The great Skene mystery

I am remotest from wishing to excuse the doggerel, or to defend its profanity. But, if not inspired, it was wrung from an intolerable sense of injury, and its effect was at least to make me feel that I had won my spiritual attainder at last. Little Miss Christmas came to hear of it, and was very cross because it had been destroyed. She wanted substantial proof of my wickedness, and the verbal means to retort upon my abuse of her dear Mr Pugsley, whom she adored, the odious little humbug. But, as for me, I gloried in my unregeneracy, and wrote more verses, which I came to be wise enough to burn.

The little wretch, as I say, came and went; but Mr Pugsley went on for ever. I grew apart from him, however; and at this day it is a wonder to me that his memory affects me with anything but a sense of humour. He spoke what he believed, after all, and I only mention him as an indifferent detail in the context of great events.

I come now to the time when I retired upon my hermitage in the Caddle woods.

Evercreech—the house, that is to say—stands on pretty high ground, which on all sides falls away into dense thickets. It is a fine old Tudor building, gabled, and with mullioned windows; but the different or indifferent fancies of generations have loaded it with incongruous excrescences. Time, however, has assimilated these to a reposeful uniformity of stain and line, and ivy has welded the mass. It was a compact beautiful pile in my earliest knowledge of it, fitting crown to its own verdant slopes.

Nowhere are its surrounding thickets denser than to the north, where the Caddle, or wildered, woods press up against the high road to Footover, turning a steep, naked shoulder of turf to the view of passers-by. Here had once run the main drive to the house, now, in the time of which I write, long abandoned in favour of a shorter approach southernward, and primeval tangle had utterly reclaimed the spot to Nature. But the ancient iron gates, moss-eaten and corroded, yet hung purposeless in the hedgerow, and gave some direction to the trend of the green track which passed under the tree branches within. A little wicket, for private coming and going, had been set thereby, high on the bank above the road, to which grassy steps descended; and at a short stone’s throw from the wicket stood the old lodge.

It was so embedded in foliage as to be hardly discernible from the gate—a little square stone building, and stone-tiled. There had never been a time when I was not familiar with it—its cold chimneys, its abandoned little rooms, the growth, and development, and flight, and renewal of the myriad insect life with which it swarmed. The dank brooding little place had always had a curious attraction for me; and now it was my own, my retreat, whose stagnant solitudes I could use to whatever processes of thought and reflection they might inspire. They surged formlessly in me the first time I stood to claim and regard my acquisition. The place had been cleaned, ordered, furnished, of course. All my scant belongings lay heaped within disorderly. But, beyond necessary clearances, I had insisted that its green surroundings should be respected. No ruthless loppings had disgraced my advent. The lodge remained the undesecrated shrine to this haunt of leaf-loving spirits—an old, old moss-grown temple to the eternal antiquity of Nature.

The fantastic note which speaks in me here I felt throbbing in my veins, soft but enchaining, from my first possession of the place. It was to speak strange things to me before it was done. Already it was a call, but at first far and faint, to a green resolution of independence. At the outset I had no thought but to spend my days here, as a good Catholic goes into retreat, and to return dutifully to the house at night, like any other homing cattle. But that purpose came early to dissolve. The arrival of the little stranger—which happened in the second week of my self-exile—banished all thought and consideration of me from the central ménage. I came to my resolve instantly, procured a camp bedstead, food, drink, and cooking utensils from Footover, and settled permanently into my hermitage. No one observed or protested. My heart was justified of its utmost bitterness, my will of its emancipation. Henceforth I would possess myself—no profitable acquirement for one in my then condition of mind.

Yet, on the whole, these days were the happiest I had known since I left school, though what termination I proposed to them did not figure in my wild philosophy. That, I am afraid, was not sound, for it harped on grievance. It was nourished on the sense of a hundred wrongs, fruit of lovelessness. I was moved for the first time to marshal these resolutely before my mind’s eye. I did not believe in original sin, Some babies were saints and some demons at a month old. I was conscious of no inherent baseness in myself, nor of a necessity to apologise for my own existence. Yet the impression enforced upon me, the atmosphere in which I had grown, had always seemed weighted with the necessity of that self-consciousness. I had been tolerated, and made to feel the fact; and lack of servile acknowledgment on my part had been counted to a graceless disposition. Yet was I not my mother’s son? And what manner of mother was this who would not have her child share in her exaltation, but was perpetually reminding him by implication of the baseness of that beginning which he owed to her? And I could have been slave to her loveliness; her patient catechumen, even, in the vulgar pietistic creed which sufficed her soul, had she ever once spoken a word of affection, played a mother’s part to me. But when I suffered, her eye was as cold as Cleopatra’s. She neither read me, nor could, perhaps, nor wanted to. I thought myself the perpetual hateful reminder to her of something she would forget; and I would not cringe, nor be mean, nor play the self-obliterating part expected of me, except in so far as my love of nature and solitude kept me aloof. But as I grew up strong—even wonderfully strong, I think—and tall and brown and passable in the face, with no hypocritical sense of shortcomings, but a feeling that at least I might be held to do a parent no discredit, I believed I should come to hate where I was hated; and, if so, I would shrink from using no part of the strength, mental and physical, with which Nature had endowed me. I wonder Lady Skene never saw the danger of her system; but her perceptives were narrow to a degree.

Now I did not know who she had been, nor how married before made a widow, nor what had been my father’s character or business. But all at once these things began to exercise my mind, when, in the first days of my complete separation from the house, I seemed to realise myself as something cut away from the main stem, a runner pinned down and then severed, and responsible for its own future development. In fact, I began to think on my own account, as was my engagement with Lord Skene; only, at the outset, I am afraid, with little concern for a possible vocation. Choice of that, I considered, whether for brain or hand, might follow on a certain knowledge of my origin; and whoever my father had been, I had no intention to insult his memory by a pretence to better dues than his. On the contrary, I rather hoped, in my savage misanthropy, to discover how my origin justified me in digging for my living.

But in truth, for all my mood I spent my time as much in dreaming as in brooding. I was at the romantic age, the soft shadows of life on one side, its infinite heights on the other. The repinings of misunderstood youth appeal, I think, much more sentimentally to the kind observer than they deserve. A thousand compensations of wonder and expectation are always at the service of the most oppressed young manhood. I found plenty for myself in that strange solitary life—the knowledge of woods at dawn; the intimacy of venturesome birds; the cosy lamp-lit room, my own, and shelves of glistening books. I owed most of the last to the good-natured kindness of Lord Skene, who had sent me down a small library of volumes at the latter end of my furnishing. These were generally tied into bundles of a dozen or so, and had been bought years before, as he told me when I went to thank him for his gift, at a sale following the decease of a young neighbour of his. They had never, for the most part, been opened since, and it was my pleasure to untie the dusty strings which restored their treasures to the light. They have their part in the development of the strange story, whose opening chapter was now to date itself from the date of my entrance into the lodge in the Caddle.

