Part 13

At the end of that time, being once more in London, he devoted himself—his affairs having now been ordered with the view to his permanent residence in the country—to some guarded inquiries about the Fair with Golden Hair. For some days, the season of the town being inauspicious, he was unable to discover anything definite about her. And then, suddenly, the news which he sought and desired came in a clap.

He was walking, one day, down a street of poor and genteel houses, when he saw her before him. He stood transfixed. There was no doubting his own eyesight. It was she: tall, slender, crowned with her accustomed glory, the flower of her beauty a little wan, as if seen by moonlight. But what confounded him was her condition. Her dress was mean, her gloves mended; every tag of cheap ribbon which hung upon her seemed the label to a separate tragedy. Thus he saw her again, the Fair with Golden Hair; but how deposed and fallen from her insolent estate!

She mounted a step to a shabby door. While she stood there, waiting to be admitted, an old jaunty cavalier came ruffling it down the street, accosted her, and accompanied her within. She might have glanced at Avenant without recognizing him. The rough dark beard he wore was his sufficient disguise.

Sir Richard made up his mind on the spot, and acted promptly. Having no intention to procure himself a notoriety in this business, he rigidly eschewed personal inquiry, and employed an official informer, at a safe figure, to ferret out the truth for him. This, epitomized, discovered itself as follows:—

Cytherea—Venus Calva—Madonna of the magic girdle, who had once reigned supreme between wealth and loveliness, who had once eaten hearts raw for breakfast, feeding her roses as vampires do, was desolate and impoverished—and even, perhaps, hungry. A scoundrelly guardian had eloped with trust funds: the crash had followed at a blow. Robbed of her recommendation to respect; deposed, at once, from the world’s idolatry to its vicious solicitation, she had fled, with her hair and her poor derided virtue, into squalid oblivion; that, at least, she hoped. But, alas for the fateful recoils on Vanity! She drives with a tight rein; and woe to her if the rein snap! A certain libidinous and crafty nobleman, of threescore or so years, had secured, in the days of the Fair’s prosperity, some little bills of paper bearing that beauty’s signature. These he had politicly withheld himself from negotiating, on the mere chance that they might serve him some day for a means to humiliate one who, in the arrogance of her power, had scoffed at his amatory, and perfectly honourable, addresses. That precaution had justified itself. The peer was now come to woo again, and less scrupulously, with his hand on a paper weapon, one stroke from which alone was needed to give the Fair’s poor drabbled fortune its quietus. She was at bay, between ruin and dishonour.

Sir Richard came immediately to a resolve, and lost no time in giving it effect. He wrote a formal note to the Fair, recalling himself courteously to her remembrance, reminding her of his original offer, and renewing it in so many words. He would do himself the honour, he said, to wait upon her for her answer on such and such a day.

To this he received no reply; nor, perhaps, expected one. He went, nevertheless, to his self-made appointment with the imperturbable confidence of a strong man.

Passing, on his way, by a perruquier’s, he checked himself, and stood for some moments at gaze in a motionless reverie. Then he entered the shop, made a purchase, and, going to a barber’s, caused himself to be shorn, shaved, and restored to the conventional aspect. Thus conditioned, he knocked at the Fair’s door, and was ushered up—bawled up, rather, by a slattern landlady—into her presence.

She rose to face him as he entered. She had his letter in her hand. Her beautiful hair, jealous, it seemed, to withdraw itself from the curioso’s very appraisement, was gathered into and concealed under a cap. Her features, thus robbed of their dazzling frame, looked curiously, sadly childish and forlorn. There were dark marks round her eyes—the scarce dissipated clouds of recent tears. Who can tell what emotions, at sight of this piteous, hard-driven loveliness, stirred the heart of the man opposite, and were repressed by his iron will?

“This letter, sir,” said the Fair, holding out the paper in a hand which shook a little. “I have tacitly permitted you to presume a right to a personal answer to that which it proposes, because such a course appeared to me the least compromising. I cannot write my name, sir, nowdays—as scandal doubtless hath informed you—but Fortune will be using it to my discredit.”

Sir Richard bowed.

“There is this difference only, madam: _my_ word is the bond of a gentleman. I vowed you secrecy.”

