Mr. Carter the detective lost no time about his work; but he did not employ the telegraph, by which means he might perhaps have expedited the arrest of Henry Dunbar’s murderer. He did not avail himself of the facilities offered by that wonderful electric telegraph, which was once facetiously called the rope that hung Tawell the Quaker, because in so doing he must have taken the local police into his confidence, and he wished to do his work quietly, only aided by a companion and humble follower, whom he was in the habit of employing.
He went up to London by the mail-train after parting from Clement Austin; took a cab at the Waterloo station, and drove straight off to the habitation of his humble assistant, whom he most unceremoniously roused from his bed. But there was no train for Warwickshire before the six-o’clock parliamentary, and there was a seven-o’clock express, which would reach Rugby ten minutes after that miserably slow conveyance; so Mr. Carter naturally elected to sacrifice the ten minutes, and travel by the express. Meanwhile he took a hearty breakfast, which had been hastily prepared by the wife of his friend and follower, and explained the nature of the business before them.
It must be confessed that, in making these explanations to his humble friend, Mr. Carter employed a tone that implied no little superiority, and that the friendliness of his manner was tempered by condescension.
The friend was a middle-aged and most respectable-looking individual, with a turnip-hued skin relieved by freckles, dark-red eyes, and pale-red hair. He was not a very prepossessing person, and had a habit of working about his lips and jaws when he was neither eating nor talking, which was far from pleasant to behold. He was very much esteemed by Mr. Carter, nevertheless; not so much because he was clever, as because he looked so eminently stupid. This last characteristic had won for him the sobriquet of Sawney Tom, and he was considered worth his weight in sovereigns on certain occasions, when a simple country lad or a verdant-looking linen-draper’s apprentice was required to enact some little part in the detective drama.
“You’ll bring some of your traps with you, Sawney,” said Mr. Carter. —“I’ll take another, ma’am, if you please. Three minutes and a half this time, and let the white set tolerably firm.” This last remark was addressed to Mrs. Sawney Tom, or rather Mrs. Thomas Tibbles — Sawney Tom’s name was Tibbles — who was standing by the fire, boiling eggs and toasting bread for her husband’s patron. “You’ll bring your traps, Sawney,” continued the detective, with his mouth full of buttered toast; “there’s no knowing how much trouble this chap may give us; because you see a chap that can play the bold game he has played, and keep it up for nigh upon a twelvemonth, could play any game. There’s nothing out that he need look upon as beyond him. So, though I’ve every reason to think we shall take my friend at Maudesley as quietly as ever a child in arms was took out of its cradle, still we may as well be prepared for the worst.”
Mr. Tibbles, who was of a taciturn disposition, and who had been busily chewing nothing while listening to his superior, merely gave a jerk of acquiescence in answer to the detective’s speech.
“We start as solicitor and clerk,” said Mr. Carter. “You’ll carry a blue bag. You’d better go and dress: the time’s getting on. Respectable black and a clean shave, you know, Sawney. We’re going to an old gentleman in the neighbourhood of Shorncliffe, that wants his will altered all of a hurry, having quarrelled with his three daughters; that’s what we’re goin’ to do, if anybody’s curious about our business.”
Mr. Tibbles nodded, and retired to an inner apartment, whence he emerged by-and-by dressed in a shabby-genteel costume of somewhat funereal aspect, and with the lower part of his face rasped like a French roll, and somewhat resembling that edible in colour.
He brought a small portmanteau with him, and then departed to fetch a cab, in which vehicle the two gentlemen drove away to the Euston-Square station.
It was one o’clock in the day when they reached the great iron gates of Maudesley Abbey in a fly which they had chartered at Shorncliffe. It was one o’clock on a bright sunshiny day, and the heart of Mr. Carter the detective beat high with expectation of a great triumph.
He descended from the fly himself, in order to question the woman at the lodge.
“You’d better get out, Sawney,” he said, putting his head in at the window, in order to speak to his companion; “I shan’t take the vehicle into the park. It’ll be quieter and safer for us to walk up to the house.”
Mr. Tibbles, with his blue-bag on his arm, got out of the fly, prepared to attend his superior whithersoever that luminary chose to lead him.
The woman at the lodge was not alone; a little group of gossips were gathered in the primly-furnished parlour, and the talk was loud and animated.
“Which I was that took aback like, you might have knocked me down with a feather,” said the proprietress of the little parlour, as she went out of the rustic porch to open the gate for Mr. Carter and his companion.
“I want to see Mr. Dunbar,” he said, “on particular business. You can tell him I come from the banking-house in St. Gundolph Lane. I’ve got a letter from the junior partner there, and I’m to deliver it to Mr. Dunbar himself!”
The keeper of the lodge threw up her hands and eyes in token of utter bewilderment.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” she said, “but I’ve been that upset, I don’t know scarcely what I’m a-doing of. Mr. Dunbar have gone, sir, and nobody in that house don’t know why he went, or when he went, or where he’s gone. The man-servant as waited on him found the rooms all empty the first thing this morning; and the groom as had charge of Mr. Dunbar’s horse, and slep’ at the back of the house, not far from the stables, fancied as how he heard a trampling last night where the horse was kep’, but put it down to the animal bein’ restless on account of the change in the weather; and this morning the horse was gone, and the gravel all trampled up, and Mr. Dunbar’s gold-headed cane (which the poor gentleman was still so lame it was as much as he could do to walk from one room to another) was lying by the garden-gate; and how he ever managed to get out and about and saddle his horse and ride away like that without bein’ ever heard by a creetur, nobody hasn’t the slightest notion; and everybody this morning was distracted like, searchin’ ‘igh and low; but not a sign of Mr. Dunbar were found nowhere.”
Mr. Carter turned pale, and stamped his foot upon the gravel-drive. Two hundred pounds is a large stake to a poor man; and Mr. Carter’s reputation was also trembling in the balance. The very man he wanted gone — gone away in the dead of the night, while all the household was sleeping!
“But he was lame,” he cried. “How about that? — the railway accident — the broken leg ——”
“Yes, sir,” the woman answered, eagerly, “that’s the very thing, sir; which they’re all talkin’ about it at the house, sir, and how a poor invalid gentleman, what could scarce stir hand or foot, should get up in the middle of the night and saddle his own horse, and ride away at a rampageous rate; which the groom says he have rode rampageous, or the gravel wouldn’t be tore up as it is. And they do say, sir, as Mr. Dunbar must have been took mad all of a sudden, and the doctor was in an awful way when he heard it; and there’s been people riding right and left lookin’ for him, sir. And Miss Dunbar — leastways Lady Jocelyn — was sent for early this morning, and she’s at the house now, sir, with her husband Sir Philip; and if your business is so very important, perhaps you’d like to see her ——”
“I should,” answered the detective, briskly. “You stop here, Sawney,” he added, aside to his attendant; “you stop here, and pick up what you can. I’ll go up to the house and see the lady.”
Mr. Carter found the door open, and a group of servants clustered in the gothic porch. Lady Jocelyn was in Mr. Dunbar’s rooms, a footman told him. The detective sent this man to ask if Mr. Dunbar’s daughter would receive a stranger from London, on most important business.
The man came back in five minutes to say yes, Lady Jocelyn would see the strange gentleman.
The detective was ushered through the two outer rooms leading to that tapestried apartment in which the missing man had spent so many miserable days, so many dismal nights. He found Laura standing in one of the windows looking out across the smooth lawn, looking anxiously out towards the winding gravel-drive that led from the principal lodge to the house.
She turned away from the window as Mr. Carter approached her, and passed her hand across her forehead. Her eyelids trembled, and she had the look of a person whose senses had been dazed by excitement and confusion.
“Have you come to bring me any news of my father?” she said. “I am distracted by this serious calamity.”
Laura looked imploringly at the detective. Something in his grave face frightened her.
“You have come to tell me of some new trouble,” she cried.
“No, Miss Dunbar — no, Lady Jocelyn, I have no new trouble to announce to you. I have come to this house in search of — of the gentleman who went away last night. I must find him at any cost. All I want is a little help from you. You may trust to me that he shall be found, and speedily, if he lives.”
“If he lives!” cried Laura, with a sudden terror in her face.
“Surely you do not imagine — you do not fear that ——”
“I imagine nothing, Lady Jocelyn. My duty is very simple, and lies straight before me. I must find the missing man.”
“You will find my father,” said Laura, with a puzzled expression. “Yes, I am most anxious that he should be found; and if — if you will accept any reward for your efforts, I shall be only too glad to give all you can ask. But how is it that you happen to come here, and to take this interest in my father? You come from the banking-house, I suppose?”
“Yes,” the detective answered, after a pause, “yes, Lady Jocelyn, I come from the office in St. Gundolph Lane.”
Mr. Carter was silent for some few moments, during which his eyes wandered about the apartment in that professional survey which took in every detail, from the colour of the curtains and the pattern of the carpets, to the tiniest porcelain toy in an antique cabinet on one side of the fireplace. The only thing upon which the detective’s glance lingered was the lamp, which Margaret had extinguished.
“I’m going to ask your ladyship a question,” said Mr. Carter, presently, looking gravely, and almost compassionately, at the beautiful face before him; “you’ll think me impertinent, perhaps, but I hope you’ll believe that I’m only a straightforward business man, anxious to do my duty in my own line of life, and to do it with consideration for all parties. You seem very anxious about this missing gentleman; may I ask if you are very fond of him? It’s a strange question, I know, my lady — or it seems a strange question — but there’s more in the answer than you can guess, and I shall be very grateful to you if you’ll answer it candidly.”
A faint flush crept over Laura’s face, and the tears started suddenly to her eyes. She turned away from the detective, and brushed her handkerchief hastily across those tearful eyes. She walked to the window, and stood there for a minute or so, looking out.
“Why do you ask me this question?” she asked, rather haughtily.
“I cannot tell you that, my lady, at present,” the detective answered; “but I give you my word of honour that I have a very good reason for what I do.”
“Very well then, I will answer you frankly,” said Laura, turning and looking Mr. Carter full in the face. “I will answer you, for I believe that you are an honest man. There is very little love between my father and me. It is our misfortune, perhaps: and it may be only natural that it should be so, for we were separated from each other for so many years, that, when at last the day of our meeting came, we met like strangers, and there was a barrier between us that could never be broken down. Heaven knows how anxiously I used to look forward to my father’s return from India, and how bitterly I felt the disappointment when I discovered, little by little, that we should never be to one another what other fathers and daughters, who have never known the long bitterness of separation, are to each other. But pray remember that I do not complain; my father has been very good to me, very indulgent, very generous. His last act, before the accident which laid him up so long, was to take a journey to London on purpose to buy diamonds for a necklace, which was to be his wedding present to me. I do not speak of this because I care for the jewels; but I am pleased to think that, in spite of the coldness of his manner, my father had some affection for his only child.”
Mr. Carter was not looking at Laura, he was staring out of the window, and his eyes had that stolid glare with which they had gazed at Clement Austin while the cashier told his story.
“A diamond necklace!” he said; “humph — ha, ha — yes!” All this was in an undertone, that hummed faintly through the detective’s closed teeth. “A diamond-necklace! You’ve got the necklace, I suppose, eh, my lady?”
“No; the diamonds were bought, but they were never made up.”
“The unset diamonds were bought by Mr. Dunbar?”
“Yes, to an enormous amount, I believe. While I was in Paris, my father wrote to tell me that he meant to delay the making of the necklace until he was well enough to go on the Continent. He could see no design in England that at all satisfied him.”
“No, I dare say not,” answered the detective, “I dare say he’d find it rather difficult to please himself in that matter.”
Laura looked inquiringly at Mr. Carter. There was something disrespectful, not to say ironical, in his tone.
“I thank you heartily for having been so candid with me, Lady Jocelyn,” he said; “and believe me I shall have your interests at heart throughout this matter. I shall go to work immediately; and you may rely upon it, I shall succeed in finding the missing man.”
“You do not think that — that under some terrible hallucination, the result of his long illness — you don’t think that he has committed suicide?”
“No,” Lady Jocelyn, answered the detective, decisively, “there is nothing further from my thoughts now.”
“Thank Heaven for that!”
“And now, my lady, may I ask if you’ll be kind enough to let me see Mr. Dunbar’s valet, and to leave me alone with him in these rooms? I may pick up something that will help me to find your father. By the bye, you haven’t a picture of him — a miniature, a photograph, or anything of that sort, eh?”