I shall never forget the weird experience of my first night there—the intense humid darkness; the awful emphasis the dead silence received from the fitful creeping and falling sounds incidental to a wooded solitude. I hardly slept at all. The echo of a rare footfall in the highroad beyond was always first a solace and then a terror. I would listen for its coming, mark its passing, and when that, owing to the muffling foliage, was seemingly halted or delayed, my heart thickened to a panic of expectation that the thread would be taken up close by—stealthy shufflings about the walls; a scratch on a window-pane. Yet, after all, nothing visited me but ghosts, and with those I was familiar. They came out of dusky nooks and corners, taunting me with my inefficiency, my loneliness, speaking unutterable things of my despicable position, and the neglect which had devoted me to it. Faint glimmering vistas into the past they showed me—glimpses of memory, which flickered only to close. Had I, indeed, always been thus, a burden, an intruder? I knew nothing of it all. My mother, in all my conscious memory of her, had never been my mother but in name. And was there nothing behind her—no shadow, even, of a father’s brief devotion? Sometimes a strange old face, evil and curious, would seem to bend down over me; but it always dissolved before it could be secured. I did not like to think I owed my life to that. And when I slept, I fought and sobbed and struggled in bewildering mists; and the cry was for ever in my heart: “Who am I? Who was my father? Why does she hate me so—on his account or my own?”

Well, enough of these moods. I am not built of the stuff which harps on self-grievances to win sympathy. Soon, and very soon, I was to become “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,” and from the first moment of my command, I never voluntarily relinquished it.

The baby, a poor peakish little male fellow, was born, I say; and I was forgotten. When at last I was remembered, development of nerve and character had so fastened me to my position, that there was no question of ousting me from it against my will. Nor was there much attempt. Lady Skene ignored me; her husband, fatuous father now, laughingly acquiesced in my wilfulness.

“Go your own way, Gaskett,” he said. “You’ll come to me when you want me, no doubt.”

No doubt at all; but not in the way he foresaw. In the meantime I led the life of a free-forester, and was more genially content than I had been for long. And then one day came the first of the change.

It was October, and the baby had been born in March. I had seen him once or twice at a distance, and that was all. There was a path running through that slope of the thickets which led up towards the house, and this path ended in the pleasant bosky sward known as the “Baby’s Garden” before mentioned. It was a lovely quiet spot, and thither the honourable Master Skene was often carried by his nurse for air and exercise. I could easily at will command a view of them without being seen myself. The life of the wild man had taught me many a trick of cunning concealment, and I never scrupled to practise an espionage which was, after all, only a necessary habit of savage precaution. There was an old dead ash, bordering on the thin fringe of the woods, into whose hollow I could slip from above, and thence observe through a spy-hole in the trunk. It was so close and unregarded in that silent chamber of green, that every word spoken from the latter was audible to me in my eyrie.

One morning I was watching thence (for I had a morbid attraction to my successor), when he and his nurse appeared before me. She was singing to him, as she walked in a sort of rhythmical march. An odd pang of jealousy, as always, seized me in their nearness, Was I not his mother’s son, too? I felt a thickness in my throat, and swallowed it down fiercely. Presently the nurse, carrying her charge, went away at the farther end; and I came out of my hiding and stood at the foot of the tree, my eyes bent on the place of their going, though, indeed, my eyes saw little. A feeling of shame and melancholy dimmed them; even obscured their vision so far that it was not for a moment or two I realised that the pair had come back, and that I was discovered. I started, and bent my brow in a fury; and then I saw to my wonder that it was not the nurse who carried the child, but a young woman—a young lady, in fact; a vision of frills, and golden hair, and heliotrope raiment. She had evidently met the nurse on her way out, and taken the baby from her, and returned with it to the garden, the other following.

Now all of a sudden she saw me, and came towards me at once, holding out her burden. Her eyes were mirthful and conciliatory; a smile quivered on her lips.

“Won’t you kiss your brother?” she said.

My brother! I had never yet realised the relationship. My heart drummed thickly. All of a sudden I caught her eyes fixed on mine.

“Yes, I am Ira,” she said, “educated, and repentant, and come back to be punished.”

Without a word, I turned on my heel and went away through the woods.

CHAPTER IV.
A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING—PHASE ONE

That afternoon I was sitting glum and glowering in my lodge, while the water for my tea was boiling on the fire, when I heard a light step in the passage; and the next moment she stood before me. I had the will and the opportunity now to regard her, here in secure possession of my own. She, not I, was the intruder. But my steady inquisition failed to abash her. She was too confident of her own charms, I suppose.

“Pray forgive me, Mr Gaskett,” she said, with a twinkling civility. “I wanted to see the hermit with my own eyes.”

“And not with Lady Skene’s or Mr Pugsley’s?” I asked.

She laughed.

“You bear a grudge long.”

“I have so little else to bear out of the past,” I said.

Her eyes became serious.

“Well, I was a beast,” she said. “And now I’m a young lady.”

“Excuse me. The distinction may be without a difference.”

“And wasn’t I right then,” she cried, with a flush, “to question your gentle origin!”

“I daresay,” I said. “But I owe you no consideration for the question. It was none of your business; and I haven’t forgiven you for it, and never shall.”

She seemed to breathe a little quickly, as if distressed. Then she sat down in a chair, and crossed her legs, and bent forward to scrutinise me.

“Richard,” she said, “what a brown strong man you have grown into; and rather taking-looking, too! I was an odious little pig—there! but girls grow up, you know. I don’t remember my little past self with pleasure, I can tell you. Won’t you forgive me and be friends?”

“What have you come home for? To be married?”

“O! What a question!”

“The sooner the better, for me.”

She bit her underlip. I could have thought it was a swollen red enough little affair already.

“Why for you?” she asked.

“You can’t expect me to welcome your reappearance,” I said.

“Can’t I?” she answered. “Well, looks ought to count for something with you by now. Don’t they?”

“I mature slowly, Miss Christmas.”

“Call me Ira.”

“Certainly I sha’n’t. It would be presumption.”

“I don’t know that it would. My father’s father was a chemist. I have found that out. He kept a shop and invented a pill and made a fortune over it. People would take it. It became a sort of infection. A royal princess caught it, and then it was all over with him. He bought a pedigree, in Wardour Street, and imposed it on the world. It would swallow anything from him.”

“Well, my father’s father never invented anything that I know—not even a family. I date from yesterday; and, as to pills, the pillmaker’s granddaughter was the bitterest I ever had to swallow.”

She was not offended, it seemed.

“That’s right,” she said. “I told you to punish me. I have deserved it, I know. But tell me if I’m pretty.”