“That is to assume, on your part,” she said quietly, “a confidentialness which, in its insult to misfortune, is at least not the _act_ of a gentleman. Moreover, a gentleman, surely, had not taken advantage of circumstances to propose to destitution what affluence had once refused him.”

“Beware, madam!” said Avenant. “Pride must make some sacrifices to virtue. If, in renewing a pure business offer, I, a simple instrument in the hands of Providence, give you an opportunity to maintain that priceless possession unimpaired, would it not be the truer self-respect to secure your honour at whatever cost to your sentiments?”

“I thank you, sir,” she said. “I have not forgotten, nor forgotten to resent, my self-constituted Mentor. I will assure him that, for the matter of my virtue, it is safe in my hands, though I have to arm those against myself.”

“Good heavens, madam!” cried Avenant. “You are not at that resource?”

“Give yourself no concern, sir,” she answered coldly. “The moral I learned of your insult, was to save myself in its despite.”

His deep eyes glowed upon her.

“You have sold your hair?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered; “to pay my debts. ’Twas your letter decided me.”

“At a thousand pounds?”

“At a hundred.”

Then she added, as if irresistibly, because she was still little more than a child, “And now, sir, how is the boaster vindicated? But your oath, I perceive, still goes beardless.”

“Within the hour only,” said he; and, thrusting his hand into his breast, he drew out the long tresses of the Fair With Golden Hair.

She stared, amazed a moment; then threw herself upon her knees by a chair, weeping and crying out—

“O, I hate you, I hate you!”

He strode, and stood over her.

“I saw them through a window as I came. How could I mistake them? There is not their like in the world. But now, my oath redeemed, it is for you to say if I am to destroy them.”

“O, my hair!” she wept; “my one beauty!”

“I have staked all on this,” he cried. “If your hair was your one beauty, my beard alone redeemed me from appalling ugliness by so much as it hid of me. Well, I have lost on both counts, if the net result is your hatred.”

She looked up, with drowned bewildered eyes, and held out her hand blindly.

“Give me back my hair,” she said, “and you shall have the hundred pounds.”

“Nay, sweet Delilah,” quoth he; “for that would be to return you your strength, and I want you weak.”

Her arm dropped to her side.

“That you may insult me with impunity!” she said bitterly.

“Ah, Delilah!” he cried; “is it so bad, that the offer of my hand and heart is an insult to a woman?”

She sank back, sitting on her heels. From under her cap, fallen awry, curled shavings of gold hung out—the residue of a squandered wealth. Her eyes were wide with amazement.

“So bad?” she whispered. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

He was not a conformable wooer. The love-wise sex shall say if he was a diplomatic one. He threw himself on his knees beside the Fair, seized her in his bear-like grip, and kissed her lips.

“Now,” he said, “it is neck or nothing. None but a parson can wipe out the stain. Hate me now, and put Love to bed for by and by.”

She smiled suddenly—like the rainbow; like an angel.

“Yes,” she said, “if you insist. But the poor thing has slept so long in my heart, that it would fain wake up at last, and confess itself.”

The peer took his settlement with a very bad grace; but he had to take it, and there was an end of him.

“Avenant,” whispered the Fair, on the evening of their wedding day, “I have been vain, spoiled, perhaps untruthful. But I wished to tell you—you can put me to sleep on the middle shelf of your cupboard.”

“It has been converted into a closet for skeletons,” he said. “I was a bachelor then.”

THE LOST NOTES

The faculty of music is generally, I believe, inimical to the development of all the other faculties. Sufficient to itself is the composing gift. There was scarcely ever yet a born musician, I do declare, who, outside his birthright, was not a born ass. I say it with the less irreverence, because my uncle was patently one of the rare exceptions which prove the rule. He knew his Shakespeare as well as his musical-glasses—better than, in fact; for he was a staunch Baconian. This was all the odder because—as was both early and late impressed upon me—he had a strong sense of humour. Perhaps an eternal study of the hieroglyphics of the leger lines was responsible for his craze; for craze I still insist it was, in spite of the way he took to convince me of the value of cryptograms. I was an obstinate pupil, I confess, and withstood to the end the fire of all the big guns which he—together with my friend, Chaunt, who was in the same line—brought to bear upon me.

