to enter. As he sat waiting a little girl of four or five, with her mother, came in and sat by him and Rupert talked to the child in his quaint, winning way, and so won her, that when the service began she continued to cling to his hand. After a while the sermon commenced, and the preacher, taking fur his text the words “And he died,” from the fifth chapter of Genesis, tried to set forth the suddenness and unwelcomeness of death, even to the long-lived patriarchs, and its increased suddenness and unwelcomeness to most of us. The sermon I suppose, was dull and commonplace enough, but if the speaker had verily seen into the mind of one of his listeners, the effect could not have been more disastrous. Orange waited till the torture became unbearable, till he could actually fed the horrid, stifling weight of earth pressing him down in his coffin, and keeping him there for ages and ages: then with a heavy groan he started up, and rushed forth with such vehemence, that he knocked down and trampled on the little girl, in his haste to get out of sight of the white faces of people scared at his face, and the child’s sad cry was borne to him out in the dark street.

The third occasion on which this sense of despair and loss oppressed him, was at a time when he was near a rugged coast. One stormy day he rode to a certain promontory, and came suddenly in sight of the great sea. As he stood watching a lonely gull, that strained, and swooped, and dipped in the surge, while the rain drizzled, and the wind whined through the long grass, the futility of his life stung him, and he hid his face in his horse’s mane and wept.

But sorest of all was the thought that he might really have won a certain fame, an easy fortune, without taking on his back the fardel which, as the months went by, became so heavy. He knew that he had done some work which would have surely gained him distinction, had he but waited. Why did you not have patience? his outraged spirit and maimed life seemed to moan; a little more patience!

I must not let you think, however, that he was unhappy. In every detail the promise of the old man was punctiliously carried out. The very maladies which Orange had desired, were twisted to his advantage. Thus, when he was laid up with a sprained ankle at an hotel at Aix-les-Bains, he formed his notorious connection with Gabrielle de Volnay. It was when he was kept for a day in the house by a cold that he wrote his little comedy, Her Ladyship’s Dinner – a comedy which, at one time, we were all so forward to praise. And on the night upon which his cab was overturned in the Sixth Avenue, New York, and he was badly cut about the head, did he not recognise in the drunken prostitute who cursed him, the erstwhile brilliant Mrs. Annice? Did he not forget his pain in the exquisite knowledge that her curses were of no avail, and flout her jeeringly, brutally? Nay! when an epidemic disease broke out in a certain part of the Riviera, and the foreign population presently fled, he used his immunity from death to hold his ground and tend the sick, and so gave cause to the newspapers to proclaim the courage and devotion of Mr. Orange. And all these fortunate incidents were suddenly brought to completeness by one singular event.

It was on a winter morning, about three o’clock, that he found himself in the district of Kilburn, and noticed a crimson stain on the sky. More from indolence than from anything else he went towards the fire; but when he came in sight of it, he was startled by a somewhat strange thing. For there at a window high up in the blazing house, stood a woman with a baby in her arms, who had clearly been left to a hideous fate on account of the fierceness of the flames. With an abrupt gesture Orange flung off his cloak.

“Where can I find the chief?” he asked a man standing near, “because I’m going up?”

The fellow turned, and seeing Rupert in his evening suit, laughed derisively.

“I say Bill!” he sings out to his mate, “this ’ere bloke says as how he’s goin’ up!” and the other’s scoffing reply struck Rupert’s ears as he pushed through the crowd.

By a letter which he carried with him, or some such authority, Orange gained his request; and the next thing that the people saw was a ladder rigged, and the figure of a man ascending through clouds of smoke. Higher and higher he went, while the flames licked and sizzled around him and seared his flesh: higher and higher till he had almost reached the window, and a wild cheer burst from the crowd for such a deed of heroism. But at that moment a long tongue of flame leaped into the sky, the building tottered and then crashed down, and Orange was safely caught by some strong arms, while the woman and child met death within the ruins. Of course this affair was noised abroad the next day; for some weeks Orange, with his hand in a sling, was a picturesque figure in several London drawing-rooms.

Now, which one of us shall say that Orange, with the tested knowledge of his exemption from death, and strong in that knowledge, deliberately did this heroic act to improve his fame, to exalt his honour? I have stated before that we must be cautious in passing judgment on him, and I must again insist on this caution. As for myself, I should be sorry to think that there is no beautiful, merciful Spirit to note an unselfish impulse, which took no thought of glory or advertisement, and count it to the man for honesty.

But the time ran, and the years sped, until was come the last month of that fifth year, which meant the end of years for Orange. When in the days of his happiness and strength, he had dwelt on this time at all, he had planned to seek out, on the last day of the year, some mountain crag in Switzerland, and there meet death, coming in the train of the rising sun, with calm and steady eyes. Alas! now to his anguish he felt a desire, which was stronger than his will, tearing at his heart to visit once more the scene of his hardships, to look again on the place where his bargain was concluded. I make certain, from a letter of his which I have seen, that in taking passage for New York, Rupert had no idea of turning aside his doom. The Cambria, on which he sailed, was due to arrive at New York a full week before the end of the year; but she encountered baffling winds and seas, and it was not till the evening of the thirty-first of December that she sighted the light on Fire Island.

As the steamer went at speed towards Sandy Hook, Orange stood alone on the deck, watching the smoke from her funnel rolling seaward of a sudden he saw rise out of the cloud, the presentment, grim and menacing, of God the Father.

IV

As the Cambria moved up towards the city, on the morning of New Year’s Day, a certain frenzy which was half insane, and a fierce loathing of familiar sights – Castle Garden, the spire of Trinity Church – took hold of Orange. He passionately cursed himself for not staying in Europe; he cursed the hour he was born; he cursed, above all! the hour in which he had made that fatal bargain. As soon as the vessel was made fast to the dock, he hastened ashore; and leaving his servant to look after his luggage, he sprang into a hack, and directed the driver to go “up town.”

“Where to, boss?” inquired the man, looking at him curiously.

“The Hoffman House,” replied Orange, before he thought. Then he cursed himself again, but he did not change the order.

I have said that the driver looked at Orange curiously; and in truth he was a strange sight. All the dignity of his demeanour was gone his eyes were bloodshot, and his complexion a dirty yellow: he was unshorn, his tie was loose, and his collar open. His terror grew as he passed along the well-known streets: he screamed out hateful, obscene things, rolling about in the vehicle, while foam came from his mouth; and as he arrived at the hotel, in his distraction he drove his hand through the window glass, which cut him into the bone.

“An accident,” he panted hoarsely to the porter who opened the door: “a slight accident! God damn you!” he yelled, “can’t you see it was an accident?” and he went up the hall to the office, leaving behind him a trail of blood. The clerk at the desk, seeing his disorder, was on the point of refusing him a room; but when Orange wrote his name in the visitor’s book, he smirked, and ordered the best set of apartments in the house to be made ready. To these apartments Orange retired, and sat all day in a sort of dull horror. For a sudden death he had in a measure prepared himself: he had made his bargain, he had bought his freedom from the cares which are the burthen of all men, and he knew that he must pay the debt: but for some uncertain, treacherous calamity he had not prepared. He was not fool enough to dream that the one to whom the debt was owed would relent: but before his creditor’s method of exacting payment he was at a stand. He thought and thought, rubbing his face in his hands, till his head was near bursting: in a sudden spasm he fell off the chair to the floor; and that night he was lying stricken by typhoid fever.

And for weeks he lay with a fiery forehead and blazing eyes, finding the lightest covering too heavy and ice too hot. Even when the known disease seemed to have been subdued, certain strange complications arose which puzzled the physicians amongst these a painful vomiting which racked the man’s frame and left an exhaustion akin to death, and a curious loathly decay of the flesh. This last was so venomous an evil, that one of the nurses having touched the sick man in her ministrations, and neglected to immediately purify herself, within a few hours incontinently deceased. After a while, to assist these enemies of Orange, there came pneumonia. It would seem as though he were experiencing all the maladies from which he had been free during the past five years; for besides his corporal ills he had become lunatic, and he was raving. Those who tended him, used as they were to outrageous scenes, shuddered and held each other’s hands when they heard him shriek his curses, and realised his abject fear of death. At times, too, they would hear him weeping softly, and whispering the broken little prayers he had learned in childhood: praying God to save him in this dark hour from the wiles of the devil.

At length, one evening towards the end of March, the mental clearness of Orange somewhat revived, and he felt himself compelled to get up and put on his clothes. The nurse, thinking that the patient was resting quietly, and fearing the shine of the lamp might distress him, had turned it low and gone away for a little: so it was without interruption, although reeling from giddiness, and scorched with fever, that Rupert groped about till he found some garments, and his evening suit. Clad in these, and throwing a cloak over his shoulders, he went downstairs. Those whom he met, that recognised him, looked at him wonderingly and with a vague dread; but he appeared to have his understanding as well as they, and so he passed through the hall without being stopped; and going into the bar, he called for brandy. The bartender, to whom he was known, exclaimed in astonishment; but he got no reply from Orange, who, pouring himself out a large quantity of the fiery liquor found it colder than the coldest iced water in his burning frame. When he had taken the brandy, he went into the street. It was a bleak seasonable night, and a bitter frost-rain was falling: but Orange went through it, as if the bitter weather was a not unwelcome coolness, although he shuddered in an ague-fit. As he stood on the corner of Twenty-third Street, his cloak thrown open, the sleet sowing down on his shirt, and the slush which covered his ankles soaking through his thin shoes, a member of his club came by and spoke to him.

“Why, good God! Orange, you don’t mean to say you’re out on a night like this! You must be much better – eh?” he broke off, for Orange had given him a grey look, with eyes in which there was no speculation; and the man hurried away scared and rather aghast. “These poet chaps are always queer fishes,” he muttered uneasily, as he turned into the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

Of the events of terror and horror which happened on that awful night, when a human soul was paying the price of an astonishing violation of the order of the universe, no man shall ever tell. Blurred, hideous, and enormous visions of dives, of hells where the worst scum of the town consorted, of a man who spat on him, of a woman who struck him across the face with her umbrella, calling him the foulest of names – visions such as these, and more hateful than these, presented themselves to Orange, when he found himself, at three o’clock in the morning, standing under a lamppost in that strange district of New York called “The Village.”

The rain had given way to a steady fall of snow: and as he stood there, a squalid harlot, an outcast amongst outcasts, approached, and solicited him in the usual manner.

“Come along – do!” she said, shivering: “We can get a drink at my place.”

Receiving no answer, she peered into his face, and gave a cry of loathing and fear.

“Oh, look here!” she said, roughly, coughing down her disgust: “You’ve been drinking too much, and you’ve got a load. Come ahead with me and you can have a good sleep.”

At that word Orange turned, and gazed at her with a vacant, dreary, silly smile. He raised his hand, and when she shrank away – “Are you afraid of me?” he said, not coarsely, but quietly, even gently, like a man talking in his sleep. Then they went on together, till they came to a dilapidated house close by the river. They entered, and turned into a dirty room lit by a flaring jet of gas.

“Now, dear; let’s have some money,” says the woman, “and I’ll get you a nice drink.”

Still no answer from Orange: only that same vacant smile, which was beginning to be horrible.

“Give me some money: do you hear!” cried the woman, stridently. Then she seized him, and went through his pockets in an accustomed style, and found three cents.

“What the hell do you mean by coming here with only this!” bellowed the woman, holding out the mean coins to Orange. She struck him; but she was very frightened, and went to the stairs.

“Say! Tom – Tommy,” she called; “you’d better come down and put this loafer out!”

A great hulking man came down the stairs, and gazed for an instant at Rupert – standing under the gas-jet, with the woman plucking the studs from his shirt. For an instant the man stood, feeling sick and in a sweat; and then, by a great effort, he approached Orange, and seized him by the collar.

“Here, out you go!” he said. “We don’t want none of your sort around here!” The man dragged Orange to the street door, and gave the wretch such a powerful shove, that he fell on the pavement, and rolled into the gutter.

And later in the morning, one who passed by the way found him there: dead before the squalid harlot’s door.

WILL

Have the dead still power after they are laid in the earth? Do they rule us, by the power of the dead, from their awful thrones? Do their closed eyes become menacing beacons, and their paralysed hands reach out to scourge our feet into the paths which they have marked Out? Ah, surely when the dead are given to the dust, their power crumbles into the dust!

Often during the long summer afternoons, as they sat together in a deep window looking out at the Park of the Sombre Fountains, he thought of these things. For it was at the hour of sundown, when the gloomy house was splashed with crimson, that he most hated his wife. They had been together for some months now; and their days were always spent in the same manner – seated in the window of a great room with dark oak furniture, heavy tapestry and rich purple hangings, in which a curious decaying scent of lavender ever lingered. For an hour at a time he would stare at her intensely as she sat before him – tall, and pale, and fragile, with her raven hair sweeping about her neck, and her languid hands turning over the leaves of an illuminated missal – and then he would look once more at the Park of the Sombre Fountains, where the river lay, like a silver dream, at the end. At sunset the river became for him turbulent and boding – a pool of blood; and the trees, clad in scarlet, brandished flaming swords. For long days they sat in that room, always silent, watching the shadows turn from steel to crimson, from crimson to grey, from grey to black.

If by rare chance they wandered abroad, and moved beyond the gates of the Park of the Sombre Fountains, he might hear one passenger say to another, “How beautiful she is!” And then his hatred of his wife increased a hundredfold.

So he was poisoning her surely and lingeringly – with a poison more wily and subtle than that of Caesar Borgia’s ring – with a poison distilled in his eyes. He was drawing out her life as he gazed at her; draining her veins, grudging the beats of her heart. He felt no need of the slow poisons which set fire to the brain; for his hate was a poison which he poured over her white body, till it would no longer have the strength to hold back the escaping soul. With exultation he watched her growing weaker and weaker as the summer glided by: not a day, not an hour passed that she did not pay toll to his eyes: and when in the autumn there came upon her two long faints which resembled catalepsy, he fortified his will to hate, for he felt that the end was at hand.

At length one evening, when the sky was grey in a winter sunset, she lay on a couch in the dark room, and he knew she was dying. The doctors had gone away with death on their lips, and they were left, for the moment, alone. Then she called him to her side from the deep window where he was seated looking out over the Park of the Sombre Fountains.

“You have your will,” she said. “I am dying.”

“My will?” he murmured, waving his hands.

“Hush!” she moaned. “Do you think I do not know? For days and months I have felt you drawing the life of my body into your life, that you might spill my soul on the ground. For days and months as I have sat with you, as I have walked by your side, you have seen me imploring pity. But you relented not, and you have your will; for I am going down to death. You have your will, and my body is dead; but my soul cannot die. No!” she cried, raising herself a little on the pillows: “my soul shall not die, but live, and sway an all-touching sceptre lighted at the stars.”

“My wife!”

“You have thought to live without me, but you will never be without me. Through long nights when the moon is hid, through dreary days when the sun is dulled, I shall be at your side. In the deepest chaos illumined by lightning, on the loftiest mountain-top, do not seek to escape me. You are my bond-man; for this is the compact I have made with the Cardinals of Death.”

At the noon of night she died; and two days later they carried her to a burying-place set about a ruined abbey, and there they laid her in the grave. When he had seen her buried, he left the Park of the Sombre Fountains and travelled to distant lands. He penetrated the most unknown and difficult countries; he lived for months amid Arctic seas; he took part in tragic and barbarous scenes. He used himself to sights of cruelty and terror: to the anguish of women and children, to the agony and fear of men. And when he returned after years of adventure, he went to live in a house the windows of which overlooked the ruined abbey and the grave of his wife, even as the window where they had erewhile sat together overlooked the Park of the Sombre Fountains.

And here he spent dreaming days and sleepless nights – nights painted with monstrous and tumultuous pictures, and moved by waking dreams. Phantoms haggard and ghastly swept before him; ruined cities covered with a cold light edified themselves in his room; while in his ears resounded the trample of retreating and advancing armies, the clangour of squadrons, and noise of breaking war. He was haunted by women who prayed him to have mercy, stretching out beseeching hands – always women – and sometimes they were dead. And when the day came at last, and his tired eyes reverted to the lonely grave, he would soothe himself with some eastern drug, and let the hours slumber by as he fell into long reveries, murmuring at times to himself the rich, sonorous, lulling cadences of the poems in prose of Baudelaire, or dim meditative phrases, laden with the mysteries of the inner rooms of life and death, from the pages of Sir Thomas Browne.

On a night, which was the last of the moon, he heard a singular scraping noise at his window, and upon throwing open the casement he smelt the heavy odour which clings to vaults and catacombs where the dead are entombed. Then he saw that a beetle – a beetle, enormous and unreal – had crept up the wall of his house from the graveyard, and was now crawling across the floor of his room. With marvellous swiftness it climbed on a table placed near a couch on which he was used to lie, and as he approached, shuddering with loathing and disgust, he perceived to his horror that it had two red eyes like spots of blood. Sick with hatred of the thing as he was, those eyes fascinated him – held him like teeth. That night his other visions left him, but the beetle never let him go – nay! compelled him, as he sat weeping and helpless, to study its hideous conformation, to dwell upon its fangs, to ponder on its food. All through the night that was like a century – all through the pulsing hours – did he sit oppressed with horror gazing at that unutterable, slimy vermin. At the first streak of dawn it glided away, leaving in its trail the same smell of the charnel-house; but to him the day brought no rest, for his dreams were haunted by the abominable thing. All day in his ears a music sounded – a music thronged with passion and wailing of defeat, funereal and full of great alarums; all day he felt that he was engaged in a conflict with one in armour, while he himself was unharnessed and defenceless – all day, till the dark night came, when he observed the abhorred monster crawling slowly from the ruined abbey, and the calm, neglected Golgotha which lay there in his sight. Calm outwardly; but beneath perhaps – how disturbed, how swept by tempest! With trepidation, with a feeling of inexpiable guilt, he awaited the worm – the messenger of the dead. And this night and day were the type of nights and days to come. From the night of the new moon, indeed, till the night when it began to wane, the beetle remained in the grave; but so awful was the relief of those hours, the transition so poignant, that he could do nothing but shudder in a depression as of madness. And his circumstances were not merely those of physical horror and disgust: clouds of spiritual fear enveloped him: he felt that this abortion, this unspeakable visitor, was really an agent that claimed his life, and the flesh fell from his bones. So did he pass each day looking forward with anguish to the night; and then, at length, came the distorted night full of overwhelming anxiety and pain.

•   •   •   •   •

At dawn, when the dew was still heavy on the grass, he would go forth into the graveyard and stand before the iron gates of the vault in which his wife was laid. And as he stood there, repeating wild litanies of supplication, he would cast into the vault things of priceless value: skins of man-eating tigers and of leopards; skins of beasts that drank from the Ganges, and of beasts that wallowed in the mud of the Nile; gems that were the ornament of the Pharaohs; tusks of elephants, and corals that men had given their lives to obtain. Then holding up his arms, in a voice that raged against heaven he would cry: “Take these, O avenging soul, and leave me in quiet! Are not these enough?”

And after some weeks he came to the vault again bringing with him a consecrated chalice studded with jewels which had been used by a priest at Mass, and a ciborium of the purest gold. These he filled with the rare wine of a lost vintage, and placing them within the vault he called in a voice of storm: “Take these, O implacable soul and spare thy bond-man! Are not these enough?”

And last he brought with him the bracelets of the woman he loved, whose heart he had broken by parting with her to propitiate the dead. He brought a long strand of her hair, and a handkerchief damp with her tears. And the vault was filled with the misery of his heart-quaking whisper: “O my wife, are not these enough?”

But it became plain to those who were about him that he had come to the end of his life. His hatred of death, his fear of its unyielding caress, gave him strength; and he seemed to be resisting with his thin hands some palpable assailant. Plainer and more deeply coloured than the visions of delirium, he saw the company which advanced to combat him: in the strongest light he contemplated the scenery which surrounds the portals of dissolution. And at the supreme moment, it was with a struggle far greater than that of the miser who is forcibly parted from his gold, with an anguish far more intense than that of the lover who is torn from his mistress, that he gave up his soul.