I looked at her calmly. It was certainly wonderful how the petite drôlesse in her had developed, amplified into something bewitching; but it was the adolescence of a witch, I thought. Her hair was umber gold, with pale green lights in it, and drawn back in loose wings from her forehead, and tied into a club at the nape of a very white neck. Her cheeks were a little lean, but pitted with the old dimples at pleasure; and the whole contour of her face was frankly girlish—soft and kind but for the eyes. Or at least I thought so. There seemed a knowledge in their artless honesty, born of depths below the blue. Blue, I say! I don’t know to this day if they are blue or green. It depends upon their point of view, whether it be sky or verdure.

She was slender and smooth-limbed; a fragrant enough creature but for the odour of memory. I answered her deliberately.

“Not to me. I have had no finishing education. I am still governed by childish prejudices. I daresay you will be a success elsewhere.”

She sighed a little, and got to her feet.

“It is a shame,” she said, and very handsomely. “You have been neglected shamefully, I know. But I’ve no right to speak. I wish you thought me pretty.”

“Well, so do I,” I said. “But, what does it matter? You are an heiress.”

She stood regarding me seriously for a little. Then all of a sudden, to my amazement, her eyes blinked with tears. I stared at her, speechless.

“Yes, I know,” she said; “it’s very silly. But you’ve no idea how you’ve been on my mind. It was at Dinan, first, and then in London, where I began to get things into their proper proportions—my own insignificance among the number. You were somehow always in the background of my thoughts—wasn’t that funny? You know, you were a very good-looking child, Richard; or perhaps you don’t know. I was horribly jealous of you, anyhow.”

“Well, well,” I said. “And how about Lady Skene, Miss Christmas? Are you still in favour with her and Mr Pugsley?”

“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,” she answered, laughing with a little twinkle through her tears. “She is a very beautiful woman, and therefore what she thinks must be right. I wish you would show me your poem after Mr Pugsley.”

“What poem? But all that stuff is over. I have burnt everything I ever wrote.”

“What a misanthrope you have become. But I don’t wonder. Am I to go now?”

“You are keeping me from my tea.”

“Won’t you let me serve it for you?”

“I serve myself; and I intend to for the future.”

“There is a story—did you ever read it?—of a shepherd who plucked a flower in a field, and brought it home and put it in water; and every night the flower turned into a beautiful girl, who swept and dusted his room for him, and set his meal, and was a flower again by the time he came down. But one night he caught her, and after that she had to remain a woman and serve him.”

“Thank you. But I don’t see the point, for I haven’t plucked you, and I don’t think you beautiful. You had better go. What would Lady Skene say?”

“I am my own mistress. Lady Skene can say what she likes. Do let me wait on you.”

A sudden mutiny of retaliation seized upon me. What did it matter? I felt quite hard and cold to the girl. “Very well,” I said, and sat down.

She busied herself at once; poured the hot water; made the tea; stood behind me while I ate and drank. I took pains to do both imperturbably and at length. She never spoke the while. At the end I got up, and pushed the fragments together.

“Now,” I said, “you can have your tea on the scraps, if you like. I am going out.”

I left her seated quietly at the table.

CHAPTER V.
A YOUNG LADY’S CHASTENING—PHASE TWO

She came to the lodge often after that, and amused herself putting the place in order, sometimes while I was present, but more often during my absence. I knew nothing of what was in her mind; but I confess it came, just at first, to give me a sort of gloating satisfaction thus to accept without comment these ministrations of what was intended, I suppose, for imperious beauty’s atonement to the poor beast whom she had wounded herself by insulting. She did not speak much, going about her duties with a young elastic confidence; but a consciousness of unuttered protest over my indifference, of wistful glances and deprecations of my blindness, began soon to grow irksome. She wanted to put herself right with herself, I supposed, rather than with me. I was ready enough to tell her so, yet somehow could never find the words.

One day, on entering my den, I was surprised to encounter the figure of Lord Skene seated therein.

“Where’s Ira?” he asked at once.

“How should I know, sir?” I answered. “She isn’t here.”

“But she comes here at times?” he said.

“That’s her affair. She’s her own mistress, and has told me so. I can’t command even the lodge, it seems.”

“Don’t be bitter, my boy,” he replied. “Only, if I were you, I wouldn’t encourage these visitations.”

“I don’t.”

“That’s right. You see, she’s a great catch—rather a unique young party with her looks and her fortune.”

“I quite understand. I assure you, sir, I shall be only too glad if you’ll keep her away.”

“What a misogynist it is!”

He looked up at me suddenly, seemed to catch his breath, and put his hand to his forehead.

“What is it, sir?” I exclaimed.

“Eh!” he said vaguely. “Nothing—O, nothing!”

He appeared to make an effort to recall himself, and was presently smiling genially, though his loose old underlip trembled.

“What a great fellow you have grown, to be sure,” he said—“a fine personable fellow and a credit to us, too.”

“You’re very good, sir. I wish I could think the same.”

“Ah!” he said nervously. “I fancy I know what you mean. It’s that that I came about, Gaskett. You mustn’t go on brooding by yourself for ever in this infernal swamp. It reflects upon me, my boy, and upon Lady Skene. Besides, you’ve got a—a brother up there, you know” (he uttered the word with an obvious effort); “and it won’t do to have scandals started about the proverbial step-relations. You come up to the house, if you want to keep the young lady from coming down here. Its the wise alternative. Let her feed her wilfulness in company—eh?”

“What do you want me to do, sir?”

“Why, take your seat at my table, like a gentleman and a man of sense. We sha’n’t poison you.”

“Forgive my asking, sir. Didn’t she suggest this to you?”

“Who? My wife?”

“O no! Miss Christmas.”

“Why, now I come to think of it, she did mention it—a well-merited reproof, perhaps.”

“I’m beholden to her, of course.”

“You ought to count yourself beholden to me, I think. I don’t know that I’ve ever given you cause, Gaskett, to doubt my friendship.”

“No, sir. I’ll do what you wish, of course.”

“That’s right. Shoo! the place smells like a well. We must get you out of it.”

So I donned a dress suit, and played the dutiful respectable, and took my place at my lord’s table—an odd new experience for me. I felt some natural awkwardness about it at first, and bungled a little over taking wine with my stepfather, for he held to the old-fashioned customs; but his cellar was good enough to be an education in itself; and, for the rest, the ladies did not embarrass me with their notice or attentions. Indeed, from the date of this my first step towards a social reformation, Miss Christmas ignored me entirely, and took pains to impress me with the fact. I was duly impressed—and amused. I supposed, quite correctly, no doubt, that his lordship had given her a hint as to the inadvisability of her visits to me, backed by a pretty literal quotation of my own expressed wishes in the matter, and that the insult by deputy had instantly effected what the insult direct had failed to do. Women, I fancy, have no objection to being bullied in an exclusive and complimentary sort of way; but the passion of brutality loses all its charms with them when it takes an agent into its confidence. Miss Christmas was deeply offended, and let me know by implication the raptures I had forgone. She literally sparkled o’ nights, frolicking like a will-o’-the-wisp before my hopelessly unravished eyes. Her dress, her jewels, her manner, her imperious caprices, all expressed, and were designed to express, the spoilt and whimsical child of fortune—leagues overhead a nameless pensioner on that same partial goddess’s bounty. She sang—not so badly on the accidental strength of a pure little contralto voice, which of all sorts finds it easiest to keep in tune; she displayed, in the childish abandonment of her caressings of dogs and cats, the passion of thin white arms, lures wickedly unattainable to my supposed swooning senses; she talked, sweetly serious, with Lady Skene, on the subject of the divine goodness in damning three-fourths of the world for the sake of the other quarter, and dropped texts from her lips as daintily as cherry stones. If it was all designed as a sharp lesson to me, it was all signally successful. “The girl is mother to the woman,” I thought. She is a humbug here as she was a humbug in my lodge. It is nothing but her puckish instinct to play a part to desire.

I never came to the house but of nights to dine, conforming only, in its strictly literal sense, with Lord Skene’s expressed wish; and then I would dawdle out an impatient hour in the drawing-room, and the moment the clock struck ten be off to my woods again. Lady Skene had accepted my reappearance with no comment but the briefest greeting; but I thought her manner to me was more chilling than ever. She seemed resolved upon disallowing my last claim to her consideration. As a child it had always been as if, coldly and softly, she had disengaged my fingers one by one from her skirts to which they clung. Now we were utterly dissevered; but I cried out still that I might not hate her. She did not hate me, I am sure. She only looked upon me as a brand, a thing foredoomed, whom it were useless to shape for a destiny which could never be his. Perhaps in her deepest heart there may have lurked a terror of herself, were she once to permit herself to think of me—a fear that after all, in some quick frenzy, she might be moved to disown the pietist for the mother. I will believe it. Such inhumanity as hers seems incomprehensible without.

As I held to my wild habits by day, playing only in the evenings up to polite convention, I was certain to encounter Miss Christmas about the grounds, and as a matter of fact I did, many times. On such occasions she would always pass me with a warble and a stare, or a cock to her kittenish nose, as if I were an odorous stable-boy, which as regularly tickled me, until one day I felt tired of it. I had run upon her at the head of the thicket path which opened into the “Baby’s Garden,” and I suddenly barred her way, so that she could not get round me right or left.

“Were you going down there?” I asked, signifying the lodge.

Fury flew into her eyes.

“How dare you—how dare you suggest it!” she cried.

“Why, it wouldn’t be for the first time, you know,” I said.

She looked in helpless anger about her a moment; then faced me like a young harpy.

“I thought, perhaps, in spite of all—of all the misfortune at your birth—you might be a gentleman at heart. But I was mistaken, and you are the very farthest from it; and I see now that it’s impossible ever to hope to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

“Thank you, for my father. My mother can answer for herself. The pillmaker’s granddaughter is the best judge, of course.”

“Let me pass, please.”

“Not just for a minute. What did you mean by the misfortune at my birth?”

She was still white with fury.

“Don’t you know? Don’t you know that you’ve no right to a name at all? You might have guessed, I think.”

“How do you know?”

“I know well enough. I once heard Mr Pugsley say so to Lady Skene, when they were discussing what to do with you, and didn’t guess that I was hidden behind the curtains. I have never forgotten it, you may be sure.”

“I am quite sure. You listened behind curtains like a born lady. Do you wonder that I have always instinctively detested you?”

“No; I have shown you I don’t.”

The storm in her had subsided in a moment. I wondered, but was not in the least mollified.

“You have shown me nothing,” I said, “but the way to right myself at last with my relations. Now you can go.”

She did not move, however, but turned as pale as her frock.

“Richard!—O, Richard!” she implored. “Don’t hit me like that. You are so strong; and I am only a girl. I had no right to say it; it might have meant nothing; and Lady Skene has always been so good to me.”

“What reason have you—or has she, for that matter—to expect any consideration from me? I will know the truth.”

“Richard, make some allowance. You had insulted me too, you know.”

“I had not.”

“You had. You asked Lord Skene to stop me from going to you.”

“I didn’t. He came and asked me himself. He told me to remember you were an heiress, and I answered that you didn’t visit me by my wish. You!”

“It was detestable. I didn’t know. Do, for pity’s sake, forgive and forget.”

“No; I have forgotten too long. I want to remember.”

“Richard! O! O!—Richard, I hate pills—I’m not a lady—won’t anything soften you!”

And at that moment the nurse, carrying the child, came round a bend of the garden. She stared and rocked, singing something tuneless; but Miss Christmas, darting past me, seized the infant from her arms, and carried it to the path.

“Richard!” she whispered, “for his sake—your little brother’s!”

My brother again. Never had anyone but this girl voluntarily assumed the natural relationship. I wavered for the first time. She saw it, with her sex’s quick intuition, and held out the warm soft bundle.

“Have you never taken him in your arms?” she said. “He’s so small and weak. There, hold him, and let him plead for me.”

“Miss Christmas!” cried the nurse.

Her tone, all the immeasurable menial warning it conveyed, stiffened me instantly. I held out my arms and received the burden.

I could have laughed at its insignificance. The apparent proportions of it had made me expect something staggering. It lay on me like a doll. Before I knew myself, I was smiling into the little red puffy face.

There followed a sharp exclamation, and on the instant Lady Skene had snatched my brother from my hands. She had come upon us unobserved. Her face was alight with an expression I had never seen there before. The statue had blazed into momentary life. She was a woman, and a cruel woman confessed for the first time in my knowledge of her.

“Not yours,” she said, deep and resentful. “He has no part or concern with you. Don’t dare to touch him or contaminate him again!”

I stood facing her without a word. In that moment my utter hate and vindictiveness were born. As she had dealt with me, so would I deal with her. The first card was in my hand. I turned quietly and left them.

CHAPTER VI.
MY FIRST ENLIGHTENMENT

Mr Pugsley sat in the study of his vicarage at Market Grazing. He was composing a sermon—no doubt on the eternal lines of pre-election and the divine partiality. He never gathered how his principles made a comfortable sinecure of his living; but a sinecure it was—a sort of well-furnished limbo, his complete enjoyment of which was only marred by a chronic dyspepsia. He looked up, as I entered, and greeted me with a frown.

“Gaskett!” he exclaimed. “I was somehow thinking of you, and here you are.”

I acknowledged the compliment promptly.

“Yes, I’m the devil, sir,” I said; “and for once in your life you’ve got to answer to me.”

He started, and turned a little yellower.

“This is a strange beginning,” he wondered. “For what, boy, do you hold me answerable to you?”

“For concealment, sir, amongst other things. Mr Pugsley, will you please to tell me if I am my mother’s son?”

He shifted a paper or two on his desk. I could see he was staggered, and thrown for the moment off his balance. I had no object in hurrying him. After all, if he had the elective licence, he had not the instinct to tell a lie.

“Answer at your leisure, sir,” I said. My tone, I quite felt it, took command. This narrow mind had no longer any terrors for me. I had come, in a day, of a very stern and sorrowful intellectual age. He turned to me presently, almost propitiatory.

“What a very curious question, Gaskett! Lady Skene has surely always done her duty by you?”

“That wasn’t what I asked. I asked if I were her son.”

“How can you doubt it?”

“I can’t, sir, to my grief.”

“To your grief? O, this is sad!”

He fidgeted with the lamp—it was evening—and tried to meet my eyes again, but avoided them.

“It is very sad,” I said. “But why should you deplore it, when from the first you have fostered and encouraged in her that spirit which is responsible for all the sadness?”

“I, Gaskett?”

“Have you not? Have you not always, sir, accounted me a child of sin?”

“Which you are, in the fullest sense.”

The admission seemed to slip out of him, in his agitation, unintentionally. Having made it, he stooped, and hurriedly took a nerve pill. He always carried a box of them about with him.

“It is what I understand,” I said quietly. “Of whose sin, in the first instance? Mr Pugsley, who was my father?”

He was very much upset. His hands on the paper shook like leaves.

“What has happened?” he said. “Why are you asking me these questions?”

“Let it be enough, sir, that I am asking them.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Think again, sir.”

“Do you doubt my honour, young man? I tell you I don’t know.”

“Where did it happen? You hail from Clapham, I believe. Was it there?”

“Yes, if you will ask.”

“Where is Clapham?”

“It is a suburb of London.”

“And she came under your administrations there—officially, I suppose.”

He rallied a little, struggling to assert himself.

“Do you bear in mind, Gaskett, of whom you speak—who it is whose errors—whose long-repented errors—you are probing?”

“The repentance came too late for me, sir; and, in any case, if it is religion, it is not reason to make me its scapegoat.”

“You were a child of wrath—a pledge of sinfulness foregone.”

“I see—a sort of whipping-boy to Grace. But I have ceased to be a boy—there’s the devil of it, Mr Pugsley. If you don’t know who my father was, does Lord Skene know?”

He shook his head, with an odd little gasp. I saw him making for the pill-box again.

“What!” cried I. “Did he, too, accept me as a pledge?”

Something in his face enlightened me. The man was too shallow to hide a guilty self-consciousness.

“Did he?” I said sharply; “or was he never told perhaps that there was any question of sinfulness?”

I could see him hesitate, and it decided me.

“Was Lord Skene told?” I said, and took a step towards him. “Was he told?” I read the answer in his perturbed eyes. “Is this how you reconcile your conscience with your interests?” I cried scornfully.

Having yielded, like a weak creature, to resolution, he took refuge, like a woman, in personal grievance. He rose, quivering all over.

“How dare you come and bully me like this!” he cried. “What instigated you to it, I say?”

“A desire for the truth, sir. I understood parsons made a speciality of it.”

“Not at all,” he retorted angrily—“at least there are truths and truths. To withhold some for a worthy purpose is not to lie.”

“Yes,” I said. “I have read about that; but I never knew till now it was a principle of Evangelicism.”

He looked at me balefully.

“And, in any case, what was the worthy purpose here?” I asked.

“You cannot be expected to appreciate it,” he said. “Your mother was a vessel potential for holiness. As you have the indelicacy to question of her past sorrows, you shall be given the truth in full. Better that than the half measure, which would only instigate your base spirit, I fear, to distortion and exaggeration. She had been ensnared by a villain whom she had lent herself to reclaim. It was the usual case of a promise given and forsworn. I never asked or learned his name. In the eyes of Heaven she was a wife; and any confession of the truth would, with such a man as Lord Skene, have been held merely to justify him in his attempts to claim her to ungodliness. As a fact, he was greatly infatuated—accepted the assumption that you were born in wedlock—engaged tacitly to ask no questions, but to accept on its merits the blessing which had been vouchsafed him.”

“Then, at least, in the eyes of Heaven, which you represent, Lady Skene is a bigamist.”

He seemed, to my surprise, to accept this casuistry with a certain relief.

“Put it that way if you like,” he said. “She was distinctly, from the moral point of view, a wife already, though legally unbound.”

“Then why, from the moral point of view, am I a child of sin?”

He began to stammer hopelessly.

“I will tell you,” I said. “It is because of the wrong she has done me, and would visit, like a woman, upon the innocent head of her disgrace. And you hate me because she does, and because you have made her interests your own. I think you have played your cards very well, Mr Pugsley.”

He bristled through all his yellow skin.

“Leave my house,” he said.

“I will leave it,” I answered, “but I will ask you another question first. What was my mother’s position, occupation, when she married?”

“Not another word,” he cried. “I have said too much already. O!”—he shook a wild finger at me—“why would she never accept my advice, given long ago, to place you out in some respectable family! I always foresaw that the time would come when you would begin to quarrel with your bread and butter—to bite the hand that fed you—to——”

“To put myself right with my stepfather,” I said.

“If you attempt it,” he cried—“if you dare—the wrath of the Almighty will fall upon your presumptuous head!”

I laughed.

“Well, I will think it over,” I said, and turned and left him.

CHAPTER VII.
MORGIANA

Near all that night I sat out in my den, wakeful and deeply meditative. Was I glad or sorry to have wormed out thus much of the truth? And of what potential profit to me was my new knowledge? As to the former, noblesse oblige: better be an unchristened vagabond than the legitimate hope of Mr Snooks, roturier. Nameless, I could make a name of my own; not be condemned all my days to the task of redeeming a vulgar one bequeathed me. Therein was signified, I thought, the true moral of all nomenclature. Why, for instance, should the son of Mr Rottengoose be handicapped from his birth with that imposed label and libel; be forced to carry throughout his blameless life that unasked and unmerited stigma of an ancestor’s villainous sobriquet; have to steel himself to the torture of the titter pursuing him over the edge of the dancing-card on which he had just impressed his awful identity; be obliged, perhaps, to advertise his ignominy on a brass plate, to stultify his fondest ideals, his most romantic passions, over the sign-manual of a decayed fowl—a name bestowed, probably, in the first instance on a village idiot; finally, be called upon to cheapen the nobility of his Last Will and Testament in the terms that “I, Robert Rottengoose, being of sound mind and in full hope of the resurrection, etc.”?

Resurrection of whom, forsooth! Why, of Robert Rottengoose. “Do hereby bequeath my curse,” I would add, “to a system which imposes honour or ridicule, either undeserved, on a new-born child. Let a man be christened into his surname, such as he shall make or choose it, only when he comes of age. Amen!”