Well, I was honest, at least; for I was my uncle’s sole provisional legatee, and heir presumptive to whatever small fortune he had amassed during his career. And day by day, as the breach between us widened, I saw my prospect of the succession attenuating, and would not budge from my position. No, Shakespeare was Shakespeare, I said, and Bacon, Bacon; and not all the cyphers in the world should convince me that any profit was to be gained by either imagining or unravelling a single one of them.

“What, no profit!” roared my uncle. “But I will persuade you, young man, of your mistake before I’m done with you. Hum-ti-diddledidee! No profit, hey? H’m—well!”

Then I saw that the end was come. And, indeed, it was an open quarrel between us, and I was forbidden to call upon him again.

I was sorry for this, because, in his more frolicsome and uncontroversial moments, he was a genial companion, unless or until one inadvertently touched on _the_ theme, when at once he exploded. Professionally, he _could_ be quite a rollicking blade, and his settings of plantation songs were owned to be nothing less than lyric inspirations. Pantomime, too, in the light of his incidental music, had acquired something more than a classical complexion; and, in the domain of knockabout extravaganza, not only did the score of “The Girl who Knew a Thing or Two” owe to him its most refined numbers, but also the libretto, it was whispered, its best Attic _bonnes-bouches_.

However, all that good company I must now forgo—though Chaunt tried vainly to heal the breach between us—and in the end the old man died, without any visible relenting towards me.

I felt his loss pretty keenly, though it is no callousness in me to admit that our long separation had somewhat dulled the edge of my attachment. I expected, of course, no testamentary consideration from him, and was only more surprised than uplifted to receive one morning a request from his lawyers to visit them at my convenience. So I went, soberly enough, and introduced myself.

“No,” said the partner to whom I was admitted, in answer to a question of mine: “I am not in a position to inform you who is the principal beneficiary under our friend’s will. I can only tell you—what a few days before his death he confided to us, and what, I think, under the circumstances, you are entitled to learn—that he had quite recently, feeling his end approaching, realized on the bulk of his capital, converted the net result into a certain number—five, I think he mentioned—of Bank of England notes, and… burned ’em, for all we know to the contrary.”

“Burned them!” I murmured aghast.

“I don’t say so,” corrected the lawyer drily. “I only say, you know, that we are not instructed to the contrary. Your uncle” (he coughed slightly) “had his eccentricities. Perhaps he swallowed ’em; perhaps gave ’em away at the gate. Our dealings are, beyond yourself, solely with the residuary legatee, who is, or was, his housekeeper. For her benefit, moreover, the furniture and effects of our late client are to be sold, always excepting a few more personal articles, which, together with a sealed enclosure, we are desired to hand over to you.”

He signified, indeed, my bequest as he spoke. It lay on a table behind him: A bound volume of minutes of the Baconian Society; a volume of Ignatius Donnelly’s Great Cryptogram; a Chippendale tea-caddy (which, I was softened to think, the old man had often known me to admire); a large piece of foolscap paper twisted into a cone, and a penny with which to furnish myself with a mourning ring out of a cracker.

I blushed to my ears, regarding the show; and then, to convince this person of my good-humoured sanity, giggled like an idiot. He did not even smile in reply, the self-important ass, but, with a manner of starchy condescension, as to a wastrel who was getting all his deserts, rose from his chair, unlocked a safe, took an ordinary sealed envelope from it, handed it to me, and informed me that, upon giving him a receipt, I was at liberty to remove the lot.

“Thanks,” I said, grinding my astral teeth. “Am I to open this in your presence?”

“Quite inessential,” he answered; and, upon ascertaining that I should like a cab called, sent for one.

“Good morning,” he said, when at last it was announced (he had not spoken a word in the interval): “I wish you good morning,” in the morally patronizing tone of a governor discharging a prisoner.

I responded coldly; tried, for no reason at all, to look threatening; failed utterly, and went out giggling again. Quite savagely I threw my goods upon the seat, snapped out my address, closed the apron upon my abasement, and sat slunk into the cavity behind, like a salted and malignant snail.

Presently I thumped the books malevolently. The dear old man was grotesque beyond reason. Really he needn’t have left life cutting a somersault, as it were.