“No, unhappily I have no portrait whatever of my father.”
“Ah, that is unlucky; but never mind, we must contrive to get on without it.”
Laura rang the bell. One of the superb footmen, the birds of paradise who consented to glorify the halls and passages of Maudesley Abbey, appeared in answer to the summons, and went in search of Mr. Dunbar’s own man — the man who had waited on the invalid ever since the accident.
Having sent for this person, Laura bade the detective good morning, and went away through the vista of rooms to the other side of the hall, to that bright modernized wing of the house which Percival Dunbar had improved and beautified for the granddaughter he idolized.
Mr. Dunbar’s own man was only too glad to be questioned, and to have a good opportunity of discoursing upon the event which had caused such excitement and consternation. But the detective was not a pleasant person to talk to, as he had a knack of cutting people short with a fresh question at the first symptom of rambling; and, indeed, so closely did he keep his companion to the point, that a conversation with him was a kind of intellectual hornpipe between a set of fire-irons.
Under this pressure the valet told all he knew about his master’s departure, with very little loss of time by reason of discursiveness.
“Humph! — ha! — ah, yes!” muttered the detective between his teeth; “only one friend that was at all intimate with your master, and that was a gentleman called Vernon, lately come to live at Woodbine Cottage, Lisford Road; used to come at all hours to see your master; was odd in his ways, and dressed queer; first came on Miss Laura’s wedding-day; was awful shabby then; came out quite a swell afterwards, and was very free with his money at Lisford. Ah! — humph! You’ve heard your master and this gentleman at high words — at least you’ve fancied so; but, the doors being very thick, you ain’t certain. It might have been only telling anecdotes. Some gentlemen do swear and row like in telling anecdotes. Yes, to be sure! You’ve felt a belt round your master’s waist when you’ve been lifting him in and out of bed. He wore it under his shirt, and was always fidgety in changing his shirt, and didn’t seem to want you to see the belt. You thought it was a galvanic belt, or something of that sort. You felt it once, when you were changing your master’s shirt, and it was all over little knobs as hard as iron, but very small. That’s all you’ve got to say, except that you’ve always fancied your master wasn’t quite easy in his mind, and you thought that was because of his having been suspected in the first place about the Winchester murder.”
Mr. Carter jotted down some pencil-notes in his pocket-book while making this little summary of his conversation with the valet.
Having done this and shut his book, he prowled slowly through the sitting-room, bed-room, and dressing-room, looking about him, with the servant close at his heels.
“What clothes did Mr. Dunbar wear when he went away?”
“Grey trousers and waistcoat, small shepherd’s plaid, and he must have taken a greatcoat lined with Russian sable.”
“A black coat?”
“No; the coat was dark blue cloth outside.”
Mr. Carter opened his pocket-book in order to add another memorandum —
Trousers and waistcoat, shepherd’s plaid; coat, dark blue cloth lined with sable. “How about Mr. Dunbar’s personal appearance, eh?”
The valet gave an elaborate description of his master’s looks.
“Ha! — humph!” muttered Mr. Carter; “tall, broad-shouldered, hook-nose, brown eyes, brown hair mixed with grey.”
The detective put on his hat after making this last memorandum: but he paused before the table, on which the lamp was still standing.
“Was this lamp filled last night?” he asked.
“Yes, sir; it was always fresh filled every day.”
“How long does it burn?”
“Ten hours.”
“When was it lighted?”
“A little before seven o’clock.”
Mr. Carter removed the glass shade, and carried the lamp to the fireplace. He held it up over the grate, and drained the oil.
“It must have been burning till past four this morning,” he said.
The valet stared at Mr. Carter with something of that reverential horror with which he might have regarded a wizard of the middle ages. But Mr. Carter was in too much haste to be aware of the man’s admiration. He had found out all he wanted to know, and now there was no time to be lost.
He left the Abbey, ran back to the lodge, found his assistant, Mr. Tibbles, and despatched that gentleman to the Shorncliffe railway station, where he was to keep a sharp look out for a lame traveller in a blue cloth coat lined with brown fur. If such a traveller appeared, Sawney Tom was to stick to him wherever he went; but was to leave a note with the station-master for his chief’s guidance, containing information as to what he had done.
In less than a quarter of an hour after leaving the gate of Maudesley Park, the fly came to a stand-still before Woodbine Cottage. Mr. Carter paid the man and dismissed the vehicle, and went alone into the little garden.
He rang a bell on one side of the half-glass door, and had ample leisure to contemplate the stuffed birds and marine curiosities that adorned the little hall of the cottage before any one came to answer his summons. He rang a second time before anyone came, but after a delay of about five minutes a young woman appeared, with her face tied up in a coloured handkerchief. The detective asked to see Major Vernon, and the young woman ushered him into a little parlour at the back of the cottage, without either delay or hesitation.
The occupant of the cottage was sitting in an arm-chair by the fire. There was very little light in the room, for the only window looked into a miniature conservatory, where there were all manner of prickly and spiky plants of the cactus kind, which had been the delight of the late owner of Woodbine Cottage.
Mr. Carter looked very sharply at the gentleman sitting in the easy-chair; but the closest inspection showed him nothing but a good-looking man, between fifty and sixty years of age, with a determined-looking mouth, half shaded by a grey moustache.
“I’ve come to make a few inquiries about a friend of yours, Major Vernon,” the detective said; “Mr. Dunbar, of Maudesley Abbey, who has been missing since four o’clock this morning.”
The gentleman in the easy-chair was smoking a meerschaum. As Mr. Carter said those two words, “four o’clock,” his teeth made a little clicking noise upon the amber mouthpiece of the pipe.
The detective heard the sound, slight as it was, and drew his inference from it. Major Vernon had seen Joseph Wilmot, and knew that he had left the Abbey at four o’clock, and thus gave a little start of surprise when he found that the exact hour was known to others.
“You know where Mr. Dunbar has gone?” said Mr. Carter, looking still more sharply at the gentleman in the easy-chair.
“On the contrary, I was thinking of looking in upon him at the Abbey this evening.”
“Humph!” murmured the detective, “then it’s no use my asking you any questions on the subject?”
“None whatever. Henry Dunbar is gone away from the Abbey, you say? Why, I thought he was still under medical supervision — couldn’t move off his sofa, except to take a turn upon a pair of crutches.”
“I believe it was so, but he has disappeared notwithstanding.”
“What do you mean by disappeared? He has gone away, I suppose, and he was free to go away, wasn’t he?”
“Oh! of course; perfectly free.”
“Then I don’t so much wonder that he went,” exclaimed the occupant of the cottage, stooping over the fire, and knocking the ashes out of his meerschaum. “He’d been tied by the leg long enough, poor devil! But how is it you’re running about after him, as if he was a little boy that had bolted from his precious mother? You’re not the surgeon who was attending him?”
“No, I’m employed by Lady Jocelyn; in fact, to tell you the honest truth,” said the detective, with a simplicity of manner that was really charming: “to tell you the honest truth, I’m neither more nor less than a private detective, and I have come down from London direct to look after the missing gentleman. You see, Lady Jocelyn is afraid the long illness and fever, and all that sort of thing, may have had a very bad effect upon her poor father, and that he’s a little bit touched in the upper story, perhaps; — and, upon my word,” added the detective, frankly, “I think this sudden bolt looks very like it. In which case I fancy we may look for an attempt at suicide. What do you think, now, Major Vernon, as a friend of the missing gentleman, eh?”
The Major smiled.
“Upon my word,” he said, “I don’t think you’re so very far away from the mark. Henry Dunbar has been rather queer in his ways since that railway smash.”
“Just so. I suppose you wouldn’t have any objection to my looking about your house, and round the garden and outbuildings? Your friend might hide himself somewhere about your place. When once they take an eccentric turn, there’s no knowing where to have ’em.”
Major Vernon shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t think Dunbar’s likely to have got into my house without my knowledge,” he said; “but you are welcome to examine the place from garret to cellar if that’s any satisfaction to you.”
He rang a bell as he spoke. It was answered by the girl whose face was tied up.
“Ah, Betty, you’ve got the toothache again, have you? A nice excuse for slinking your work, eh, my girl? That’s about the size of your toothache, I expect! Look here now, this gentleman wants to see the house, and you’re to show him over it, and over the garden too, if he likes — and be quick about it, for I want my dinner.”
The girl curtseyed in an awkward countrified manner, and ushered Mr. Carter into the hall.
“Betty!” roared the master of the house, as the girl reached the foot of the stair with the detective; “Betty, come here!”
She went back to her master, and Mr. Carter heard a whispered conversation, very brief, of which the last sentence only was audible.
That last sentence ran thus:
“And if you don’t hold your tongue, I’ll make you pay for it.”
“Ho, ho!” thought the detective; “Miss Betsy is to hold her tongue, is she? We’ll see about that.”
The girl came back to the hall, and led Mr. Carter into the two sitting-rooms in the front of the house. They were small rooms, with small furniture. They were old-fashioned rooms, with low ceilings, and queer cupboards nestling in out-of-the-way holes and corners: and Mr. Carter had enough work to do in squeezing himself into the interior of these receptacles, which all smelt, more or less, of chandlery and rum — that truly seaman-like spirit having been a favourite beverage with the late inhabitant of the cottage.
After examining half-a-dozen cupboards in the lower regions, Mr. Carter and his guide ascended to the upper story.
The girl called Betsy ushered the detective into a bedroom, which she said was her master’s, and where the occupation of the Major was made manifest by divers articles of apparel lying on the chairs and hanging on the pegs, and, furthermore, by a powerful effluvium of stale tobacco, and a collection of pipes and cigar-boxes on the chimney-piece.
The girl opened the door of an impossible-looking little cupboard in a corner behind a four-post bed; but instead of inspecting the cupboard, Mr. Carter made a sudden rush at the door, locked it, and then put the key in his pocket.
“No, thank you, Miss Innocence,” he said; “I don’t crick my neck, or break my back, by looking into any more of your cupboards. Just you come here.”
“Here,” was the window, before which Mr. Carter planted himself.
The girl obeyed very quietly. She would have been a pretty-looking girl but for her toothache, or rather, but for the coloured handkerchief which muffled the lower part of her face, and was tied in a knot at the top of her head. As it was, Mr. Carter could only see that she had pretty brown eyes, which shifted left and right as he looked at her.
“Oh, yes, you’re an artful young hussy, and no mistake,” he said; “and that toothache’s only a judgment upon you. What was that your master said to you in the parlour just now, eh? What was that he told you to hold your tongue about, eh?”
Betty shook her head, and began to twist the corner of her apron in her hands.
“Master didn’t say nothing, sir,” she said.
“Master didn’t say nothing! Your morals and your grammar are about a match, Miss Betsy; but you’ll find yourself rather in the wrong box by-and-by, my young lady, when you find yourself committed to prison for perjury; which crime, in a young female, is transportation for life,” added Mr. Carter, in an awful tone.
“Oh, sir!” cried Betty, “it isn’t me; it’s master: and he do swear so when he’s in his tantrums. If the ‘taters isn’t done to his likin’, sir, he’ll grumble about them quite civil at first, and then he’ll work hisself up like, and take and throw them at me one by one, and his language gets worse with every ‘tater. Oh, what am I to do, sir! I daren’t go against him. I’d a’most sooner be transported, if it don’t hurt much.”
“Don’t hurt much!” exclaimed Mr. Carter; “why, there’s a ship-load of cat-o’-nine-tails goes out to Van Diemen’s Land every quarter, and reserved specially for young females!”
“Oh! I’ll tell you all about it, sir,” cried Mr. Vernon’s housemaid; “sooner than be took up for perjuring, I’ll tell you everything.”
“I thought so,” said Mr. Carter; “but it isn’t much you’ve got to tell me. Mr. Dunbar came here this morning on horseback, between five and six?”
“It was ten minutes past six, sir, and I was opening the shutters.”
“Precisely.”
“And the gentleman came on horseback, sir, and was nigh upon fainting with the pain of his leg; and he sent me to call up master, and master helped him off the horse, and took the horse to the stable; and then the gentleman sat and rested in master’s little parlour at the back of the house; and then they sent me for a fly, and I went to the Rose and Crown at Lisford, and fetched a fly; and before eight o’clock the gentleman went away.”