Well, I was Richard Gaskett—not so bad on the whole; but why was I? I wondered if Lord Skene would tell me; I wondered if it were Lady Skene’s maiden name—yet hardly that; for would not the admission have betrayed her to her noble suitor? Perhaps it was my father’s, since, “from the moral point of view,” she was his wife. Yet, somehow, morality did not seem to me to be much in question in the matter; and on the whole I was inclined to think that my name was as illegitimate as my birth. The fact disturbed me only in so far as it afforded me, probably, no clue to my father’s identity; for it was to that that my thoughts were now turning with a very resolute purpose. I would discover it by hook or crook; learn to whom I was indebted for my disgrace; gain into my own hand the knowledge which could make this cruel puppet of a mother move to my will. I possessed already the germ of the truth: I was base, and my stepfather did not know it. Proof, clinching and double-wrought, would come with that further discovery, could I alight on it. I would hold it over her head, bowing that under an eternal horror of exposure. As she had been an unnatural mother to me, so would I be an unnatural son to her.

And all of a sudden the tears were crowding into my eyes. I could not tell why; and I rose quickly and went to the door. It was a lovely quiet night, with a moon somewhere behind the trees, and all the sky marbled with dove-grey clouds. And I held out my arms to them; neither did I know why; but, like a child, I wanted something or somebody to comfort me.

“It is no good,” I muttered, and dropped my chin heavily on my breast, and returned to my brooding, but this time over a pipe and a glass of toddy. They helped me to brighter, if no less defiant, thoughts. Would Mr Pugsley whisper awfully to his patroness of my visit, and put his head to hers in some design to bridle me? I cared nothing. I felt strong as Atlas to bear the world my new emancipation had opened out to me; my head rang with a hundred purposes of do and dare; I was my own utter master, by virtue of that discovery, and free. Let those who had ridden me look to their own harness.

Early on the following morning, coming home from a brisk stroll in the November woodlands, I found Miss Christmas in my room. She had a brown fur boa round her neck, and a little fur cap on her head like a Zouave’s busby in miniature, with a pert plume. Under the boa was a glimpse of scarlet handkerchief, which contrasted rather pleasantly with the gold of her hair, and her cheeks were pink with walking. She greeted me with a troubled look, as she noticed how I paused and my face darkened seeing her there.

“Am I so horribly de trop,” she said, “when you have nothing but your own thoughts to live with?”

“That’s the reason,” I answered grimly.

“You don’t make it easy for me,” she said. “And I had come to beg your pardon, Richard.”

“Why should I help you out in anything, unless it were the door?”

She flushed; she bit her lip; it was as much as her temper would allow her, I could see, to stand and listen.

“You are really horribly rude,” she said.

“I daresay I am. As a cultivated young lady of family, you should have more prescriptive tact than to provoke the natural boor in me.”

“I don’t believe it is natural. I believe, in your bitterness, you are resolved to make yourself out much worse than you are.”

“That is very generous of you. And you have come, moreover, to beg my pardon—for what?”

Her mouth opened a little. She seemed to deprecate my expression very entreatingly. Her eyebrows took a pained arch, her eyes a speaking wistfulness.

“Richard,” she said—“don’t be so angry, so unforgiving with me!”

“Why do you think me either? I ask you again, what have you come to beg my pardon for?”

Her lips quivered as she looked up at me. She seemed unable to speak for a moment.

“It was cruel,” she whispered at last—“so cruel and ungenerous, that I could only wish at the moment that I wasn’t bound to her by so many ties of affection. But I am, and I will be loyal.”

“Are you apologising for Lady Skene?”

“No; I am asking pardon for myself, because I was the unwilling cause of it all. Won’t you forgive me, Richard?”

“If I thought,” I said, “of calculating up all you have to answer to me for! I don’t feel very kind to you.”

“Be unkind, then,” she said. “Only forgive me.”

I struggled with myself a little.

“I can’t,” I said at last. “I’m afraid I’m very vindictive, and must have my pound of flesh first.”

“Take it of me,” she said at once, “in whatever way you like.”

I laughed.

“Fine heroic words! Would you submit to the process? I’m in the way to humble some folks.”

“Richard,” she said, “remember who she is. Spare your mother. I’m ready to take the blame and the punishment for both.”

She was certainly a young slight thing; prettyish in a fancy way; easy to bend or break.

“You speak rashly,” I said. “I remember your story about the shepherd. Your petals would be pretty well rubbed by the time I’d done with you.”

“Very well,” she said. “I’ll take the risk. I believe I know you better than you do yourself.”

“Do you? I’ve half a mind, you little flower of fortune, to put you to the test.”

“I’m waiting.”

A stubborn devil was awake in me.

“Are you offering yourself my slave, or what, Miss Morgiana?”

“Your slave, if you like.”

“Very well. The floor wants scrubbing, and there’s a well outside. Get some water and scrub it.”

I thought she would fling away at once; but, instead, she took off her hat and jacket, found somewhere a pail and brush, and went outside very meekly. I listened wickedly. The windlass, I knew, would be a task for her chicken arms; and, indeed, I heard her plainly enough panting and struggling with it. But, for all that, she appeared presently, staggering, with her pail brimful; and I made no offer to relieve her of it.

“Now,” I said, “I won’t be witness to your awkwardness. I’m going for a walk, and to think over more important difficulties than yours. But, when I come back, I shall expect to find the place cleaned and tidied, and you gone.”

And I did. I gave her a couple of hours, before I returned whistling. The floor was white, the table laid for lunch, two eggs put in a cold saucepan by the grate, the fire piled up to smoulder, and a nosegay of red leaves and berries placed in a tumbler on the windowsill. The place looked neater and homelier than I had ever succeeded in making it, and Morgiana was gone. Of the eternal instinct are Eve’s daughters; and this one, it appeared, had no difficulty in “throwing back” from silks to homespun.

That night came a very strange experience to me.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE WRITING ON THE WALL

On entering the dining-room at Evercreech, I found company assembled. I had not been warned, and I was not introduced. I came in late, and took my seat at the table quietly, being placed between Mr Pugsley and a lady whom I did not know. I learned, however, in due course, that she was a Mrs Dalston, who, with her husband, also present, was a new-comer in the neighbourhood. The two had taken the Lone Farm, a decent but rather decayed property situated on the outskirts of Market Grazing, and foolishly reputed to be haunted. But it was inexpensive—perhaps because of its reputation—and fully adequate to the needs of a childless couple. The only other guest was, to my pleasure, Sir Maurice Carnac, who had earlier shown me friendship, and who was down somewhere in Hampshire for the shooting. But he looked little capable of shouldering a gun, and was altogether sadly altered from my memory of him, having but lately, as I learned, recovered from a paralytic stroke, whose passing had left him much debilitated. He lay sunk in his chair, like a heap of human ashes, and with all the old fire of roguery smouldering low in him. But he seemed to awaken suddenly on my entrance, and looking across at me as I sat down, treated me to a leer and wink.

“Hillo, Charlie, my boy!” he chuckled. “What sport with the girls, hey!”

Consternation sat on every face. My lord, looking much perturbed, bent to the old rascal, and enlightened him.

“Gaskett, Carnac; Gaskett!” he said. “You remember Richard Gaskett?”