But, as I cooled outwardly, a warmer thought would intrude. It drew, somehow, from the heart of that little enclosure lying at the moment in my pocket. It was ridiculous, of course, to expect anything of it but some further development of a rather unkind jest. My uncle’s professional connexion with burlesque had rather warped, it would appear, his sense of humour. Still, I could not but recall that story of the conversion of his capital into notes: and an envelope——!

Bah! (I wriggled savagely). It was idiotic beyond measure so to flatter myself. Our recent relations had precluded for ever any such possibility. The holocaust, rather! The gift to a chance passer-by, as suggested by that fool of a lawyer! I stared out of the window, humming viciously, and telling myself it was only what I ought to expect; that such a vagary was distinctly in accordance with the traditions of low comedy. It will be observed that I was very contemptuous of buffoonery as a profession. Paradoxically, a joke is never played so low as when it is played on our lofty selves.

Nevertheless, I was justified, it appeared. It may be asked, Why did I not at once settle the matter by opening the envelope in the cab? Well, I just temporized with my gluttony, till, like the greedy boy, I could examine my box in private—only to find that the rats had devoured all my cake. It was not till I was shut into my sitting-room that I dared at length to break the seal, and to withdraw——

Even as it came out, with no suggestion of a reassuring crackle, I realized my fate. And this was it: please to examine it carefully—

[IMAGE: images/img_197.jpg, “Musical notes”]

Now, what do you make of it? “_Ex nihilo nihil fit_,” I think you will say with me. It was literally thus, carefully penned in the middle of a single sheet of music-paper—a phrase, or _motif_, I suppose it would be called—an undeveloped memorandum, in fact—nothing else whatever. I let the thing drop from my hand.

No doubt there was some capping jest here, some sneer, some vindictive sarcasm. I was not musician enough to tell, even had I had spirit for the endeavour. It was unworthy, at least, of the old man—much more, or less, than I deserved. I had been his favourite once. Strange how the _idée fixe_ could corrode an otherwise tractable reason. In justice to myself I must insist that quite half my disappointment was in the realization that such dislike, due to such a trifle, could have come to usurp the old affection.

By and by I rose dismally, and carried the jest to the piano. (Half a crown a day my landlady exacted from me, if I so much as thumped on the old wreck with one finger, which was the extent of my talent.) Well, I was reckless, and the theme appeared ridiculously simple. But I could make nothing of it—not though Mrs. Dexter came up in the midst, and congratulated me on my performance.

When she was gone I took the thing to my chair again, and resumed its study despondently. And presently Chaunt came in.

“Hullo!” he said: “how’s the blooming legatee?”

“Pretty blooming, thanks,” I said. “Would you like to speculate in my reversion? Half a crown down to Mrs. Dexter, and the use of the tin kettle for the day.”

“Done,” he said, “so far as the piano’s concerned. Let’s see what you’ve got there.”

He had known of my prospective visit to the lawyers, and had dropped in to congratulate me on _that_ performance. I acquainted him with the result; showed him the books, and the tea-caddy, and the penny, and the remnants of foolscap—finally, handed him the crowning jest for inspection.

“Pretty thin joke, isn’t it?” I growled dolefully. “Curse the money, anyhow! But I didn’t think it of the old man. I suppose you can make no more of that than I can?”

He was squinting at the paper as he held it up, and rubbing his jaw, stuck out at an angle, grittily.

“H’m!” he said, quite suddenly, “I’d go out for a walk and revive myself, if I were you. I intend to hold you to that piano, for my part; and you wouldn’t be edified.”

“No,” I said: “I’ve had enough of music for a lifetime or so! I fancy I’ll go, if you won’t think me rude.”

“On the contrary,” he murmured, in an absorbed way; and I left him.

I took a longish spin, and returned, on the whole refreshed, in a couple of hours. He was still there; but he had finished, it appeared, with the piano.

“Well,” he said, rising and yawning, “you’ve been a deuce of a time gone; but here you are”—and he held out to me indifferently a little crackling bundle.

Without a word I took it from his hand—parted, stretched, and explored it.

“Good God!” I gasped: “five notes of a thousand apiece!”

He was rolling a cigarette.

“Yes,” he drawled, “that’s the figure, I believe.”

“For me?”

“For you—from your uncle.”

“But—how?”

He lighted, took a serene puff or two, drew the _jest_ from his pocket, and, throwing it on a chair, “You’ll have to allow some value to cryptograms at last,” he said, and sat down to enjoy himself.