Before eight, and it was now past three. Mr. Carter looked at his watch while the girl made her confession.
“And, oh, please don’t tell master as I told you,” she said; “oh, please don’t, sir.”
There was no time to be lost, and yet the detective paused for a minute, thinking of what he had just heard.
Had the girl told him the truth; or was this a story got up to throw him off the scent? The girl’s terror of her master seemed genuine. She was crying now, real tears, that streamed down her pale cheeks, and wetted the handkerchief that covered the lower part of her face.
“I can find out at the Rose and Crown whether anybody did go away in a fly,” the detective thought.
“Tell your master I’ve searched the place, and haven’t found his friend,” he said to the girl; “and that I haven’t got time to wish him good morning.”
The detective said this as he went down stairs. The girl went into the little rustic porch with him, and directed him to the Rose and Crown at Lisford.
He ran almost all the way to the little inn; for he was growing desperate now, with the idea that his man had escaped him.
“Why, he can do anything with such a start,” he thought to himself. “And yet there’s his lameness — that’ll go against him.”
At the Rose and Crown Mr. Carter was informed that a fly had been ordered at seven o’clock that morning by a young person from Woodbine Cottage; that the vehicle had not long come in, and that the driver was somewhere about the stables. The driver was summoned at Mr. Carter’s request, and from him the detective ascertained that a gentleman, wrapped up to the very nose, and wearing a coat lined with fur, and walking very lame, had been taken up by him at Woodbine Cottage. This gentleman had ordered the driver to go as fast as he could to Shorncliffe station; but on reaching the station, it appeared the gentleman was too late for the train he wanted to go by, for he came back to the fly, limping awful, and told the man to drive to Maningsly. The driver explained to Mr. Carter that Maningsly was a little village three miles from Shorncliffe, on a by-road. Here the gentleman in the fur coat had alighted at an ale-house, where he dined, and stopped, reading the paper and drinking hot brandy-and-water till after one o’clock. He acted altogether quite the gentleman, and paid for the driver’s dinner and brandy-and-water, as well as his own. At half-after one he got into the fly, and ordered the man to go back to Shorncliffe station. At five minutes after two he alighted at the station, where he paid and dismissed the driver.
This was all Mr. Carter wanted to know.
“You get a fresh horse harnessed in double-quick time,” he said, “and drive me to Shorncliffe station.”
While the horse and fly were being got ready, the detective went into the bar, and ordered a glass of steaming brandy-and-water. He was accustomed to take liquids in a boiling state, as the greater part of his existence was spent in hurrying from place to place, as he was hurrying now.
“Sawney’s got the chance this time,” he thought. “Suppose he was to sell me, and go in for the reward?”
The supposition was not a pleasant one, and Mr. Carter looked grave for a minute or so; but he quickly relapsed into a grim smile.
“I think Sawney knows me too well for that,” he said; “I think Sawney is too well acquainted with me to try that on.”
The fly came round to the inn-door while Mr. Carter reflected upon this. He sprang into the vehicle, and was driven off to the station.
At the Shorncliffe station he found everything very quiet. There was no train due for some time yet; there was no sign of human life in the ticket-office or the waiting-rooms.
There was a porter asleep upon his truck on the platform, and there was one solitary young female sitting upon a bench against the wall, with her boxes and bundles gathered round her, and an umbrella and a pair of clogs on her lap.
Upon all the length of the platform there was no sign of Mr. Tibbles, otherwise Sawney Tom.
Mr. Carter awoke the porter, and sent him to the station-master to ask if any letter addressed to Mr. Henry Carter had been left in that functionary’s care. The porter went yawning to make this inquiry, and came back by-and-by, still yawning, to say that there was such a letter, and would the gentleman please step into the station-master’s office to claim and receive it.
The note was not a long one, nor was it encumbered by any ceremonious phraseology.
“Gent in furred coat turned up 2.10, took a ticket for Derby, 1 class, took ticket for same place self, 2 class. — Yrs to commd, T.T.“
Mr. Carter crumpled up the note and dropped it into his pocket. The station-master gave him all the information about the trains. There was a train for Derby at seven o’clock that evening; and for the three and a half weary hours that must intervene, Mr. Carter was left to amuse himself as best he might.
“Derby,” he muttered to himself, “Derby. Why, he must be going north; and what, in the name of all that’s miraculous, takes him that way?”
The railway journey between Shorncliffe and Derby was by no means the most pleasant expedition for a cold spring night, with the darkness lying like a black shroud on the flat fields, and a melancholy wind howling over those desolate regions, across which all night-trains seem to wend their way. I think that flat and darksome land which we look upon out of the window of a railway carriage in the dead of the night must be a weird district, conjured into existence by the potent magic of an enchanter’s wand — a dreary desert transported out of Central Africa, to make the night-season hideous, and to vanish at cock-crow.
Mr. Carter never travelled without a railway rug and a pocket brandy-flask; and sustained by these inward and outward fortifications against the chilling airs of the long night, he established himself in a corner of the second-class carriage, and made the best of his situation.
Fortunately there was no position of hardship to which the detective was unaccustomed; indeed, to be rolled up in a railway rug in the corner of a second-class carriage, was to be on a bed of down as compared with some of his experiences. He was used to take his night’s rest in brief instalments, and was snoring comfortably three minutes after the guard had banged-to the door of his carriage.
But he was not permitted to enjoy any prolonged rest. The door was banged open, and a stentorian voice bawled into his ear that hideous announcement which is so fatal to the repose of travellers, “Change here!” &c., &c. The journey from Shorncliffe to Derby seemed almost entirely to consist of “changing here;” and poor Mr. Carter felt as if he had passed a long night in being hustled out of one carriage into another, and off one line of railway on to another, with all those pauses on draughty platforms which are so refreshing to the worn-out traveller who works his weary way across country in the dead of the night.
At last, however, after a journey that seemed interminable by reason of those short naps, which always confuse the sleeper a estimate of time, the detective found himself at Derby still in the dead of the night; for to the railway traveller it is all of night after dark. Here he applied immediately to the station-master, from whom he got another little note directed to him by Mr. Tibbles, and very much resembling that which he had received at Shorncliffe.
“All right up to Derby,” wrote Sawney Tom. “Gent in furred coat took a ticket through to Hull. Have took the same, and go on with him direct. — Yours to command, T.T.”
Mr. Carter lost no time after perusing this communication. He set to work at once to find out all about the means of following his assistant and the lame traveller.
Here he was told that he had a couple of hours to wait for the train that was to take him on to Normanton, and at Normanton he would have another hour to wait for the train that was to carry him to Hull.
“Ah, go it, do, while you’re about it!” he exclaimed, bitterly, when the railway official had given him this pleasing intelligence. “Couldn’t you make it a little longer? When your end and aim lies in driving a man mad, the quicker you drive the better, I should think!”
All this was muttered in an undertone, not intended for the ear of the railway official. It was only a kind of safety-valve by which the detective let off his superfluous steam.
“Sawney’s got the chance,” he thought, as he paced up and down the platform; “Sawney’s got the trump cards this time; and if he’s knave enough to play them against me —— But I don’t think he’ll do that; our profession’s a conservative one, and a traitor would have an uncommon good chance of being kicked out of it. We should drop him a hint that, considering the state of his health, we should take it kindly of him if he would hook it; or send him some polite message of that kind; as the military swells do when they want to get rid of a pal.”
There were plenty of refreshments to be had at Derby, and Mr. Carter took a steaming cup of coffee and a formidable-looking pile of sandwiches before retiring to the waiting-room to take what he called “a stretch.” He then engaged the services of a porter, who was to call him five minutes before the starting of the Normanton train, and was to receive an illegal douceur for that civility.
In the waiting-room there was a coke fire, very red and hollow, and a dim lamp. A lady, half buried in shawls, and surrounded by a little colony of small packages, was sitting close to the fire, and started out of her sleep to make nervous clutches at her parcels as the detective entered, being in that semi-conscious state in which the unprotected female is apt to mistake every traveller for a thief.
Mr. Carter made himself very comfortable on one of the sofas, and snored on peacefully until the porter came to rouse him, when he sprang up refreshed to continue his journey.
“Hull, Hull!” he muttered to himself. “His game will be to get off to Rotterdam, or Hamburgh, or St. Petersburg, perhaps; any place that there’s a vessel ready to take him. He’ll get on board the first that sails. It’s a good dodge, a very neat dodge, and if Sawney hadn’t been at the station, Mr. Joseph Wilmot would have given us the slip as neatly as ever a man did yet. But if Mr. Thomas Tibbles is true, we shall nab him, and bring him home as quiet as ever any little boy was took to school by his mar and par. If Mr. Tibbles is true — and as he don’t know too much about the business, and don’t know anything about the extra reward, or the evidence that’s turned up at Winchester — I dare say Thomas Tibbles will be true. Human nature is a very noble thing,” mused the detective; “but I’ve always remarked that the tighter you tie human nature down, the brighter it comes out.”
It was morning, and the sun was shining, when the train that carried Mr. Carter steamed slowly into the great station at Hull — it was morning, and the sun was shining, and the birds singing, and in the fields about the smoky town there were herds of sweet-breathing cattle sniffing the fresh spring air, and labourers plodding to their work, and loaded wains of odorous hay and dewy garden-stuff were lumbering along the quiet country roads, and the new-born day had altogether the innocent look appropriate to its tender youth — when the detective stepped out on the platform, calm, self-contained, and resolute, as brisk and business-like in his manner as any traveller in that train, and with no distinctive stamp upon him, however slight, that marked him as the hunter of a murderer.
He looked sharply up and down the platform. No, Mr. Tibbles had not betrayed him. That gentleman was standing on the platform, watching the passengers step out of the carriages, and looking more turnip-faced than usual in the early sunlight. He was chewing nothing with more than ordinary energy; and Mr. Carter, who was very familiar with the idiosyncrasies of his assistant, knew from that sign that things had gone amiss.
“Well,” he said, tapping Sawney Tom on the shoulder, “he’s given you the slip? Out with it; I can see by your face that he has.”
“Well, he have, then,” answered Mr. Tibbles, in an injured tone; “but if he have, you needn’t glare at me like that, for it ain’t no fault of mine. If you ever follered a lame eel — and a lame eel as makes no more of its lameness than if lameness was a advantage — you’d know what it is to foller that chap in the furred coat.”
The detective hooked his arm through that of his assistant, and led Mr. Tibbles out of the station by a door which opened on a desolate region at the back of that building.
“Now then,” said Mr. Carter, “tell me all about it, and look sharp.”
“Well, I was waitin’ in the Shorncliffe ticket-offis, and about five minutes after two in comes the gent as large as life, and I sees him take his ticket, and I hears him say Derby, on which I waits till he’s out of the offis, and I takes my own ticket, same place. Down we comes here with more changes and botheration than ever was; and every time we changes carriages, which we don’t seem to do much else the whole time, I spots my gentleman, limpin’ awful, and lookin’ about him suspicious-like, to see if he was watched. And, of course, he weren’t watched — oh, no; nothin’ like it. Of all the innercent young men as ever was exposed to the temptations of this wicked world, there never was sech a young innercent as that lawyer’s clerk, a carryin’ a blue bag, and a tellin’ a promiskruous acquaintance, loud enough for the gent in the fur coat to hear, that he’d been telegraphed for by his master, which was down beyond Hull, on electioneerin’ business; and a cussin’ of his master promiskruous to the same acquaintance for tele-graphin’ for him to go by sech a train. Well, we come to Derby, and the furry gent, he takes a ticket on to Hull; and we come to Normanton, and the furry gent limps about Normanton station, and I sees him comfortable in his carriage; and we comes to Hull, and I sees him get out on the platform, and I sees him into a fly, and I hears him give the order, ‘Victorier Hotel,’ which by this time it’s nigh upon ten o’clock, and dark and windy. Well, I got up behind the fly, and rides a bit, and walks a bit, keepin’ the fly in sight until we comes to the Victorier; and there stoops down behind, and watches my gent hobble into the hotel, in awful pain with that lame leg of his, judgin’ the faces he makes; and he walks into the coffee-room, and I makes bold to foller him; but there never was sech a young innercent as me, and I sees my party sittin’ warmin’ his poor lame leg, and with a carpet-bag, and railway-rug, and sechlike on the table beside him; and presently he gets up, hobblin’ worse than ever, and goes outside, and I hears him makin’ inquiries about the best way of gettin’ on to Edinborough by train; and I sat quiet, not more than three minutes at most, becos’, you see, I didn’t want to look like follerin’ him; and in three minutes time, out I goes, makin’ as sure to find him in the bar as I make sure of your bein’ close beside me at this moment; but when I went outside into the hall, and bar and sechlike, there wasn’t a mortal vestige of that man to be seen; but the waiter, he tells me, as dignified and cool as yer please, that the lame gentleman has gone out by the door looking towards the water, and has only gone to have a look at the place, and get a few cigars, and will be back in ten minutes to a chop which is bein’ cooked for him. Well, I cuts out by the same door, thinkin’ my lame friend can’t be very far; but when I gets out on to the quay-side, there ain’t a vestige of him; and though I cut about here, there, and everywhere, lookin’ for him, until I’d nearly walked my legs off in less than half an hour’s time, I didn’t see a sign of him, and all I could do was to go back to the Victorier, and see if he’d gone back before me.
“Well, there was his carpet-bag and his railway-rug, just as he’d left ’em, and there was a little table near the fire all laid out snug and comfortable ready for him; but there was no more vestige of hisself than there was in the streets where I’d been lookin’ for him; and so I went out again, with the prespiration streamin’ down my face, and I walked that blessed town till over one o’clock this mornin,’ lookin’ right and left, and inquirin’ at every place where such a gent was likely to try and hide hisself, and playing up Mag’s divarsions, which if it was divarsions to Mag, was oncommon hard work to me; and then I went back to the Victorier, and got a night’s lodgin’; and the first thing this mornin’ I was on my blessed legs again, and down at the quay inquirin’ about vessels, and there’s nothin’ likely to sail afore to-night, and the vessel as is expected to sail to-night is bound for Copenhagen, and don’t carry passengers; but from the looks of her captain, I should say she’d carry anythink, even to a churchyard full of corpuses, if she was paid to do it.”
“Humph! a sailing-vessel bound for Copenhagen; and the captain’s a villanous-looking fellow, you say?” said the detective, in a thoughtful tone.
“He’s about the villanousest I ever set eyes on,” answered Mr. Tibbles.
“Well, Sawney, it’s a bad job, certainly; but I’ve no doubt you’ve done your best.”
“Yes, I have done my best,” the assistant answered, rather indignantly: “and considerin’ the deal of confidence you honoured me with about this here cove, I don’t see as I could have done hanythink more.”
“Then the best thing you can do is to keep watch here for the starting of the up-trains, while I go and keep my eye upon the station at the other side of the water,” said Mr. Carter, “This journey to Hull may have been just a dodge to throw us off the scent, and our man may try and double upon us by going back to London. You’ll keep all safe here, Sawney, while I go to the other side of the compass.”
Mr. Carter engaged a fly, and made his way to a pier at the end of the town, whence a boat took him across the Humber to a station on the Lincolnshire side of the river.
Here he ascertained all particulars about the starting of the trains for London, and here he kept watch while two or three trains started. Then, as there was an interval of some hours before the starting of another, he re-crossed the water, and set to work to look for his man.
First he loitered about the quays a little, taking stock of the idle vessels, the big steamers that went to London, Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Hamburg — the little steamers that went short voyages up or down the river, and carried troops of Sunday idlers to breezy little villages beside the sea. He found out all about these boats, their destination, and the hours and days on which they were to start, and made himself more familiar with the water-traffic of the place in half an hour than another man could have done in a day. He also made acquaintance with the vessel that was to sail for Copenhagen — a black sulky-looking boat, christened very appropriately the Crow, with a black sulky-looking captain, who was lying on a heap of tarpaulin on the deck, smoking a pipe in his sleep. Mr. Carter stood looking over the quay and contemplating this man for some moments with a thoughtful stare.
“He looks a bad ’un,” the detective muttered, as he walked away; “Sawney was right enough there.”
He went into the town, and walked about, looking at the jewellers’ shops with his accustomed rapid glance — a glance so furtive that it escaped observation — so full of sharp scrutiny that it took in every detail of the object looked at. Mr. Carter looked at the jewellers till he came to one whose proprietor blended the trade of money-lending with his more aristocratic commerce. Here Mr. Carter stopped, and entered by the little alley, within whose sombre shadows the citizens of Hull were wont to skulk, ashamed of the errand that betrayed their impecuniosity. Mr. Carter visited three pawnbrokers, and wasted a good deal of time before he made any discovery likely to be of use to him; but at the third pawnbroker’s he found himself on the right track. His manner with these gentlemen was very simple.
“I’m a detective officer,” he said, “from Scotland Yard, and I have a warrant for the apprehension of a man who’s supposed to be hiding in Hull. He’s known to have a quantity of unset diamonds in his possession — they’re not stolen, mind you, so you needn’t be frightened on that score. I want to know if such a person has been to you to-day?”
“The diamonds are all right?” asked the pawnbroker, rather nervously.
“Quite right. I see the man has been here. I don’t want to know anything about the jewels: they’re his own, and it’s not them we’re after. I want to know about him. He’s been here, I see — the question is, what time?”
“Not above half an hour ago. A man in a dark blue coat with a fur collar ——”
“Yes; a man that walks lame.”
The pawnbroker shook his head.
“I didn’t see that he was lame,” he said.
“Ah, you didn’t notice; or he might hide it just while he was in here. He sat down, I suppose?”
“Yes; he was sitting all the time.”
“Of course. Thank you; that’ll do.”
With this Mr. Carter departed, much to the relief of the money-lender.
The detective looked at his watch, and found that it was half-past one. At half-past three there was a London train to start from the station on the Lincolnshire side of the water. The other station was safe so long as Mr. Tibbles remained on the watch there; so for two hours Mr. Carter was free to look about him. He went down to the quay, and ascertained that no boat had crossed to the Lincolnshire side of the river within the last hour. Joseph Wilmot was therefore safe on the Yorkshire side; but if so, where was he? A man wearing a dark blue coat lined with sable, and walking very lame, must be a conspicuous object wherever he went; and yet Mr. Carter, with all the aid of his experience in the detective line, could find no clue to the whereabouts of the man he wanted. He spent an hour and a half in walking about the streets, prying into all manner of dingy little bars and tap-rooms, in narrow back streets and down by the water-side; and then was fain to go across to Lincolnshire once more, and watch the departure of the train.
Before crossing the river to do this, he had taken stock of the Crow and her master, and had seen the captain lying in exactly the same attitude as before, smoking a dirty black pipe in hie sleep.
Mr. Carter made a furtive inspection of every creature who went by the up-train, and saw that conveyance safely off before he turned to leave the station. After doing this he lost no time in re-crossing the water again, and landed on the Yorkshire side of the Humber as the clocks of Hull were striking four.
He was getting tired by this time, but he was not tired of his work. He was accustomed to spending his days very much in this manner; he was used to taking his sleep in railway carriages, and his meals at unusual hours, whenever and wherever he could get time to take his food. He was getting what ha called “peckish” now, and was just going to the coffee-room of the Victoria Hotel with the intention of ordering a steak and a glass of brandy-and-water — Mr. Carter never took beer, which is a sleepy beverage, inimical to that perpetual clearness of intellect necessary to a detective — when he changed his mind, and walked back to the edge of the quay, to prowl along once more with his hands in his pockets, looking at the vessels, and to take another inspection of the deck and captain of the Crow.
“I shouldn’t wonder if my gentleman’s gone and hidden himself down below the hatchway of that boat,” he thought, as he walked slowly along the quay-side. “I’ve half a mind to go on board and overhaul her.”
Mr. Carter was so familiar with the spot alongside which the Crow lay at anchor, that he made straight for that part of the quay and looked down over the side, fully expecting to see the dirty captain still lying on the tarpaulin, smoking his dirty pipe.
But, to his amazement, he saw a strange vessel where he expected to see the Crow, and in answer to his eager inquiries amongst the idlers on the quay, and the other idlers on the boats, he was told that the Crow had weighed anchor half an hour ago, and was over yonder.
The men pointed to a dingy speck out seaward as they gave Mr. Carter this information — a speck which they assured him was neither more nor less than the Crow, bound for Copenhagen.
Mr. Carter asked whether she had been expected to sail so soon.
No, the men told him; she was not expected to have sailed till daybreak next morning, and there wasn’t above two-thirds of her cargo aboard her yet.
The detective asked if this wasn’t rather a queer proceeding.
Yes, the men said, it was queer; but the master of the Crow was a queer chap altogether, and more than one absconding bankrupt had sailed for furrin parts in the Crow. One of the men opined that the master had got a swell cove on board to-day, inasmuch as he had seen such a one hanging about the quay-side ten minutes or so before the Crow sailed.
“Who’ll catch her?” cried Mr. Carter; “which of you will catch her for a couple of sovereigns?”
The men shook their heads. The Crow had got too much of a start, they said, considering that the wind was in her favour.
“But there’s a chance that the wind may change after dark,” returned the detective. “Come, my men, don’t hang back. Who’ll catch the Crow yonder for a fiver, come? Who’ll catch her for a fi’-pound note?”
“I will,” cried a burly young fellow in a scarlet guernsey, and shiny boots that came nearly to his waist; “me and my mate will do it, won’t us, Jim?”
Jim was another burly young fellow in a blue guernsey, a fisherman, part owner of a little bit of a smack with a brown mainsail. The two stalwart young fishermen ran along the quay, and one of them dropped down into a boat that was chained to an angle in the quay-side, where there was a flight of slimy stone steps leading down to the water. The other young man ran off to get some of the boat’s tackle and a couple of shaggy overcoats.
“We’d best take something to eat and drink, sir,” the young man said, as he came running back with these things; “we may be out all night, if we try to catch yon vessel.”
Mr. Carter gave the man a sovereign, and told him to get what he thought proper.
“You’d best have something to cover you besides what you’ve got on, sir,” the fisherman said; “you’ll find it rare and cold on ‘t water after dark.”
Mr. Carter assented to this proposition, and hurried off to buy himself a railway rug; he had left his own at the railway station in Sawney Tom’s custody. He bought one at a shop near the quay, and was back to the steps in ten minutes.
The fisherman in the blue guernsey was in the boat, which was a stout-built craft in her way. The fisherman in the scarlet guernsey made his appearance in less than five minutes, carrying a great stone bottle, with a tin drinking-cup tied to the neck of it, and a rush basket filled with some kind of provision. The stone bottle and the basket were speedily stowed away in the bottom of the boat, and Mr. Carter was invited to descend and take the seat pointed out to him.
“Can you steer, sir?” one of the men asked.
Yes, Mr. Carter was able to steer. There was very little that he had not learned more or less in twenty years’ knocking about the world.
He took the rudder when they had pushed out into the open water, the two young men dipped their oars, and away the boat shot out towards that seaward horizon on which only the keenest eyes could discover the black speck that represented the Crow.
“If it should be a sell, after all,” thought Mr. Carter; “and yet that’s not likely. If he wanted to double on me and get back to London, he’d have gone by one of the trains we’ve watched; if he wanted to lie-by and hide himself in the town, he wouldn’t have disposed of any of his diamonds yet awhile — and then, on the other hand, why should the Crow have sailed before she’d got the whole of her cargo on board? Anyhow, I think I have been wise to risk it, and follow the Crow. If this is a wild-goose chase, I’ve been in wilder than this before to-day, and have caught my man.”
The little fishing smack behaved bravely when she got out to sea; but even with the help of the oars, stoutly plied by the two young men, they gained no way upon the Crow, for the black speck grew fainter and fainter upon the horizon-line, and at last dropped down behind it altogether.
“We shall never catch her,” one of the men said, helping himself to a cupful of spirit out of the stone-bottle, in a sudden access of despondency. “We shall no more catch t’ Crow than we shall catch t’ day before yesterday, unless t’ wind changes.”
“I doubt t’ wind will change after dark,” answered the other young man, who had applied himself oftener than his companion to the stone-bottle, and took a more hopeful view of things. “I doubt but we shall have a change come dark.”
He was looking out to windward as he spoke. He took the rudder out of Mr. Carter’s hands presently, and that gentleman rolled himself in his new railway rug, and lay down in the bottom of the boat, with one of the men’s overcoats for a blanket and the other for a pillow, and, hushed by the monotonous plashing of the water against the keel of the boat, fell into a pleasant slumber, whose blissfulness was only marred by the gridiron-like sensation of the hard boards upon which he was lying.
He awoke from this slumber to hear that the wind had changed, and that the Pretty Polly— the boat belonging to the two fishermen was called the Pretty Polly— was gaining on the Crow.
“We shall be alongside of her in an hour,” one of the men said.
Mr. Carter shook off the drowsy influence of his long sleep, and scrambled to his feet. It was bright moonlight, and the little boat left a trail of tremulous silver in her wake as she cut through the water. Far away upon the horizon there was a faint speck of shimmering white, to which one of the young men pointed with his brawny finger It was the dirty mainsail of the Crow bleached into silver whiteness under the light of the moon.
“There’s scarcely enough wind to puff out a farthing candle,” one of the young men said. “I think we’re safe to catch her.”
Mr. Carter took a cupful of rum at the instigation of one of his companions, and prepared himself for the business that lay before him.
Of all the hazardous ventures in which the detective had been engaged, this was certainly not the least hazardous. He was about to venture on board a strange vessel, with a captain who bore no good name, and with men who most likely closely resembled their master; he was about to trust himself among such fellows as these, in the hope of capturing a criminal whose chances, if once caught, were so desperate that he would not be likely to hesitate at any measures by which he might avoid a capture. But the detective was not unused to encounters where the odds were against him, and he contemplated the chances of being hurled overboard in a hand-to-hand struggle with Joseph Wilmot as calmly as if death by drowning were the legitimate end of a man’s existence.
Once, while standing in the prow of the boat, with his face turned steadily towards that speck in the horizon, Mr. Carter thrust his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, where there lurked the newest and neatest thing in revolvers; but beyond this action, which was almost involuntary, he made no sign that he was thinking of the danger before him.
The moon grew brighter and brighter in a cloudless sky, as the fishing-smack shot through the water, while the steady dip of the oars seemed to keep time to a wordless tune. In that bright moonlight the sails of the Crow grew whiter and larger with every dip of the oars that were carrying the Pretty Polly so lightly over the blue water.
As the boat gained upon the vessel she was following, Mr. Carter told the two young men his errand, and his authority to capture the runaway.
“I think I may count on your standing by me — eh, my lads?” he asked.
Yes, the young men answered; they would stand by him to the death. Their spirits seemed to rise with the thought of danger, especially as Mr. Carter hinted at a possible reward for each of them if they should assist in the capture of the runaway. They rowed close under the side of the black and wicked-looking vessel, and then Mr. Carter, standing up in the boat gave a “Yo-ho! aboard there!” that resounded over the great expanse of plashing water.
A man with a pipe in his mouth looked over the side.
“Hilloa! what’s the row there?” he demanded fiercely.
“I want to see the captain.”
“What do you want with him?”
“That’s my business.”
Another man, with a dingy face, and another pipe in his mouth, looked over the side, and took his pipe from between his lips, to address the detective.
“What the —— do you mean by coming alongside us?” he cried. “Get out of the way, or we shall run you down.”
“Oh, no, you won’t, Mr. Spelsand,” answered one of the young men from the boat; “you’ll think twice before you turn rusty with us. Don’t you remember the time you tried to get off John Bowman, the clerk that robbed the Yorkshire Union Assurance Office — don’t you remember trying to get him off clear, and gettin’ into trouble yourself about it?”
Mr. Spelsand bawled some order to the man at the helm, and the vessel veered round suddenly; so suddenly, that had the two young men in the boat been anything but first-rate watermen, they and Mr. Carter would have become very intimately acquainted with the briny element around and about them. But the young men were very good watermen, and they were also familiar with the manners and customs of Captain Spelsand, of the Crow; so, as the black-looking schooner veered round, the little boat shot out into the open water, and the two young oarsmen greeted the captain’s manoeuvre with a ringing peal of laughter.
“I’ll trouble you to lay-to while I come on board,” said the detective, while the boat bobbed up and down on the water, close alongside of the schooner. “You’ve got a gentleman on board — a gentleman whom I’ve got a warrant against. It can’t much matter to him whether I take him now, or when he gets to Copenhagen; for take him I surely shall; but it’ll matter a good deal to you, Captain Spelsand, if you resist my authority.”
The captain hesitated for a little, while he gave a few fierce puffs at his dirty pipe.
“Show us your warrant,” he said presently, in a sulky tone.
The detective had started from Scotland Yard in the first instance with an open warrant for the arrest of the supposed murderer. He handed this document up to the captain of the Crow, and that gentleman, who was by no means an adept in the unseamanlike accomplishments of reading and writing, turned it over, and examined it thoughtfully in the vivid moonlight.
He could see that there were a lot of formidable-looking words and flourishes in it, and he felt pretty well convinced that it was a genuine document, and meant mischief.
“You’d better come aboard,” he said; “you don’t want me; that’s certain.”
The captain of the Crow said this with an air of sublime resignation; and in the next minute the detective was scrambling up the side of the vessel, by the aid of a rope flung out by one of the sailors on board the Crow.
Mr. Carter was followed by one of the fishermen; and with that stalwart ally he felt himself equal to any emergency.
“I’ll just throw my eye over your place down below,” he said, “if you’ll hand me a lantern.”
This request was not complied with very willingly; and it was only on a second production of the warrant that Mr. Carter obtained the loan of a wretched spluttering wick, glimmering in a dirty little oil-lamp. With this feeble light he turned his back upon the lovely moonlight, and stumbled down into a low-ceilinged cabin, darksome and dirty, with berths which were as black and dingy, and altogether as uninviting as the shelves made to hold coffins in a noisome underground vault.
There were three men asleep upon these shelves; and Mr. Carter examined these three sleepers as coolly as if they had indeed been the coffined inmates of a vault. Amongst them he found a man whose face was turned towards the cabin-wall, but who wore a blue coat and a traveller’s cap of fur, shaped like a Templar’s helmet, and tied down over his ears.
The detective seized this gentleman by the fur collar of his coat and shook him roughly.
“Come, Mr. Joseph Wilmot,” he said; “get up, my man. You’ve given me a fine chase for it; but you’re nabbed at last.”
The man scrambled up out of his berth, and stood in a stooping attitude, for the cabin was not high enough for him, staring at Mr. Carter.
“What are you talking of, you confounded fool!” he said. “What have I got to do with Joseph Wilmot?”
The detective had never loosed his hand from the fur collar of his prisoner’s coat. The faces of the two men were opposite to each other, but only faintly visible in the dim light of the spluttering oil-lamp. The man in the fur-lined coat showed two rows of wolfish teeth, bared to the gums in a malicious grin.
“What do you mean by waking me out of sleep?” he asked. “What do you mean by assaulting and ballyragging me in this way? I’ll have it out of you for this, my fine gentleman. You’re a detective officer, are you? — a knowing card, of course; and you’ve followed me all the way from Warwickshire, and traced me, step by step, I suppose, and taken no end of trouble, eh? Why didn’t you look after the gentleman who stayed at home? Why didn’t you look after the poor lame gentleman who stayed at Woodbine Cottage, Lisford, and dressed up his pretty daughter as a housemaid, and acted a little play to sell you, you precious clever police-officer in plain clothes. Take me with you, Mr. Detective; stop me in going abroad to improve my mind and manners by foreign travel, do, Mr. Detective; and won’t I have a fine action against you for false imprisonment — that’s all?”
There was something in the man’s tone of bravado that stamped it genuine. Mr. Carter gnashed his teeth together in a silent fury. Sold by that hazel-eyed housemaid with her face tied up! Sent away on a false trail, while the criminal got off at his leisure! Fooled, duped, and laughed at after twenty years of hard service! It was too bitter.
“Not Joseph Wilmot!” muttered Mr. Carter; “not Joseph Wilmot!”
“No more than you are, my pippin,” answered the traveller, insolently.
The two men were still standing face to face. Something in that insolent tone, something that brought back the memory of half-forgotten times, startled the detective. He lifted the lamp suddenly, still looking in the traveller’s face, still muttering in the same half-absent tone, “Not Joseph Wilmot!” and brought the light on a level with the other man’s eyes.
“No,” he cried, with a sudden tone of triumph, “not Joseph Wilmot, but Stephen Vallance — Blackguard Steeve, the forger — the man who escaped from Norfolk Island, after murdering one of the gaolers — beating his brains out with an iron, if I remember right. We’ve had our eye on you for a long time, Mr. Vallance; but you’ve contrived to give us the slip. Yours is an old case, yours is; but there’s a reward to be got for the taking of you, for all that. So I haven’t had my long journey for nothing.”
The detective tried to fasten his other hand on Mr. Vallance’s shoulder; but Stephen Vallance struck down that uplifted hand with a heavy blow of his fist, and, wresting himself from the detective’s grasp, rushed up the cabin-stairs.
Mr. Carter followed close at his heels.
“Stop that man!” he roared to one of the fishermen; “stop him!”
I suppose the instinct of self-preservation inspired Stephen Vallance to make that frantic rush, though there was no possible means of escape out of the vessel, except into the open boat, or the still more open sea. As he receded from the advancing detective, one of the fishermen sprang towards him from another part of the deck. Thus hemmed in by the two, and dazzled, perhaps, by the sudden brilliancy of the moonlight after the darkness of the place below, he reeled back against an opening in the side of the vessel, lost his balance, and fell with a heavy plunge into the water.
There was a sudden commotion on the deck, a simultaneous shout, as the men rushed to the side.
“Save him!” cried the detective. “He’s got a belt stuffed with diamonds round his waist!”
Mr. Carter said this at a venture, for he did not know which of the men had the diamond belt.
One of the fishermen threw off his shoes, and took a header into the water. The rest of the men stood by breathless, eagerly watching two heads bobbing up and down among the moonlit waves, two pairs of arms buffeting with the water. The force of the current drifted the two men far away from the schooner.
For an interval that seemed a long one, all was uncertainty. The schooner that had made so little way before seemed now to fly in the faint night-wind. At last there was a shout, and a head appeared above the water advancing steadily towards the vessel.
“I’ve got him!” shouted the voice of the fisherman. “I’ve got him by the belt!”
He came nearer to the vessel, striking out vigorously with one arm, and holding some burden with the other.
When he was close under the side, the captain of the Crow flung out a rope; but as the fisherman lifted his hand to grasp it, he uttered a sudden cry, and raised the other hand with a splash out of the water.
“The belt’s broke, and he’s sunk!” he shouted.
The belt had broken. A little ripple of light flashed briefly in the moonlight, and fell like a shower of spray from a fountain. Those glittering drops, that looked like fountain spray, were some of the diamonds bought by Joseph Wilmot; and Stephen Vallance, alias Blackguard Steeve, alias Major Vernon, had gone down to the bottom of the sea, never in this mortal life to rise again.
The Pretty Polly went back to the port of Kingston-upon-Hull in the grey morning light, carrying Mr. Carter, very cold and very down-hearted — not to say humiliated — by his failure. To have been hoodwinked by a girl, whose devotion to the unhappy wretch she called her father had transformed her into a heroine — to have fallen so easily into the trap that had been set for him, being all the while profoundly impressed with the sense of his own cleverness — was, to say the least of it, depressing to the spirits of a first-class detective.
“And that fellow Vallance, too,” mused Mr. Carter, “to think that he should go and chuck himself into the water just to spite me! There’d have been some credit in taking him back with me. I might have made a bit of character out of that. But, no! he goes and tumbles back’ards into the water, rather than let me have any advantage out of him.”
There was nothing for Mr. Carter to do but to go straight back to Lisford, and try his luck again, with everything against him.
“Let me get back as fast as I may, Joseph Wilmot will have had eight-and-forty hours’ start of me,” he thought; “and what can’t he do in that time, if he keeps his wits about him, and don’t go wild and foolish like, as some of ’em do, when they’ve got such a chance as this. Anyhow, I’m after him, and it’ll go hard with me if he gives me the slip after all, for my blood’s up, and my character’s at stake, and I’d think no more of crossing the Atlantic after him than I’d think of going over Waterloo Bridge!”
It was a very chill and miserable time of the morning when the Pretty Polly ground her nose against the granite steps of the quay. It was a chill and dismal hour of the morning, and Mr. Carter felt sloppy and dirty and unshaven, as he stepped out of the boat and staggered up the slimy stairs. He gave the two young fishermen the promised five-pound note, and left them very well contented with their night’s work, inglorious though it had been.
There were no vehicles to be had at that early hour of the morning, so Mr. Carter was fain to walk from the quay to the station, where he expected to find Mr. Tibbles, or to obtain tidings of that gentleman. He was not disappointed; for, although the station wore its dreariest aspect, having only just begun to throb with a little spasmodic life, in the way of an early goods-train, Mr. Carter found his devoted follower prowling in melancholy loneliness amid a wilderness of empty carriages and smokeless engines, with the turnip whiteness of his complexion relieved by a red nose.
Mr. Thomas Tibbles was by no means in the best possible temper in this chill early morning. He was slapping his long thin arms across his narrow chest, and performing a kind of amateur double-shuffle with his long flat feet, when Mr. Carter approached him; and he kept up the same shuffling and the same slapping while engaged in conversation with his superior, in a disrespectful if not defiant manner.
“A pretty game you’ve played me,” he said, in an injured tone. “You told me to hang about the station and watch the trains, and you’d come back in the course of the day — you would — and we’d dine together comfortable at the Station Hotel; and a deal you come back and dined together comfortable. Oh, yes! I don’t think so; very much indeed,” exclaimed Mr. Tibbles, vaguely, but with the bitterest derision in his voice and manner.
“Come, Sawney, don’t you go to cut up rough about it,” said Mr. Carter, coaxingly.
“I should like to know who’d go and cut up smooth about it?” answered the indignant Tibbles. “Why, if you could have a hangel in the detective business — which luckily you can’t, for the wings would cut out anything as mean as legs, and be the ruin of the purfession — the temper of that hangel would give way under what I’ve gone through. Hanging about this windy station, which the number of criss-cross draughts cuttin’ in from open doors and winders would lead a hignorant person to believe there was seventeen p’ints of the compass at the very least — hangin’ about to watch train after train, till there ain’t anything goin’ in the way of sarce as yen haven’t got to stand from the porters; or sittin’ in the coffee-room of the hotel yonder, watchin’ and listenin’ for the next train, till bein’ there to keep an appointment with your master is the hollerest of mockeries.”
Mr. Carter took his irate subordinate to the coffee-room of the Station Hotel, where Mr. Tibbles had engaged a bed and taken a few hours’ sleep in the dead interval between the starting of the last train at night and the first in the morning. The detective ordered a substantial breakfast, with a couple of glasses of pale brandy, neat, to begin with; and Mr. Tibbles’ equanimity was restored, under the influence of ham, eggs, mutton-cutlet, a broiled sole, and a quart or so of boiling coffee.
Mr. Carter told his assistant very briefly that he’d been wasting his time and trouble on a false track, and that he should give the matter up. Sawney Tom received this announcement with a great deal of champing and working of the jaws, and with rather a doubtful expression in his dull red eyes; but he accepted the payment which his employer offered him, and agreed to depart for London by the ten o’clock train.
“And whatever I do henceforth in this business, I do single-handed,” Mr. Carter said to himself, as he turned his back upon his companion.
At five o’clock that afternoon the detective found himself at the Shorncliffe station, where he hired a fly and drove on post-haste to Lisford cottage.
The neat little habitation of the late naval commander looked pretty much as Mr. Carter had seen it last, except that in one of the upper windows there was a bill — a large paper placard — announcing that this house was to let, furnished; and that all information respecting the same was to be obtained of Mr. Hogson, grocer, Lisford.
Mr. Carter gave a long whistle.
“The bird’s flown,” he muttered. “It wasn’t likely he’d stop here to be caught.”
The detective rang the bell; once, twice, three times; but there was no answer to the summons. He ran round the low garden-fence to the back of the premises, where there was a little wooden gate, padlocked, but so low that he vaulted over it easily, and went in amongst the budding currant-bushes, the neat gravel-paths and strawberry-beds, that had been erst so cherished by the naval commander. Mr. Carter peered in at the back windows of the house, and through the little casement he saw a vista of emptiness. He listened, but there was no sound of voices or footsteps. The blinds were undrawn, and he could see the bare walls of the rooms, the fireless grates, and that cold bleakness of aspect peculiar to an untenanted habitation.
He gave a low groan.
“Gone,” he muttered; “gone, as neat as ever a man went yet.”
He ran back to the fly, and drove to the establishment of Mr. Hogson, grocer and general dealer — the shop of the village of Lisford.
Here Mr. Carter was informed that the key of “Woodbine Cottage had been given up on the evening of that very day on which he had seen Joseph Wilmot sitting in the little parlour.
“Yes, sir, it were the night before the last,” Mr. Hogson said; “it were the night before last as a young woman wrapped up about the face like, and dressed very plain, got out of a fly at my door; and, says she, ‘Would you please take charge of this here key, and be so kind as to show any one over the cottage as would like to see it, which of course the commission is understood? — for my master is leaving for some time on account of having a son just come home from India, which is married and settled in Devonshire, and my master is going there to see him, not having seen him this many a long year.’ She was a very civil-spoken young woman, and Woodbine Cottage has been good customers to us, both with the old tenants and the new; so of course I took the key, willin’ to do any service as lay in my power. And if you’d like to see the cottage, sir ——”
“You’re very good,” said Mr. Carter, with something like a groan. “No, I won’t see the cottage to-night. What time was it when the fly stopped at your door?”
“Between seven and eight.”
“Between seven and eight. Just in time to catch the mail from Rugby. Was it one of the Rose-and-Crown flies, d’ye think?”
“Oh, yes, the fly belonged to Lisford. I’m sure of that, for Tim Baling was drivin’ it and wished me good-night.”
Mr. Carter left the Lisford emporium, and ran over to the Rose and Crown, where he saw the man who had driven him to Shorncliffe station. This man told the detective that he had been fetched in the evening by the same young woman who fetched him in the morning, and that he had driven another gentleman, who walked lame like the first, and had his head and face wrapped up a deal, not to Shorncliffe station, but to little Petherington station, six miles on the Rugby side of Shorncliffe, where the gentleman and the young woman who was with him got into a second-class carriage in the slow train for Rugby. The gentleman had said, laughing, that the young woman was his housemaid, and he was taking her up to town on purpose to be married to her. He was a very pleasant-spoken gentleman, the flyman added, and paid uncommon liberal.
“I dare say he did,” muttered Mr. Carter.
He gave the man a shilling for his information, and went back to the fly that had brought him to the station. It was getting on for seven o’clock by this time, and Joseph Wilmot had had eight-and-forty hours’ start of him. The detective was quite down-hearted now.
He went up to London by the same train which he had every reason to suppose had carried Joseph Wilmot and his daughter two nights before, and at the Euston terminus he worked very hard on that night and on the following day to trace the missing man. But Joseph Wilmot was only a drop in the great ocean of London life. The train that was supposed to have brought him to town was a long train, coming through from the north. Half-a-dozen lame men with half-a-dozen young women for their companions might have passed unnoticed in the bustle and confusion of the arrival platform.
Mr. Carter questioned the guards, the ticket-collectors, the porters, the cabmen; but not one among them gave him the least scrap of available information. He went to Scotland Yard despairing, and laid his case before the authorities there.
“There’s only one way of having him,” he said, “and that’s the diamonds. From what I can make out, he had no money with him, and in that case he’ll be trying to turn some of those diamonds into cash.”
The following advertisement appeared in the Supplement to the Times for the next day:
“To Pawnbrokers and Others. — A liberal reward will be given to any person affording information that may lead to the apprehension of a tall man, walking lame, who is known to have a large quantity of unset diamonds in his possession, and who most likely has attempted to dispose of the same.”
But this advertisement remained unanswered.
“They’re too clever for us, sir,” Mr. Carter remarked to one of the Scotland-Yard officials. “Whoever Joseph Wilmot may have sold those diamonds to has got a good bargain, you may depend upon it, and means to stick to it. The pawnbrokers and others think our advertisement a plant, you may depend upon it”
“I went back to my mother’s house a broken and a disappointed man. I had solved the mystery of Margaret’s conduct, and at the same time had set a barrier between myself and the woman I loved.
“Was there any hope that she would ever be my wife? Reason told me that there was none. In her eyes I must henceforth appear the man who had voluntarily set himself to work to discover her father’s guilt, and track him to the gallows.
“Could she ever again love me with this knowledge in her mind? Could she ever again look me in the face, and smile at me, remembering this? The very sound of my name must in future be hateful to her.
“I knew the strength of my noble girl’s love for her reprobate father. I had seen the force of that affection tested by so many cruel trials. I had witnessed my poor girl’s passionate grief at Joseph Wilmot’s supposed death: and I had seen all the intensity of her anguish when the secret of his existence, which was at the same time the secret of his guilt, became known to her.
“‘She renounced me then, rather than renounce that guilty wretch,’ I thought; ‘she will hate me now that I have been the means of bringing his most hideous crime to light.’
“Yes, the crime was hideous — almost unparalleled in horror. The treachery which had lured the victim to his death seemed almost less horrible than the diabolical art which had fixed upon the name of the murdered man the black stigma of a suspected crime.
“But I knew too well that, in all the blackness of his guilt, Margaret Wilmot would cling to her father as truly, as tenderly, as she had clung to him in those early days when the suspicion of his worthlessness had been only a dark shadow for ever brooding between the man and his only child. I knew this, and I had no hope that she would ever forgive me for my part in the weaving of that strange chain of evidence which made the condemnation of Joseph Wilmot.
“These were the thoughts that tormented me during the first fortnight after my return from the miserable journey to Winchester; these were the thoughts for ever revolving in my tired brain while I waited for tidings from the detective.
“During all that time it never once occurred to me that there was any chance, however remote, of Joseph Wilmot’s escape from his pursuer.
“I had seen the science of the detective police so invariably triumphant over the best-planned schemes of the most audacious criminals, that I should have considered — had I ever debated the question, which I never did — Joseph Wilmot’s evasion of justice an actual impossibility. It was most likely that he would be taken at Maudesley Abbey entirely unprepared, in his ignorance of the fatal discovery at Winchester; an easy prey to the experienced detective.
“Indeed, I thought that his immediate arrest was almost a certainty; and every morning, when I took up the papers, I expected to see a prominent announcement to the effect that the long-undiscovered Winchester mystery was at last solved, and that the murderer had been taken by one of the detective police.
“But the papers gave no tidings of Joseph Wilmot; and I was surprised, at the end of a week’s time, to read the account of a detective’s skirmish on board a schooner some miles off Hull, which had resulted in the drowning of one Stephen Vallance, an old offender. The detective’s name was given as Henry Carter. Were there two Henry Carters in the small band of London detective police? or was it possible that my Henry Carter could have given up so profitable a prize as Joseph Wilmot in order to pursue unknown criminals upon the high seas? A week after I had read of this mysterious adventure, Mr. Carter made his appearance at Clapham, very grave of aspect and dejected of manner.
“‘It’s no use, sir,’ he said; ‘it’s humiliating to an officer of my standing in the force; but I’d better confess it freely. I’ve been sold, sir — sold by a young woman too, which makes it three times as mortifying, and a kind of insult to the male sex in general!’
“My heart gave a great throb.
“‘Do you mean that Joseph Wilmot has escaped? I asked.
“He has, sir; as clean as ever a man escaped yet. He hasn’t left this country, not to my belief, for I’ve been running up and down between the different outports like mad. But what of that? If he hasn’t left the country, and if he doesn’t mean to leave the country, so much the better for him, and so much the worse for those that want to catch him. It’s trying to leave England that brings most of ’em to grief, and Joseph Wilmot’s an old enough hand to know that. I’ll wager he’s living as quiet and respectable as any gentleman ever lived yet.’
“Mr. Carter went on to tell me the whole story of his disappointments and mortifications. I could understand all now: the moonlit figure in the Winchester street, the dusky shadow beneath the dripping branches in the grove. I could understand all now: my poor girl — my poor, brave girl.
“When I was alone, I rendered up my thanks to Heaven for the escape of Joseph Wilmot. I had done nothing to impede the course of justice, though I had known full well that the punishment of the evil-doer would crush the bravest and purest heart that ever beat in an innocent woman’s bosom. I had not dared to attempt any interposition between Joseph Wilmot and the punishment of his crime; but I was, nevertheless, most heartily thankful that Providence had suffered him to escape that hideous earthly doom which is supposed to be the wisest means of ridding society of a wretch.
“But for the wretch himself, surely long years of penitence must make a better expiation of his guilt than that one short agony — those few spasmodic throes, which render his death such a pleasant spectacle for a sight-seeing populace.
“I was glad, for the sake of the guilty and miserable creature himself, that Joseph Wilmot had escaped. I was still gladder for the sake of that dear hope which was more to me than any hope on earth — the hope of making Margaret my wife.
“‘There will be no hideous recollection interwoven with my image now,’ I thought; ‘she will forgive me when I tell her the history of my journey to Winchester. She will let me take her away from the companionship that must be loathsome to her, in spite of her devotion. She will let me bring her to a happy home as my cherished wife.’
“I thought this, and then in the next moment I feared that Margaret might cling persistently to the dreadful duty of her life — the duty of shielding and protecting a criminal; the duty of teaching a wicked man to repent of his sins.
“I inserted an advertisement in the Times newspaper, assuring Margaret of my unalterable love and devotion, which no circumstances could lessen, and imploring her to write to me. Of course the advertisement was so worded as to give no clue to the identity of the person to whom it was addressed. The acutest official in Scotland Yard could have gathered nothing from the lines ‘From C. to M.,’ so like other appeals made through the same medium.
“But my advertisement remained unanswered — no letter came from Margaret.
“The weeks and months crept slowly past. The story of the evidence of the clothes found at Winchester was made public, together with the history of Joseph Wilmot’s flight and escape. The business created a considerable sensation, and Lord Herriston himself went down to Winchester to witness the exhumation of the remains of the man who had been buried under the name of Joseph Wilmot.
“The dead man’s face was no longer recognizable. Only by induction was the identity of Henry Dunbar ever established: but the evidence of the identity was considered conclusive by all who were interested in the question. Still I doubt whether, in the fabric of circumstantial evidence against Joseph Wilmot, legal sophistry could not have discovered some loophole by which the murderer might have escaped the full penalty of his crime.
“The remains were removed from Winchester to Lisford Church, where Percival Dunbar was buried in a vault beneath the chancel. The murdered man’s coffin was placed beside that of his father, and a simple marble tablet recording the untimely death of Henry Dunbar, cruelly and treacherously assassinated in a grove near Winchester, was erected by order of Lady Jocelyn, who was abroad with her husband when the story of her father’s death was revealed to her.
“The weeks and months crept by. The revelation of Joseph Wilmot’s guilt left me free to return to my old position in the house of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby. But I had no heart to go back to the old business now the hope that had made my commonplace city life so bright seemed for ever broken. I was surprised, however, into a confession of the truth by the good-natured junior partner, who lived near us on Clapham Common, and who dropped in sometimes as he went by my mother’s gate, to while away an idle half-hour in some political discussion.
“He insisted upon my returning to the office directly he heard the secret of my resignation. The business was now entirely his; for there had been no one to succeed Henry Dunbar, and Mr. John Lovell had sold the dead man’s interest on behalf of his client, Lady Jocelyn. I went back to my old post, but not to remain long in my old position; for a week after my return Mr. Balderby made me an offer which I considered as generous as it was flattering, and which I ultimately and somewhat reluctantly accepted.
“By means of this new and most liberal arrangement, which demanded from me a very moderate amount of capital, I became junior partner in the firm, which was now conducted under the names of Dunbar, Dunbar, Balderby, and Austin. The double Dunbar was still essential to us, though the last of the male Dunbars was dead and buried under the chancel of Lisford Church. The old name was the legitimate stamp of our dignity as one of the oldest Anglo-Indian banking firms in the city of London.
“My new life was smooth enough, and there was so much business to be got through, so much responsibility vested in my hands — for Mr. Balderby was getting fat and lazy, as regarded affairs in the City, though untiring in the production of more forced pine-apples and hothouse grapes than he could consume or give away — that I had not much leisure in which to think of the one sorrow of my life. A City man may break his heart for disappointed love, but he must do it out of business hours if he pretends to be an honourable man: for every sorrowful thought which wanders to the loved and lost is a separate treason against the ‘house’ he serves.
“Smoking my after-dinner cigar in the narrow pathways and miniature shrubberies of my mother’s garden, I could venture to think of my lost Margaret; and I did think of her, and pray for her with as fervent aspirations as ever rose from a man’s faithful heart. And in the dusky stillness of the evening, with the faint odour of dewy flowers round me, and distant stars shining dimly in that far-off opal sky; against which the branches of the elms looked so black and dense, I used to beguile myself — or it may be that the influence of the scene and hour beguiled me — into the thought that my separation from Margaret could be only a temporary one. We loved each other so truly! And after all, what under heaven is stronger than love? I thought of my poor girl in some lonely, melancholy place, hiding with her guilty father; in daily companionship with a miserable wretch, whose life must be made hideous to himself by the memory of his crime. I thought of the self-abnegation, the heroic devotion, which made Margaret strong enough to endure such an existence as this: and out of my belief in the justice of Heaven there grew up in my mind the faith in a happier life in store for my noble girl.
“My mother supported me in this faith. She knew all Margaret’s story now, and she sympathized with my love and admiration for Joseph Wilmot’s daughter. A woman’s heart must have been something less than womanly if it could have tailed to appreciate my darling’s devotion: and my mother was about the last of womankind to be wanting in tenderness and compassion for any one who had need of her pity and was worthy of her love.
“So we both cherished the thought of the absent girl in our minds, talking of her constantly on quiet evenings, when we sat opposite to each other in the snug lamp-lit drawing-room, unhindered by the presence of guests. We did not live by any means a secluded or gloomy life, for my mother was fond of pleasant society: and I was quite as true to Margaret while associating with agreeable people, and hearing cheerful voices buzzing round me, as I could have been in a hermitage whose stillness was only broken by the howling of the storm.
“It was in the dreariest part of the winter which followed Joseph Wilmot’s escape that an incident occurred which gave me a strangely-mingled feeling of pleasure and pain. I was sitting one evening in my mother’s breakfast-parlour — a little room situated close to the hall-door — when I heard the ringing of the bell at the garden-gate. It was nine o’clock at night, a bitter wintry night, in which I should least have expected any visitor. So I went on reading my paper, while my mother speculated about the matter.
“Three minutes after the bell had rung, our parlour-maid came into the room, and placed something on the table before me.
“‘A parcel, sir,’ she said, lingering a little; perhaps in the hope that, in my eager curiosity, I might immediately open the packet, and give her an opportunity of satisfying her own desire for information.
“I put aside my newspaper, and looked down at the object before me.
“Yes, it was a parcel — a small oblong box — about the size of those pasteboard receptacles which are usually associated with Seidlitz powders — an oblong box, neatly packed in white paper, secured with several seals, and addressed to Clement Austin, Esq., Willow Bank, Clapham.
“But the hand, the dear, well-known hand, which had addressed the packet — my blood thrilled through my veins as I recognized the familiar characters.
“‘Who brought this parcel?’ I asked, starting from my comfortable easy-chair, and going straight out into the hall.
“The astonished parlour-maid told me that the packet had been given her by a lady, ‘a lady who was dressed in black, or dark things,’ the girl said, ‘and whose face was quite hidden by a thick veil.’ After leaving the small packet, this lady got into a cab a few paces from our gate, the girl added, ‘and the cab had tore off as fast as it could tear!’
“I went out into the open yard, and looked despairingly London-wards. There was no vestige of any cab: of course there had been ample time for the cab in question to get far beyond reach of pursuit. I felt almost maddened with this disappointment and vexation. It was Margaret, Margaret herself most likely, who had come to my door; and I had lost the opportunity of seeing her.
“I stood staring blankly up and down the road for some time, and then went back to the parlour, where my mother, with pardonable weakness, had pounced upon the packet, and was examining it with eyes opened to their widest extent.
“‘It is Margaret’s hand!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, do open — do, please, open it directly. What on earth can it be?’
“I tore off the white paper covering, and revealed just such an object as I had expected to see — a box, a common-place pasteboard box, tied securely across and across with thin twine. I cut the twine and opened the box. At the top there was a layer of jewellers’ wool, and on that being removed, my mother gave a little shriek of surprise and admiration.
“The box contained a fortune — a fortune in the shape of unset diamonds, lying as close together as their nature would admit — unset diamonds, which glittered and flashed upon us in the lamplight.
“Inside the lid there was a folded paper, upon, which the following lines were written in the dear hand, the never-to-be-forgotten hand:
“‘EVER-DEAREST CLEMENT — The sad and miserable secret which led to our parting is a secret no longer. You know all, and you have no doubt forgiven, and perhaps in part forgotten, the wretched woman to whom your love was once so dear, and to whom the memory of your love will ever be a consolation and a happiness. If I dared to pray to you to think pitifully of that most unhappy man whose secret is now known to you, I would do so; but I cannot hope for so much mercy from men: I can only hope it from God, who in His supreme wisdom alone can fathom the mysteries of a repentant heart. I beg of you to deliver to Lady Jocelyn the diamonds I place in your hands. They belong of right to her; and I regret to say they only represent apart of the money withdrawn from the funds in the name of Henry Dunbar. Good-bye, dear and generous friend; this it the last you will ever hear of one whose name must sound odious to the ears of honest men. Pity me, and forget me; and may a happier woman be to you that which I can never be! M. W.’
“This was all. Nothing could be firmer than the tone of this letter, in spite of its pensive gentleness. My poor girl could not be brought to believe that I should hold it no disgrace to make her my wife, in spite of the hideous story connected with her name. In my vexation and disappointment, I appealed once more to the unfailing friend of parted or persecuted lovers, the Jupiter of Printing-House Square.
“‘Margaret,’ I wrote in the advertisement which adorned the second column of the Times Supplement on twenty consecutive occasions, ‘I hold you to your old promise, and consider the circumstances of our parting as in no manner a release from your old engagement. The greatest wrong you can inflict upon me will be inflicted by your desertion. C. A.”
“This advertisement was as useless as its predecessor. I looked in vain for any answer.
“I lost no time in fulfilling the commission intrusted to me I went down to Shorncliffe, and delivered the box of diamonds into the hands of John Lovell, the solicitor; for Lady Jocelyn was still on the Continent. He packed the box in paper, and made me seal it with my signet-ring, in the presence of one of his clerks, before he put it away in an iron safe near his desk.
“When this was done, and when the Times advertisement had been inserted for the twentieth time without eliciting any reply, I gave myself up to a kind of despair about Margaret. She had failed to see my advertisement, I thought; for she would scarcely have been so hard-hearted as to leave it unanswered. She had failed to see this advertisement, as well as the previous appeal made to her through the same medium, and she would no doubt fail to see any other. I had reason to know that she was, or had been, in England, for she would scarcely have intrusted the diamonds to strange hands; but it was only too likely that she had chosen the very eve of her own and her father’s departure for some distant country as the most fitting time at which to leave the valuable parcel with me.
“‘Her influence over her father must be complete,’ I thought, ‘or he would scarcely have consented to surrender such a treasure as the diamonds. He has most likely retained enough to pay the passage out to America for himself and Margaret; and my poor darling will wander with her wretched father into some remote corner of the United States, where she will be hidden from me for ever.’
“I remembered with unspeakable pain how wide the world was, and how easy it would be for the woman I loved to be for ever lost to me.
“I gave myself up to despair; it was not resignation, for my life was empty and desolate without Margaret; try as I might to carry my burden quietly, and put a brave face upon my sorrow. Up to the time of Margaret’s appearance on that bleak winter’s night, I had cherished the hope — or even more than hope — the belief that we should be reunited: but after that night the old faith in a happy future crumbled away, and the idea that Joseph Wilmot’s daughter had left England grew little by little into conviction.
“I should never see her again. I fully believed this now. There was never to be any more sunshine in my life: and there was nothing for me to do but to resign myself to the even tenor of an existence in which the quiet duties of a business career would leave little time for any idle grief or lamentation. My sorrow was a part of my life: but even those who knew me best failed to fathom the depth of that sorrow. To them I seemed only a grave business man, devoted to the dry details of a business life.
“Eighteen months had passed since the bleak winter’s night on which the box of diamonds had been intrusted to me; eighteen months, so slow and quiet in their course that I was beginning to feel myself an old man, older than many old men, inasmuch as I had outlived the wreck of the one bright hope which had made life dear to me. It was midsummer time, and the counting-house in St. Gundolph Lane, and the parlour in which — in virtue of my new position — I had now a right to work, seemed peculiarly hot and frowsy, dusty and obnoxious. My work being especially hard at this time knocked me up; and I was compelled, under pain of solemn threats from my mother’s pet medical attendant, to stay at home, and take two or three days’ rest. I submitted, very unwillingly; for however dusty and stifling the atmosphere in St. Gundolph Lane might be, it was better to be there, victorious over my sorrow, by means of man’s grandest ally in the battle with black care — to wit, hard work — than to be lying on the sofa in my mother’s pleasant drawing-room, listening to the cheery click of two knitting-needles, and thinking of my wasted life.
“I submitted, however, to take the three days’ holiday; and on the second day, after a couple of hours’ penance on the sofa, I got up, languid and tired still, but bent on some employment by which I might escape from the sad monotony of my own thoughts.
“‘I think I’ll go into the next room and put my papers to rights, mother,’ I said.
“My dear indulgent mother remonstrated: I was to rest and keep myself quiet, she said, and not to worry myself about papers and tiresome things of that kind, which appertained only to the office. But I had my own way, and went into the little room, where there were flowers blooming and caged birds singing in the open window.
“This room was a sort of snuggery, half library, half breakfast-parlour, and it was in this room my mother and I had been sitting on the night on which the diamonds had been brought to me.
“On one side of the fireplace stood my mother’s work-table, on the other the desk at which I wrote, whenever I wrote any letters at home — a ponderous old-fashioned office desk, with a row of drawers on each side, a deep well in the centre, and under that a large waste-paper basket, full of old envelopes and torn scraps of letters.
“I wheeled a comfortable chair up to the desk, and began my task. It was a very long one, and involved a great deal of folding, sorting, and arranging of documents, which perhaps were scarcely worth the trouble I took with them. At any rate, the work kept my fingers employed, though my mind still brooded over the old trouble.
“I sat for nearly three hours; for it was a very long time since I had had a day’s leisure, and the accumulation of letters, bills, and receipts was something very formidable. At last all was done, the letters and bills endorsed and tied into neat packets that would have done credit to a lawyer’s office; and I flung myself back in my chair with a sigh of relief.
“But I had not finished my work yet; for I drew out the waste-paper basket presently, and emptied its contents upon the floor, in order that I might make sure of there being no important paper thrown by chance amongst them, before I consigned them to be swept away by the housemaid.
“I tossed over the chaotic fragments, the soiled envelopes, the circulars of enterprising Clapham tradesmen, and all the other rubbish that had accumulated within the last two years. The dust floated up to my face and almost blinded me.
“Yes, there was something of consequence amongst the papers — something, at least, which I should have held it sacrilegious to consign to Molly, the housemaid — the wrapper of the box containing the diamonds; the paper wrapper, directed in the dear hand I loved, the hand of Margaret Wilmot.
“I must have left the wrapper on the table on the night when I received the box, and one of the servants had no doubt put it into the waste-paper basket. I picked up the sheet of paper and folded it neatly; it was a very small treasure for a lover to preserve, perhaps: but then I had so few relics of the woman who was to have been my wife.
“As I folded the paper, I looked, half in absence of mind, at the stamp in the corner. It was an old-fashioned sheet of Bath post, stamped with the name of the stationer who had sold it — Jakins, Kylmington. Kylmington; yes, I remembered there was a town in Hampshire — a kind of watering-place, I believed — called Kylmington! And the paper had been bought there — and if so, it was more than likely that Margaret had been there.
“Could it be so? Could it be really possible that in this sheet of paper I had found a clue which would help me to trace my lost love? Could it be so? The new hope sent a thrill of sudden life and energy through my veins. Ill — worn out, knocked up by over-work? Who could dare to say I was any thing of the kind? I was as strong as Hercules.
“I put the folded paper in the breast-pocket of my coat, and took down Bradshaw. Dear Bradshaw, what an interesting writer you seemed to me on that day! Yes, Kylmington was in Hampshire; three hours and a half from London, with due allowance for delays in changing carriages. There was a train would convey me from Waterloo to Kylmington that afternoon — a train that would leave Waterloo at half-past three.
“I looked at my watch. It was half-past two. I had only an hour for all my preparations and the drive to Waterloo. I went to the drawing-room, where my mother was still sitting at work near the open window. She started when she saw my face, for my new hope had given it a strange brightness.
“‘Why, Clem,’ she said, ‘you look as pleased as if you’d found some treasure among your papers.’
“‘I hope I have, mother. I hope and believe that I have found a clue that will enable me to trace Margaret.’
“‘You don’t mean it?’
“‘I’ve found the name of a town which I believe to be the place where she was staying before she brought those diamonds to me. I am going there to try and discover some tidings of her. I am going at once. Don’t look anxious, dear mother; the journey to Kylmington, and the hope that takes me there, will do me more good than all the drugs in Mr. Bainham’s surgery. Be my own dear indulgent mother, as you have always been, and pack me a couple of clean shirts in a portmanteau. I shall come back to-morrow night, I dare say, as I’ve only three days’ leave of absence from the office.’
“My mother, who had never in her life refused me anything, did not long oppose me to-day. A hansom cab rattled me off to the station; and at five minutes before the half-hour I was on the platform, with my ticket for Kylmington in my pocket.”
“The clock of Kylmington church, which was as much behind any other public timekeeper I had ever encountered as the town of Kylmington was behind any other town I had ever explored, struck eight as I opened the little wooden gate of the churchyard, and went into the shade of an avenue of stunted sycamores, which was supposed to be the chief glory of Kylmington.
“It was twenty minutes past eight by London time, and the summer sun had gone down, leaving all the low western sky bathed in vivid yellow light, which deepened into crimson as I watched it.
“I had been more than an hour and a half in Kylmington. I had taken some slight refreshment at the principal hotel — a queer, old-fashioned place, with a ruinous, weedy appearance pervading it, and the impress of incurable melancholy stamped on the face of every scrap of rickety furniture and lopsided window-blind. I had taken some slight refreshment — to this hour I don’t know what it was I ate upon that balmy summer evening, so entirely was my mind absorbed by that bright hope, which was growing brighter and brighter every moment. I had been to the stationer’s shop, which still bore above its window the faded letters of the name ‘Jakins,’ though the last of the Jakinses had long left Kylmington. I had been to this shop, and from a good-natured but pensive matron I had heard tidings that made my bright hope a still brighter certainty.
“I began business by asking if there was any lady in Kylmington who gave lessons in music and singing.
“‘Yes,’ Mr. Jakins’s successor told me, ‘there were two music-mistresses in the town — one was Madame Carinda, who taught at Grove House, the fashionable ladies’ school; the other was Miss Wilson, whose terms were lower than Madame Carinda’s — though Madame wasn’t a bit a foreigner except by name — and who was much respected in the town. Likewise her papa, which had been quite the gentleman, attending church twice every Sunday as regular as the day came round, and being quite a picture of respectability, with his venerable pious-looking grey hair.’
“I gave a little start as I heard this.
“‘Miss Wilson lived with her papa, did she?’ I asked.
“‘Yes,’ the woman told me; ‘Miss Wilson had lived with her papa till the poor old gentleman’s death.’
“‘Oh, he was dead, then?’
“‘Yes, Mr. Wilson had died in the previous December, of a kind of decline, fading away like, almost unbeknown; and being, oh, so faithfully nursed and cared for by that blessed daughter of his. And people did say that he had once been very wealthy, and had lost his money in some speculation; and the loss of it had preyed upon his mind, and he had fallen into a settled melancholy like, and was never seen to smile.’
“The woman opened a drawer as she talked to me, and, after turning over some papers, took out a card — a card with embossed edges, fly-spotted, and dusty, and with a little faded blue ribbon attached to it — a card on which there was written, in the hand I knew so well, an announcement that Miss Wilson, of the Hermitage, would give instruction in music and singing for a guinea a quarter.
“I had been about to ask for a description of the young music-mistress, but I had no need to do so now.
“‘Miss Wilson is the young lady I wish to see,’ I said. ‘Will you direct me to the Hermitage? I will call there early to-morrow morning.’
“The proprietress of Jakins’s, who was, I dare say, something of a matchmaker, after the manner of all good-natured matrons, smiled significantly.
“‘I know where you could see Miss Wilson, nearer than the Hermitage,’ she said, ‘and sooner than to-morrow morning. She works very hard all day — poor, dear, delicate-looking young thing; but every evening when it’s tolerably fine, she goes to the churchyard. It’s the only walk I’ve ever seen her take since her father’s death. She goes past my window regular every night, just about when I’m shutting up, and from my door I can see her open the gate and go into the churchyard. It’s a doleful walk to take alone at that time of the evening, to be sure, though some folks think it’s the pleasantest walk in all Kylmington.’
“It was in consequence of this conversation that I found myself under the shadow of the trees while the Kylmington clock was striking eight.
“The churchyard was a square flat, surrounded on all sides by a low stone wall, beyond which the fields sloped down to the mouth of a river that widened into the sea at a little distance from Kylmington, but which hereabouts had a very dingy melancholy look when the tide was out, as it was to-night.
“There was no living creature except myself in the churchyard as I came out of the shadow of the trees on to the flat, where the grass grew long among the unpretending headstones.
“I looked at all the newest stones till I came at last to one standing in the obscurest corner of the churchyard, almost hidden by the low wall.
“There was a very brief inscription on this modest headstone; but it was enough to tell me whose ashes lay buried under the spot on which I stood.
“To the Memory of
J. W.
Who died December 19, 1853.
‘Lord have mercy upon me, a sinner!‘
“I was still looking at this brief memorial, when I heard a woman’s dress rustling upon the long rank grass, and turning suddenly, saw my darling coming towards me, very pale, very pensive, but with a kind of seraphic resignation upon her face which made her seem to me more beautiful than I had ever seen her before.
“She started at seeing me, but did not faint. She only grew paler than she had been before, and pressed her two hands on her breast, as if to still the sudden tumult of her heart.
“I made her take my arm and lean upon it, and we walked up and down the narrow path talking until the last low line of light faded out of the dusky sky.
“All that I could say to her was scarcely enough to shake her resolution — to uproot her conviction that her father’s guilt was an insurmountable barrier between us. But when I told her of my broken life — when, in the earnestness of my pleading, she perceived the proof of a constancy that no time could shake, I could see that she wavered.
“‘I only want you to be happy, Clement,’ she said. ‘My former life has been such an unhappy one, that I tremble at the thought of linking it to yours. The shame, Clement — think of that. How will you answer people when they ask you the name of your wife?’
“‘I will tell them that she has no name, but that which she has honoured by accepting from me. I will tell them that she is the noblest and dearest of women, and that her history is a story of unparalleled virtue and devotion!’
“I sent a telegraphic message to my mother early the next morning; and in the afternoon the dear soul arrived at Kylmington to embrace her future daughter. We sat late in the little parlour of the Hermitage; a dreary cottage, looking out on the flat shore, half sand, half mud, and the low water lying in greenish pools. Margaret told us of her father’s penitence.
“‘No repentance was ever more sincere, Clement,’ she said, for she seemed afraid we should doubt the possibility of penitence in such a criminal as Joseph Wilmot. ‘My poor father — my poor wronged, unhappy father! — yes, wronged, Clement, you must not forget that; you must never forget that in the first instance he was wronged, and deeply wronged, by the man who was murdered. When first we came here, his mind brooded upon that, and he seemed to look upon what he had done as an ignorant savage would look upon the vengeance which his heathenish creed had taught him to consider a justifiable act of retaliation. Little by little I won my poor father away from such thoughts as these: till by-and-by he grew to think of Henry Dunbar as he was when they were young men together, linked by a kind of friendship, before the forging of the bills, and all the trouble that followed. He thought of his old master as he knew him first, and his heart was softened towards the dead man’s memory; and from that time his penitence began. He was sorry for what he had done. No words can describe that sorrow, Clement: and may you never have to watch, as I have watched, the anguish of a guilty soul! Heaven is very merciful. If my father had failed to escape, and had been hung, he would have died hardened and impenitent. God had compassion on him, and gave him time to repent.’”
The End