“Hey!” The old man sat up. What link of memory had slipped in him, obliterating a whole score of years? “Richard, hey?” he said, immensely sly. “I know, I know. The lovely one’s pledge—earnest of widowed respectability. But mum, mum, my boy—I know. What days, hey!”

The soup engaged and silenced him—at least in everything but its absorption. It was some moments before the talk could find itself an embarrassed vent. But Sir Maurice brightened as he fed. Good fare was the natural aliment to that impoverished soil. He had only wandered and lost himself when hungry. In a little he had forgotten all about his balourdise, and was paying senile compliments along the table to his hostess.

In the moment of its delivery, however, the strange lady next me had turned quickly and looked me in the face. She appeared to me an utterly colourless person, fade, thin, dowdy, with hardly a sign of spirit or expression—a condemned ghost of womanhood. I wondered presently at the fond attentions with which her husband treated her, at his efforts to win a smile from her unresponsive face, and his patience when habitually baffled, since he himself was a fine bold figure of a man, white-teethed, black-whiskered, for all his forty-five or so years. And I wondered still when I came to learn how persistently she had disappointed his hopes of an heir, the few children she had born to him having died one by one on the very threshold of their existence. But perhaps all those fruitless pangs were accountable as much for his manly devotion as for her insensibility. She might have held him responsible for that seed of death which had stultified all the rich Woman in her. In any case, that he was more attached to her than she to him was obvious.

She spoke little—nothing to me; and, I noticed, ate little, but crumbled her bread all dinner-time. I was not concerned, inasmuch as it gave me the opportunity to observe elsewhere, which I had the inclination, and the provocation now, moreover, to do. Though the object of the old ex-governor’s misbegotten attention, and the immediate brief cynosure of all eyes, I was the only one, I think, not momentarily confounded. A curious self-possession, a sort of conceit of masterfulness, had come to claim me of late. A kind of cold and scrutinising philosophy had found me out of the old dependence. Having had long the will to counter my allotted destiny, a very little of the means had encouraged me to something like effrontery. I felt already a sense of power; a truculence in the face of the least supposed imposition on me of superiority.

While, therefore, they were all looking at me, I was coolly intent on Lady Skene. One hurried glance my way she gave; and then her eyes were lowered to the cloth, as she drew off her gloves and addressed some commonplace remark to Mr Dalston, who sat on her right. Her voice, I have not yet observed, was marked by a slight Cockney intonation—hardly to be gathered from its softness—just a twang from Cheapside, like the faintest distant whine of Bow Bells. But it was enough to imply her origin.

Looking away from her, my eyes travelled to Mr Pugsley beside me. He was obviously flustered and annoyed—shifted his shoulders, pinched his nose, defied, self-conscious, my stare, and failed utterly to stand up to it. Then he cleared his throat with violence, and affected, ostentatiously, to prefer the menu card to my company.

I laughed to myself, speculating on the idyllic guilt-consciousness which must be flowing between these two. The baronet’s malapropism had followed curiously pat on my recent enlightenment. I recalled the stories of his ancient intimacy with Lord Skene, of his reputed co-partnership with that nobleman in a rollicking adventure or two. Were they, my lady and her pious accomplice, hearing, in their hearts, the first creaking of the wheels of retribution? Poor panic-struck conspirators!

Yet I was sorry that Fate had imposed on Lady Skene so vulgar a confederate; for I could not but think the man vulgar, ordained priest as he was, and quite sincere, I believe, in his evangelicism. But, apart from him, and her subscription to his ugly phraseologic cant, she was so lovelily one of those presences whom age cannot wither (the rest of the quotation hardly applied to her); so perpetual a provocation—and aggravation—to the worshipper of beauty; so serene a thing, so coldly tantalising, so refinedly a figure for the sweet altitudes of romance! Ah, that she would make me her knight indeed—champion of a mother’s fame, dearer even than a wife’s! No need, then, to dread the consequences of an infamy atoned through love. I would have struck for—not against her. But she had preferred the inhuman part. So be it.

I ended my scrutiny with an inward sigh, and turned it elsewhere. I had plentiful opportunity. No one addressed, or appeared even to consider me. Right opposite, Miss Christmas, who sat between Sir Maurice and Mr Dalston, was engaged in rallying her either neighbour charmingly. She was quite at her ease with both, confident of herself as the most attractive of social siderites—a star of unquestionable magnitude. And they responded, of course—men of the world, and quick in persiflage. They laughed at her butterfly sallies, and humoured them because she was pretty and an heiress They were patently captivated. “Ah!” I thought: “if you knew how this very morning she has been scrubbing my floor for me!”

No one would have thought it possible. She was gay as a fairy; flower-complexioned; her hair like a misty aureole. A string of pearls was round her throat, and pearls were in her ears—“wicked little shells for recording scandal, and answering to it with pearls of price, too,” said Sir Maurice, after she had retorted upon some society calumny of his.

“O!” she cried; “to compare my poor ears to oysters!”

“Natives!” said Mr Dalston. “There are no oysters and no ears in all the world like our English breed.”

She asked him seriously how he knew—if he had travelled much?

“Far and wide,” he said, “and in all countries except Italy, I believe.”

I wondered why he made, or had made, the reservation.

“A sentiment,” he said, as if I had put the question to him. “I lost a dear friend there once.”

Actually I found his eyes fixed on mine. They were a dark penetrating feature in his face, set under strong brows, and somehow quite at variance with the smiling good humour of his mouth. His hair, though almost white, was full and wavy as a boy’s, and contrasted strangely with his jet-black mutton-chop whiskers, and those again with the strong white line of his teeth. He was tall and excellently compact, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, and had altogether the appearance of a man entirely at his ease with himself and the world.

“Do you know it—Italy?” he asked of me.

“I have never been from here but to school,” I answered.

“Ah!” he said: “what visions! what a prospect! That emancipation from tutelage, and all the world to follow!”

He was interrupted by a quick shrill exclamation from his wife:

“Look! What has happened? What is the matter with him?”

She was on her feet, we were all on our feet, in an instant. Sir Maurice Carnac was fallen heaped back into his chair, his shapeless old face all wryed as if in an exhaustion of horrible laughter, incoherent sounds coming from his lips.

“Carnac!” cried Lord Skene.

For to-morrow we die!

“This is my business,” said Mr Pugsley, in an agitated voice. All honour to his creed so far, for he was terribly unnerved.

The stricken man was carried upstairs by the servants, followed by the minister and his lordship. We all waited, huddled into a silence unbroken but for the whimpering of the women. Only Mrs Dalston remained quite passionless and unmoved. Once I saw her husband quietly offer to take her hand in his, and I saw her as quietly repulse him. His, according to the feminine persuasion, was an irresistible personality, all black and white and pink, and inevitably suggestive of past triumphs. She was the only one, I dare swear, who had ever been able to keep him at arm’s length; and that, perhaps, was the secret of her hold over him.

Presently Lord Skene came down. His hand was shaking and his lips, as he spilt out a glass of wine and swallowed it.

“Pugsley asked him if he was saved,” he stuttered, “and he answered that he’d be damned if he wasn’t. There was no refuting that. Poor old Maurice!”

Presently he recollected himself, and begged his company to stand not upon the order of their going, but to acquit him of any suspicion that such an awful calamity had been imminent.

It was Mr Dalston who reassured and commiserated him in terms of the readiest and most delicate sympathy.

Sir Maurice Carnac died that night.

CHAPTER IX.
I VISIT CLAPHAM

On the second morning after its seizure, the body of the old ex-governor was carried away in a hearse to Footover Station, thence to be conveyed to its London home. I had avoided the house in the interval, being jealous of the least suggestion of intrusion; but I hung about the drive on the day of the removal, and threw a little spray of thyme upon the hearse as it passed. So much for a beggar’s remembrance! He had always accepted me fairly, old prosperous worldling as he was, on equal terms. Then I put him resolutely out of my thoughts, and went back to my hermitage, there to mature a little scheme of adventure which I had had in my mind ever since that moment when Mr Pugsley had confessed to me the theatre (presumptive) of a certain event in which I was interested.

An American humourist relates somewhere of a prisoner who had been confined for thirty years in a loathsome dungeon, when a bright idea struck him—he opened the window and got out. Now some such inspiration had seized me all in an instant. Why, in the name of perversity, was I eating my heart out in an aggrieved solitude, when simply at will I might be a traveller—a tentative explorer, at least—and be learning to ride my own destinies instead of being ridden by them? I had not yet sat, like the mythological gentleman, so long upon a rock that I had grown to it. I had means, and certainly at least a definite object in breaking into them. I would wing my test flight for that Clapham suburb which Pugsley had mentioned, and examine the ground there, at least, for subsequent exploiting.

A tingle of adventure was in this as well as a vengeful resolution. It would be something, after all, to breathe a novel air into my stagnant lungs. I had lived so long remote and self-contained, that the prospect of even a Cockney suburb was a prospect potential of romance to me. No one would note my absence, and, if anyone did, how would it concern me? I was free, and my own master.

And so, the very next morning, valise in hand, I strode away, walking determinedly, with no effort at concealment. I went out by the wicket, and took the road to Footover, and thence a train to Waterloo. I was young, green, gullible, no doubt; but a certain hardness of muscle and disposition was always at my service and that of others. Few minor mishaps of the way have befallen me through life, and I was early in expanding to the practical knowledge which overrides difficulties. I mention this merely to explain the ease with which my inexperience resolved these first small problems of self-dependence—my introduction to the roaring traffics of existence, to the wiles and hypocrisies of men. I spent that night at an hotel in the Waterloo Bridge Road; and my initiation into its ways profited me.

Early on the following day I walked through the seethe of the streets to the Victoria Station, and so, by the local service, reached Clapham Road. I will not say that I greeted this goal to my adventure, shapeless as that was, without a certain excitement and hurrying of the blood. Here, somehow and somewhere, had been enacted the prologue to my young unprofitable life. This same busy street, going up southward through a dull avenue of bricks and windows, had housed, perhaps, the germ of that secret, which, dark and poignant a one as it appeared to me, was nevertheless of the commonest breed of secrets all the world over. And, indeed, its setting here seemed prosy enough—monotonous, respectable, unlovely—houses built for the most part in the sober chocolate hue of a century earlier; staid rows of shops; moderate traffic of omnibuses passing back and forth—everything betokening a condition of decent prosperity.

But, coming presently into a sort of little open place or circus, where the single road split out into a fan of three, I was refreshingly struck by some more definite suggestion there of an atmosphere which had already thinly appealed to me. This atmosphere was faintly redolent of past coaching days. It breathed from the tavern doors of the old “Plough Inn,” about which were congregated a half dozen or so of the very legitimate descendants of Tony Veller, but fallen, alas! upon degenerate times. The omnibuses, which they drove in these, stood ranked, yellow and green and red, by the kerb. When any one of the loiterers, detaching himself rubicundly from his fellows, would mount a box, and gather the greasy ribbons into his gloved hands, a whiff of Henry Alken, of his coachmen and stable-tubs and ostlers, would seem irresistibly borne into one’s senses. So, too, the rows of white posts and rails, skirting that side of the common which made for Tooting (Tooting! What suggestion in the very word of windy horns and galloping mails!), seemed to carry one into far perspectives of dead and past adventure. It was this way—though I did not know it then—streamed the enormous traffic of the Derby week, a page snatched out of the Regency eld, and still keeping the gay characteristics of that reckless hard-drinking era. But now the road appeared peaceful enough—a sunny road skirting a great sunny common, where lazy gipsy men, of the true Romany Chal type, kept a paddock of donkeys for hire, and little rookeries of crazy tenements marked at intervals the camping-grounds of dead and gone squatters.

Perhaps it was the result of my reading, or of a purposeless sentiment, or of Fate—let it be what you will; but I was moved to take that road, in an easy sauntering mood. Its freedom, its inviting openness appealed to me. I am no believer in the divinity which hedges kings or exacts its wages of sin; but I am a believer in Luck. Luck is the only power, so it seems to me, who can reconcile the discordant claims of the creeds. Some men—most, one may say—pray to him in vain. I have an idea that he was the nameless, the unknown God of the Greeks.

And, no doubt, of his nature, it is fruitless to appeal to Luck. Perversity is his rule of Godhead—his rules prove the exception. He smiles not on his votaries, nor frowns on his maligners. Incuriousness about him is the only way—but by no means the inevitable one—to attract his notice. Whereby, I really think I became his casual protégé. In all these days my creed was never other than a creed of indifferent and independent fatalism—if to fatalism can be applied such a term of belief. In any case it was near enough to aggravate Luck into seeking to win me to his worship instead. He made a first tentative bid for my suffrage on the present occasion.

I had sauntered a half mile, perhaps, up this pleasant old coaching way, the open common, with its ponds and trees and gorse thickets, to my right hand, to my left a long rank of houses, comfortable, mellow, prosperous, having for the great part bushy gardens in front, when my eye was caught by vision of a cosy tavern, standing across the way in a copse of elm-trees, and bearing in its every appointment and circumstance the tokens of a vanished era. The little paddock of turf in front, planted with the sign of the “Windmill,” and having its own private posts and rails, round which the drive swept; the wooden horse trough; the brown of the walls and the gold and grass-green canvas hung up on them, inviting irresistibly to somebody’s “Entire”—here was the right Regency travellers’ rest-and-be-thankful. It was mild bright weather, and a water cart went by sprinkling up an aromatic scent of dust. I thought of beer, beer in a glass, amber and sparkling, with a kiss of foam at the lip, and I crossed the road to the tavern. And there, over its door, stuck up before my eyes, was the legend “Richard Gaskett, licensed dealer in beer, tobacco and spirits.”