“Chaunt!”

“O,” he said, “it was a bagatelle. An ass might have brayed it out at sight.”

“Please, I am something less than an ass. Please will you interpret for me?” I said humbly.

He neighed out—I beg _his_ pardon—a great laugh at last.

“O,” he cried: “your uncle was true blue; he stuck to his guns; but I never really supposed he meant to disinherit you, Johnny. You always had the first place in his heart, for all your obstinacy. He took his own way to convince you, that was all. Pretty poor stuff it is, I’m bound to confess; but enough to run _your_ capacities to extinction. Here, hand it over.”

“Don’t be hard on me,” I protested, giving him the paper. “If I’m all that you say, it was as good as cutting me off with a penny.”

“No,” he answered: “because he knew very well that you’d apply to me to help you out of the difficulty.”

“Well, help me,” I said, “and, in the matter of Bacon, I’ll promise to be a fool convinced against my will.”

“No doubt,” he answered drily, and came and sat beside me. “Look here,” he said; and I looked:—

[IMAGE: images/img_200.jpg, “Musical notes”]

“You know your notes, anyhow,” said he. “Well, you’ve only got to read off these into their alphabetical equivalents, and cut the result into perfectly obvious lengths. It’s child’s play so far; and, indeed, in everything, unless this rum-looking metronome beat, or whatever it may be, bothers you for a moment.”

He put his finger on the crazy device perched up independently in the left-hand corner; and then came down to the lines again.

“Let that be for the moment,” said he. “It don’t much signify, after all. How do these notes go? that’s the main question. Read ’em off.”

I spelt them out, following his finger: “b a c e f d e c a d e c.”

“That’s a good boy,” he said. “And now, what are these things beyond, that have run off the lines, so to speak?”

“What are they? Why, I don’t see what they can be but notes.”

“Exactly. Five notes.”

I stared at the bundle in my hand, and then up at Chaunt.

“O-o-o-o!” I exclaimed.

He uttered a loud ironic laugh. “Well,” he said: “what does ‘b a c e f d e c a d e c’ spell?”

I scratched my nose. “You tell me, please.”

“O Jerusalem!” he cried, and took his pencil to the line, thus: b a c | e f | d e | c a d e | c—

“Well?” he said again.

I shook my head.

He positively stamped. “Listen here,” he cried: “‘bac ef de cad-e c’—_don’t_ you see?”

“No.”

“O, you ineffable ass! ‘Back of the caddy’ (that’s to say the tea-caddy; there it is), ‘see’—see what? What follows? Why, five notes, don’t they? ‘Back of the caddy see five notes’—and there _they_ are.”

I sank in a heap in my chair. Light had dawned on me. “And you found ’em there, I suppose?” I murmured—“behind a false back or something?”

He nodded. “You’re getting on.”

“And, please, what’s the thing at the top?” I continued faintly. “Let me get it all over at once.”

“Ah!” he said: “there’s a trifle more ingenuity in that, perhaps. What is it, to begin with? A demisemiquaver balanced on the top of an M Y, eh?”

“So it appears to me.”

“To any one. Don’t be frightened. Try it every way round, and conclude with this: ‘On the top of M Y’—that is to say, ‘_on_ M Y,’ which is _my_, ‘a demisemiquaver’: or, shorn of all superfluities (he pencilled it down), thus: ‘on my demisemiquaver.’ Now apply the same process.”

I looked; pondered; felt myself instantly and brilliantly inspired; seized the pencil from him, and ticked off the measurements:—

“On my demise | mi | q | u | av | er.”

“Exactly,” said Chaunt, rising with the air of an at-length-released martyr, and proceeding to roll another cigarette: “‘On my demise, my cue you have here.’ ’Pon my word, without irreverence, it’s worthier of the composer of ‘Say, den, Julius, whar yo’ walkin’ roun’?’ than of the author of ‘Some Unnoticed Sides of Bacon.’ But all one can say is that he adapted himself to the intellectual measure of his legatee. Have you got a match?”

I must end, I am really ashamed to say, with this. Anyhow, in one way my uncle was triumphant: I was convinced, at last and at least, of _a_ value in cryptograms.

THE UNLUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD