Part 6

Hope, dying on a pallet up three flights of stairs, sprang alert on the instant. It might be a friend, a creditor, the housekeeper: something telepathic, flowing through the panels, assured me that it was none of these things. Tap-tap! so smart on the woodwork that it made me jump. I swept pipes and tobacco into a drawer. “Come in!” I cried. Then, as the visitor entered, “John, throw up the window a little! O, bother the boy! he’s out.”

I don’t know if the new-comer was imposed on. He nodded and sniffed.

“Tobacco!” he exclaimed. “What an age since I’ve tasted it! Mr. Ganthony, I presume?”

I bowed.

“Barrister-at-law?”

I bowed again. My plate was in the hall to inform him.

“Accept my instructions for a brief.”

He stated it so abruptly that it took my breath away. If all this was outside procedure, I was not going to quarrel with my bread and butter. I motioned him to a chair, and, taking up pen and paper tentatively, was in a position to scrutinize my visitor.

His appearance was certainly odd—a marked exaggeration, I should have pronounced it, of the legal type. His face was very red; his enormous side-whiskers very white. Large spectacles obscured his eyes, and he wore his silk hat (of an obsolete pattern) cocked rakishly over one of them. Add to this that his voluminous frock-coat looked like a much larger man’s misfit; that his black cotton gloves were preposterously long in the fingers; that he carried a “gamp” of the pantomime pattern, and it will be obvious that I had some reason for my astonishment. But I kept that in hand. A lawyer, after all, must come to graduate in the eccentricities of clients.

He looked perkily, with an abrupt action of his head, round about him; then came to me again.

“Large practice?” he asked.

“Large enough for my needs,” I answered winningly.

“H’m!” He sniffed. “They don’t appear to be many.”

“That—excuse me—is my affair,” I said with dignity.

“Of course,” he said; “of course. Only I looked you up—accident serving intuition—on the supposition that you were green, you know—one of the briefless ones—called to the Bar, but not chosen, eh?”

I plumped instantly for frankness.

“You are my first retainer,” I said.

His manner changed at once. He pulled his chair a little nearer me, with an eager motion.

“That’s what I wanted,” he said. “That’s it. The sort that are suffering to win their spurs. None of your egregious old-stagers, who require their briefs to be endorsed to the tune of three figures before they’ll move—‘monkey’-in-the-slot men, _I_ call ’em. Thinks I to myself, Here’s the sort that’ll be willing to take up a case on spec’.”

My enthusiasm shot down to zero.

“O!” I said, with a falling face; “on speculation!”

“There’s a fortune in it for a clever advocate,” he answered eagerly. “A fortune! all Pactolus in a nutshell. I’ve had my experiences of the other kind. They squeeze you, and throw you away; take the wages of sin, and hand you over to the deuce. What do _you_ say?”

“If you will give me the particulars,” I answered, without heart, “I shall be able to judge better. Your client——?”

He laughed joyously; frowned; put his hat on the floor; crossed his arms over his umbrella-handle, and glowered ferociously at me, squinting through his glasses.

“Exactly,” he said; “my client, ha-ha! Here, then, young sir, is my client’s case.

“His name is Buggins” (I glanced involuntarily at the wall). “He is, or was, until envy combined with detraction to ruin him, a company-promoter. As such, his trend was always towards insurance. It offered the best opportunities to a great creative genius. Buggins, being all that, recognized the still amazing potentialities in a field of commerce, which, though much worked, remains unexhausted—almost, one might say, inexhaustible. In his younger days he showed a pretty invention in devising and engineering what I may call personal essays in this line. His Insurance against Waterspouts, which he worked principally in the Midlands, brought him some handsome returns with a single generation of farmers. It was based on a cloud-burst at Bethesda, in Wales, which ruined quite a number. Other flights of his immature genius were, respectively, Insurance against Death in Diving-bells; against Death of a Broken Heart; against Official Strangulation; against Non-fatal Disfiguration by Lightning; against Death by Starvation (this last was largely patronized by millionaires). On a somewhat higher plane were his _Provident Dipsomaniary_, whose policies matured, or ‘burst,’ as Buggins phrased it, at the age of eighty-five, an essential condition being that the holders must put in their claims in person; his _Physical Promotion League_, which guaranteed to pay to the parents of any child, insured in it during his teens, a sum of ten pounds on the child’s reaching twenty-five years of age and a minimum height of six feet, and a thousand pounds for every additional inch which it grew afterwards; his _Anti-Fiction Mutual_, whose policies were forfeitable on first conviction of having written a novel (this proved one of the most profitable of all Buggins’s enterprises for a time; but in the end the national malady proved incurable, and subscribers fell off); his _Psychical Pocket Research Society_, which offered an Insurance against Ghost-seeing, the policy-holder forfeiting his claim on proof of his first supernatural visitation (but this was so violently assailed by the opposition society, which offered to prove that there were not three people in the United Kingdom who were insusceptible to spooks, that the scheme had to be abandoned); finally, in this category, his _Bachelors’ Protection Association_, which provided that, if a member reached the age of ninety without having married, he should receive an annuity beginning at fifty pounds, and rising, by yearly increments of ten pounds, to ten thousand pounds—figures which, in a centenarian age, were successful in dazzling a great many.

“But, by then, Buggins was beginning to master the deep ethics of his trade, and to realize that its heaviest emoluments were rooted in the grand principle of profitable self-denial. People _will_ be unselfish if they see money in it; you can’t stop ’em.

“One other notable venture marks this period of what I may call his moral transition. That was his inspired scheme for insuring _against_ illness, in the sense that any policy-holder admitting him or herself to be seriously indisposed, lost the right to compensation. It would have proved a godsend in a neurotic age; but the antagonism of the entire medical profession, with the single exception of the officer appointed by the company, killed it.

“We come now to Buggins’s final matured achievements. I beg your pardon?”

I had said nothing; but I suppose there is such a thing as a “speaking” silence. Certainly, if I had looked as I felt, I was a more drivelling maniac by now than Buggins himself. The visitor seemed to shoot out his eyes like an angry crab.

“Young man, young man!” he said warningly, “I begin to be suspicious that, after all, I may be misplacing my confidence.”

He looked banefully into his hat, where it stood rim upwards on the floor; then, suddenly overwrought, kicked it fiercely across the room. The action seemed to restore him to complete urbanity. He smiled.

“So perish all Buggins’s enemies!” he said loftily; “and hail the grand climacteric!”

He pinned me, like a live butterfly, to the wall behind me with a fixed and penetrating gaze.

“What would you say,” he said quietly, “to an Insurance against Brigandage, available to all travelling in Sicily or the Balkans, and realizable” (his watchfulness was intense) “on the receipt, at the head-offices in the Shetland Islands, of a nose, ear, or other organ, attested, under urgency, by the nearest consul, to be the personal property of the applicant desiring a ransom?”

He paused significantly. “I should say,” I responded drivellingly, “that, as a feat of pure inspiration, it—it takes the cake.”

“Ah!” He shouted it, and sprang to his feet joyously. “You are the man for me! You justify my confidence, as the returns justified Buggins’s daring conception. Would you believe it: within the first few months, bushels of noses were received at the head-offices, every one of which Buggins had no difficulty in proving to be false! But, hush! stay!—there was to be a higher flight!”

He had been pacing riotously up and down. Now he flounced to a stop before me, and held me once more with his glittering eye.

“It took the form,” he whispered, “of a _Purgatory Mutual_, on the Tontine principle, the last out to take the pool!”

I rose, trembling, to my feet, as he burst into a violent fit of laughter.

“It was that,” he shouted, as he set to racing up and down again, “which let loose the dogs of envy, spite, and slander. They called him mad—_him_, Buggins, _mad_, ha-ha! It was the fools themselves were mad. He ignored their clamour; his vast brain was yet busy with immortal conceptions; he matured a scheme against _Death from Flying-machines_” (here he tore off one whisker and threw it into the fireplace); “he did more—he personally tested the theory of aerostatics” (here he tore off the other whisker, and stamped on it). “Too great, too absorbed, he never noticed that the unstable engine had landed him in the grounds of a private asylum, and, relieved of his weight, had soared away again. The attendants came; they seized and immured him; they would not believe his assurances that he was a perfect stranger. From that day to this, when fortuitous circumstances enabled him to escape, he has appealed to their justice, their humanity, in vain.”

Again he stopped before me, and, flinging his spectacles in my face, rent open the breast of his coat.

“Know me at last for what I am!” he yelled. “I am Buggins, and I appoint you my advocate in the action I am about to bring against the Commissioners of Lunacy!”

The door opened softly, and a masculine face peered round the edge. Its scrutiny appearing satisfactory, it was followed by the whole of an official form, which, in its entering, revealed another, large and passionless, standing behind it.

“Now, Mr. Buggins,” said the first, “we’re a-waitin’ for you to take up your cue.”

The visitor whipped round, started, chuckled, and, to my relief and surprise, responded rather abjectly.

“All right, Johnson,” he said. “I just slipped out between the acts for a whiff of fresh air.”

“Well,” said the man, “you must be quick and come along, or you’ll spile the play.”

He went quite tamely, and the second official outside received him stolidly into custody. Mate number one lingered to touch his cap to me and explain.

“Flyborough Asylum, sir. They give him a part in some private theatricals, and he tuk advantage of his disguise as a family lawyer to hook it between the acts. None of us reco’nized him, or guessed what he’d done, till the time come for him to take up his cue; and then, with the prompter howling for him and him not answering, the truth struck us of a heap.”

I was down in my chair, flabby and gasping.

“But what brought him to _me_?” I groaned.

“Train, sir,” answered the man; “plenty of ’em, and easy to catch from the suburbs. Why he come on here? Why, his offices in the old days was in Furnival’s; it were that give us the clue. I suppose, now” (he took off his cap, took a red handkerchief from it, thoughtfully mopped his forehead, and returned the bandana to its nest), “I suppose, now, he’s been a-gammoning of you pretty high with his insurances? His fust principle in life was always to play upon fools.”

AN ABSENT VICAR

“Exactly,” said the Reverend Septimus Prior; “the exchange was the most fortuitous, not to say the most fortunate” (he gave a little giggle and bow) “possible. Your uncle saw my advertisement, answered it, and for a brief period he goes to my cure, and I come to his.”

“Well, if you feel certain,” said Miss Robin, regretfully resting in her lap the novel she was reading.

Mr. Prior sipped his tea and nibbled his rusk. In the intervals between, he would occasionally glance at the portrait of a scholarly cleric, with a thin grim mouth and glassy eyes, which bantered him from the wall opposite.

“Your uncle—Mr. Fearful?” he had once ventured to ask; and the niece had answered, “Yes. It is very like him.”

Now he paused, with his cup half-way to his mouth.

“I beg your pardon?” he exclaimed.

Miss Robin put her book to her lips, and looking over it—really rather charmingly,—yawned behind the cover. She was surprisingly dégagée for a country vicar’s niece—self-collected, and admirably pretty; though her openwork stockings, which she did not hesitate to cross her legs to display, filled him with a weak sense of entanglement in some unrighteous mystery.

“You said?” he invited her.

“I said, If you feel certain,” she repeated calmly.

“Ah!” he said. “Yes. You mean?”

“I mean,” she said, without a ruffle, “that Uncle Philip _may_ have settled to swap livings with you _pro tem._, and _may_ have started off to take yours, and _may_ have got there—_if_ you feel certain that he has.”

“To be sure,” he answered. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Had he arrived—when you started—for here?”

“No. Certainly he hadn’t arrived. My train was due. I had to leave a message; but——”

She stopped him by dropping her book into her lap; and, clasping one knee in her hands, conned him amiably.

“Did he lead you to expect a niece among the charges he was committing to your care—or cure?” she asked.

“Well, I must confess,” said the young man, blushing, “he—ah! mentioned a housekeeper—Mrs. Gaunt, I think—but——”

“No, of course not,” she interrupted him. “He had forgotten all about me.”

Mr. Prior gasped, and looked down. This was his first holiday exchange of livings—an unsophisticated venture, which he was already half repenting. A suburban cure; a desire for fresh pastures; a daring resolution; an advertisement in the “Church Times”; a prompt answer; as prompt an acceptance (after due reference to the Clergy List); a long railway journey; a tramp, relatively as long, to a remote parsonage on the road to a seaport; an arrival in the dark; an innocence of all expectation of, or preparation for him; an explanation; production of his written voucher, and—here he was, accepted, he could not but think, on sufferance. But there he thought wrong. Miss Robin was not near so upset by his appearance as he was.

“He comes and goes” (she said of Uncle Philip) “without reference to anybody or anything. We never know what he’ll do next, or who’ll introduce himself into the house as his friend. It may be a burglar or a pirate for all we know. All sorts of strange people come up from the port, and are shown into my uncle’s room, and out again by himself at the side door. At least, I suppose so. We never know what becomes of them, or what’s going on, any more than I doubt he does himself. I dare say they fleece him nicely; and—you may laugh—but when he’s in his absent moods, you might undress him without his knowing. Only he’d probably strike you to the ground when he found out—he’s such an awful temper.”

“Dear me!” murmured the young man; “how very curious. One hears of such cases.”

“Does one?” said Miss Robin. “I’d rather hear of, than live with them, anyhow; and in a desert, too. It wouldn’t so much matter if he didn’t always hold others to blame for his mistakes and mislayings. He kept me in bed a week once, because he’d read right through a treatise on explosives in the pulpit, before he discovered that it wasn’t his peace-thanksgiving sermon.”

“Astonishing!” said Mr. Prior; then added, with a faint smile, “Well, I can promise you, at least, that _I’m_ not a pirate.”

“No,” she said, “I can see you’re not. Won’t you have some more tea?”

He was shown to his bedroom by Mrs. Gaunt, who was a stony, silent woman, bleak with mystery. All night the wind howled round the lonely building; and the unhappy man, who, in a phase of worldly revolt, egged on by a dare-devil parishioner, had once read “The House on the Marsh”, thought of Sarah and Mr. Rayner, and of a silent weaving of strings across the stairway in the dark to catch him tripping should he venture upon escape.

He arose, feverish, to a sense of hooting draughts in a grey house, and went to matins in the gaunt dull church, which stood as lonely as a shepherd’s hut on a slope hard by. There was nothing in sight but wind-torn pastures, and, all around, little graves, which seemed trying vainly to tuck themselves and their shivering epitaphs under the grass. There appeared nothing in the world to attract a congregation; but, as a matter of fact, there were a few old frosted spinsters present, of that amphibious order, a sort of landcrabs, which forgathers on the neutral wastes between sea and country.

Mr. Prior went back to his dreary breakfast at the Vicarage. His lady hostess, it appeared, was wont to lie late abed, and did not think it worth her while to alter her habits for him. The meal, however, had been served and left to petrify, pending his return from matins. It was with a consciousness of congealed bacon-fat, insufficiently dissolved by lukewarm tea, sticking to the roof of his mouth, that he rose from it, and pondered his next movement. No one came near him. He looked dismally out on a weedy drive. He rather wished Miss Robin would condescend to his company. He was no pirate, certainly; but he believed he would brave, had braved already, much for his cloth. She had beautiful eyes—clear windows, he was sure, to a virginal soul. But then, the other end! the white feet peeping through that devil’s lattice! He tried to recall any authority in Holy Writ for openwork stockings. Certainly pilgrims went barefoot, and half a loaf was better than no bread.

“This will not do, Septimus,” he said, weakly striking his breast. “I will go and compose my sermon.”

He stepped into the hall. It was papered in cold blue and white marble, with a mahogany umbrella stand, and nothing else, to temper its tomb-like austerity. At the further end was a baize door of a faded strawberry colour.

He was entitled to the run of the house, he concluded. There had been no mention of any Bluebeard chamber. But, then, to be sure, there had been no mention of a niece. The association of ideas tingled him. What if he should turn the handle and alight on Miss Robin?

He flipped his breast again, frowning, and strode to the baize door. Beside it, he now observed, a passage went off to the kitchens. Desperately he pulled the door, found a second, of wood, beyond it, opened that also, and found himself in what was obviously the Vicar’s study.

Obviously, that is to say, to his later conceptions of his correspondent. Otherwise he might have taken it for the laboratory of a scientist. It was lined with bookcases, sparsely volumed; but five out of every six shelves were thronged with jars, instruments, and engines of a terrifying nature. In one place was a curtained recess potential with unholiness. Prints of discomposing organs hung on the walls. Immemorial dust blurred everything. There was a pedestalled desk in the middle, and opposite it, hung with a short curtain, a half-glazed door which the intruder, tiptoeing thither and peeping, with his heart at the gallop, found to lead into a dismal narrow lane which communicated with the road. He returned to the desk, which, frankly open, seemed to invite him to its use, and was pondering the moral practicability of composition in the midst of such surroundings, when a voice at his ear almost made him jump out of his skin.

“Pardon me, sir; but have you the master’s permission to use this room?”

Mrs. Gaunt had come upon him without a sound.

“Dear me, madam!” he said, wiping his forehead. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, sir,” she said, in her stony, colourless way, “that this room is interdict to both great and little, now and always, unless he makes an exception in your favour.”

“There was no specific mention of it, certainly,” said Mr. Prior, “neither for nor against. I concluded that the use of a study was not debarred me.”

“Pardon me,” she repeated monotonously. “I believe you concluded wrong, sir.”

“The door was not locked.”

“There are some prohibitions,” she said, “that need no locks.”

The inference was fearful.

“Miss June” (ecstatic name!) “and I,” she said, “have never dared so much as to put our noses inside, and not a word spoken to forbid it.”

Mr. Prior, to his own astonishment, revolted. Smarting, perhaps, under the memory of some suspected covert innuendo in a certain silvery acquiescence in a statement of his made last night, he revolted. He would prove that he could be a pirate if he chose.

“I shall stop here,” he said, trembling all over. “There was no embargo laid, and I must have somewhere to write my sermon.”

“Of course,” said a voice; and Miss Robin stood in the doorway—the most enchanting morning vision, her eyes bright with curiosity.

“I am delighted you support me,” he said, kindling and advancing.

She still looked beside and around him.

“Do you know,” she said, “it is perfectly true. I have not once dared to venture in here before, though never actually told not to. But that is all one, I think. What an extraordinary litter!”

She had not ventured! and with the inducement of her petrifying surroundings! She was uninquisitive, then—“an excellent thing in woman.”

“Since there is no veto,” he said, incomparably audacious, “supposing we explore together?”

She looked at him admiringly.

“I should like to.” She hesitated.

“June!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.

“And I will,” said the girl.

But the housekeeper, content, it appeared, with her protest, stood, not uninterested in the subsequent investigation.

“Do you not find all this a little remote, a little lifeless sometimes, Miss Robin?” said the clergyman, greatly daring.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Eels get used to skinning. It’s not life, of course. But I have to make the best of it, and there’s no help.”

“Ah, yes, there is!” said her companion, intending to imply the spiritual, but half hoping she would construe it into the material consolation.

“What do you mean?” she asked simply.

“Why,” he said, stammering and blushing furiously, and giving away his case at once, “with your youth, and—and beauty—O, forgive me! I am a little confused.”

“Where do you live?” she said, fixing him with her large eyes.

“At Clapton,” he murmured.

“It sounds most joyous,” she said, clasping her hands.

Hardly knowing what he did, he pulled the curtain away from the recess by which they stood, and instantly staggered back. The housekeeper, who, foreseeing his act, had crept up inquisitively behind, gave a mortal gasp, and Miss Robin a faint shriek—for, stretched lifeless and livid on a couch within, lay the stark body of a man.

For a minute they all stood staring, frozen with horror; then Mrs. Gaunt began to wring her hands.

“It is the same,” she cried, in awful tones. “I remember him—the dark foreigner. He wandered up here from the port a week ago; and I took him in to the master, and he _never came out again_. I thought he had let him go by the door there into the lane. O, woe on this fearful house! Long have I suspected and long dreaded. The sounds, and the awful, awful smells!”

“Perhaps,” whispered the girl, gulping, and clutching at her breast, “he died unexpectedly, and uncle put him away here, and forgot all about him.”

Mrs. Gaunt shrieked, and seizing the clergyman’s arm, pointed—

“Look! Pickled babies—one, two, three! And bones! And a fish-kettle! It is all plain. He kills them, and boils them down for his experiments, and by an accident he forgot to empty his larder—his larder! hoo-hoo!—before he went!”

She broke into hysteric laughter and gaspings. Miss Robin, whinnying, tottered quite close up to the young man, who stood shivering and speechless.

“What can we do to save him?” she whimpered. “Mr. Prior, say something!”