CHAPTER XII.

TOM BRISTOW’S RETURN.

“What can be sweeter or more charming than an English May-day? I declare I’ve seen nothing in the East at all comparable to it.”

The speaker was Tom Bristow; the person addressed was a casual compagnon de voyage, whose acquaintance he had made during the Channel passage; and the scene was a first-class compartment in the mail train from Dover to London.

“You wouldn’t be so ready to praise an English May-day if you had been here last week, as I was,” was the reply. “No sunshine—not a gleam; but, in place of it, a confounded east wind that was almost keen enough to shave you. Every second fellow you met spoke to you through his nose; and when you did happen to get near a fire, you were frozen through on one side before you were half warmed through on the other.”

“Well, it’s pleasant enough now, in all conscience,” said Tom, with a smile of easy content.

Tom Bristow, who was very thorough in most of his undertakings, had remained abroad—extending his travels into Palestine and Egypt—till his health was completely reestablished. But, as he said to himself, he had now had enough of sands and sunsets; of dirty Algerines and still dirtier Arabs; of camel-riding and mule-riding; of beggars and bucksheesh; and he was now coming back, with renewed zest, to the prosaic duties of everyday existence, as exemplified, in his case, in the rise and fall of public securities and the refined gambling of the London Stock Exchange.

By the time he had been a week in London he had made himself thoroughly master of the situation again, and almost felt as if he had never been away. “I have been so long used to an idle life,” he said to himself, about a fortnight after his return, “that very little work seems to knock me up. Why not take the five o’clock train this afternoon, and run down as far as Gatehouse Farm, and spend a couple of days with old Li Dering? Where in the wide world is there any air equal to that which blows across the sandhills of the old farm?”

Between nine and ten o’clock on Sunday morning Tom Bristow knocked at the well-remembered door. After sleeping at the Station Hotel, he had walked leisurely across the fields, his heart beating high with the expectation of shortly being able to grasp his friend by the hand. Everything seemed as if he had left the farm but yesterday, except that then it was autumn and now it was spring. Mrs. Bevis answered his knock. She started at the sight of him, and could not repress an exclamation of surprise. “Yes, here I am once more,” said Tom, with his pleasant smile. “Don’t tell me that Mr. Dering is not at home.”

Mrs. Bevis’s answer was a sudden burst of tears.

“What has happened, Mrs. Bevis?” cried Tom, in alarm. “Not—not—?” His looks finished the question.

“Oh, Mr. Bristow, haven’t you heard, sir?” cried Mrs. Bevis through her sobs.

“I’ve heard nothing—not a word. I have only just returned from abroad.”

“Mr. Dering, sir, is lying in Duxley gaol, waiting to take his trial at the next assizes.”

“His trial!” echoed Tom in amazed perplexity. “Trial for what?”

“For wilful murder, sir!”

“Can this be true?” cried Tom, as he sank back, with blanched face and staring eyes, on the old oaken seat in the porch.

“Only too true, sir—only too true!” moaned Mrs. Bevis. “But I’ll never believe that he did it—never!” she added emphatically. “A kinder heart, a truer gentleman, never drew breath.”

“I’ll say amen to that,” replied Tom, earnestly. “But Lionel Dering committed for wilful murder! It seems an utter impossibility.”

“Why, all England’s been ringing with the story,” added Mrs. Bevis.

“And yet I’ve never heard of it. But, as I said before, I’ve only just got back from the East, where I was two months without seeing a newspaper.

“I couldn’t bear to tell you about it, sir. My heart seems almost broken as it is. But I’ve got the newspapers here with all the account in. Perhaps you would like to read them for yourself, sir.”

“I should indeed, Mrs. Bevis. But did I understand you aright when you said that Mr. Dering was in Duxley gaol?”

“That’s the place, sir.”

“Duxley in Midlandshire?”

“The very same, sir.”

“But what was Mr. Dering doing so far away from home?”

“Law, sir I’d forgotten that you were a stranger to the news. Master’s a rich man now, sir. His uncle died last autumn, and left him a great estate close by Duxley. He’s been living there ever since.”

“You astonish me, Mrs. Bevis. But what is the name of the estate?”

“Park Newton. But may I ask whether you know Duxley, sir?”

“I know Duxley very well indeed. I was born and brought up there.”

“To think of that, now!”

“Then the name of Mr. Dering’s uncle must have been Mr. Arthur St. George?”

“That’s the name, sir. I recollect it quite well, because it put me in mind of St. George and the Dragon. But I’ll fetch you the newspapers.”

She brought the papers presently, and left Tom to himself while he read them. The case was as Mrs. Bevis had stated it. Lionel Dering stood committed to take his trial at the next assizes for the wilful murder of Percy Osmond.

Mrs. Bevis, coming back after a quarter of an hour, found Mr. Bristow buried deep in thought, with the newspapers lying unheeded by his side.

“You don’t believe that he did it, do you, sir?” she asked, with tearful earnestness.

“I would stake my existence on Mr. Dering’s innocence!” said Tom, emphatically.

“God bless you, sir, for those words!” cried Mrs. Bevis. “There must surely be some way to help him—some way of proving that he did not do this dreadful thing?”

“Whatever friendship or money can do shall be done for him. That you may rely upon.”

“Mr. Dering saved your life, sir. You will try and save his, won’t you?”

“I will—so help me Heaven!” answered Tom, fervently.

“It is strange,” mused Tom, as he walked sadly back to the station, “that in all our long conversations together Dering should never have mentioned that he had an uncle living within three miles of Duxley, and I should never have spoken of the town by name as the place where I was born and reared. And then to think that Tobias Hoskyns, my old governor, should be the man of all men into whose hands Dering has entrusted his case! But the whole affair is a tissue of surprises from beginning to end.”

Next morning, at nine o’clock, Mr. Tom Bristow, after a preliminary knock, walked into the private office of Mr. Tobias Hoskyns, of Duxley, attorney-at-law.

Mr. Hoskyns was a frail-looking, spare-built man of some fifty-five or sixty years. He was rather short-sighted, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He had gray hair, and gray whiskers that ended abruptly half-way down his cheeks, as though too timid to venture farther. He was dressed with a certain old-fashioned precision, that took little or no heed of the variations of fashion, but went on quietly repeating itself from one year’s end to another. He was very fond of snuff, which he imbibed, not after the reckless and defiant manner affected by some lovers of the powdered weed, but in a deferential, half-apologetic kind of way, as though he were ashamed of the practice, and begged you would make a point of forgetting his weakness as speedily as possible. He carried an old-fashioned silver snuff-box in his waistcoat pocket, and in another pocket a yellow silk handkerchief of immense size, bordered with black. In short, Mr. Hoskyns was a clearly individualized figure, and one might safely say that, by sight at least, he was known to every man, woman, and child in Duxley.

He was very pleased indeed to see his quondam clerk. “Then you do still manage to keep your head above water, eh?” he said, as he shook Tom warmly by the hand.

“Yes. The waters of speculation have not quite swallowed me up,” said Tom, demurely.

“Ah, you know the old proverb, ‘a rolling stone,’ et cetera. You should have stuck to your stool in the outer office, as I advised you to do. You might, perhaps, have been junior partner by this time, and—this in your ear—the business gets more lucrative every year; it does really. Ah, Tom, Tom, you made a great mistake when you left Duxley! Thought you were going to set the Thames on fire, I know you did.”

“Experience, sir, is said to make fools wise. Let us hope that I shall have gathered a little of the commodity by-and-by.”

“Well, you must come and dine with me this evening. Can’t stay now. I’m due at the gaol in fifteen minutes.”

“That’s the very place to which I want to go with you.”

“Eh? Bless my heart, what do you want to go there for?”

“To see the same man that you are going to visit—to see my dear friend, Lionel Dering.”

“Why, good gracious, you don’t mean to say——” and Mr. Hoskyns took off his spectacles, and stared at Tom in blank amazement.

Then Tom had to explain, in the fewest possible words, how it happened that he and Lionel Dering were such excellent friends. Five minutes later they were on their way to the gaol.

As they passed through the lawyer’s outer office, Tom glanced round. With one exception, the faces of all there were strangers to him. The exception was not a very inviting person to look at, but Tom went up and shook hands with him. He was a tall, big-boned, loosely-built man of five and forty, dressed in very rusty black—an awkward, shambling sort of fellow, unshaven and uncombed, with grubby hands and bleared eyes, and with a wild shaggy mop of hair which had once been jet black, but was now thickly sprinkled with gray. The man’s features were wanting neither in power nor intellect, but they were marred by an air of habitual dissipation—of sottishness, even—which he made no effort to conceal.

“Jabez Creede is still with you, I see,” said Tom, as he and the lawyer walked down the street.

“Yes, I still keep him on,” answered Hoskyns, “though, if I have threatened once to turn him away, I have a hundred times. With his dirty, drunken ways, the man, as a man, is unbearable to me; but, as a clerk, I don’t know what I should do without him. For engrossing, or copying, he is useless, his hand is far too shaky. But in one other respect he is invaluable to me: his memory is like a prodigious storehouse, in which he can lay his hand on any particular article at a moment’s notice. He knows how useful he is to me, and he presumes on that knowledge to do things that I would submit to from no other clerk in my employ.”

There was no difficulty in passing Tom into the gaol. In the case of a prisoner of such distinction as Mr. Dering, some of the more stringent of the prison regulations were to a certain extent relaxed. Besides which, Mr. Hoskyns and the governor were bosom friends, playing whist together two or three evenings a week the winter through, and wrangling over the odd trick, as only old companions can wrangle; so that the lawyer’s word soon placed Tom inside the magic gates, and after he had been introduced to Mr. Dux, the aforesaid governor, he might be said to be duly possessed of the Open Sesame of the grim old building.

“This is kind of you, Bristow, very kind!” exclaimed Lionel, as he strode forward to greet his friend. “When we parted last we little thought that our next meeting would be in these halls of dazzling light.” He laughed a dismal laugh, and pressed Tom down into his own chair.

For a moment or two Tom could not trust himself to speak. “There’s a silver lining to every cloud, you know, old boy,” he stammered out at last. “You must bear up like a brick. Please Heaven, we’ll soon have you out of this hole, and everything will come right in the long run, never fear.” He felt that it was not at all what he had intended to say, but, somehow, his usual ready flow of words seemed dried up for a little while.

Lionel Dering had been nearly a month in prison. Confinement to a man of his active outdoor habits was especially irksome, and Tom was not surprised to find him looking pale and more careworn than he had ever seen him look before. He was extraordinarily cheerful, however; and when Tom told him that it was his intention to stay at Duxley till the trial was over, he brightened up still more, and at once proposed that they two should have a game at chess, there and then, as in the old pleasant days at Gatehouse Farm.

“Dux is very good to me,” he explained. “He comes to see me for an hour most evenings. He and I have had several games together. The turnkey will fetch his board and men in five minutes.”

Mr. Hoskyns was somewhat scandalized. “I cannot get my client,” he explained to Tom, “to evince that interest in his trial, and the arrangements for his defence, that the importance of the occasion demands. It really almost seems as if Mr. Dering looked upon the whole business as referring, not to himself, but to some stranger in whose affairs he took only the faintest possible interest.”

“My dear Hoskyns,” said Lionel, “you pumped me dry long ago of every morsel of information that I could give you respecting this wretched business. You can get nothing more out of me, and may as well leave me in peace. Employ whom you will to defend me, if defence I need. That is your business, not mine.”

So Tom and Lionel had their game of chess, and a long talk together afterwards, and when Tom at last left the prison, it was with a promise to be there again at an early hour next morning.

Lionel Dering’s first care after his arrest was to write to Edith West, in order that she might learn the news direct from himself, and not through a newspaper or any other source.

“My darling Edith,” he wrote, “a terrible misfortune has befallen me. A gentleman, Mr. Percy Osmond by name, one of my guests at Park Newton, has been foully murdered, and I am accused of the crime. That my innocence will be made clear to the world at my trial, I do not doubt. Till that day comes I must submit, with what patience I may, to be kept closely under lock and key in this grim building from which I write. You see that I write quite calmly, and without any fear whatever as to the result. My greatest trouble in the matter is my enforced deprivation of your dear society for a little while. I will write you fuller particulars to-morrow. I am afraid that it will be necessary to fix the date of our marriage a month later than the time agreed upon, but certainly not more than a month. That of itself is very annoying. I beg that you will not fret or worry yourself on my account. This is but a little trial which will soon be over, and which, years hence, will shape itself into a seasonable story to be told round the Christmas fire.”

Lionel saw from the moment of his arrest that the evidence against him was far too strong to allow him to hope for any other issue than a commitment for trial at the assizes. And he was right. The magistrates before whom he was taken could not do otherwise than commit him for wilful murder. The jet stud found in the dead man’s hand, the saturated handkerchief, the streaks of blood on his shirt—damning proofs all, which Lionel Dering could neither explain nor extenuate—left them no other alternative.

And that, to the public at large, seemed the strangest feature of the case: Mr. Dering either could not or would not offer any explanation. If it seemed strange to the outside world that no explanation was forthcoming, how much stranger did it seem to Lionel himself, that he was utterly unable to offer any! How and by what means had those terrible evidences of guilt come there? Day and night, night and day, during his first week in prison, he kept on asking himself the same question, only to acknowledge himself utterly baffled, and as far from any satisfactory answer the last time he asked it as he was the first. All that he could say was, that he knew absolutely nothing; that his mind was an utter blank from the moment he flung himself, half stupefied, on his dressing-room sofa till the moment he woke next morning and found his handkerchief saturated with blood. Heartsick and brain-weary, he at length gave up all effort to solve a problem which, as far as he was concerned, seemed incapable of any solution; and set himself to face the inevitable with what patience and resignation he could summon to his aid. He could only trust and hope that on the day of the trial, something would turn up, some proof be forthcoming, which would exculpate him utterly, and prove once more the fallibility of even the strongest chain of circumstantial evidence. If not—but the alternative was not a pleasant one to contemplate.

As already stated, Lionel’s first act after his arrest was to write a note to Edith West. Twelve hours later, Mrs. Garside and Miss West stepped out of the train at Duxley station. The newspapers had told them that Mr. Dering’s case was in the hands of a certain Mr. Hoskyns, and the first person they accosted after leaving the station, directed them to that gentleman’s office. Fortunately, Mr. Hoskyns was at home. They told him who they were, and that their object in coming to Duxley was to see and be near Mr. Dering.

“I shall see Mr. Dering this evening,” said the lawyer. “I will tell him that you are in Duxley, and should he prove willing to see you—which I do not doubt that he will—you can accompany me to the prison at ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”

Lionel was overjoyed to learn that Edith was so near him, and could not find in his heart to blame her for coming, however injudicious such a step might have seemed to many people. But even he, as yet, had conceived but a very vague idea of the infinite capabilities of a character such as hers.

On the morrow they met, and it was a meeting that made even Hoskyns, case-hardened though he was, remember for a moment that, many, many years ago, he himself had been young.

The moment the door was opened Edith sprang to Lionel’s arms, utterly indifferent to the fact that Mrs. Garside and the lawyer were looking on from the background. “My life! my love! my husband!” she murmured, between her tears. “At last, at last!—my own, never to be lost to me again. And this is your home—this miserable cell! It shall be my home too. If they will not let me stay with you, my heart, at least, will be with you day and night—always.”

“Now I feel that you love me,” was all that Lionel could say for the moment.

“I cling to you because you are in trouble,” said Edith. “My place is by your side. I have a right to be here, and nothing shall keep me away. To-morrow, or next day at the latest, Lionel, you must make me your wife.”

“What, marry you here, Edith! In this place, and while I am a prisoner charged with wilful murder!”

“Yes; in this place, and while you are a prisoner charged with wilful murder.”

“My darling child, what are you thinking of?” in mild protest from Mrs. Garside.

“Aunt, I know perfectly well what I am thinking of. I have been Lionel’s promised wife for some time. I am now going to be his wife in reality. I am only a weak woman, I know; I cannot really help him; I can only love him and watch over him, and do my best to lighten the dark hours of his life in prison.”

“But suppose the worst comes to the worst,” said Lionel, very gravely, “and such a result is by no means improbable.”

Edith shuddered. “You only supply me with one argument the more,” she answered. “The deeper your trouble—the greater your peril—the closer must I cling to you. It is hard to see you here—hard to know of what you are accused—but you will break my heart altogether, Lionel, if you drive me from your side.”

Gently and gravely, Lionel argued with her, but to no purpose. It is possible that his arguments were not very powerful ones; that they were not very logically enforced. Who could have resisted her loving, passionate plea? Not Lionel, whose heart, despite his outward show of resistance, went out half-way to meet hers, as Edith’s own instinct too surely told her.

Three days later they were married in the prison chapel. Mr. Hoskyns made a special journey to London and brought back the licence. One stipulation was made by Lionel—that the marriage should be kept a profound secret, and a profound secret it was kept. The witnesses were Mrs. Garside, Hoskyns, Mr. Dux, and the chief warder. Beyond these four, and the chaplain, the knowledge did not extend. Even the turnkeys, whose duty it was to attend to Lionel, had no suspicion of what had taken place.

Three weeks had come and gone since the marriage of Lionel and Edith when Tom Bristow first set foot inside the gaol.