Rupert Godwin

THE STOLEN LETTER.

The banker took no measures for reviving Clara Westford from the fainting-fit into which she had fallen after the perusal of that paragraph in the Times.

She had fallen backwards, and her pale still face was turned towards the ceiling.

Rupert Godwin knelt beside her, and examined that white statuesque face with a long and earnest scrutiny.

“Quite unconscious!” he exclaimed, as he lifted Mrs. Westford’s unresisting hand, and watched it fall inert and lifeless. “Death itself could scarcely be less conscious of surrounding events. Nothing could be better.”

The banker rose from his knees, and with a soft and cautious footstep walked slowly round the room.

It was charmingly furnished, and it bore the traces of constant occupation. There was an open work-table, an open piano, a box of water-colours, and upon a table by one of the windows there was an elegant little walnut-wood easel. In a comfortable corner near the fireplace stood a desk in different coloured woods, with an easy-chair before it. The lid of the desk was closed, but a bunch of keys hung from the lock.

“It looks like her desk,” muttered the banker, “and if so I can scarcely fail to find what I want.”

He glanced once more at the figure lying on the sunlit floor.

Clara Westford had not stirred.

Then, with careful fingers, Rupert Godwin lifted the lid of the desk and looked within.

In a row of pigeon-holes before him he saw numerous packets of letters, some tied with common red tape, others with blue ribbon.

“Those are his letters,” muttered the banker, with a sneer. “I would wager a small fortune that those are his letters which she has tied with that dainty blue ribbon. Sir John Ponsonby’s haughty daughter can be as sentimental as a school-girl, I daresay, where her dashing Captain is concerned.”

He took out one of the packets.

Yes, upon the uppermost envelope was written—“From my husband.”

“Let me see how the fellow signs his name,” said Rupert Godwin. “Perhaps he uses only initials, and I shall be balked that way. I must have his full signature.”

The banker drew one of the letters from the packet, and took it from its envelope.

It was a very long letter, and it was signed in full—“Harley Westford.”

“Yes, the Fates favour my schemes,” muttered Rupert Godwin, as he put the single letter in his waistcoat-pocket, and replaced the packet in the pigeon-hole from which he had taken it.

Then, after one last look at Clara Westford, he left the room.

He went to the hall, where he rang a bell violently. A female servant hurried to answer his summons, and started back in alarm at the sight of a stranger.

“I am an old friend of Mrs. Westford’s,” said Rupert Godwin; “but unhappily I am the bearer of very ill news. Your mistress has fainted; you had better run to her at once. Stay; what is the name of your doctor?”

“Doctor Sanderson, sir, in the village. He lives at the house with the green blinds, please sir. The first on the left as you pass the Seven Stars, please, sir.”

“I’ll send him, then, immediately.”

“Thank you, sir; thank you.”

The girl ran away, eager to be with her mistress; and the banker left the ill-fated house, whose peace had fled before his ill-omened coming.

He went to the village, and found the house where the surgeon lived. He left a message for that gentleman, and then walked to a little inn where he had left his dog-cart and groom.

He stepped into the vehicle and drove towards Winchester, whence he had come that day. On the road, a little pony-carriage passed him, driven by a girl with bright golden hair, set off by a coquettish little turban hat. A young man was lolling by her side.

That bright happy-looking girl was Violet Westford.

The banker started as if he had seen a ghost, and looked back after the vehicle with an eager gaze.

“Yes, that girl must be her daughter,” he thought. “How the sight of her recalls the past!—the very day when I met Clara Ponsonby riding by her father’s side—the day when sudden love sprang up in my heart, an ‘Adam at his birth.’ And from that hour to this I have loved her. Yes, I have loved her, though hatred and vengeful thoughts have mingled strangely with my love. I love her; but I would bring her to my feet. I worship her; and yet I would humiliate her to the very dust.”

With such thoughts as these in his mind, Rupert Godwin drove back to Winchester, and alighted at the chief hotel in the old city.

He had come to Winchester; but not alone. Crime has terrors and penalties which even the cleverest criminal cannot escape. Rupert Godwin knew that he was to some extent in the power of his old clerk Jacob Danielson, and he determined to make that clerk his accomplice.

“If the old man is with me in my schemes, and accepts a reward for his service, he can never betray me,” he argued with himself.

The banker knew that Jacob Danielson was the slave of two passions—two fatal passions, which render a man the easy prey of any tempter.

These two passions were avarice and the love of strong drink. Jacob Danielson was, in his pettifogging way, a miser; and he was an habitual brandy-drinker.

To get brandy, or to get money, he would have been tempted to sell his soul to the legendary fiend of mediæval times, who seems to have been always on the look-out for that kind of bargain.

The banker had watched his clerk almost as closely as the clerk had watched him, and he knew the weak points of Danielson’s character.

“He would like to be my master,” thought Rupert Godwin, “and he possesses knowledge that might give him a powerful hold over me; but, in spite of that, I will make him my slave.”

In the mean time the banker had determined upon conciliating his clerk in every way. The hand of steel in the velvet glove was exemplified by Mr. Godwin’s policy. He had brought Danielson to Winchester with him; and that gentleman was enjoying free quarters at the hotel, and drinking as much brandy as he pleased to call for.

The banker’s policy was very simple. He wanted to destroy the only creature he feared, and he thought that he should be able to effect that work of destruction through the agency of Danielson’s own vices.

He found the clerk sitting in a parlour at the hotel—a very pleasant apartment, looking into a garden. A decanter half full of brandy stood on the table; but the clerk was sitting in a moody attitude, with his arms folded, and he was not drinking.

The banker looked at his subordinate with a suspicious glance. Rupert Godwin did not care to see his clerk thus deeply absorbed in thought.

Sharp and rapid in all his habits and manners as Danielson ordinarily was, he seemed this afternoon almost like a creature absorbed in a dream. He turned his eyes slowly towards the banker, and looked at him with a strange unseeing gaze, almost as a blind man might have looked at the sun with his dull sightless orbs.

“Why, Jacob,” cried Rupert Godwin, “what’s the matter with you? You look like a man who has newly awakened from a trance.”

“I have been in a trance,” answered the clerk in a dreamy tone. “I was out in the street just now, and I saw a ghost pass by.”

“A ghost?”

“Yes; a ghost, such as men often see in the broad sunlight—the ghost of my dead youth. I saw a woman—the living image of the only one creature I ever loved; and she seemed to me like a phantom.”

The clerk sighed as he stretched out his tremulous hand to the decanter and refilled his glass.

“But there’s comfort here,” he muttered; “there’s always comfort in this. There’s not many sorrows that this won’t drown, if a man can only get enough of it.”

Never had the banker seen his clerk so deeply moved. “Why, Jacob,” he exclaimed, “this does indeed surprise me! I thought you were a man of iron—hard as iron, pitiless as iron, strong as iron; I never knew you had a heart.”

“No more I have,” answered the clerk; “not now—not now. I had a heart once, and it was broken. I was a fool once, and I was made to pay for my folly. But that’s long gone by. Come, Mr. Godwin, I’m myself again. You don’t pay me to dream; you pay me to work, and I’m ready for your work, whatever it is. You didn’t bring me down to Winchester for my pleasure, or for yours. You brought me because you had something for me to do. What is it? that’s the question.”

“A question not to be answered just yet, Jacob,” replied the banker. “We’ll dine first, and go to business afterwards. The evenings are chilly, so I’ll order a fire.”

The order was given, and the fire lighted; a well-chosen little dinner was served presently, and the two men seated themselves at the table, which glittered with cut glass and massive plate.

“Strange,” thought Rupert Godwin, as he looked furtively at the wizen face of the clerk, “this man talks of the ghost of his dead youth! Have not I too, seen the phantom of the past—that girl with the violet eyes and the golden hair? She seemed to me like the ghost of the Clara Ponsonby I fell in love with two-and-twenty years ago.”

The clerk was by this time quite himself again, and he had resumed that half-servile, half-ironical manner which he generally had with his master.

“This is indeed luxury,” he said, rubbing his dry withered palms, as he looked from the handsomely furnished room to the glittering dinner-table. “It is not every day that I dine like this. You are a good master, Mr. Godwin.”

“I mean to be a liberal one,” answered the banker; “and I will pay you well, if you serve me faithfully. I make no pretence of generosity, but I will pay handsomely for handsome service.”

“Good, Mr. Godwin; the wisest men are those who pretend the least.”

The banker knew that it was useless to play the hypocrite with Jacob Danielson. Clever as Rupert Godwin was, he always felt that the clerk’s sharp rat-like eyes could fathom the remotest recesses of his mind.

There was only one secret that he believed to be hidden from Jacob Danielson. That was the secret of Harley Westford’s disappearance.

Little more was said during dinner, for the waiters of the hotel were in attendance throughout the repast. Mr. Godwin kept his clerk’s glass filled with a succession of expensive wines; and the waiters opened their eyes to their widest extent as they saw the little wizened man pour the sparkling liquids down his throat as fast as they could supply them.

The banker himself did not drink; and this fact did not escape Jacob Danielson, who smiled a cunning smile as he perceived his employer’s abstinence.

At last the cloth was removed, and dessert was placed upon the table—the conventional dessert peculiar to provincial hotels, flanked by a decanter of tawny port, and a jug of claret which the head-waiter declared to be genuine Lafitte, and which figured in the wine-carte at eighteen shillings a bottle. The head-waiter hovered about the table for a few minutes after that noted claret had been set before Mr. Godwin, poked the fire with a profoundly studious air, as of a man who had given a lifetime of study to the science of poking fires, looked meditatively at the two gentlemen as if deliberating upon the possibility of their wanting something else, and anon silently departed.

Then, with the curtains closely drawn, and the waxen lights gleaming from their tall silver branches, the two men drew their chairs closer to the hearth, and settled themselves for the evening.

“Now then for business,” exclaimed the clerk, as the sound of the head-waiter’s boots died away in the distance.

The banker was not quick to reply to this address. He was sitting looking at the fire, brooding darkly. His task was not an easy one, for he was about to ask Danielson to become his accomplice in a crime.

At last he spoke.

“Danielson,” he said, gravely, “you and I have been involved in many transactions, some of which the world would scarcely call honest.”

“Some of which the world would call decidedly dishonest,” answered the clerk, with a sinister grin.

“But, then, is it an honest world?” asked the banker.

“O yes; a very honest world, until it is found out.”

“Ay, there’s the difference. The detected villain is a scoundrel only fit for the gallows; the undetected villain may pass for a saint.”

There was a pause, and then the banker said, in a tone which he endeavoured to render indifferent:

“You remember that merchant captain—the man called Harley Westford—who came to Wilmingdon Hall to demand the return of that money which he had deposited with me?”

“O yes; I remember him perfectly.”

“I am sorry to tell you that the poor fellow is dead.”

“Indeed!”

Jacob Danielson looked very steadfastly at the face of his employer, but there was no surprise in the tone in which he uttered that one word “indeed.”

“Yes; the Lily Queen has been lost, and all hands with her.”

“But how do you know that Harley Westford was on board the Lily Queen?”

“How do I know it? Why, because he was captain and owner of the vessel, and because he declared his intention of sailing with her, without fail. Why should he not sail in the Lily Queen?”

“I can’t imagine any reason,” answered the clerk, with his steadfast gaze still fixed on the banker’s face, which had grown suddenly pallid. “I really can’t imagine any reason; but then, you know, such singular things happen in this life. There may have been something—some accident, to prevent Captain Westford’s departure.”

“Pshaw!” exclaimed Rupert Godwin. “Utterly impossible! I tell you, man, Harley Westford sailed in the Lily Queen, and has gone down to the bottom of the sea with her and her cargo.”

“And in that case Harley Westford’s heirs may come upon you at any moment for the twenty thousand pounds deposited in your hands.”

“They might come upon me for it, if they had any evidence that it was ever placed in my hands,” replied the banker. “But what if they have no such evidence?”

“There is the receipt which you gave Harley Westford.”

“Yes; and which has no doubt gone down with him to the depth of the ocean.”

“What if he lodged that receipt in other hands before sailing on his Chinese expedition?”

“That is scarcely likely. No man ever foresees his own doom. At any rate, I speculate upon the chance that Harley Westford carried the receipt with him, and that it perished with its owner. In that case, there is only one person who knows of the twenty thousand pounds—and that person is yourself. Can I trust you?”

“You have trusted me before.”

“Yes; and with important secrets, but never with such a secret as this. Will the gift of a thousand pounds, to be paid in ten instalments at intervals of six months—will such a gift as that buy your fidelity?”

“It will,” answered Jacob Danielson.

“Then I will execute any deed you choose to draw up, engaging myself to pay you that money. And now, I want something more than your silence. I want your service.”

“You shall have both.”

“Good!” replied the banker. “Now, then, listen to what I have to say. When Harley Westford deposited his fortune in my hands, he also deposited the title-deeds of a small estate in this county. Those deeds and that estate must be mine.”

“But how so?”

“By virtue of a deed executed by Harley Westford before his departure—a deed, giving me sole possession of the estate if a certain sum, lent by me to him, was not repaid within six months of the date of his signature.”

“O, indeed! The estate will be yours by virtue of such a deed as that!”

“Yes; a document formally drawn up by a lawyer, and signed by you as witness.”

“But I never witnessed any such deed,” answered the clerk.

“Your memory fails you to-night, my dear Danielson; you will have a better memory to-morrow, especially if I give you fifty pounds on account of our bargain.”

The banker said this with a sinister smile. The clerk fully understood him.

“Make it a hundred,” he exclaimed, “and you will find that I have an excellent memory.”

“So be it. And now I want you to try and remember if you have any friend—a lawyer’s clerk, we’ll say—who knows how to draw up a legal document in which there shall be no flaw, and who is also clever at imitating the handwriting of other people.”

“Let me think a little before I answer that question,” replied Danielson.

He sat for some minutes thinking deeply, with his sharp eyes fixed upon the fire.

“Yes,” he said at last, “I do know such a man.”

“And you will have the deed prepared and executed at once?”

“I will. The man will want money for his work.”

“He shall be paid handsomely,” answered the banker.

“And how about the signature which he is to imitate?”

Rupert Godwin took the stolen letter from his pocket, and tore off the Captain’s autograph. This he handed to Jacob Danielson.

“You understand what you have to do?” he asked.

“Perfectly.”

No more was said. The clerk’s brains seemed no more affected by the wine that he had taken than if he had been drinking so much water. He sat looking, sometimes at the fire, sometimes at the thoughtful face of his employer; and every now and then he refilled his glass from one of the decanters standing near him.

But, drink as deeply as he might, his mind seemed entirely unaffected by what he drank. Rupert Godwin, watching him furtively even in the midst of his own reverie, perceived this.

“The man is made of iron,” he thought, as he went to his own room, after bidding Jacob Danielson good-night. “With many of my secrets in the possession of such a man as this, how can I ever know rest?”

And then, after a pause, he muttered:

“Rest!—rest! When have I ever rested since—”

Only a groan finished that broken sentence.