On a shrewd, grey evening in the autumn they carried him down to bury him in the vault by the side of his wife. This he had desired; for he thought that in no other vault however dark, would the darkness be quite still; in no other resting-place would he be allowed to repose. As they carried him they intoned a majestic threnody – a chant which had the deep tramp and surge of a triumphant march, which rode on the winds, and sobbed through the boughs of ancient trees. And having come to the vault they gave him to the grave, and knelt on the ground to pray for the ease of his spirit. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine!

But as they prepared to leave the precincts of the ruined abbey, a dialogue began within the vault – a dialogue so wonderful, so terrible, in its nature, its cause, that as they hearkened they gazed at one another in the twilight with wry and pallid faces.

And first a woman’s voice.

“You are come.”

“Yes, I am come,” said the voice of a man. “I yield myself to you – the conqueror.”

“Long have I awaited you,” said the woman’s voice. “For years I have lain here while the rain soaked through the stones, and snow was heavy on my breast. For years while the sun danced over the earth, and the moon smiled her mellow smile upon gardens and pleasant things. I have lain here in the company of the worm, and I have leagued with the worm. You did nothing but what I willed; you were the toy of my dead hands. Ah, you stole my body from me, but I have stolen your soul from you!”

“And is there peace for me – now – at the last?”

The woman’s voice became louder, and rang through the vault like a proclaiming trumpet. “Peace is not mine! You and I are at last together in the city of one who queens it over a mighty empire. Now shall we tremble before the queen of Death.”

The watchers flung aside the gates of the vault and struck open two coffins. In a mouldy coffin they found the body of a woman having the countenance and the warmth of one who has just died. But the body of the man was corrupt and most horrid, like a corpse that has lain for years in a place of graves.

THE ABIGAIL SHERIFF MEMORIAL

Lyddy, the mulatto girl at Mrs. Wassman’s rooming-house, opened my door noisily.

“Say, are you awake?”

“No.”

“Well, here’s some mail for you.”

“All right, put it there,” I mumbled with my head under the bedclothes. “What time is it?”

“’Bout half-past three. The sun’s been shinin’ jest lovely all day. Listen, why don’t you go out in the sun once and a while? ’Pears to me that’s what you kind of need ’stead of layin’ there in bed an’ stayin’ out all night. Mrs. Wassman’s gettin’ real mad. Yes, sir.”

“Tell her I was in as early as four o’clock this morning. That will console her.”

The mulatto gave a good-humoured laugh. I heard her singing and banging with a brush outside on the stairs. I was furious at being waked up when I might have had two or three hours more of unconsciousness. With my eyes closed, I tried to think of nothing. But it was no use. The awakening, the most hideous hour of the twenty-four, had to be faced.

I pulled over the chair on which my clothes had been thrown and went through the pockets. Four cents, a subway ticket, a half-empty packet of cigarettes, and a small “taken-while-you-wait” photograph of a girl. Where had I got that? Oh, yes; it was that girl who said she was a model. Her shoulders had been painted by – who did she say had painted her shoulders? She had been on the covers of two magazines. I tore up the photograph and threw the pieces on the floor, and then looked for the letter which the mulatto had brought in. Whom could it be from? I hardly ever got letters nowadays.

I glanced at the envelope, but when I saw the business address of Abner, the picture-dealer, in the corner I flung it away in disgust and lay down again and pulled the bedclothes over my head. It was, of course, another request from Abner to give him some work that would cover the advance he had made six months ago.

“What a rotten life!” I thought.

Soon it would be a year since I had touched a brush or a drawing-pencil. I had had the beginnings of a sort of renown among certain groups; a few articles even had been written about me in little hole-and-corner magazines; but now there was nothing I was more sick of than art and the chatter of art. Art? I hardly gave a thought to it. I would gladly have put my boot through any picture ever painted if the act would have brought me enough for one really big trial of fortune. I had the conviction that the reason my luck had been so invariably bad of late was that the stakes I was obliged to play were too paltry and also too vital. When you are staking your food and shelter, you are so nervous that your judgment is no longer trustworthy. That is how it had been with me for seven or eight months.

One glorious night I won twenty times as much as I ever got for a picture. But of late the sums I had to put up were so small that I used sometimes go in terror lest they would refuse me at the door. One night they did refuse me; they said I was a broken-down bum. I walked along a street of private houses wondering what I could do. I was suffering the torments of the damned. I would have taken my vest and shirt off and pawned them, but it was too late to pawn. I would have gone to Abner, gone down on my knees to him, entered into any contract he liked, but it was too late for him, too. What was I to do? It was a hard, cold night, but although I was thinly clad, and had not eaten anything to speak of for the last two days, I scarcely felt the cold. I must have had fever, for I was shaking and burning all over. I felt sure that if I could get back there, just once for only five minutes, the luck would come flowing my way. I could not go back to where I lived. I thought with horror of the bare room and the flaring gas-jet. “I’ll go in the river,” I thought, “sooner than go back to my bedroom tonight.”

Just ahead of me, a motor car stopped. A footman jumped off and opened the door, and a lady stepped out. It was no decision of mine; I had no time for decision; I was driven by instinct to go up to her.

“You couldn’t help a poor fellow this cold night?”

“Here, you get out!” shouted the footman. “Beat it, you dirty beggar!”

But the lady turned, and seeing a shabby-looking man without an overcoat, being hustled by her fur-clad servant, she may have thought that things were not altogether as they ought to be. Anyhow, she paused as she was entering the house.

“I’m so sorry for you,” she said to me. “Please take this;” and she handed me a bill.

It was as well she did. If she had refused, I might have plucked her rich cloak off her back and made a run for it. I tell you, I was desperate.

“Madam’s too good to the like of you,” said the footman. “If you don’t clear off I’ll call a policeman.”

I turned into the avenue, and by the advantage of a street lamp I looked at the note in my hand. It was probably a dollar, but it might be two. It was ten! Whether it had been given by good-will or in mistake; there it was. And it brought luck that night; I did well.

With the proceeds I furbished myself up somewhat. Heaven knows I hesitated about doing this; but it was necessary. If I presented a fairly decent appearance where I went to play, they would not be so ready to insult me and throw me out. That was the only reason I bought clothes, for I had gradually cut adrift from all acquaintances; and as for the art-world that lives in expensive studios, and gives receptions, and wears dress-clothes, and looks after its health, I had nothing to do with it. It was always a question with me when I had a dollar whether it would be safe to go without food or not. Once I had a kind of fit in that place where we played, and they made things very unpleasant for me. They were afraid I might die in the house, and then the police would come in. So to prevent a recurrence of the fainting-fit I began to eat more regularly.

Sometimes I would take what might be called a good dinner, two or three dishes. Then I would give myself some advice and go immediately back to my room, resolved to stay in all night. But if you have only one room, the worst hours to be in it, I think, are the early hours of the night. For if you have only a cheap room to depend on for shelter, and hold that precariously, you have surely had horrible thoughts in it at one time or another; and they are all over the wall. If you find yourself in your room at nine or ten o’clock in the evening, a time when you might have a respite, these haggard thoughts come down from the wall and crowd round you, and the anguish is such that only the most heroic spirits can bear it. I never could. The voices in the streets, the lights and noise, called me out of that place of torment. In the streets you have the illusion of sharing the torment with others.

It all seems strange to me when I look back on that time now – now that life has become so grey and indifferent. I ask myself, could that really have been me? I hardly existed till five or six at night. It all depended on the awakening. If I regained consciousness upon the pleasant thought that I had recovered a good sum from the night before, I might go out, even if the sun were shining; stroll in the park; buy myself a decent meal. In the opposite case, I would lie there supinely, prolonging a comatose state as much as I could, so as not to face the blank merciless day with all the shifts and expedients and scrawpings and humiliations. As for work – drawing and painting – are you laughing at me? I tried it once or twice, to do what is called commercial work – pictures for advertisements. Even with that kind of thing I could make no headway. I stared at the paper for an hour at a time, but I was developing a new system of play, a flawless system which was bound to succeed.

Well! This day that the letter had come from Abner, I found that I had four cents and a subway ticket. Curse it all! It was late in October, but my vest would have to go to the pawnshop. Also the silver cigarette case which I kept for desperate emergencies. I could no longer recall the number of times it had been pawned and redeemed. It had been a good friend to me, that cigarette case, since that woman gave it me with her name, “Maggie,” reproduced in facsimile of her writing across the cover. I suppose she thought I should always carry it next to my heart. She did not foresee the coarse jokes of pawnbrokers’ assistants about “Maggie,” at which I used to smile in the hope of putting them in the humour to advance a little more. I heard the cuckoo-clock in Mrs. Wassman’s parlour pipe out five, and decided to get up. But I lay till about half-past five. Then I dressed, wrapped my vest in a piece of newspaper, and slipped the cigarette case into my pocket. My hat was really too bad; somebody had sat on it last night. As I was studying it absentmindedly, my eyes fell on Abner’s letter on the floor near the torn photograph of the girl. Perhaps I had better see what he had to say! Then I thought it would be only giving myself useless pain to read the letter, and I went out leaving it on the floor.

I had to go uptown, and then across, to reach the pawnshop I customed. Near Madison Avenue, going toward Fifth, whom should I run upon but Abner himself! I kept my eyes down and was for shuffling by, but he hailed me.

“Hullo! Is that the way you treat your friends? Didn’t you get my letter?”

His tone was cordial; he seemed to be safe and to mean well. I could see no sign in his eyes of the dollars he had lent me.

“You look more than usually prosperous, Abner. The picture business must be booming.”

“Yes, I’ve struck a good line lately – modern Belgians – Endsor, Van Mieghem, Rik Wonters. Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“About what?”

“Why, about what I said in my letter.”

“The fact is, Abner, I forgot to read your letter.”

“Well, there it is! I said when I was dictating it that very likely you wouldn’t read it. You’ll come in for a million someday and never know it. Look here!” he said good-humouredly; and he took my arm. “Just stroll up Fifth Avenue with me, and I’ll tell you about the business.”

As we walked along he explained that a lawyer had come to see him last week on behalf of a friend who lived in a remote town in New England. The friend had presented a library to his native place, and desired to hang a portrait of himself, and also one of his wife, in the reading-room.

“I thought of you,” said Abner. “Like a flash, you came into my head. I said to myself: ‘I’ll send him up there.’ You’re just the man, and it will do you good.”

“Why this unaccustomed philanthropy?” I inquired. “I don’t want to leave New York. Besides, I am not the kind of man they are looking for. If there is money in it, and no doubt there is, seeing you have taken on the deal, why don’t you get one of those men with the well-advertised names and expensive studios?”

“Just because they have the expensive studios,” Abner drawled. “There is money in this commission, as you justly remark, but not enough money for gilt-edged ornaments of art. Do you know that you, can’t walk into the expensive studios nowadays and say you want a thing done at once? Damned if they don’t pull out their engagement-books like dentists. No, no, you’re the man I want. You’ve got talent enough, and of course you are much cheaper.”

We were now come to the square at the entrance to Central Park. He pointed to one of the hotels which stand there.

“Come in here with me and have a drink. We’ll make arrangements, and I’ll give you some money at once. You don’t want to leave New York? Why, it’s the very thing for you. I speak as a friend. You look suffering and exhausted. I suppose you can paint still, can’t you? How long is it since you tried?”

“Of course, as I have no money, I am not a free-agent. I’m a slave,” I said, “like most other paupers. Still, I don’t like to have my life mapped out for me by somebody else. What is more, I won’t. Let us hear what are your terms. If they are not tempting, you will have to find somebody else to paint your citizens, Abner.”

He swallowed the cocktail he had ordered. Then he mentioned the fee, which was much higher than I had expected.

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars right now,” he said, and he pulled out his cheque-book.

The project, after all, began to take a fairer light. I thought of my mean room with horror, and of Mrs. Wassman with her shrill or tearful demands for rent. Unless I won tonight upon the product of the cigarette case and my vest, I should be driven to sell the pawn-ticket, and after that I should be utterly on my beam-ends. In any case, this portrait painting would not be for long. And the change to walking out of this restaurant with a hundred dollars, instead of just my vest wrapped in newspaper to depend on, was too sweet to be resisted.

“Very well,” I said. “Hand over the hundred.”

“You’ll go tomorrow, certainly?” he asked as he tore the cheque out of his book. “No mistake?”

“Haven’t you any ready money?”

He gave me four dollars.

“Just write me a line when you get up there. I’m sending them a telegram tonight, and they will expect you tomorrow.”

He added a few directions which I wrote down.

Then we had another drink and parted.

I felt rather dazed. I had eaten very little for some days, and the spirits I had taken went to my head. I found myself about eight o’clock in the crowd on Broadway, still carrying my vest. A man and a woman got out of a motor car in front of a restaurant and I heard my name called. It was Jennie Graham, the girl who had given me her photograph the night before.

“Gee! you look ghastly,” she said. “Listen, come and be introduced to my friend.” She pointed to a man in dress-clothes who was standing a few paces away. “Then you can dine with us. He’s sure to ask you. I’ll make him.”

“I have a word for you,” I said abruptly. “That photograph you gave me last night – it came to grief. I haven’t got it any more.”

But she continued to look at me kindly. “Gee! I’m sorry for you. And there’s no help for it.”

“No help for what?”

“You’re so unhappy!” she cried. “So unhappy! I don’t believe there is another man as unhappy as you. You don’t know yourself how unhappy you are.”

I felt in my coat pockets for Abner’s cheque. “Do me a favour,” I said. “Keep this for me tonight, and send it down to me tomorrow morning about ten.”

I gave her my address. From the door of the restaurant she turned and glanced back at me. She seemed to be still saying, in her voice made husky by too many cigarettes: “So unhappy! So unhappy!”

She sent the cheque before nine in the morning. I had come in very late and had thrown myself dressed on the bed. I went out at once to cash the cheque and came back and paid Mrs. Wassman. This text was stolen from someone who worked hard to get it to you.

That done, I sat in my room with the rest of the money in my hands. I had that peculiar feeling of contentment which comes over a man who is constantly threatened with having the bed plucked from under him, when he has secured himself a shelter for some time ahead. Mrs. Wassman would leave me in peace now for several weeks. Why go away? The sum of money I held was by no means large; but it was enough with which to try certain combinations bound to win…. I could see them working out before my eyes. On the other hand, if I should lose, I should lose, too, all the fee that was to come from Abner. He would get somebody else.

What a struggle! Three times I went downstairs and out into the street, and came back. The last time I decided I would not make the journey. Two minutes later, I seized my hat and ran downstairs, and made for a street car. In the car I arranged that I would give myself only a minute to catch the train. If there should be people blocking the way at the ticket-window, I would be too late, and there was not another train all day. Accordingly, I hung about the streets neighbouring the station, and then lounged in at the last minute. The ticket-window was clear! I boarded the train just as it was moving out.

In the train, I sat feeling as if I were drowned. There was a thin whining in my ears; I could think of nothing. The struggle had spent me. The first clear thought I had, came in about an hour, and it was that I had not told Mrs. Wassman I was leaving. Such few things as I owned were still in that square, dismal room. Abner’s letter and the torn photograph were still lying on the floor.

At a town where I had to wait over an hour to connect with another train, I thought I had better buy a few necessary things. I should have to walk in on those people with a paper parcel for baggage, but it could not be helped. Besides, I did not care.

They lived in a good-sized house standing well back from a little street bordered with trees. Something unfriendly and depressing emanated from the house as soon as you crossed the threshold. If I were a practised writer, I suppose I could bring the sensation home to you; but as it is, it baffles me to realise it on paper. It was not so much a sensation of mystery as of secrecy. Those who had died in that house, in the seventy years or more it had been standing, had not quite gone away; something of them remained in the still rooms. At mealtimes there always seemed to be some other presence, or presences, at the table besides the master and mistress of the house.

The word for them is subdued. They were subdued to the atmosphere of their house, to their traditions, to the naïve furniture they sat among. This unprotesting acquiescence in the unlovely was, of course, to be expected, given the locality. The tradition was the same as that of the British small tradesman, nonconformist in religion and politics – the stock they originated from. Dreary and unpicturesque religion had no doubt in the first place inspired the dreary and un-picturesque surroundings. In a community which had never opened its eyes to any of the arts except literature, and to that only on its unartistic side, the absence of any testimony to aesthetic needs was not surprising. What did surprise, as one glanced about and the lack of any personal touch became more and more distressing, was that they had conceded so far to an unfamiliar spirit as to have their portraits painted. Certainly they were the very first of their family to make this concession.

That first night neither of them affected me beyond a consciousness that they were there and that I was their guest. It is true that I felt sick, and desperate, and sorry to my heart I had come there; and I was unable to study them accurately. But in the days that followed, when I had become more resigned and clear-headed, they remained so antipathetic and irritating that I used to invent all sorts of excuses to be as little with them as I could manage.

David Sheriff was null. He struck me as one of the innumerable men who live out their lives without ever realising themselves. He was president of the local bank, as his father had been before him, and had, by the report of the town, much money; though beyond whatever pleasure came from the consciousness that he was rich, he got no pleasure or profit of any kind, that I could see, out of his wealth. In our intercourse he always remembered he was paying me; he was very far indeed from that stage of civilisation which breeds the patron of artists, who feels himself less the obliger than the obliged. He was perhaps fifty-five, with a lot of loose black hair parted in the middle over a square forehead, protruding at the top, and a plump face – one of the most usual types of American. He had suffered a stroke of palsy two or three years ago, and now and then his hands trembled violently, and his head nodded a little. It was easy to see that the gift of this library to his native town he regarded as the central event of his career; it was never long out of his conversation. He had not yet got over his astonishment at his own generosity. It seemed even that he was not quite at his ease about this, for he kept talking to justify himself, to prove to himself he was right – that he had not thrown away money on a toy.

“Was it your own notion?” I asked one day when I was painting him. From the moment I had set eyes on him, I had decided upon the kind of thing I was going to turn out – something after the manner of the John S. Sargent official portrait. It was weary work; I had no heart for it, and I was often on the point of kicking my easel across the room. I took a long pull at the coffee I had standing by me. “Did you think of it all out of your own head?” I asked him insolently enough.

“Well, n-no,” he hesitated. “ It was more my wife’s idea.”

“But your wife’s name is Miriam, isn’t it? Why do you call the library the Abigail Sheriff Memorial? Was Abigail Sheriff your daughter?”

I was feeling all the time that I should like to throttle some of his money out of him, and besides, the plan of his ridiculous library filled me with contempt. But, although I put my crude questions roughly, he showed no resentment. On the contrary, he smiled for some reason or other in a deprecating way and looked a little confused.

“The fact is, Abigail Sheriff was my wife’s sister. She was my first wife. She died – painful memories—” He ended in a mutter. “It was my wife’s idea,” he said again.

I did not feel any active rancour toward this fool; it was mere exasperation. I hardly remembered him when I was not in his presence. But his wife, Miriam Sheriff, I disliked intensely, with that kind of dislike which makes one hate the thought of some persons. She was tall and thin and dark and looked considerably younger than her husband. Her thin lips, pressed close together, indicated a life spent in self-repression, and a long habit of silence. When you saw her, what struck you first was an impression of gauntness, the gauntness noticeable in sufferers from consumption, especially if they are tall; and next, in a secondary way, an impression of flame, and, so to speak, of frigid rage, as if she moved among the contingencies of life warily; and resented that she had so to move. Withal she was handsome, with a kind of handsomeness which repelled rather than attracted, and indeed made no effort to attract. She had extraordinary brown eyes, under long lashes which I could not help looking at, which nobody, such was their magnetism, could help looking at, although they were weary and veiled and somehow quenched, whether from looking out on tedious days or too much weeping. A mole on the cheek near the lips added to the peculiar fascination of the face, by relieving the bitter expression of the mouth. You thought as you looked at her: “Here is a woman who has suffered much, whose spirit has been outraged and perhaps mortally wounded.” You thought that, I say, but you felt no compassion. I even went so far as to fancy that the fine, tragic face was an accident of nature, covering nothing more than a soul as shallow and peevish as any of her neighbours. She was often in fits of black silence which nobody dared to interrupt, – brooding, despondent, and, as I thought, almost torpid. When she did talk it was invariably of the town and the people round about. Some of her characterisations were searing and drew protests from her husband. I learned that the inhabitants of the town disliked her, and were dreadfully afraid of her. Me, she seemed to make a point of ignoring as much as she could; she would talk past me to her husband when we were all three together. Even when I looked at her she always looked quickly away. From some things she said, I gathered that she disapproved of the pursuit of art.

“All those boys and girls in New York and Boston, who are studying painting, want an excuse not to do any real work,” she said once in her bitter way. “I know nothing about art,” she said another time.

“You are like me,” I said, “in that.”

“You? You live by it, don’t you?”

“No, I can’t live by it. Bless you, I ain’t got enough punch.”

“You are not serious,” she murmured; and she fell into one of her abstracted fits, twining and untwining her slim fingers in her lap while she stared with her dark frown at a point on the floor.

I had begun to paint her now, and accordingly she was obliged to speak to me more than she had done hitherto. My intention had been to brush out a portrait of her in exactly the same style as the one I had done of her husband. But I had been more and more struck by that fugitive look in her eyes, that unwillingness to meet my gaze, as if behind the eyes were a hunted soul seeking madly for refuge. This look, so much in contrast to the hard composure of the face, always interested me, especially as soon as I noticed that I was the only person who called it forth. At her husband, and at everybody else, she looked steadily, with impatient tolerance, and it was their eyes which shifted before hers.

It weighed with me so much that after the first sittings I threw aside my canvas and began again in an altogether different style. I thought to paint something phantom-like, swooning and imprecise, after the manner of Eugene Carnière. Thus, it seemed to me, I had the best chance of catching the soul; and it was the soul, lurking behind those eyes, I wanted to draw forth.

Now, after I had been working at this for some days, I was puzzled and disturbed by an inexplicable alteration in the picture. I was satisfied with my work, which I scarcely ever am; and during the sittings, while Mrs. Sheriff was in front of me, it seemed to me that I was doing just what I had set out to do – drawing forth her soul. But one morning, when the picture was beginning to take its final shape, I could not believe the report of my eyes when I examined it.

This was not a portrait of Mrs. Sheriff I was doing; it was a portrait of somebody else; somebody I had never seen before. It was as if you were to see, after you had written a letter, a letter in your handwriting, but upon a subject altogether different from what you thought you had written about, upon a subject, in fact, of which you had no cognisance. I was extremely frightened; I feared I was going out of my mind. I looked still more attentively at the canvas, and I fancied I saw a vague look of Jennie Graham, the girl back there in New York. Yes, there was a vague suggestion of what I can only call the “forgivingness” of her face in the face I had painted. “That’s it!” I thought furiously. “The delusions are beginning. They were bound to begin. Why did I ever come to this damned hole?”

I had not a sitting with Mrs. Sheriff that morning because she had to go to a funeral. I was very glad of it. I resolved to give up the work and start for New York. The husband’s portrait was finished:

Abner would have to find somebody else to do the wife, somebody who had not suffered from strain and hardship and disappointment, whose vision was unimpaired. I went out of doors about one. It was a clear autumn day with a soft and humid air stirring. There was a wood, spreading over many miles beyond the town, where I was used to walk, or just to lie on my back among the leaves. There the year was dying like a love-lorn queen, yielding herself passionately to death. And I took comfort in those woods, and the dreamy, dappled light, that was shed there. My mood changed….

In truth, that land there is like a woman. It embraces you with all its colour and softness, and entrances and lulls like a love-philtre. Lying caressed under its gold and crimson, plunged in its ever-changing, ever-offering beauty, time is no more. You want nothing of the naïve and unwise turmoil of the marketplace; content to let the days slip through your fingers like the variously coloured beads of a rosary. That is all. To lie close to nature, very close, seeing nothing but the spacious day and the soft low brows of the night, was all I wanted now. I was bewitched by the land. It looked at me, with all its entrancement, so reproachfully: “How can you go away?” That life back there of a month ago – Mrs. Wassman, the mulatto, the dingy bedroom, the foul air and the grinding anxiety – what a hideous dream!

But also, what a state I had fallen into to paint my portrait like that! It was not that I had lost my skill, because, as I recalled the picture out here in the woods, it seemed to me that I had never done anything so good. But it was a portrait of somebody I had never seen. And yet the husband’s portrait had come out all right; it was an honest, workmanlike portrait, entirely unoriginal, a shameless pastiche of Sargent, which any public body would be glad to accept with speechifying. But when I thought of the other, I shuddered with horror. And I began to blame the model, that horrible Mrs. Sheriff. My feeling for her now was hatred.

I spent the afternoon in the woods. Toward evening I came upon an opening which gave upon a bay, an arm of the sea.

I had been trying to recall, as I walked, anything special about Mrs. Sheriff. Up to this I had taken no interest in her, but now I had the vivid interest we feel in anything we hate or dread. I remembered that on the second night I was there, I had asked David Sheriff how old his house was, and upon hearing his reply, I had said, as a flourish, that in every house which has been standing long a corpse lies under the hearthstone. He had received this with the usual chuckle which he uttered when anything amused him. But his wife had seemed extremely angry, and spoke hardly another word during the evening. This was plainly the whim of a stupid, provincial woman, who looked on any kind of plain speaking as bad manners.

What else was there? I could not remember anything. Oh, yes! There was that night it was blowing so hard, and in an excess of boredom I had said inanely that I wondered the entrance door was not blown open. The wind was really pounding on the windows. But Mrs. Sheriff had evidently taken my remark as an insult to her house, and rose abruptly from the table (we were at dinner) and did not appear again. Her husband apologised for her, a little awkwardly I thought. The next day, when I saw Mrs. Sheriff I excused myself, and explained that I had not meant to imply that her house was not sound; but she brushed my excuses aside as of no consequence in her frigid way. “What a disagreeable woman!” I said to myself for the hundredth time.

I was thinking that now, as I stood facing the bay. Looking seaward, about two miles away to the west, were the capes; between them the breakers, always tumbling just there, were gleaming; and behind them the sun was going down. The sky was a blaze of harmonies; wilder lights, such ineffable beauty, I had not seen than on that ending day. It seemed as if the light were pouring through a gorge which led on and on to the end of the world, into eternity. It was the gate of heaven. It was sheer nature, untarnished by any touch of man. Thus, and no otherwise, must the scene have lain before the eyes of the lonely Indian, when, on this day and at this hour, six hundred years ago, he stood on this spot and stared at the sunset. Nothing – absolutely nothing was there to indicate the presence of man.

That is, looking far out to sea, as I was doing. But as my gaze shortened, there appeared on an elevation of the ground, a space clear of trees a hundred yards or more in front of me, a woman’s figure, standing solitary and black in the intensely clear light of the sunset-tide. I knew her at once, both by her unusual tallness and also by something special in her hearing. It was Mrs. Sheriff. She was, as I say, clad all in black: she must have come straight here from the funeral. She had her back to me, looking toward the sunset; and even as I saw her she stretched out her arms and then drew them in to her breast – a gesture of yearning and embrace. Then I saw her drop on her knees, and she bowed down till her head touched the ground. She must have remained nearly a minute in that position: I know it was long enough for me to fear she had died. At last she rose and walked a little unsteadily nearer to where I lingered till she came to a tall tree which stood solitary, with its russet leaves touched to something more exquisite by the sunset. She stood gazing for a time at this tree, and then suddenly she flung her arms about the trunk and pressed her lips to the rugged bark.

“She is a madwoman,” I thought.

I determined to slip away, if possible, without letting her see me. But, to strike a path, I had to move toward where she stood; and the leaves and dead twigs rustled and crackled under my feet. She turned and saw me.

She started violently, and stood resting one hand on the tree and the other held over her heart. She was evidently astonished to see anybody in this lone place. But in a moment she had recovered herself. She had recognised me; and she came forward without hesitation or reluctance, as it seemed, though she still wavered in her walk.

I have already described her, and you picture her as repellent. Certainly that is how she had impressed me. But as she came toward me now in the sunset, I thought I had never seen anybody so beautiful. It was an unearthly beauty; a radiance encircled her; her face was transfigured. About her lips and in her eyes was a smile tender and welcoming, such as I had never seen before; it was clear that she did not at all resent my presence. I felt that she was even glad I was there.

“You saw me at my devotions?”

Now that she was close by, I perceived that her eyes were dilated and that she was panting a little from some strange emotion which was too strong for her sorely labouring heart. I muttered ungraciously that I had only just caught a glimpse of her as I was searching for the path.

“We own these woods,” she said. “Nobody ever comes here except in the middle of summer, and very few at any time.”

Then, as if unable longer to bear these trivialities of convention, she impulsively seized my hand.

“Oh, I am so glad you have come! I have always wished to see you in this place, because I am natural here, I am myself. I know you will understand me. I felt the very first night you came that you understood me; and I could never look at you afterward because I knew you were reading my soul.”

She paused, coughed a little, and touched her lips with a handkerchief. I thought I saw a bloodstain on it, but it may have been the uncertain light. “I knew you would sympathise with me,” she said.

“Yes. But how did you know?”

“Because you are so unhappy – so unhappy!” she cried out in a kind of transport. “We understand each other by that. I love you, – I love you, because you are so unhappy.”

I plucked away my hand. Her words brought Jennie Graham to my mind, and I remembered the vague likeness to Jennie Graham in my unfortunate portrait. I had Jennie Graham on the brain! She was beginning to haunt me, apparently! Mrs. Sheriff’s repetition of Jennie Graham’s words vexed me beyond control. I moved a few paces away.

But she came up to me and seized my hand again, and put her face so close to mine that I felt her breath warm on my cheek. “Listen, you will understand me. Sometimes I think I am hanging to that tree yonder – that tree I love – nailed to it, with two burning nails through the palms of my hands, and my face to the west looking down the bay toward the sunset. Tell me, do you ever think that?”

Her eyes were wild and imploring; there was agony in the broken sound of her voice. “She is mad,” I thought again. “You are a sun-worshipper?” I said tolerantly for the sake of saying something.

She looked at me as if she did not quite understand what I said. Then her expression changed to something like ecstasy. “Oh, the sun! I love the sun. Yes, I worship it – that is the right word. I kneel to it, most of all when it is setting. I think when it is going – If this should be the last time I shall ever see it! – If I should die before tomorrow? And then I think that to die means to be merged into all that glory, and it is the greatest happiness. You are not angry because I say these things to you – not angry at all? I have always lived here; I have never been anywhere else. I love the sea. And the leaves on the trees now – I love them, the beautiful things, beautiful for themselves alone. Nobody sees them. They grow more beautiful and beautiful and then they die, and nobody has seen them. Sometimes I think they are a little lonesome; that is why I kiss and comfort them. But most times I think that that is the way to be beautiful – only for yourself – to create beauty only for yourself, and care not at all whether it is praised or not. Tell me what you think. I think so much by myself – all day long. All day and often all night. I don’t know whether my thoughts are right or not. But you can tell me, because you sympathise with me. You see my soul.”

I stared at her, lost in wonder. This spirit so absorbed in a passion for beauty – a far stronger passion than I had myself, perhaps stronger and more disinterested than the passion of any artist living – how it must have starved! What a power of self-repression; what an iron will she had shown to go on living her life in stagnant ugliness, the deliberate elimination of the charm of existence! I thought of her house. How her cabined soul must have beaten against those walls!

“Your trees, decked for themselves alone, are the true aristocrats,” I said for the sake of an answer. I was not thinking of what I said.

She looked at the ground with the frown she always had when she was in one of her reveries.

“All my life I have loved beauty,” she said slowly at last. “Beauty and love – those are all I care for. I have only been able to find them in nature. I have never been away or seen things. Tell me, should I have found a greater love and beauty than in the trees here, and the sea, and the sunset, and the first star?”

“No,” I answered positively. “As to love I cannot speak. But for beauty, you would have found no greater beauty, because the world has no greater beauty to give.”

“Do you think they do not love us?”

“I don’t know. You, perhaps – you are nearer to them than I am. I think they are indifferent.”

She pondered this again in the same way, staring at the ground. “Let us go home,” she said at length.

We walked, side by side, in silence. I was not inclined to talk, and even if I had been, it was impossible to talk the vulgar’ gossip of life to this woman. After we had gone about a quarter of a mile, we came upon the trunk of a fallen tree lying across the path.

“Sit down here,” she said.

I placed myself beside her on the log and she threw her arm lightly about my shoulders. Nothing this extraordinary woman did could startle me now. In what way exactly she regarded me, I could not tell; but she had established in her mind some kind of comradeship between us. It would soon be dusk. The far shore of the bay was glowing in crimson and orange, with the trees in a black close mass, like a span of velvet below. One star gleamed in the serene air. Far off in the woods a little owl began to cry. In the gathering shadows, she turned on me a face which I could see was quivering with anguish.

“You are so unhappy, so unutterably unhappy. Tell me, have you ever committed a crime?”

I tried to laugh. “Yes, numbers,” I said uncomfortably.

“Oh, I don’t mean faults – sins. They are of no importance. You mean sins, don’t you? But I mean crime, a great crime. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes, I think I do.”

“And have you?”

“No.”

“Ah!” … I do not know what that sigh, which arose from the depths of her stuffed bosom, signified – whether relief, or, shocking as it may sound, disappointment. Her arm dropped from my shoulders.

After a moment she spoke again: “What did you mean when you said that night – you know, the second or third night you were here – that in every house which has been standing many years a corpse lies under the hearthstone? Do you remember? It struck me very much. What did you mean?”

“What did I mean? I don’t know what I meant. I spoke just to – I meant nothing.”

“Listen, shall I tell you what I think you meant? You meant that people do things, perhaps without thinking, that kill other people. Is that it?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“You mean there are many more people who have killed other people than are known?”

“Yes, or than know it themselves even. We are very lucky if we can get through life without killing anybody. Have those who lived in your house before you never killed anybody? Just think a minute. Have they never discharged a dependent unfairly, or in a fit of anger? Perhaps that act eventually killed the dependent, either by rendering him or her hopeless, or in some other way. Did they never leave a man or woman in despair? Did they never nag or humiliate or take unjust advantage? Did they never bear false witness? Did they never put the law in motion to extract the last penny from the poor? Then there are letters that kill. There are a thousand things that kill. Oh, yes, we are very lucky if we get through life without killing somebody.”

“Or being killed?” she asked in a whisper.

“There are those that don’t kill.”

“Is it kill or be killed?”

“No; not that—”

She jumped up from the log and stood before me in the unreal light, looking taller than ever in her black mourning gown. She stretched out her arms full length, with her slender hands loosely open.

“I want you to kill me!” she said.

I shall never forget how she said it. If she had been asking me to love her, to kiss her, she could not have looked at me with greater sorcery. “Kill me!” she repeated breathlessly. “No, don’t interrupt – hear me out. You will do it, I know, because I love you. I have been waiting for you to come, so long, and when you came I knew you saw my soul. And I said to myself – when I tell him all, when I explain, he will kill me. Listen, it will be quite safe. I have a private fortune; I will leave it all to you. We shall settle the details. Oh, I want to die. Only those who want to die, cannot die. That woman whose funeral I was at today, she wanted to live. I want to die and I have not the courage to kill myself. But you will kill me, my friend.”

I sat there motionless under some evil spell.

“You will do it?” she cried, and on her face, which she bent down close to mine, was a smile of wild rapture.

I shuddered: I felt that something terrible and yet lovely was brooding over me. Then, I pulled myself together, and rose sharply to my feet. “What strange things you say, Mrs. Sheriff! You have everything to live for, money and comfort. Your husband will be wondering what has become of you. Let us hurry back.”

We walked the rest of the way without speaking another word. I was very much shaken. I was convinced she was irresponsible. She was plainly ill and in agonies of wretchedness. I thought I heard her sob in the darkness….

But at dinner she was still and frigid as usual. She spoke hardly at all to me, but she no longer avoided my eyes. Two or three times she gazed at me so long and intently that I thought her husband would remark it. I must have had some sympathy with her, as she said; for although I had seen so much misery from poverty and had endured so much misery myself from the same cause that I had little pity for miseries which did not arise from lack of money or were not accompanied by penury, yet I found myself pitying Mrs. Sheriff. I even went so far as to point out to David Sheriff when we were alone together that same evening that his wife’s health needed care.

“Oh, she’s all right,” he mumbled. “ She’s been like that for years. There’s nothing the matter with her.” The next morning, when she came as usual to sit to me for an hour in the loft, which I had chosen on account of the light to work in, she greeted me hardly at all, and seemed more absorbed and restrained and withdrawn from the life around her than ever. Did she even remember how she had been in the wood the day before? It was quite possible she did not. Such outbursts of emotion, I thought, are often followed by a blank. The exhausted spirit can bear no more.

Still, watching her as she sat there listless, I regarded her otherwise than I had done on other mornings. I knew now that there were certain subjects she would respond to. Up to this it had never occurred to me to ask her opinion, any more than the opinion of her husband, about my work. David Sheriff, it is true, had shown some interest in his own portrait; what he was anxious about was the likeness, he wanted something that “the boys” would recognise. He used to stand awhile sometimes looking over my shoulder, like children do about a painter who is painting out-of-doors. But she never showed the slightest curiosity; she had never glanced at either picture. She submitted to be painted.

But I remembered this morning that the impression which a woman with a sense of beauty so developed took from a picture would be worth having. I said something like this to her.

She started, roused out of her dream. “My sense of beauty?” she murmured with a wry little smile. “Poor me!”

I turned round her husband’s portrait from the wall and held it up before her. She looked hard at it for a little, not at all like a connoisseur of the fine arts, but as one trying rather to gather some fact or facts from it, as if she were reading a letter. Then she sighed.

“It is very good,” she said; “very like. It is also very cruel. You were angry when you painted it. You did it against your will, did you not? As for beauty, it is not beautiful at all. Beauty is not hard like that. There is more peace and repose and – what do you call it? – detachment in beauty, I think. That is not beautiful like a tree or a flower; it is ugly, like a man at a tea-party in a small town – our town here.”

I was a little nettled, perhaps because what she said struck home. “I am afraid you are too classic for me,” I scoffed. “You are akin to Lessing and Goethe. I hardly dare to show you what I have done with yourself.”

The picture was resting on the easel covered with a cloth. “You will bear in mind,” I continued, “that it is not quite finished. A strange thing has happened to me with it. I have been trying to paint you, what I saw in you. But what has come out is not you; it as a portrait of somebody I never saw. And yet I saw her in you. I have been ill and miserable and poor; perhaps my vision has become affected. But you can judge for yourself. Look!” And I drew away the cloth.

I have said that I was trying to paint my picture in the style of Eugene Carrière. That great artist’s power of bringing the body to the very confines of life, of catching the twilight between the temporal and spiritual, of seizing the human frame when it is swooning away and the ghost emerging, I had thought of when I set out to paint this strange Miriam Sheriff. But my work was not a mere imitation of Carrière – that I swear; it was the best picture I had ever painted, or can ever hope now to paint.

Mrs. Sheriff seemed at first unwilling to look at it. Then, visibly putting some constraint on herself, she turned toward the picture resolutely. She gave a low cry and pressed her left hand against her side with her habitual gesture. I thought she was going to fall. But she turned away and hurried from the room.

Almost before I had time to be astonished I heard her light foot on the stairs coming up again. She put a photograph into my hands.

“Is that the face you saw?” she asked.

It was the photograph of a young woman dressed after the fashion of fifteen or twenty years ago. She had a handsome face, very unusual; and it was this face I had painted. But in the photographed face there was something sensual, defiant, even sullen; whereas in my picture it was as if the same woman had passed through some purgatory and come forth a thousand times purified.

“It is my sister Abigail,” said Mrs. Sheriff. “I never see her like that photograph. I always see her, just behind my eyes, with that look of forgiving as she is in your picture. That is how she looked a few minutes before she died.” She paused, and then added quietly: “I murdered her.”

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t say such a terrible thing!”

“That face is what you saw in me, as you said just now. I knew all the time you were seeing it and drawing it out of me. I made up my mind several days ago to tell you all about it. I am going to tell you.”

“Not here in this house?”

She glanced carelessly round the walls. “Well, no. Perhaps not in the house. I had rather be out in the open. You remember that tree where you saw me yesterday? Go there this afternoon.”

I was first at the tryst by a good hour. It looked as if she were not coming, and I felt infinitely relieved. I ought to have resisted her impulse to make me her confidant. If she had a tragedy in her life, why should I burthen myself with it? Surely I had enough already to weigh me down. That portrait – what flaw in eye or brain, what casting-off from the wharves of life and voyaging into the unpathed seas of the invisible world, did that portend?

But when, at last, I sighted her in the distance, the forebodings which had been so heavy upon me since morning suddenly appeared idle. Perhaps the reason was that she was not garbed in black, as she had been yesterday, but wore the many-coloured costume of a woman who lives in the country and is much out-of-doors. These healthy clothes, the soft hat she had on, her bright muffler, her rough gloves and her walking-stick, took her out of time isolation in which I had been seeing her, and established a relation between her and ordinary, average women of commonplace existence. Her appearance now was so inconsistent with the vision of her making that appalling confession in the morning that – I reminded myself once more – that she must be suffering from hallucinations and that she had perhaps forgotten by this time why she had brought me there.

But when she was drawing near, a little breathless as if she had hurried, I saw the countenance – cold, and indifferent, and repelling in advance any attempt at intimacy – which she kept for the town, vanish, really as if she had cast off a mask; and there came into her haunted eyes a look of even more intense anguish than I had seen yesterday.

“You won’t be able to worship the sun this afternoon,” I said, in a trivial tone, attempting to start the conversation.

It was indeed a dull, soundless day, with low-hanging clouds. Ever and anon the sun, concealed by clouds, sent forth a shaft of light which was not sunshine. The bay lay glassy smooth, the colour of slate. The leaves had lost their colour and looked dead and shrivelled on the branches, ready to fall. While I had been sitting still there, I had actually heard them dying, a strange dim crackling noise which began, and then ceased, and began once more….

I had spoken to her, as I say, in jest, but in her reply was great solemnity.

“I don’t think I shall ever be able to look at the sun again. Not since I saw what I saw this morning.”

She meant my picture. “You make too much of it,” I said to soothe her.

“Abigail, my sister, and I used to come to this place when we were quite little,” she went on dreamily. “She used to stand with her back against that tree over there, to see if she was taller than I was. How strange that seems after all this time! She always wanted to be taller than I was. David Sheriff, who is my husband now, used to measure us. He used to cut notches in the tree. I wonder if they are there still? I never thought to look till now.

“He was our cousin, but much older than we were. I loved David when I was a little girl; and when I grew up I loved him. He loved Abigail, but she cared nothing at all for him. We had not much money then. David’s father was well-to-do, but Abigail and I lived with our mother, who was a widow. Then sister made up her mind to go to Boston and take up business there. It was the best thing she could do if she would not marry David. She was always quarrelsome with mother – with me, too.

“I don’t know just what she did in Boston. Mother used to send her money sometimes. She was cashier in some large store. She got mixed up with a man who was also employed in the store, and he persuaded her to steal money for him. It must have been for him. Then they found her out and arrested her.

“David was going to marry me. I was so glad and so was mother. But when this news came he hurried to Boston. He stood up in court and said he had always loved her, and that if they would let her go he would marry her and pay back the money she had taken. They did let her go on these terms, and sister married him at once.

“That was like a knife in my side. I had begun to get my trousseau together. Now there was no more hope. What made it worse was that the very first flight they came home, I saw that Abigail hated David, though he was crazy about her. She only loved the man for whom she had stolen, and he had disappeared.

“She was surly and hard and defiant. She looked as she looks in that photograph I showed you; it was taken a few days after they came home. She was unwell. She had a cold when she arrived and coughed a good deal. She didn’t seem to care. Soon she had to stay in bed.

“I went over from mother’s to nurse her. Sister was terribly querulous and unkind to everybody, but especially to David. She accused him of forcing her into marriage, and declared that she would never be a wife to him.

“She got worse, and the thought came to me from outside my head – I remember that quite well – it seemed to enter my head from outside: If she was to die, David would be free.

“Then one evening the doctor came, and said she was much better. She looked better. She was not going to die after all! And a terrible thing came into my head. It was something the doctor said that suggested it. It was a rough winter night with a terrific gale up – I don’t think I have ever heard the wind blow so loud since. The doctor gave sister a sleeping-powder and said she must be kept warm. ‘If she gets through this night well,’ he told us, ‘she will mend quickly.’ Then he said as he was going that he hoped the windows and doors were strong or the wind might blow them in.

“I was to sit up all night with sister. When the clock struck one I looked at her. She was sleeping well with her head on her arm; she was very warm and her skin was moist. We were in that room you have now: you know it almost faces the stairs and the street door. We had padded the cracks in the door to keep out the draughts, for the bed was near the door and it had not been possible to move it.

“I stole downstairs and opened the street door. Then I went back upstairs and left the bedroom door open and drew the blankets off sister. The icy wind came streaming into the room. I opened the window to make more of a draught, and sat there shivering, hoping it would kill me too. I did not want to live; I only wanted David to be free from the unhappy life before him with sister.

“After a while she stirred and began to cough. But she did not wake up. Cough – cough – cough – I hear that often. But she never woke up. About half-past four I went down and shut the door. If anybody had passed and seen the door open he would have thought it was the gale. But nobody passed.

“I came upstairs again and closed the bedroom door and the window. Then something terrible happened. I heard steps coming slowly upstairs – heavy, deliberate steps like an old man’s. Then there came three loud knocks at the door. I jumped into the bed beside sister and covered my head with the blankets. I wonder I did not die from terror. I waited to hear the steps go away from the door. But they did not go away. It was death that had come.

“Sister woke up and began to cry. She was much worse. When David was up he went for the doctor. But sister Abigail died toward nightfall.” . We had been standing all this time. There was a distorted smile about her mouth. Then she pressed her fingers to her breast, and turned round and stood with her back to me.

“Perhaps it was not that,” I said at last, uneasily, in a low voice.

“Yes, it was that. The doctor said she must have got a sudden chill—”

We were silent again, for a long time. I could think of nothing to say. At last, wanting to say something, I stammered: “You have your husband, the man you love—”

She turned round quickly. Her eyes were quite dry. The imploring smile had gone from her face.

“Yes, I have him,” she replied in a hard voice. “You see what he is. That is my punishment.”

Then she looked at me intently, straight into the eyes. “Now you hate me,” she said.

“Hate you? Oh, you poor creature!”

“Then kiss me,” she said, “if you cannot hate me.”

I took her head between my hands and kissed her on the forehead.

“Will you kill me now?” she whispered insidiously.

“Oh, my God – no.”

“But you were sent for that. That is what the picture means.”

“I don’t know what it means. But not that. Never think it.”

“Then good-bye – and forever – my friend, my brother.”

She walked quickly away in the dusk and I did not follow her. She did not appear at dinner that evening; she had a headache, her husband said. About nine o’clock I went up to the loft and cut my picture into strips. I felt as if I were stabbing a living creature. I burned the strips in the stove which was there. Then I came down and told David Sheriff that I had fulfilled the contract for his own portrait, but that I found I could make no headway with the portrait of Mrs. Sheriff and so I was going away in the morning.

“Call yourself a painter?” he said. “Why, she ought to be easier than me. She can sit still, I know that.” He chuckled, but he was evidently put out.

“I daresay Mr. Abner can find you someone else—”

“Well, no. I guess not. I guess it’s my picture the folks want to see down in that library.” He added that he used to do some drawing himself in his young days. “Over there in the woods, near the bay, I used to draw my cousins. I used to stand them against a tree and cut notches in it to mark their height.”

A few months later Abner showed me a newspaper which he had received from David Sheriff. It was a local paper and it gave a full account of the opening of the Abigail Sheriff Memorial Library. My portrait of David Sheriff had been much praised by the orators. There was no mention of a portrait of Mrs. Sheriff, and it was said that she herself had been absent from the ceremony, “owing to illness.”

THE END OF A FAMILY

TAKEN FROM THE PAPERS OF
M. CHALUMET-LACLUZE,
A WELL-KNOWN PARISIAN LAWYER,
LATELY DEAD

I

On a hot evening in August 1893, just after dinner, I was handed a note from the Marquis de Péréfix, who desired to see me at once.

Since my grandfather’s time our office had managed the affairs of this ancient and distinguished family. They had always been what may be called wealthy sometimes, of course, less than at other times, but at no time had they come down to the narrow means, and even penury, from which so many families of our old nobility have suffered. The Péréfix of the revolutionary time was a friend of Horace Walpole, whom he had met at Lord Hertford’s, when that nobleman was ambassador to France; and aided by the astute Mr. Walpole he had very profitably invested large sums in English securities, so that when he returned to France in the last years of the Empire he returned in no equivocal position. During the Restoration, and again under Louis-Philippe, the Péréfixes accepted diplomatic and military posts which they occupied worthily enough. After the coup d’état they retired altogether from public affairs, regarding the various forms of government which followed that event with impatient disapproval. A few of them served in the army: one lost his life at Wörth. The father of my present client was an influential member of the Jockey Club, and divided his time about equally between racehorses and dancers at the opera. He was notorious in Paris on account of his waistcoats. “M. le Marquis de Péréfix wore another of his amazing waistcoats,” the journalists would write when they reported some function of the fashionable world. “A man must be celebrated for something,” he used to say to my father with his pinched little smile, which insinuated a vague irony.

His son, the present Marquis, Caspar Joachim Marie Jean, Marquis de Péréfix, lord of Sauxillanges and of other places, was now forty-eight years old. During his minority he had led rather a nomad and expensive life, and had borrowed large sums on his prospects. Upon the death of his father, it had been my duty to arrange these debts and to put his affairs generally in order; and ever since I had been in constant intercourse with him, though I saw him rarely, and knew really very little of his way of life.

Accordingly, as I sauntered through the hot air of the evening to the rue Barbet-de-Jouy, where he lived, I was unable to imagine what he wanted to see me about. All I knew was that nothing in the ordinary course of business would be the subject of our interview, for his affairs were in perfect order, thanks in art to my excellent management, and also to a more regular and regulated expenditure of funds which he himself had adopted of late years. So, as I paced gravely through streets at first full of provincials and foreigners, and then, as I drew near the river, almost empty, I had an opportunity to exercise what little imagination I have. Possibly it was owing to this vacuity of mind that my thoughts, which I endeavour to keep cold and precise as my written or spoken statements, became agreeably, and what I suppose might be called poetically affected, as I crossed the bridge, by the full moon casting unequal splashes of light on the river water and unshadowing fantastically the cathedral towers – a sight I had been familiar with any time these sixty years and never before noticed particularly. That is why I mention it here, for it has no bearing on my narrative, and the impression was dissipated long before I reached the quiet street where the Marquis dwelt.

The house itself was old, like all those in that street, but his apartments were furnished in the modern style with considerable taste and luxury. I found him in the dining-room. He had evidently dined in company, but he was now sitting alone at the table smoking. He greeted me with more exuberant cordiality than he usually showed; his eyes glittered and his face was a little flushed, and from these indications I concluded he had drunk rather too much wine.

The Marquis de Péréfix had always seemed to me an extremely handsome man, and as he got older the distinction of his features increased. He stood well, with the supple, well-knit frame of a man who spends much of his time in violent exercise. His dark clear-cut face was relieved by brindled hair somewhat thin at the temples, and by black eyebrows; which in their turn overshadowed very expressive eyes, with that look of profound melancholy which is often seen in the eyes of our French nobility even when their present fortunes seem happiest. I speak here, of course, of the genuine French nobility, those who date back authentically to Louis XV at least. These, deprived as they are of political power, seem to me to have as a body an air of greater charm and distinction than any other nobility in Europe. This may be in part owing to the great sufferings which the ancestors of many of them endured, and also, no doubt, to the strictness with which marriages in most cases have been limited till very lately to unions among themselves – a custom which has preserved the type at the expense of certain physiological advantages.

As it turned out, it was of his own marriage that the Marquis wished to speak to me. Such an obvious business for a lawyer I had left out when I was considering in the street the reasons for my summons, because he had repeatedly declared to me, upon my frequent remonstrances, that he had the strongest objection to marry.

“I am very glad,” I said. “As I have often remarked, it is a pity to let the old family die out. For a family that has had at one time or another so many branches, you are singularly extinct. Except for you—”

“That’s just the point,” he interrupted eagerly. “I have no relations that count, nobody to consider in this matter but myself. Consequently I can marry whom I choose.” He poured out and shoved over to me some champagne – a wine I detest. Then he went on, bringing out his words with the emphasis of one who expects a dispute and has prepared in advance:

“I intend to marry Elizabeth – Mlle. Elizabeth Kymars.”

I knew of this lady. She was a circus-rider – not one of the kind who wear tights and jump through hoops, but of the other kind who in top-hat and habit perform seriously the evolutions of the haute-école. She had lived under the “protection,” as it is called, of the Marquis for over two years, and it had fallen among my duties to pay large bills for her to jewellers, dressmakers, and other tradespeople. And as all such bills were paid with my cheques, I am afraid I incurred some unjust reproach among certain respectable tradesmen who happened to have my personal custom as well as that of Mlle. Kymars; for comparing the modest purchases I made for my wife and daughter with the large bills I paid on behalf of the circus-rider, they could hardly fail to draw conclusions to my detriment as a husband and father.

The Marquis examined me narrowly as he lit a cigarette, and having apparently satisfied himself that there was little opposition to be feared, he went on talking in his even and rather nasal voice.

“I have a thousand reasons for this step, and two or three are excellent ones. I like Mlle. Kymars; I am very fond of her indeed. In some months she will be the mother of my child.”

“Really!” I cried, very much startled.

The Marquis nodded with the satisfaction of one who witnesses the success of a premeditated effect. “Now, here is the point. This child, boy or girl, will be my heir and will inherit in a very short time.”

“Nonsense, nonsense.”

“It is not nonsense,” said the Marquis testily. “I know what I am talking about. I was examined by Budmose-Cladel lately, and he hardly gives me three years to live.”

I was confounded, but I made a show of spirits. “One doctor is not enough for a decision of that kind,” I said. “Who else have you seen?”

“Who else? Nobody else. I don’t want to ask all the doctors in Paris how soon I am going to die. It’s a blow, but there it is. It would be a blow if I were ninety. What’s the use? Besides, I know I’m done for. My heart is all wrong. I’ve never been the same man since I got that sunstroke in the Sahara.”

He blew out a great puff of smoke.

“It’s a serious moment for me,” he pursued gravely. “It’s a serious moment for anybody who thinks as a Christian. I dare say I haven’t lived a very Christian life, but I intend to set myself in order to die like one. By the rules of the Church, I must either regulate my position with Elizabeth or separate from her altogether. Now this last is quite out of the question. I’m not going to separate from Elizabeth. So you see—”

He waved his hand to show that further argument was useless. I perceived that this was indeed the case, and so I took my part at once.

“When you give me your instructions I will draw up the necessary papers,” I said. “As you say, you have nobody’s feelings to consult in this matter but your own. There are only your relatives, the Princess San Rossore in Italy, and the Countess of Southmead in England. I suppose you will notify them?”

“Quite useless,” he replied. “It is not their business. They are sure to get to hear of it somehow or other. Besides—”

At this moment the door was opened cautiously. I expected to see the circus-rider, the future marchioness, enter, but it was in fact an apparition much more disquieting.

“Come in, Isidor,” said the Marquis to a burly man who stood hesitating on the threshold. “This is M. Chalumet-Lacluze, who has been kind enough to come and see me.” And he introduced Mr. Isidor Lorty, one of the ringmasters at the Nouveau Cirque.

This man’s profession explained his presence. His familiarity and swaggering assurance, as he drew a chair to the table and poured out a glass of wine, were also accounted for by a remark which the Marquis let drop to the effect that Isidor was a cousin of the bride. I am bound to say I was not prepossessed favourably by Isidor. He seemed a low type of rastaquouère. He was a big and obviously very strong man, with heavy rounded shoulders like a labourer, oily black hair plastered down over his narrow forehead, small cunning black eyes, a conquering moustache, and a thick neck. He wore some diamond rings on his fingers, which were hairy and not very clean. He had an expansive smile which showed his strong white teeth, but this did not nullify the unpleasant effect of his manner, which was that of a man uneasy and servile trying to assert himself by swaggering in the company of his betters. The Marquis, however, seemed to like him.

“I got sick of playing dice with Elizabeth, so I thought I’d come in,” he remarked, and shot a furtive look at me out of his little black eyes as if to gather whether I was a friend or an enemy. He spoke French well, but he was certainly not French. It was hard to say exactly what he was: Servian possibly, or Rumanian, or some species of Tzigany.

The Marquis rose. “Let us go into the drawing-room,” he said. “We shall find Elizabeth there.”

I had never seen this lady before, and I could not help admiring her appearance, without being in the least captivated by it. She had in fact the kind of beauty that many men would coldly admire, but only a few would love. As we entered she was leaning against the mantelpiece, and a rather close-fitting gown revealed the perfection of her muscular figure, used, one could see, to hard training from childhood. Her face had a curious pearl-like pallor which threw into brilliant relief her enigmatic black eyes and black hair. But the most extraordinary thing about her face was the look of indomitable pride settled there. For a trained observer like myself, it was easy to make out that this was not an affectation of a person accustomed to show herself as a spectacle: it was innate. Nor was it the look of disdain and superiority of the tamer of horses, often called upon to risk her life, though there was something of that in it too. No; this was the look of the natally proud soul piercing the face and influencing the carriage – proud too, as such souls are, without warrant, without any reference to what they are or what they have done in the world – which often, when the surroundings happen to be mean, exposes them to the hushed gibes of onlookers.

Certainly any gibes uttered at the expense of Mlle. Kymars would have been very hushed indeed. For here was one of the women who can give a look which cuts like a whip, and whose own arm would be quick to avenge an affront. In truth she was the personification of the haughty aristocrat dear to novelists and actresses; though the haughty expression of countenance is not often in reality found among families of some antiquity. The Marquis de Péréfix, for instance, whose ancestors, some of them, were in the Crusades, and another received Henry VIII on the field of the Cloth of Gold, looked melancholy, resigned, unassertive, and almost ordinary, in comparison with this little circus-rider, sprung from Heaven knows where.

She received me amiably enough, and talked with much more connection and sense than I had anticipated. She too was certainly not French, nor had she the distinguishing marks of any nation. Like her cousin, she was probably some kind of gypsy, at least in part. I sat there doing my best till the three fell into a vehement discussion over horses, whereupon I took my leave.

A short time after, the marriage was celebrated privately in one of the chapels of St. Clotilde.

II

On the night of the 11th of December, 1903, I received a telegram, handed in at the office of the chief town of Puy-de-Dôme, the department in which the château of the Marquis de Péréfix was situated, asking for my presence in most urgent terms. This telegram was unsigned and afforded no explanation as to what I was wanted for. It was too late to go that night, but the next morning I caught a very early train to Clermont-Ferrand.

During the long, cold journey towards the mountains, I had leisure to spend some thought on this client of mine, whom I had not thought of with any particularity for a long time. Notwithstanding the prediction of the doctor, he had survived these ten years. About two months after his marriage he had retired to his country estate, and had never since left it. There in due season a son was born, the only child of the pair. I had every reason to suppose the Marquis happy in his odd marriage, for if he had not been I should infallibly have been consulted, and I never was. In fact, my relation to the Marquis was become merely that of a Paris agent whose aid is rarely needed, and, as I say, I had got to think but seldom of a man for whom the services I performed were almost mechanical.

It was the parting of the day and night when I arrived at Clermont-Ferrand. The evening was cold and rough, and just as I left the station a fine snow began to fall. The château of the Marquis was some eight miles away over mountain roads, and at the Hôtel Poste I found the landlord very reluctant to send out horses in this wild weather. His wife proposed to me a comfortable room for the night, clinching her offer with the assurance that a man of my years would certainly catch his death on such a night journey, either by a fall, or just by cold and snow. However, I waved these sinister prophecies aside, and what with the bribe of a good sum, and the promise that horses and driver could be quartered on the Marquis till they were fit to return, I obtained at length a carriage. After I had eaten a good meal we started. I remember I remember having been somewhat amused at the look I caught on the face of the landlady, an odd confusion of pity and terror, as standing under a great lamp in the snow, she watched us clattering across the Place with much cracking of whip.

But scarcely had we cleared the town than I was nearer sharing than laughing at the good woman’s dismay. It was a pitch-black night as we struck into the uneven roads, and the wind came with such force that I thought it would send the carriage on its side. I sat inside holding on to the armrests to keep my balance, while through the glass I could see the broad back of the driver, crusted with snow, as he sat in the shine of the lamps, bellowing at the stocky Auvergne horses. Fortunately the snow left off after we had been going about half an hour, but the darkness and the rugged way were still a sufficient cause for anxiety – and, no doubt, more to me, who knew not where I was going, than to the driver, familiar with these roads from childhood. At last, after we had been travelling very slowly for some hours, the carriage stopped. It was now about eleven o’clock.

The driver dismounted. I let down the glass, put my head out, and saw him examining the feet of the steaming horses.

“Are we at the house?” I cried.

He came slowly back to me, and stood by the front wheel in the lamplight.

“There,” he said, pointing with his whip, “is the château.”

I peered into the direction he indicated, but could see nothing that looked like a house. A drizzling snow had again begun to fall. After a while I made out a haze of yellow light at a certain distance, which seemed to rise from far below the level of the road.

“Do you mean where the light is?”

He nodded. “The château lies deep in the glen. It will be a hard pull to get down.”

He mounted again, turned sharp to the right, and a descent began, with sliding of wheels and scrunching of brakes, which lasted more than a quarter of an hour. Then we passed through an archway, struck a good level road, and in a few minutes came before the house. It seemed to be a large building, and lights shone from many of the windows.

The grave man clad in black, by whom I was received, led me through wide stone passages to a large high room, comfortably though rather stiffly furnished, and having the walls dressed with portraits in heavy frames. A great fire blazed at the far end, and near it was drawn a small table laid for supper with shining napery and silver.

“Very sad about the young Count, sir,” said the man.

“Has anything happened to him?”

“He died suddenly two days ago. His body is still in the house. The Marquis himself,” added the man, “is dying. He is not expected to live through the night. He had the Sacraments this afternoon. What a series of misfortunes!”

“You may well say that!” I answered, feeling colder than ever I did on the road. “And where is her ladyship?”

“Her ladyship never leaves the sickroom, except for a few hours’ rest. She has nursed the Marquis ever since he became seriously ill. We all say she looks ill enough herself. I had orders to bring you to the Marquis as soon as you arrived, but perhaps you would like some food first?”

“No, I will go at once.”

The man, walking ahead with a lamp, led me a considerable distance through several winding corridors. The house – a part of it, at all events – was evidently of some antiquity, and had escaped destruction during the revolutionary time, possibly on account of its secluded position, lying as it did in a hollow between hills and quite invisible from the main road.

At a certain door he stopped, opened it a little, and whispered to one inside. Then he made me a sign to enter.

A large screen standing at some distance from the door blocked a sight of the room till I had passed round it. Then, indeed, I had before me a lugubrious scene.

The room was wide and lofty, with an uneven floor of polished oak, mostly covered with rugs. Candles in branched silver candlesticks cast a sad and unequal light. A large curtained bed stood in the corner, and red curtains were drawn across the vast windows. One side of the room was very curiously painted and had the words of a Latin psalm in antique characters upon it: the other walls were covered with tapestry. Altogether the effect of the room was sombre and depressing, and exhaled that heavy odour of mortality which pervades rooms where someone lies at the point of death.

Near a great carven fireplace in which the logs glowed, in a deep chair propped with pillows, the Marquis sat with vacant eyes, breathing stertorously. The doctor, a fat, clever-looking little man, stood by him, and as I entered was taking his pulse. Nearby, a Sister of Charity in her white hood and blue gown stood holding a small bowl. And leaning over the back of the chair, regarding the dying man with an indescribable look of yearning and devotion such as I was startled to see on that proud impassive face, was the ex-circus-rider, the Marchioness de Péréfix.

The Sister touched her, and she pulled herself together as if startled out of a dream. Then she raised herself up, and after giving me a long, haggard look, moved away to a door which opened into a smaller room. I followed, and when I was face to face with her, I saw that although she bore the stains of watching and great suffering, although she was clad in a loose white dressing robe and her hair was unbrushed and carelessly knotted, the imperious beauty of her face and carriage was as striking as ever.

“Here is a dreadful state of affairs, madam,” I said. “The death of the young Count—”

“Ah, yes,” she murmured; “my poor little son! Tell me – you have known the Marquis a long time – do you think he looks as if he might pull through?” I hesitated for an instant; but seeing her composed, almost stern look, I spoke freely. “Madam, I have seen too many people die to be deceived in the signs. M. de Péréfix is very near death.”

“It is a pity,” she replied. “I have done all I could.”

“There is one consolation,” I said, after a short pause. “He does not know of the death of the young Count—”

“On the contrary,” she interrupted, “he knew shortly after it happened. I told him myself.”

I stared at her. “Was that quite wise, quite merciful—”

“He had to know, while there was yet time to alter his will. He did add a codicil. I have it here to give you.”

With that she went to a desk and took out an envelope. In this was a paper with the following words:

“On account of the death of my beloved son, Melchior Louis Elizabeth, Count de Sauxillanges, I desire that, with the exception of the provision for my wife and the legacies to servants mentioned in my will, all the other provisions in that document may be null and void, and my property disposed of in accordance with a memorandum I left with my lawyer in Paris, M. Chalumet-Lacluze, just before my journey into Africa, when I thought I should die childless.”

This was signed with the well-known signature of the Marquis, and duly witnessed.

“We have that memorandum quite safe,” I said to the Marchioness. “There will be no difficulty.”

She made a vague gesture with her hand which I took to mean that nothing could possibly interest her less, and actually had the resolution to ask me some questions about my adventures on the road, though I saw that she was not thinking of me personally any more than of a piece of furniture. I regarded her with uneasiness and some indignation. I resented her calmness and self-control before her husband dying in one room, and the yet unburied body of her only child in the other. Her devotion to her husband appeared genuine; but why had she afflicted his last hours with the miserable news that his son was dead and his race ended? For it was unnecessary: as things were, the codicil of the Marquis was of little importance. Ah, the bohemian, the child of the circus, was well seen in such an action! – without feeling and tactless, eager to secure herself at all hazards, and perfectly unable to comprehend the anguish of a man of family who learns that his ancient race is finished.

A new silence fell between us, while the storm lashed the windows. She broke in by inquiring whether I had eaten, and upon my reply that I had not, made that an excuse to put an end to the interview, and glided back to the sickroom. I followed, and when I was come up to the Marquis I took his hand which lay idle on the arm of his chair.

“Marquis de Péréfix,” I said, in a solemn voice, “how is it with you, sir? Here is your old friend Chalumet-Lacluze. Be of good cheer.”

I know not whether he heard me, for he made no kind of motion. Then I released his hand and left the room, in a sorrow intensified by the reflection that the nearest friend to the dying man was an old lawyer from Paris whom he had scarcely seen in ten years.

I found a good supper on the table by the fire, but I drew in my chair to it with a very faint appetite. Hard and dry as I am supposed to be, and as perhaps I am, I could almost have wept as I thought of the sad end of this distinguished family with which my own had been so long connected.

When I had as good as finished the meal, the door opened and the doctor came in.

“I thought I would allow you to get your supper over before I broke in on you,” he observed, and brought up a chair. “I can do no good to the Marquis by staying up there in his room. He may last till morning.”

“I suppose he is certain to die?”

The doctor nodded as he lit a cigar. “It is a question of hours. He has not been a strong man for some years, and in my opinion he would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the extreme care of his wife.”

“Really?”

“I practise at Mont-Dore during the season, but in the winter I am here, and he has been under my observation for some years. Her attention to him has been extraordinary. You will think me fanciful for a man who prides himself on being scientific, but I do sometimes think she has kept him alive by her force of will. Now you are going to laugh.”

“Oh no, I don’t feel like laughing. She has a very singular and powerful character, I think.”

“She has. She will need all of it tomorrow or next day to stand the facer we are obliged to give her.”

I stared at him. “You mean—”

The doctor bent across the table. “I mean that the young Count de Sauxillanges did not die a natural death. He was poisoned.”

“Good Heavens!” I was so horrified that I could hardly speak. “Wasn’t the boy ill?”

“He had a bronchial cold – nothing at all to worry about. He was a robust lad, fond of the open air. Then between the morning and night he collapsed and died with every symptom of poisoning.”

I pushed my chair back from the table. “But who would poison the boy in his father’s house? There must be some mistake.”

“Oh, it is not only my opinion, though I may say I am not usually mistaken in such matters. Le Cateau of Clermont-Ferrand had been called into consultation about the Marquis, and was present at the lad’s death. It was in fact owing to the fuss he made that I – most unwillingly, I assure you – took any steps.”

“And pray what steps have you taken?” I asked. “I hope you don’t intend to cause any scandal in this distinguished family? I must remind you that though the line of the Marquis is at this moment practically ended, he has relations, both in France and abroad, very highly placed – very highly placed—”

I broke off. I was so shocked that I hardly knew what I was saying

“I don’t think we have caused any scandal so far,” replied the doctor, “and I don’t know that we intend to. But I can only speak for myself. Some scandal is inevitable if Dr. Le Cateau insists on a public examination, as he threatens. Le Cateau is a Radical-Socialist in politics, and the feelings of noble families don’t weigh much with him. But what it was possible to do I have done. Nobody up to the present has heard a word of this affair except yourself, myself, Le Cateau, and one other person. This is the Sub-prefect of Police of Clermont-Ferrand.”

“What!” I exclaimed. “You have already put the matter in the hands of the police?”

“I saw no way to avoid having an investigation in the house. All that was left was to have it done in the quietest way possible. I persuaded the Sub-prefect to come out here on the pretence of examining into a fire which luckily happened at a farm near by some nights ago. He lodges here in the château, which seems very natural, for the Marquis has often put him up when he had business in the district. Then I got permission from the Marchioness to wire to you, putting my request to her on the ground of her husband’s illness, which appeared reasonable enough.”

“And what,” I inquired, “has this police officer discovered?”

“He had better tell you himself,” answered the doctor, rising. “He is waiting to see you. Shall I bring him in?”

The Sub-prefect of Police turned out to be an energetic kind of man, with, as I judged, a considerable natural fund of astuteness and cunning developed by police methods, and provincial police methods at that. The Prefect was away on leave of absence, he explained, so the duties had fallen upon him.. He spoke with a certain emphasis as though he expected to be contradicted, and was on his guard against it, and I remarked in him what I have had often occasion to remark in the course of my professional experience, the jealousy and distrust of the provincial functionary before a Parisian.

After we had talked a little, “This is a very dark business,” I said with a sigh.

“You are right in the spirit of metaphor,” replied the Sub-prefect, who was rolling a cigarette, “but in the matter of fact you are wrong.”

“Indeed? How is that?”

“Because,” said the Sub-prefect, looking me straight in the face with a smile, “I have discovered the criminal.”

I almost jumped out of my chair; but the doctor had evidently been informed already, for he only nodded in acquiescence. The Sub-prefect paused a moment, calculating his effects.

“The criminal,” he resumed, “is a servant in this house. She has been nurse to the young Count for some years. Her name is Jeanne Dangu.”

I took this in at first with some scepticism. “And what reasons have you for suspecting this woman?”

“I think we can satisfy you,” said the Sub-prefect. “The Count, as the doctor here will tell you, was poisoned by a dose, or repeated doses, of digitalin. Now I have found an empty bottle of digitalin in this woman’s room, hidden away, so as not to be noticed, among other bottles in the drawer of the washstand. Some people – I might say most people – would never have examined the bottles on the wash-stand, acting on the supposition that the instinct of the criminal would lead her to destroy such a damning evidence of her crime. But I make it a rule to take no chances.”

“And a very good rule too,” I said. “There remains the alternative that the woman might have bought the bottle for her own use.”

“That is impossible,” put in the doctor. “I know the bottle – in fact it came out of my surgery for the Marquis. Digitalin was in his treatment for a while, but we had given it up, which is the reason the bottle wasn’t missed.”

“But you must have a motive,” I exclaimed. “People as a rule don’t commit murders by way passing the afternoon. Now what motive can you possibly allege as likely to influence this nurse – this servant-woman – to poison a boy ten years old?”

There was no immediate reply, and I thought I had embarrassed the Sub-prefect; but I was mistaken. He was meditating, and after a few moments he threw back his head and looked at me with a significant smile.

“M. Chalumet-Lacluze,” he began, “I have a theory about that which you may think good or not, but which seems adequate to me. I flatter myself upon being something of a psychologist, which helps me very considerably in criminal investigations. Well, here is what I have worked out. This woman Dangu has only been here four years. She comes from the suburbs of Paris: she is, in fact, a Parisian. Now between the character of the Parisian worker and the provincial there is a vast difference, and allowance should always be made for it. The provincial, especially in the smaller towns, is sane, saving, takes long views, has a great respect for the law and its representatives; the Parisian, on the other hand, is reckless and often thriftless, lives on excitement, and continually craves some new sensation. It follows that such people are particularly open to the worst suggestions of crime – and not the ordinary everyday crime such as you meet with in the provinces, but refinements and variations of crime. Their natures being completely demoralized, monstrous unheard-of notions rise in their heads and are harboured there.”

He paused to light a cigarette and looked round at us both. We remained impassive.

“I take it,” pursued the Sub-prefect, “that you agree so far. Now I come to the case before us. This woman Dangu is a Parisian: therefore, strange ideas, monstrous whims must be allowed for and even expected. She is, by profession, a nurse – what is called a nursery-governess. Her profession throws her, a poor woman, among the well-to-do class, and places under her eyes luxuries and enjoyments which she can never hope to have. Hence, even with the best-disposed, envy, depression; with the demoralized, the degenerate, an impulse to crime. Now, I have noticed in nurses that they often love their charges immoderately; but they often also hate them. The first is, of course, evident enough; but the last is hidden from all but the most skilled observers, for it is obvious that a woman who wished to keep her place would do her best to conceal her hate. But in disorganized individuals there is no temperate emotion: it is either extreme love or violent hate. Arrived at that point, they are ready to commit a crime from either the hate or love which happens to sway them. Upon the hate motive I need not dwell; but I would point out that the love motive is equally potent for crime. For the love becomes sometimes so uncontrollable that a nurse, as is well known, will kidnap a child from jealousy of the child’s parents or she will kill the child. That, gentlemen,” concluded the Sub-prefect, “is my version of the case.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked at us both, awaiting our opinion. I in my turn looked at the doctor, but he remained obstinately silent, so I was forced to speak.

“I think your theory is plausible,” I said slowly at last, picking my words so as not to offend him, “and considered as a theory even ingenious. But I have found that nothing is more dangerous in criminal cases than to apply abstract theories to particular instances. For example, as you say you are a psychologist, you must know that the best psychologists have abandoned the ‘guilty look’ theory as practically worthless. To apply your theory successfully in this case would require a knowledge of the character of Jeanne Dangu which none of us possesses.”

“I hold to it,” exclaimed the Sub-prefect confidently.

“I repeat, it is an interesting theory,” I replied.

“I’m afraid the Marchioness will have to be told tomorrow,” interposed the doctor in a low voice. “My colleague at Clermont-Ferrand spoke of demanding an autopsy before the funeral.”

“Gentlemen,” I said, rising, “you will forgive me if I talk no more tonight. I am an old man and very tired. You can share my feelings. I arrive here, all unprepared, and find my old friend dying and his son a corpse in the house – you say, most foully murdered. This is too terrible to speak of further. It is a dark business – dark and shameful. God forgive us all!”

And with that we parted for the night.

III

The morning broke fine after the storm. I was told by the servant who came to my bedroom that the Marquis had died about six o’clock. Downstairs, I found the people moving about their work with a listless air, stunned by these calamities.

Just before eleven, while I and the police functionary were having breakfast together, Dr. Le Cateau from Clermont-Ferrand arrived. He was a tall, spare man with a hard, positive manner, austere and even sour, and, I think, very keen-witted. He was inclined to treat respectfully the official’s view of the case. Both of these men were most earnest with me to open the matter to the Marchioness, and the local doctor, coming in while we were still arguing, added his persuasion to theirs.

Accordingly, I sent a message to the lady asking when it would be convenient for her to see me. The servant came back and said her ladyship would receive me at once. So, leaving the three men together, I went upstairs with the greatest reluctance and a heart like lead. The servant announced me, and retired.

When I entered, the Marchioness was crouching over the fire with her hands open to the blaze as if she were suffering from the cold, but no sooner was I well in the room than she drew herself up erect in her chair. Shall I ever forget that commanding, impenetrable face? Not a quiver of a muscle betrayed emotion; the wide dark eyes were dry; and her pallor seemed no deeper than usual. Alone, a quite irrepressible sigh before she spoke, hardly noticeable, betrayed the sorely charged heart.

I ventured some words of condolence, which I felt were idle enough, and then spoke of her fatigue and advised her to rest.

“Oh, I am not tired,” she said; “not tired at all. I couldn’t sleep,” she added, staring at me with her parched eyes, “if I tried.”

I nodded. “Yes, I can understand how you feel. But you should try. I am told that you watched night and day by your husband.”

“I have done what I could,” she said.

These words, spoken in the same tone, were the words she had used to me the night before, and I now observed for the first time that we were in the same little room. The Marquis, then, lay dead in the next room, with the door half open between, and all through our interview I felt his presence, as if he were paying attention to us in there.

We spoke again about the funeral; then she let a silence fall and lay in her chair staring into space, doubtless expecting me to take my leave – if, indeed, she had not forgotten me altogether.

With an immense effort I summoned my resolution and stood up before the fire.

“Madam,” I began huskily, “there is one matter I am obliged to speak to you about, and believe me I never had anything so disagreeable to do in my life. It is about the death of the Count de Sauxillanges.”

She was quite still. “About my poor son?”

“Yes. The doctors here – not only the local doctor, but Le Cateau from Clermont – declare his death was not natural.” I hesitated, looking at her. “They say he was poisoned.”

She murmured something that I did not catch, and then asked: “Deliberately poisoned?”

I assented. She seemed absolutely calm. I need not say I was rather astonished at this lack of surprise and of any emotion at receiving such a heart-breaking piece of news, but she was such a queer, cold woman that what would have appeared monstrous in others in her seemed natural enough.

“They have even,” I added, “put their finger on the criminal.”

This stirred her a little. “Ah!” she said. “And whom do they accuse?”

“It is not so much they who accuse, nor I either. It is the chief of police. Practically, he accuses a servant in the house, Jeanne Dangu.”

To my utter stupefaction, she flung back her head and gave vent to a peal of horrible, joyless laughter which left me helpless and powerless as if I had been nailed to the floor.

“Jeanne!” exclaimed the Marchioness. “Oh, my God! Jeanne, who is crying her poor heart out and refuses to stir from the side of my dead son! There’s an idea for you!”

“They found the poison bottle in her room,” I stammered.

She leaned forward and fixed her beautiful, terrible eyes on me. “M. Chalumet-Lacluze,” she asked earnestly, “do they mean to accuse Jeanne? Do they mean to punish her?”

I recovered myself a little at this appeal. “She will undoubtedly be under very strong suspicion, and if the matter is not cleared up, I am afraid—” I threw out my arm vaguely.

“You are afraid they will kill Jeanne?”

“Oh no, I don’t say that – far from it.”

Then the Marchioness stood up. “Listen, M. Chalumet-Lacluze. You must tell them not to kill Jeanne. Jeanne is a good woman. Jeanne has only loved – she has done nothing bad at all. It was I who killed my son.”

If the house had been shaken to its foundations by an earthquake I could not have been more startled. But at once I had a reaction. The lady was raving, of course; her brain was turned by sorrow.

I suppose she read what I thought on my face, for she answered as if I had spoken.

“I am quite in my senses, M. Chalumet-Lacluze. Jeanne must not suffer for me. Nobody must suffer for me. What I did was the best thing to do. I think it was the best thing to do. I would have kept silent – for the honour of the Marquis, you know – but I am not afraid to tell. I can explain it all so easily to you, because you know everything from the beginning.”

When she had said that, she did a singular thing. She went to the half-open door, and looked round it into the room where the corpse lay. Then holding the door in her hand she turned to me. “Would you prefer me to speak in there?” she said.

I can’t explain why, but I was taken with a strong shudder. I could only shake my head. She left the door open and came back to her chair with her free, unhumbled movement, and no least look of shame or terror upon her indomitable marble face.

“That poor Jeanne!” she said as she dropped into her chair. “How could they accuse her, the poor woman! She came to me some nights ago for some drops to ease her raging tooth. I was so full of other things at the time that I took up the first empty bottle I found to put her drops in, without looking at the label. That is how they found the bottle in her room. But all that has no importance, as you can see. I am going to tell you about it, from the beginning.”

She let her eyes fall on a point in the floor and kept them fixed there, frowning a little. She remained silent so long that at last I said: “Madam, I am waiting to hear what you have to tell.”

“Yes. I am sorry; I was thinking. You know I was married only about six months before the birth of my son. It was because I was going to have a child that the Marquis married me. He thought he was going to die very soon, and he wished this child to bear his name. But the Marquis was not the father of my child, as he thought he was. The father of the child was Isidor Lorty. You met this man the night you came to our house in Paris years ago. I don’t think you liked him. He left Paris just after our marriage and I never saw him again. I have heard he was killed in America.

“At the time of my marriage I did not care much for the Marquis, and I felt no unwillingness to trick him in this way. Women brought up as I have been learn early to seize all advantages that offer over the men they have dealings with. Besides, I saw hardly anything to choose between being a wife or a mistress. I did not want to marry: I had never asked him to marry me. The only advantage I saw in it was that my son would have a smoother life than if he came on the world as the son of Lorty. That is why I married.”

I was going to speak, but she held up her hand.

“Please don’t interrupt me or I shan’t be able to go on again. M. Chalumet-Lacluze, by the time my son was born I loved my husband I loved him before all else in the world. I would have laid down my life for him. How did this come about? I don’t know; I cannot explain. But nothing has changed me, nothing could change me. I think I may have done him some good. I hope so. The doctors gave him only three years to live. He has lived ten.

“But the boy as he grew up was a dagger in my heart. I loved him too – oh yes, I loved him well, my poor little Louis! But when I saw the pride of the Marquis over the lad, and how he used to take him everywhere, and present him as his son, and say all the great things the little Count would do when he himself was gone, and arrange everything with a view to the future of Louis – what a blade of fire in my breast! It was not that I had to tell any lies; but I had to stand by and see a huge lie acted every day and all day. And the worst was that the Marquis was always searching for resemblances to himself and his ancestors in Louis. He used to imagine he found them; but I saw well enough that the boy only resembled me, and that later he would resemble Lorty. And I saw in the future the name of Péréfix carried and all the family wealth owned by a thick man with low and brutal instincts who looked like Lorty, and who had only in his veins the blood of a bully and of a drab of a circus-rider.

“I used to lie awake for hours at night thinking what I had better do. You will say, I ought to have told the Marquis. Do you think I did not often consider that? But I did not want to kill him – no, I did not want to kill him. And it would have killed him. He might have killed me first and that would not have mattered, but he would have died himself of shame and the knowledge that I, whom he loved so much, had so shamefully tricked him. No, I could not tell him about the boy. I had not the strength….

“So the time went on, till some weeks ago when he fell very ill. Then he began to make all kinds of arrangements for the boy’s future – leaving him all his property, writing to his relations about him, and so on. It was even arranged that the boy should go for a while after his father’s death to one of the relations of the family, a Princess in Italy. Then I said to myself: All this must not be. Louis must not inherit this great name, and all its riches and responsibilities: he has not the blood to bear them. He will but make a failure or, very likely, a disgrace of his life, and that will be an injury done by me to the man who has loved me so kindly.

“Then I said: It would be better if little Louis died while he is happy. The Marquis will be sorry; but if I tell the truth he will be shamed, and it is better he should go with sorrow to his grave than with shame. Then, when I had thought these things, I took the poison to little Louis and I gave it to him myself.”

The low voice ceased; but what I was about to say was struck from my lips, for her iron self-control suddenly broke down and she began to sob, horrible dry sobs, staring at me meanwhile with wide, tearless eyes.

“He looked so pretty!” she said.

I am free to say I never went through such a harrowing moment. When I considered the force of will which had enabled her to carry this anguish stuffed in her bosom, and that no womanish tenderness had abated her resolution to work out her plan, she appeared to me a monster; and yet – God forgive me! – I felt as I looked at her a stir of pity. For when I thought of her wild rearing, her warped code, her dark morality, on the one hand; and then of her love and devotion and the unselfishness of her motives, she became, for the moment at all events, a kind of inverted heroine, a saint predestined to hell. She repelled and even frightened me; she filled me with abhorrence; but mingled with that was a pang of regret for an admirable force misused and lost. My feelings might be summed up in the line of the great poet Racine which I had often heard declaimed on the stage:

Ainsi que la vertu, le crime a ses degrés.

Her paroxysm was mastered in a few seconds. When she spoke again it was in the even, unemotional voice she had used all the time.

“I am sorry for that,” she said. “I have been watching a good deal lately, and I am rather worn out. M. Chalumet-Lacluze, you will understand that you must tell those gentlemen downstairs what I have told you, and nothing must be done to Jeanne. If they wish to accuse me, I am of course quite ready. Only, if you could arrange to leave the matter at rest it might be better, because, you know, his memory” – she looked towards the half-open door – “would be smirched if his wife was placed in the assize court.”

“Ah, his memory!” I repeated bitterly. “That ought to have been thought of before.”

She looked at me with immense sadness. “You see, I did not love him then.”

The strange woman! Her remorse was plainly applied only to her false dealing with the Marquis, and not at all to the taking off of her little son. And I judged that she regarded this as one of the harsh necessary acts of existence which it was useless to repent or bewail.

“I know you dislike me, M. Chalumet-Lacluze, but there is one favour you may possibly do me on account of your dead friend. If these gentlemen decide to accuse me publicly, will you give me some warning before they act?”

I saw what she meant. “You shall be warned,” I replied. “Madam, I have nothing more to say to you. I am very unhappy, and no doubt you are still more unhappy.”

At that she gave me a wry little smile, and as I stepped into the corridor, I saw her rise from her chair and walk towards the half-open door which led into the chamber of death.

•   •   •   •   •

I went down and found those gentlemen, and thereupon opened the case to them as it was, and dwelt with all my resources upon the uselessness of a prosecution and the advisability of keeping the secret between us. The local doctor and, to my surprise, the police functionary came round without much difficulty to my view, but Dr. Le Cateau gave me great trouble. He poured out his fury on the Marchioness, whom he compared to Jael, Judith, and to others I have forgotten, and he even became insulting to myself, calling me the henchman of aristocrats and a screener of their vices. How I had the patience and skill to manage him, suffering as I was from the effects of the terrific blow I had just received, I know not; but I did at last bring him also to promise silence.

“Besides,” I said, “justice will not have long to wait, for if ever I saw the marks of death on any face, it is on the face of that most miserable woman upstairs. Even now, unless I am mistaken, she is measuring her grave.”

Two days later, in dull cold weather, the Marquis and the boy were laid together in the ancient vault of the Péréfix family. The Marchioness attended the funeral. Her lips and cheeks were faded to ashes as though they had already begun to separate from life; blue circles were under her eyes and showed up cruelly in the daylight; but she bore herself in her mourning robes through that black funeral and the sullen dirging of the choir with an air of intense suffering dignity which impressed all beholders. When the rite was ended, I felt such insuperable horror at the thought of returning to the house where the lonely woman would be lodged with her grief and sin, that I availed myself of the doctor’s carriage to Clermont-Ferrand, whence I took the first train to Paris.

IV

Five months after, she died. Before her death she saw no doctor, saw no priest, and by her orders was buried among the poor and outcast. The personal fortune left her by her husband was untouched, and was placed at my disposition. After some reflection, I distributed this among such institutions as particularly care for circus-people, van-dwellers, and other wanderers by the road. I hope they sometimes pray for their unknown benefactress, and that I may gain a little blessing too from their prayers.

ORIGINAL SIN

Sans cesse à mes côtés s’agite le Démon,

Il nage autour de moi comme un air impalpable;

Je l’avale, et le sens qui brûle mon poumon

Et l’emplit d’un désir éternel et coupable.

The Demon is constantly stirring at my side,
He swims around me like an impalpable air;
I swallow him, and feel him burn my lungs
And fill them with an eternal and sinful desire.

—Charles Beaudelaire,
Les Fleurs du Mal.

When Alphonse D’Aubert had laid down his book for the fifth time, having taken it up five times in his wrestle with his thoughts, he decided that even L’Ennemi des Lois could not distract him, and so, at four o’clock in the morning, he went into the streets. As he crossed the deserted Boulevard, a little boy drew near with a plaintive cry: “Charité, Monsieur!” and Alphonse, who was almost morbidly good-natured, gave him an alms, and paused for a few minutes of pleasant talk. When he fell to his walk again, he began to consider, with a sort of sick wonder, why the child who lived in his mind to such fell purpose, could not become to him as this child he had just left: as all other children, – exquisite, helpless, piteous things, craving for love and protection. Thus it was always with him: after his blackest nights he was ever in the morning at his penitentials: and when the dawn was creeping over the roofs of the houses, he forgot how feverishly he had yearned in the darkness to press his long fingers on the soft throat of a child.

Whether Alphonse was in love with Madame Dantonel or not, it may be said that she was the creature he cared most for on earth. Certainly, on her side, she looked for nothing more tender than a friendship with this somewhat strange young man, whom, in a way of motherly tenderness, she regarded, with his bizarreries, his exclusiveness, his superior silences, as a rather terrible child, spoilt by his excellent fortune in the world. At her house in the Champs-Elysées he found himself most readily at his ease: and this fact led him by the hand to the opinion, that he was never in the least happy when he was not there. She was the widow of a man who had been engaged with politics: Alphonse never troubled to inquire how engaged; only recognised the death of the political person as a relief, and as a period to the slight embarrassment with which he was wont to listen to the patriotics – an embarrassment which all forms of activity brought to his contemplative and somewhat melancholy spirit. And after that, he was never so serene, so nearly joyous, as when he was in the company of Madame Dantonel and the little Clotilde, her only child, who was now four years old.

It was on a day when he was most delightful, when he was taking life gaily, that, looking at the little girl as she played on the floor, the stunning desire came to him to take her by the throat and squeeze out her life. He took his leave in manifest disturbance; and fled into the street. He was shaking with horror: of a truth he loved this child, next to its mother, supremely; and yet, amid his disgust, he could not stifle a lust to murder her, – a thrilling satisfaction, as he thought of the life ebbing from her face while he crushed her soft round throat with his fingers. That was the first bad night of the many bad nights to come. On the following afternoon he went to the house again, to try himself – to see how he would “get on”; but within five minutes he departed, grinding his teeth and biting at his nails to keep down his passion, which was driving him to rush back to the house and slay the child before its mother’s face. But after a ghastly night of torture, and sweat, and weeping, he found himself, in the morning, suddenly recovered! All his old affection for the child once more lived in his heart: the devil, it seemed, had been worsted: and it was in this glad condition that he lived for a few weeks. He had given Clotilde many presents before; but now he spent hours in the toyshops, finding a certain piety in thus eagerly buying, as though he were making good a case with his conscience. Ah, those few excellent days! How brilliant he was; how he dealt with the sunshine; how airily he tossed a salute to the passengers in the street!

But it was on a dreary afternoon, when the rain was whipping through the courtyard, as Alphonse stood talking lightly to Madame Dantonel and the child, that he suddenly knew himself to be the slave of his old passion. Oh, to crush that satin throat! He made one tremendous, straining effort, and so beat himself; but the effort was too much for his physical strength, and he fell on the floor as if dead.

When he began to get his senses, he found Madame Dantonel bending over him with a look of sharp anxiety.

“Ah, my poor friend!” she exclaimed, “but you have been very ill!”

“I have been ill, but now I am well,” says Alphonse, in a thick voice. “I am going away – far away from Paris.”

“Going away!” And when she got over her surprise: “But why?”

“Because I do no good here,” he said, getting on his feet. “Because I find my life too narrow. I go to the café, I chat, I smoke cigarettes. Good. I dine, I go to the opera, to a soiree. My God!” he cried out, “do you call that a life? Please, my dearest friend, do not prevent me. I am going away.”

She took his hand very kindly. “Go, if you wish it,” she said; “but remember that you have always two friends here. Is it not so, Clotilde?”

Alphonse was taken with a hard shudder as he went out.

He decided to go to England; with an ultimate thought, perhaps, of America. He crossed the channel in wintry and boisterous weather, and when he came to Dover he was well content to lie there: postponing, gratefully enough, his arrival at London till the next day. Tired with his tossing journey, he took to his bed early; and at once fell into the profound sleep of fatigue, from which he awoke, about two o’clock, hot and trembling. The figure of the child was before him in the darkness of the room; the full throat, above all! was apparent and particular. He rolled on the bed, and tore and bit the pillows: not before had he longed with this violent frenzy to see the child stretched at his feet, looking solidly white and dead. Damp and shaking, he put on his clothes and went down to talk with the night-porter – a desperate chance under the best conditions; for a foreigner, hopeless! as he found. So he returned to his room, and opened his windows to the raining night. A strong salt wind was singing up channel; and Alphonse let it get into his hair and eyes, finding respite in this way, and a certain peace. Thus he spent the night, till the dawn came to show the grey, uneasy sea, and the grey sky. He departed, when morning had come, on board the earliest packet-boat, and that evening he found himself again in Paris.

Things having come to this point, you may ask fairly: Why did he not turn to the obvious remedy – self-destruction? Yes! But upon reflection it does not seem so likely. Indeed, upon reflection it would appear, that when a man has a desire, a fierce lust to satisfy, he prefers, however the powers of his soul may rebel, to live for the gratification of that desire, that fierce lust. Be that as it will, the man I am writing about did not contemplate suicide; did not, for a moment, glance along that road of escape. But he gave a dainty supper, to which he invited some of his male acquaintance, and a few ladies of generous virtue. There sat by him a superb creature, with gleaming shoulders and snapping black eyes; and as the mirth grew more disordered, he laid his hand on her swelling throat and tried to tempt himself to kill her in the sight of the revellers. Anyone rather than the child! But even as he thought it, the child floated before his eyes; the remembrance of the strange satiety he would feel when he had choked out her life, which he would not feel at all were he to kill this woman, caused his hand to fall listlessly to his side; and pleading a sudden dizziness, he left the merrymakers to themselves.

So on the next afternoon, we find him once more repairing to the Champs-Elysées and the house of Madame Dantonel. He was feeling easier today; and he discovered at Madame Dantonel’s, one visitor who helped to soothe his irritated nerves. This was an old military officer: and Alphonse found his cheerfulness and honest geniality of character very pleasant. He had sat for about twenty minutes, when Madame Dantonel exclaimed—

“My poor little Clotilde! She has a cold, a slight sore throat, and this is the time when the bonne goes downstairs, so she will be quite alone. Forgive me if I go to her.”

The time had come. “Permit me!” said Alphonse, on his feet in an instant. It was as though a stranger were talking: he could no more help the words than he could help breathing. “Pray do not deprive Monsieur of your company. I will go to Clotilde; it will delight me to see her, and I know the room quite well.”

He hardly waited for the murmured pleasure, but ran, trembling with eagerness, up the stairs. The little girl was in bed playing with her doll, and she greeted him with a smile and a glad cry. He clenched his teeth, and squeezed and crushed her throat till the pretty tiny face became black and swollen, and the poor little frame, after a shake and a quiver, lay quite still.

As he came down, he heard Madame Dantonel say good-bye to the visitor, and the hush of her dress as she passed through the hall.

“Mon Dieu! how pale you look!” she cried, raising both hands. “Is anything the matter with Clotilde?”

“Clotilde is very well,” says Alphonse. “But I think the room was too hot for me, and I am going away now.”

“Really! so soon?” she said, genuinely sorry. And she held out her hand.

“No! please don’t shake hands with me, I am not worthy!” cries Alphonse, with a wan smile, passing the matter off as a jest. “You will find Clotilde very well,” he said again.

The door closed behind him. As the mother went upstairs to her child, he took his way to a chemist’s shop which he knew of in the neighbourhood.

MY ENEMY AND MYSELF

In the garden, when I was a child, I used to stare for hours at the white roses. In these there was for me a certain strangeness, which was yet quite human; for I know that I was full of sorrow if I found the petals strewn over the hushed grass. I had a terror of great waters, wild and lonely; I saw an austere dignity in the moon shining on a flat sea; things, cordage and broken spars, cast ashore by the ocean, told me wonderful, sad tales. And because my head was thick with thoughts, I had little speech; and for this I was laughed at and called stupid: “He was always a dull child,” murmured my mother, bending over me, when I, in the crisis of a fever, was on the point of embarking for a vague land. As I grew older, I still dwelt within my soul, a satisfied prisoner: the complaint of huge trees in a storm; the lash and surge of breakers on an iron coast; the sound of certain words; the sight of dim colours which blend sometimes in grey sunsets; the heavy scent of some exquisite poisonous flower; a contemplation of youthful forms engaged in an unruly game; – ah! in these things also I found perfect sensation and ecstasy. Still, my tongue held to its old stubbornness: I was ever delayed by a habit of commonplace speech, a shame at exposing my thoughts. In time I won a cloud of easy acquaintance; but my awkwardness in conversation, my tendency to be maladroit, – call it what you like! always stepped between when I was about to make a friend. Then, at last, came Jacquette.

I remember that she was playing a composition by Chopin, a curious black-coloured thing, when I first came into her company; and now, even as I write, when our love is over, I hear that sombre music again. But the important matter is, that here was the person I had been seeking so long; here was the mind to meet with my mind; with her I could, at length, get out of myself (as we now say); become free. All the dear thoughts which had for years dwelt with me in close privateness, I gave to her – all my desires, all my mean hopes. Ah! the merry airs we had then: her bright laughter which, as wind, drove glumness, as foam, before it! I think I tired her of my enthusiasms and decisions; but it was so sweet to have someone to listen and understand, and she never would admit that she was tired. Nay! one morning in the apple-orchard, when the wind was turning her hair to the sunshine, she kissed me very prettily on the mouth.

After that, I forget how long it was till I came in one night and found my enemy sitting with her at the fireside. He was not my enemy then, mind you: indeed, I thought him a nice, pleasant creature, with a mighty handsome face. We became familiar: he seemed to like me, and I was sure I had gained another friend. The months glided by, and we three came to sitting together late of nights: he and Jacquette, the wise people, silent, gazing at each other; I, the fool, in the middle, talking in a youthful, impassioned way. Once I paused suddenly, and looked up, and caught a somewhat contemptuous smile peeping from the corners of Jacquette’s mouth and dancing in her eyes; while he, for an answer, fell a-Iaughing into her face. Of course, I must have wearied them both, bored them (as we say) to desperation; but I was a very young man, with all the warmth and admiration of the young; and in the time of youth, a woman is always older than a man. Besides, I loved her so much, and I had such strange pleasure in loving her, that I think it was rather cruel of her to laugh.

“Why did you laugh at me?” I asked, when I was twisting a garland of wild roses for her hair.

“Oh, I didn’t laugh!” she exclaimed. “Or if I did,” she added, looking down with a tooth on her lip, “it must have been because I was so pleased to hear you saying beautiful words to us – poor ignorant things!”

The next day I had an affair of great importance in the town where I lived, so I told Jacquette that on account of this affair I could not go down, as my custom was, to her cottage by the sea, that night. But as the day waned, and the night closed in, I became the thrall of a longing to hear her singing voice, to play fantastic music with her delightfully. Thus it came about that it was nearly eleven o’clock when I reached the shore, and hearkened to the calling sea. There was a note of melancholy, almost a sob, in the noise of it tonight: and that, taken with a monstrous depression, filled me strangely with a desire to die – to give up life at this point! I saw a light in Jacquette’s bedroom, but the rest of the little house was dark; and I was turning away, when my hand chanced to strike the door-handle, which I pushed, and found the door not locked. Let me go in! (thinks I): I shall sit awhile and dream of Jacquette, and a few chords touched softly on the piano will tell my love I am dreaming of her. Here (perhaps you will say!) I was wrong: but I was ready to welcome a servant’s company, or, in spite of his growing offensiveness, my enemy’s, should I find him there, rather than be alone with my saddening thoughts. The room I chose to sit in, because there was a dying fire in it, was just under Jacquette’s bedroom; and ere I had sat a minute, I became conscious of voices in the room above. As soon as I made out the man’s voice, a thousand serpents seemed literally to eat their way into my brain, turning my vision red; and I lay for an hour, maybe, on the carpet, fainting, and stricken, and dazed. Now, at last, after an hour I was myself, or rather more than myself, with every nerve tight as a fiddle-string, still seeing red, as I unclasped the long jackknife, which the Greek sailor had given me, and laid it in the hollow of my hand.

I knew that it would dawn by three o’clock, so I stood quite still, only moving my tongue over my dry lips, and shaking my head to keep a sweat from running into my eyes. A cat cried in the road, and the breakers thundered against the rocks.

A little before dawn, while it was yet dark, I heard a murmur of low voices – her voice and my enemy’s; and then the man came down the stairs.

“Good night, my sweet love!” said Jacquette.

“O my darling, good night!” came from my enemy, and so he banged the door behind him.

One moment I paused to peer through the window, and make sure of my man. Then I fetched a run, and was on him like a panther, holding him close, with his hot breath scorching my face. Coming on him from behind, as I did, the middle finger of my left hand struck his eye, and now, as I pressed, the eye bulged out.

“My friend,” he groaned, “for Christ’s sake, have pity!”

“To hell with your friendship!” I said. “Much pity you had for my honour!” says I, and with that I let him have the knife in his throat, and the blood spurted over my hands hot and sticky. As soon as I could get free of his clutch, I looked up at Jacquette’s bedroom window, and there she was, sure enough! in her nightdress, with the blind in her hand, gazing out. Straight up to her room I went, and flung open the door. She turned to me, grey and whingeing.

“My little love,” she began.

I put my hands on my hips and spat hard into her face. Then I tramped downstairs and out of the lonely cottage.

I had not the least fear of detection: the servants slept in an out-house, and the place was too desolate for any chance passenger.

I stood triumphing by the corpse of my enemy; but even as I looked the moon showed from a rift of cloud, lighting the blood, and the hue left by violent death in the features, and I ran for my life from that hideous one-eyed thing.

I came to the town, and to a house where I lay constantly, about four o’clock, in a curious trembling fit. I bathed my head and hands, however, in a heavy perfume, and then became strangely calm, and fell to thinking of the Tightness of the deed. Just there was the consoling thought: certainly I had done a murder, but in doing it I had delivered punishment to a traitress and her paramour. Now that the thing was over, it was clearly my duty to forget all about it as soon as possible; and this I set myself to do, aided by a cigarette and a novel of the ingenious Miss Jane Austen. I had succeeded in my aim, I was clear-minded and very serene, when of a sudden something heavy fell against the door of my room.

“At this hour?” I murmured in surprise, and went to the door.

A body that nearly knocked me down, the dead body of a man, fell into the room, and lay, face downward, on the carpet. Then I did the one act I shall never cease to regret: From a movement of kindness, pity, curiosity, what you will! I bent down and turned over the corpse. Slowly the thing got to its feet; and my enemy, with a dry gaping wound in his throat, and his eye hanging from its socket by a bit of skin, stood before me, face to face.

“O God, have mercy!” I screamed, and beat on the wall with my hands; and again and again – “God, have mercy!”

“You do well to ask God for mercy,” says my enemy; “for you will not get much from men.” He stood by the fire-place.

“I beg of you,” I said, in a low, passionate voice, “I beg of you, by all you find dear, for the sake of our old friendship, to leave this place, to let me go free,”

He shook his head. “For Jacquette’s sake?” He laughed harshly.

“My friend,” I said to my enemy, “for Christ’s sake, have pity!”

“Pity you?” says he, in a jeer. “You!”

As I looked at him, I was stung into strong fury. My eyes clung to the wound in his throat, and my fingers ached to close in it – to misuse it, to maul it.

But as I sprang at him, he gave a shriek that woke the town; a shriek of fear too, let me think it at this last, like to that of a lost soul when the gates of hell have closed behind forever: and when the people of the house rushed in, they found me kneeling by his dead body, with my knife in my enemy’s throat, and his new blood, bright and wet, on my hands.

•   •   •   •   •

They will hang me because I loved Jacquette,

A STUDY IN MURDER

As I got out of a cab at Piccadilly Circus, I was hailed by Gladwin.

“Just the man I was looking for!” he cried. “Let us go somewhere and have a drink.”

At that moment a glass of brandy happened to be the thing I wanted; so I followed Gladwin to the Criterion readily enough. Besides, he was excited: and people are always interesting when they are excited.

“A man feels strange,” said Gladwin, sitting down by a table, “when he looks around this place and thinks that everybody in it will outlive him.”

“Do you feel like that, by any chance?” I asked, lighting a cigarette,

“Yes, I do, Let me tell you this, my friend,” he went on, in his earnest, impulsive way, which was wont to become a little wearisome: “You know that I’m not much better than a pauper.

Well! I’m sick of slaving away for a wretched paltry salary, and I’m going to end it all, I’ve thought about it for a long time, and something that happened today has quite settled it. – By the way, do you think I’m mad?”

“Oh Lord, no!” says I.

“Because I’m not. Now, you know as well as I do, that all this time, since luck has taken to using me as a football, I’ve been kept together by the thought of Margaret.

I thought, that somehow or other, if I only pegged on, I might – Well! I have seen her today. She was kind enough to state that she could never marry me, and that her father didn’t want her to see me again. She was also so good as to mention that it would be insane, considering my position, for her to marry against her father’s wishes. Then she spoke of you…. Hullo! you’ve upset your glass! Waiter, another soda and brandy here! – As I was saying, she spoke of you. She said that her father was most anxious to have her married to you, and was doing his utmost to bring about the match. I suppose you never did have any feeling in that way for Margaret?”

“My dear fellow!”

“I thought not; and I told her so. Besides, I said that you were too good a friend of mine to try to step into my shoes. But she only shook her head, and went out of the room weeping. And so tonight I’m going to end it all! In your company I’m going to do everything that makes a man’s life bright and merry; and then I’m going to blow the soul out of my body somewhere by the river. – You’ll come with me?”

“Yes – of course!” I said, with a slight hesitation, “But what are these things that make a man’s life bright and merry? Only the usual stupidities – dining, a theatre or music hall, and all that!”

“But it is these very banalities that I want!” exclaimed Gladwin. “I have done them so often when I was fairly happy, that I am anxious to learn what they seem like on the night when I’m going to die. Meet me for dinner at the Berkeley at half-past seven.”

As I drove home to dress, I took this letter from my pocket and read it again:

“I write to you because I know that you are such a true friend to us both, and have so much influence with my father. I need not protest that I love Mr. Gladwin with all my heart; but how can I tell him so, when my father will not even speak to him! Please, please try to do us good, to make our lives content. Perhaps you will think it a fine and great thing, to serve two creatures who can never repay you.— Margaret.”

“How odd it is,” says Gladwin, as we strolled towards the Empire, “that all this stir and bustle which I am in the midst of tonight, will be going on just the same tomorrow night, as though I had never existed.”

“Yes,” I replied; “how proud you must feel as you move amongst this commonplace throng! Dr. Johnson said, that when a man has resolved to kill himself, he may go and take the king of Prussia by the nose, at the head of his army. It is a fair question whether a man has not a right to take leave of life when it ceases to charm – to be beautiful.”

“If you are so much in love with suicide,” says Gladwin, rather irritably for him, “why on earth don’t you do it yourself?”

“Oh! I have a great many reasons. The chief of them is, that so many people depend on my life. Take my valet, for instance. That young man supports his mother and three sisters. Now if I were to die, I should be a cause of misfortune to all of them. No; I cannot commit suicide, because of my valet.”

“Of course you are right,” said Gladwin, as we turned into the theatre; “and I am a fool!”

“Are you under sentence of death?” a woman asked Gladwin in the promenade, as it is called, of the Empire.

She laughed, and disappeared in the crowd. I turned to inspect Gladwin: and indeed he had a low look. His face was pale and wet: there was nervousness, fatigue, even fear, in his demeanour. Seeing these things, I led the way to the bar.

“My friend, when I look around this place, with all its light and joy, it almost tempts me to give up the game,” said Gladwin, with a glass of brandy in his shaking hand.

“How few people there are in the world who have the courage to give life the slip!” I murmured, as if in a study. “Men talk glibly about death being preferable to the smallest evils of our lot: but it is when people come face to face with death that they wave the white feather in a vehement and degrading fashion. There are but two sets of heroes in the world – the Anarchists and the Suicides!”

“You don’t mean to say I’m a coward?” Gladwin rapped out with a flush,

“Really, I was hardly thinking of you. I have concluded that you intend to go back to your drudgery; to see Margaret—”

“You think wrong,” interrupted Gladwin. “Let us get out of this damned hole – it stifles me!”

“When Margaret wept today,” remarked Gladwin, as we sat to supper in the Hotel Continental, “do you know I – that is, it just occurred to me, that she might love me after all!”

“One is usually deceived in these cases,” I said, drawing on the tablecloth with a fork. “You wish her to love you, and naturally twist every unmeaning thing to your advantage.”

“You know best,” answered Gladwin, filling his glass. “If she loved me, you would be first to notice it. Margaret has a beautiful mind,” he added after a bit, “I hope she may never be unhappy.” And with that he put his hands to his face – to hide his tears, I think; because he laughed so loud the next moment. Notwithstanding this merriment, I thought it wise to purchase a small flask of brandy as we left the hotel.

“If I think of the time when I was a lad, it just takes the heart out of me!” declared Gladwin, as we walked, through quiet streets, arm-in-arm to the river. “My people were always so good to me; and the dear old place—”

He choked.

“Try a little of this stuff,” I said, offering my flask.

He took a long drink; and then we went on for a while in silence.

“I know I wasn’t born to end like this!” he broke out suddenly. “I’m not clever, and I’m not much good anyway; but I’ve never lied, I’ve never cheated, and I don’t think I’ve ever spoken a bad word of anyone. By God, I haven’t! And now nobody cares for me, and I’m being paid out like a hanged dog!”

We had come to the Embankment by this time, so I turned on him with great indignation.

“And do you think I would stand idly by and watch this performance,” I exclaimed, “save that I am sure you can never continue your mean life! I am sure, too, that you could never bear the thought of Margaret in another man’s arms; but from what I’ve heard—”

“Please don’t add the last straw,” he screamed out in a sort of agony; “let me die without knowing that! – You are the best friend I have ever had,” he said, taking my hand, “the best friend that any fellow ever had.”

I pressed his hand, with real feeling. Then I looked around, and noting that we were free from observation, I said:

“I think I will stop here, while you go on to the bridge. Never fear, old chap, I shall see the last of you – ’tis all I can do.”

“Good-bye,” said Gladwin; “God bless you, my friend!”

He went forward a little; then, much to my annoyance (for I dreaded lest some should find us in company), he came back again, showing a ghastly, twitching face.

“If I thought that Margaret loved me—” he mumbled in his throat.

“She shall hear of your death,” I murmured, “and she will be sorry for you!”

He nodded his head twice, as if satisfied, and went to the bridge. There he climbed upon the parapet, exploded a pistol at his face, and fell forward into the water.

“Did you see that suicide?” says I to the policeman who came running up.

“Yes, sir,” answered the man, fumbling for his whistle.

“I had nothing to do with it, had I?”

He stopped short and looked at me narrowly. I fell to examining my cigarette to see if it was burning well. He was a young man, new to the police service, I should think. Doubtless I impressed him – in my favour, I mean: I do so impress people sometimes.

“You, sir!” he exclaimed, and shook his head. “Oh dear no, sir!”

“That’s all right,” I said. And then I laughed.

HUGO RAVEN’S HAND

I

The girl had always been an annoyance to Hugo Raven. Even when their relations had been most intimate, he had found her petulant, wayward, at times a little morose; and now, although he had not seen her for nearly a year, the recollection of her vaguely troubled him. She had letters of his, for instance – eager, passionate letters, written in warm and unwary moments – which he regretted; and these letters, exposed just at this point of his career, might prove disastrous. “What a bother she is, that Grace Casket,” he said to himself.

He sat to breakfast, one Sunday morning in summer, in his chambers in the Temple. The rooms were light and charming: a drowsy peace had settled on everything. Through the open windows the breath of the lime trees in King’s Bench Walk floated in, and a humming bee would now and then hover above a bowl of wet, amber-coloured roses. He had the Morning Post of yesterday propped up before him, so ordered, that he could with ease read this advertisement:

“A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place between Hugo Raven, Esq., of the Inner Temple, barrister-at-law, and Hilda, only daughter of Sir Matthew Chancel, Bart., of 12, Walpole Street, Mayfair, and The Priory, Little Maddon, Dorset.”

He read this advertisement so often, that he noted how one of the letters in his name was a little out of place – printed higher than the others, and he was irritated. But he thought that the advertisement, on the whole, ran very well. He leaned back in his chair, stroking his beard with his large, powerful hand, on which he wore two rings, and stared at the ceiling. Yes! certainly he had done well for himself in the world; had now, in his thirty-fifth year, reached the “home-stretch,” as people say. He had been only an ordinary passman at Oxford; but when he came to town he discovered in the law, which has the reputation of being so dry, matter which for him was not dry at all. Well! just this interest of his in his subject, taken with his somewhat arrogant, overbearing (could it have been what is called browbeating?) manner, was found most valuable in his practice at the Bar. After a while he became accustomed, and began to be talked about; he was said to be a safe man to have on your side. Then he went a great deal into London society, with the purpose of discovering some woman who had money enough to be his wife. This girl, Hilda Chancel, he had now found. He was rather a favourite with people. Sometimes he engaged a little with the fine arts. He painted tiny pictures of fields, and farmhouses, and sunsets, in water-colours. He said he adored music; and in a box, at an opera of Wagner, would pass a pleasant hour in conversation. When there was nobody to talk to, he yawned and looked horribly “bored,” then he told you, afterwards, how the music had charmed him. He despised men of letters, whom he called “writing chaps,” and had the illusion (like many another!) that if he could only spare an hour or two a week for trifling, he could produce great books. Indeed, he used to write sugary little verses for the albums of ladies – verses about “flowers” and “showers,” “heart” and “part,” “kiss” and “bliss.” He would read these verses to his friends, and he called them his “poems.” He had met Grace Casket, who was an assistant in a milliner’s shop in Regent Street, by accident, and he had made her – a girl of this class – his mistress on principle; his principle being, that an adventure which is bought is not worth having.

Hugo put his hands in his pockets, and sauntered lazily to the window. The sun gleamed on the buildings of the Temple; and all about was the stillness which makes Sunday a festival in that quiet neighbourhood. Below the window, on the gravel, some pigeons gurgled and coo’d – that strange sound of pigeons! which reminds one, in some subtile fashion, of the soft feel of warm milk. Hugo watched one of them that had gone apart from the others, strutting and pruning itself, with idle concentration; then, quite naturally, his eyes fell on Crown Office Row, and the form of a woman at the far end. He started wildly; a sick feeling came all about his heart, as if a hand had grasped him and tightened there. Then he fell to reasoning with himself. The figure in the distance had, certainly, a look of Grace Casket; but in our lives people did not appear in that way, just when you were thinking of them, as they did in silly novels and stories. He was one of those men who, having never had a taste of the marvellous, their use is, not to stand in doubt, but to deny strenuously that marvels happen. He watched the woman as she came slowly along, swinging her parasol, and stopping now and then to look over the gardens towards the river. An old gate-keeper, in his coat with brass buttons, hobbled by: she spoke to him, and he seemed to be indicating this very house. After that she came straight for the entrance.

“How absurd!” thought Hugo. “There are other men on the staircase besides myself.”

He heard her slow, rather heavy step on the wooden stairs, and the hush of her dress. She knocked at his door. It was Grace Casket, sure enough. What a misfortune!

He thought of resting still, so that she might conclude he was out. She knocked again. Ah, curse her! She was sure to go to Whitcomb’s rooms opposite, and ask about him. He walked with quick, hard steps, and unlocked the door.

“Oh, Hugo!”

“Come in, come in! somebody may see you.”

When she entered the room, the first thing she did was to cross over and bury her face in the cool roses. Hugo thought that was rather pretty of her. She was tall and fair-formed; of the English type of prettiness – of beauty, if you will! – with her scarlet lips, her cheeks cream and red, and her waving, bronze- coloured hair. Her hands were large and covered with black gloves; when she sat down she let her hands fall together in her lap, and Hugo perceived that there was a hole in the finger of a glove. There was a note of the provinces in her speech: it came like the odour of fields in a dusty street on a hot day. Sometimes she neglected to give the letter h its full value; and when she observed that she had done so, she became confused, and added the letter to the next word in her mouth which began with a vowel. This habit lent a quaint effect to her talk, and it greatly annoyed Hugo Raven. “How different she is from Hilda Chancel,” he thought.

She sat looking at Hugo, who was standing. “Won’t you talk to me, Hugo?” asked the girl at last, a little plaintively.

“Oh, yes, of course I’ll talk to you. I suppose you came here to talk,” he answered, roughly. “Why did you come here? Will you be good enough to tell me that?”

“Hugo, dear, please don’t be angry with me – I can’t stand your anger!” She stood up and stretched out her arms, then drew them in and clasped her hands on her breast – a graceful, unconscious action. “I read in the paper yesterday that you are engaged to be married. I didn’t know where to find you before. Oh, you can’t think what I’ve suffered this last year! For six weeks I was so ill that I couldn’t work, and I had no one to turn to. Then this morning I came here. I met an old man outside – I think he belongs here – and he showed me the house. He seemed to know you.”

“Very likely!” Hugo answered abruptly. “Now then, what do you want?”

“What do I want? Oh, Hugo dearest, don’t talk to me like that – you kill me! Why I want you, dear – you – you – you! You are everything in the world to me! Don’t marry this other girl! No matter how nice she is, she can’t love you as I do. Don’t marry her – marry me!”

“Marry you? Marry a girl out of a bonnet shop? You must be mad!” he exclaimed brutally. “Great heavens! that would be a fine ending of my career. Upon my word, I congratulate you on your inspiration!”

Possibly, to endure his brutality had become a habit with her; for she went on as though he had not spoken.

“Or don’t marry me, if you don’t like. Only let me be near you always, never go away from you, I will be so quiet and good, and I’ll try hard to improve, indeed I will. Oh, my God, how much I love you!” she cried, and began to sob.

There fell a silence. A warm air glided softly into the room and stirred the curtains. The flutter of the pigeons sounded far off. Stealthily, the sun had crept to the bowl of roses, and was drying them. In a sharp, hard tone, a clock struck the quarter.

“I suppose you are thinking,” she said, wearily, “that it would be as well if I was dead,”

As a matter of fact, he had been thinking of nothing whatever. He started now, and looked up.

“You know I have always liked you, Grade,” he murmured, taking a pen from the table and playing with it.

She heard him call her “Gracie,” and her eyes cleared.

“Oh, Hugo, let us forget all that has happened. Let us forget this dreadful last year. Let us go on as we used to, and have our own love, I’ve got all your letters, and I read them sometimes and think how sweet you were. Do you remember?”

“Yes; I remember.”

“Let us begin again all the dear old things – our long nights together, our walks.”

“I was going to propose a walk somewhere,” Hugo said. “You know Acton Green where we used to walk; we shall go there. Can you come tomorrow?”

“Ah! not tomorrow. But Tuesday—”

“Very well! on Tuesday. I will meet you there about five o’clock; I can’t get away before, but the days are long, you know. And now,” he added, looking at his watch, “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave me. I have two or three people coming to see me about some business matter, and I should not like them to find you here.”

“Kiss me before I go, Hugo dear,” she said. “You have not kissed me for so long!” He kissed her, tenderly enough. “You do love me, don’t you?” she cried, clinging to him.

“You know I love you,” he answered slowly.

He watched her as she went down the stairs. At the end of the first flight, she paused as if taking thought.

“On Tuesday, remember, you will be sure to come?” she called.

“On Tuesday; have I not said Tuesday?” said Hugo, with an impatient laugh, and banged his door.

II

It had become a custom with Hugo, since his engagement, to dine at Sir Matthew Chancel’s house on Sunday evenings. On this Sunday, after his interview with Grace Casket, he talked a great deal. Hilda Chancel thought he was brilliant and wonderful.

Just at that time, the evening papers were packed with details of an atrocious murder. In the drawing-room, after dinner, they talked of murders. Miss Chancel loved them. She would like to know a murderer; she said murderers were adorable creatures.

“Hilda!” cried her mother.

Hilda Chancel was tall and thin, of a remarkable appearance. She had an easy temperament, a temperament which inclined her towards letting things go loosely by. She made rash little speeches, either because she thought they were clever, or because she did not think at all.

Now she laughed. “Oh, Hugo, you must help me!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you simply worship murderers?”

“Ah! I am afraid I can’t help you in this,” he said gravely. “A murderer sins deeply against his fellow-men. I wonder how he can live after the act, how he can endure the remorse. If I were to commit a murder, I should see only one way out of the misery, and that way would be suicide.”

Everybody thought that this was extremely well said. Hilda, who took her morals from him, let the topic fall. Shortly after Hugo went away.

As he was walking rapidly to his club, he was hailed in a thick and jovial voice.

“Why, Raven, old chap, I haven’t seen you for an age! How d’ye do, old bird? You’re not so great that you can’t notice a fellow.”

Hugo knew who had stopped him. “How are you, Scarford?” he said frigidly, and was for going on.

This Scarford was a doctor; a man of parts, yet a hopeless failure. He had taken a good degree in science with half of his strength, and had been, at one time, an enthusiastic scholar. Of a sudden he had become gross, and slovenly, a railer at decorum; and now he went through life unshorn and sodden-eyed. He frequented the houses of call in the Strand, consorting with second-rate actors; and knew a bar-maid at every inn between Trafalgar Square and Ludgate Circus. He and Raven had been at Harrow together, where he had often done Raven’s Latin for him. During the past five years, whenever Raven sighted him in the distance, he thought it his duty to cross the street to avoid a meeting with him.

“I am in a hurry, Scarford,” he said now, trying to brush past.

But the other was too quick for him, and grasped his arm. “Let us have a drink together,” he stammered.

A thought shot through Hugo’s head. “Where are you living now?” he asked.

“Oh, somewhere in the forest of South Kensington – you know it is a forest,” says Scarford, with a loud laugh.

Hugo just smiled. “Have you a surgery there, and drugs, and all that?” he went on, to make sure that he would not be wasting his time with a sot.

“Oh yes, I suppose they are all there, unless somebody has run away with them. I say, old chap, you’re much too sober, and so am I. Let us go and have a drink.”

For a full hour, Hugo sat on a high stool, before a bar, drinking whisky; and was introduced to people whom he devoutly wished never to meet with again. There was a girl behind the bar, with a look remote from innocence, in whom Scarford was interested. Could it be the curious chemistry of her hair? Hugo wondered.

When, at last, they came into the open air, the doctor turned very drunk. Hugo proposed to drive home with him, and they went off in a hansom.

At his house Scarford produced more whisky; and they sat in the “surgery” drinking, and talking together. Hugo spoke of poisons. He had been reading some cases of strange, subtle poisonings lately; and he remembered one affair, in particular, which had come under his notice when he was last on circuit. He contradicted the doctor on some points, and the latter grew angry.

“You shall see for yourself!” he cried. He got up, and fetched three jars. “I’ve got some stuff here that will kill a horse in less than five minutes.”

“How very interesting!” says Hugo, smelling at the jars. “Dear me! I had no idea. May I take a little of this? I – you see, I am a little of a chemist myself, and I should like to analyze this at my leisure.”

“You may take the whole blooming lot if you like!” said Scarford, slapping his legs and laughing. “Only don’t ask me to pay the undertaker. I’ll go as chief mourner. To see me as chief mourner at old Raven’s funeral!” – and he roared, and hiccoughed, brushing the tears from his face.

Hugo went back to his chambers very gaily; and all the next day he carried a light heart. On Tuesday he was busy; and it was after six o’clock when he arrived at Acton Green. Grace Casket was waiting for him.

“How late you are!”

“How could I get here before?” he asked crossly.

Then he subdued the irritation which this girl always caused him, and went on quietly: “I came as soon as I could. I was engaged all day.”

“Yes, I know, dear. I was stupid to say that!”

“Have you been here long?” he asked, not because he cared, but because he could think of nothing else to make conversation.

“Since four o’clock. I know you said five, but I had an idea that I might miss you, and I have something important to say,” She looked as if she had been crying.

“Well! won’t you say it now?”

“Not yet, please! I would rather wait awhile.”

They walked on through the strange, pretty village – strange, because it is like a toy, or model, village, set down in the midst of one of the ugliest parts of London – till they came to a stile, on the other side of which was a path which led over the fields to Willesden, It was very still. Overhead, the leaves of the trees intermingling looked like patterns of Brussels lace. The sun having hung in the sky for some time, like a plate of red-hot metal, suddenly dropped down; and night was there.

“Tell me your important thing, Grace.”

“Not yet! not yet! – oh, I can’t yet!”

She was only playing on him in her old silly way, he thought. It was her troublesome, tortuous method again, and it maddened him.

They climbed the stile, and walked some yards till they came to a clump of bushes. Hugo looked all around.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“Hugo dearest, you did not kiss me when we met; and I feel so tired. You have not kissed me today.”

“No, by God! but I’ll kiss you now!” and with that he drove a knife into her neck, behind the ear.

She gave a deep groan, and Hugo put his hand over her mouth to stifle her. She caught his hand between her teeth and bit it. Then they fell on the ground together, and Hugo saw her eyes staring up at him full of hate or love – he could not tell which; only recognised a great longing for the power of speech – to say one word – in them. She dug her fingers into the earth, and stretched out straight – stiff and straight. She was dead.

He bound his bleeding hand with his handkerchief, and fled from the corpse, leaving the knife – a common one, not easily to be recognised – in the neck. As he sped over the field he had but one thought. “She is dead! I shall not have to marry her. No exposure! She is dead. Marry a girl like that, who could hardly spell! and her rough hands! No! a thousand times, no!” He ran, and this thought ran in his company, till he came face to face with a man whom he took to be a tramp. By one of those uncontrollable impulses, which impel us at times to do just what we would not, he was moved to accost the man and ask the way to Willesden. The man told him civilly enough; and then begged. Hugo gave him two shillings, and started off again. How mad of him to speak to the tramp. The man must have noted, even in the dusk, his disturbed air. And to give him two shillings – a ridiculously large sum! It was like hush-money. So he came to Willesden,

Little jets of gas were springing up in the streets. Before a flaring public-house he paused, and then went in. Inside there were a number of rough-looking men, who kept their eyes fixed on Hugo. He asked for the best brandy, and remained, drinking deeply, for half an hour. He was not the philosophic murderer, careless and indurated: he was appalled, and his heart was oppressed by the horrible deed he had done; and he drank because he wanted to forget that white thing lying away there among the bushes.

After awhile he began to talk to the men, and treated some of them. They grew familiar.

“Give every man in the place a drink at my expense!” cried Hugo, and started to sing a catch.

“I don’t know so much about that!” says the barman, truculently – putting his thumbs in his waistcoat; “I think you’ve had about enough. What’s the matter with that there hand o’ yours?”

The blood had soaked through the handkerchief, and a red stain showed. Hugo explained that he had fallen on the steps of the Underground Railway.

“I think after this one you’d better get home,” the man said, when he had served the drinks. “Soon you won’t know where you are. You’ve got a tidy lot inside you already.”

“My good friend,” exclaimed Hugo, “my dear and good friend – I knew you were my friend the moment I saw you – as you say, and as I say, home is the place. Now, I’ll go home – if you can get me a cab.”

“Cab, sir? I’ll get you a cab,” said a thin, red-haired fellow by the door. He darted out, and returned in a few minutes with a cabman at his heels.

“’Ere’s a four-wheeler, sin I got ’im for you, sir,”

“Is that what you want me to drive?” cried the cabman in great disgust. “I thought as you said a toff. ’Ere, you Jimmy! Do you want me to drive ’im? That ain’t no toff. Why, look at ’is eyes! He’s a-trying to laugh, and he’s just green afraid o’ somethin’!”

“Come now, don’t give us any of that!” said the man behind the bar, who was anxious to be rid of Hugo. “If you don’t want to drive the gentleman, somebody else will. He’s stood drinks to every man in the place, and he’ll give you one, too, if you want it. What’ll ye have?”

“Why, if ’e’s got the money, then that’s all right,” answered the cabman, on whom this speech had taken effect. “If ’e pays my fare, it’s no business o’ mine; and I asks his parding if I’ve said what’s a bit off. I ain’t perticler who I drive, nor nobody ever said it o’ me neither.”

He took his drink; and, going outside, held the cab door open while Hugo stumbled into the cab. Then he climbed on the box, and the cab rattled away.

In the cab the thought of the murdered girl came once more to Hugo. He saw her face, her dress, the hands he had despised so much; in especial, he saw that last lingering look in the eyes, ere the life died out of them forever. He beat his hands and rubbed his face – the thought was still present. He put his head out of the window; the dead face grinned at him in the darkness.

As the cab jolted along the quiet roads, he heard a hoarse voice singing a ditty which was popular at the time:

“But all the same, it is a shame

To leave a pretty maidie,

When every little gentleman

Walks home with a little lady.”

It was the cabman, who was thus endeavouring to make the hour go lightly.

Hugo knew the song, and bawled out the next stanza:

“At four a.m. we cuddle them,

As through the streets we’re going;

’Tis ten to one we see the sun,

And hear the cocks a-crowing!

That drunken loon, the bare-faced moon,

Leaves useful corners shady,—

When every little gentleman

Walks home with a little lady.”

The cab began to go slower, and then it stopped. The cabman got off the box and shoved his red, pimpled face through the open window.

“Look ’ere, guv’nor!” he said, “just drop it, will you? I don’t know who you are, nor where you come from; and I don’t want to. But I sing this ’ere song on Sundays to my missus and the kids, and I don’t want to think when I’m singin’ it, maybe next Sunday, that you’ve been a singin’ of it too. You may be balmy, or you may ’ave taken an extra drop – but, any’ow, I don’t like you, that’s all! If you don’t take what I say, I’ll set you down ’ere – it’s all one to me!”

Hugo smiled grayly. “Very well! very well!” says he. “I’ll do anything you want. Only get on! For the love of God,” he cried, the terror which was in his soul leaping to his eyes for a moment, “get on! get on! Drive away from this cursed place. Here, I know you are a good chap – shake hands!” and he held out his hand wrapped in the stained handkerchief.

“No; I don’t want any of yer blood,” replied the cabman roughly: “but I suppose I’ll drive you.” He climbed on his box, and the cab rumbled on again.

III

Early on Thursday afternoon, Hugo Raven sat in his chambers in the Temple. He was very serene. The long, choking agony which had come on the heels of the murder, had given place to a sense of relief: and now he only thought what a benefit it was to have no more of the girl. He had eagerly scanned the papers to see if the body had been discovered: but the matter was not mentioned by any of them. It was very hot. Not a leaf stirred on the trees outside his windows, and the hum and murmur of the busy crowd beneath lulled and soothed him. How fortunate he was! He was waiting for Lady Chancel and her daughter, who had gone to see some one or other in the city, and were to pick him up on their way back. He was going to take them to a “private view” in Bond Street, of the works of a painter. He dozed. Yes: how fortunate he was!

There was a knock at the door, and Hilda and her mother entered, Hugo was immediately alert and attentive, pushing up comfortable chairs, and offering iced drinks. Hilda looked deliciously fresh and cool in a dress of some white, clinging stuff, and a large hat with drooping flowers. She drew off one of her gloves, and her thin hand reminded him of the women in Rossetti’s pictures: not that he liked Rossetti’s pictures; but he liked hands of that kind. They were so different from – well, no matter!

“We have just come from that horrid city,” said Miss Chancel; “and it is so nice of you to give us something with ice in it, Hugo! I wonder there is any smoke left in the other parts of London: the people in the citv look as if they absorbed it all.”

“They are black, poor dears!” murmured Lady Chancel; “and they seem in such a hurry.”

“On a day like this,” the girl went on, “one ought to sit on a rock without clothes, like the people we shall probably see in the pictures in a few minutes, sucking cold drinks through a straw.”

“My dearest Hilda!” exclaimed her mother, whose life had, by this time, become one long protest against her daughter’s talk, and one long submission to her daughter’s will.

“But the pictures do not suggest the whole truth,” said Hugo smiling, and bending forward. “You see, there might come a time of storm.”

“Yes!” sighed the girl; “I suppose one would have to keep one’s clothes to provide against a storm. I don’t like storms.”

There came a rap at the door. “What a bother!” cried Hugo. “Pardon me a moment till I see who it is.”

Two men stood in the passage. “Mr. Hugo Raven?” says one.

“Yes.”

“Thank you, sir. I come from Scotland Yard. We want to see you about a girl named Grace Casket, who was found murdered on Wednesday morning in the fields near Acton.”

Before Hugo could stop them, they had shoved past him into the room.

One was a tall man with an authoritative manner; the other was low-sized, with sandy hair and beard, and stupid, fish-like eyes.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” said the big man.

Hugo followed them, a little pale, but perfectly tranquil. He put his right hand, which was almost healed, into the pocket of his trousers.

“This is Lady Chancel and her daughter,” he explained; “I am engaged with them. Can’t you come some other time?”

“Or we can go, it you have business, Hugo,” said Hilda, rising.

“I think I like the ladies to remain,” says the little man.

“Yes!” added the other; “the ladies might remain. I think you said you knew this Grace Casket?” he went on, turning sharp on Hugo.

“I said nothing of the kind.”

“Did you know her?”

Hugo got rather confused: the presence of Hilda and her mother was against him. “I did not,” he answered.

“That’s very odd!” said the little man; “because there was a letter found on her addressed to you!”

“Let us go, mother!” cried Hilda, rising again decisively.

“If you will please to stay, madam,” said one of the men. “You shan’t be kept long.”

“This is monstrous!” Hugo broke out; “perfectly monstrous to keep the ladies here against their will!” He did not say more, however, lest he should have the appearance of being guilty.

“Suppose you read that letter for the gentleman, William,” observed the big man.

So the little man read it, slowly, haltingly, in his squeaky voice.

“My own Hugo,

“If I have not the courage to say what I want to tonight, I am going to send yon this letter. Somehow, I don’t think I shall speak to you before we part tonight. Oh, it is so hard to say! But I thought you were a little cold to me when I saw you on Sunday. But it may be my imagination, Hugo, darling, I don’t know how to say it right, but if you really love this other girl more than me, take her, dear, and I shall never see you or trouble you again. I will send back all your letters if you want them, but I should like to keep them. They will be all I have of you. My own Hugo, I hope you will be always happy. Think of me sometimes. My heart is breaking.

“With all my love.

“Gracie.”

Hugo sat by the table, shading his face with his left hand. Then this was the important thing she had wanted to say! She had made her great renunciation, she had yielded of her own accord, and the murder was useless, after all I He felt a spasm of pity for the poor dead face; was it already beginning to rot and grow shapeless? He turned his eyes. Hilda was very white, and Lady Chancel looked old, and wrinkled, and yellow.

“Of course you did know this girl, Mr. Raven,” said the detective.

“She was my mistress for three years. I had not seen her for a year. She came here on Sunday and made a scene, and to pacify her, I promised to meet her on Tuesday. I did not keep that appointment.”

“Well now, that’s strange!” remarked the big man. “A gentleman answering to your description spent about an hour in the Stag of Ten public at Willesden on Tuesday night.”

“I was not the man,” Hugo said, low and doggedly.

“Not? Then this gentleman, whoever he was, took a four-wheeler as far as the Marble Arch. There he discharged the four-wheeler, and took a hansom. The driver of the four-wheeler didn’t like the looks of his fare, so he took the number of the hansom. The driver of the hansom has been found, and remembers perfectly driving a gentleman to the Temple from the Marble Arch, on Tuesday night. He says the gentleman was drunk. He says, too, that he heard the gate-porter say: f Good night, Mr. Raven,’ as you – that is, as the gentleman went in.”

All this time the little man was edging over to the table, on the right side of Hugo. Now he knocked over, as if by chance, a valuable porcelain vase. Instinctively, Hugo plucked his hand from his pocket to save it. The little man grasped him by the wrist.

“How dare you seize my hand! you scoundrel!” yelled Hugo, losing all control. “Let go my hand.”

But the little man held him with a grip like steel. “Look at the wound on this hand, ladies, please!” he called; “I want you to see this hand before it heals. The dead woman had blood in her mouth. She bit the man that murdered her.”

There was a close silence. Then Hugo rose.

“Of course if you want to make evidence out of this bruise on my hand,” he said, calmly, “I am naturally powerless. There is one thing, however, which will throw great light on this matter. It is in my bedroom. Let me go there: I shall return at once.”

The detectives, knowing that he could not escape, agreed.

What followed passed so quickly, that no one had time to interfere, Hugo Raven came back into the room, laid his hand on the table, and then, drawing a small axe from under his coat, he sent it through his wrist. It fell with a dull thud.

“If you think my hand is such a valuable piece of evidence, gentlemen, there it is for you!” and he tossed it into the empty grate.

He gave a groan, and staggered over to the mantelpiece. “Scarford knows something, after all!” he muttered.

“He has poisoned himself,” said the little man, who had been in the bedroom, “he did it well, too! He can’t live more than a minute.”

His eyes grew larger and larger; they seemed to start from the sockets. His tongue shot out, all black and furred. Still, he did not fall. The blood from the stump fell – drip – drip – drip – on the carpet.