Part 17

DOUBT was melting in the mind of Sir Arthur Babraham. He was coming now to a perception of the truth. To one who lived in the world, who saw men and things at an obtuse angle, the story as told by this young man verged upon the incredible and yet he felt sure it was true. The fellow was an Original, an unkind critic might even say that he was a trifle “cracked,” but if this visionary who adored beauty for its own sake could enact such a piece of deceit it would be unwise ever to trust one’s judgment again in regard to one’s fellow creatures. And the reverse of the medal was shewn just as plainly in the face of the old dealer.

Man of affairs as Sir Arthur was, however, he knew better than to take a hasty decision upon what, after all, might prove to be wrong premises. It was his clear duty to see justice done in a strange matter, but he would leave to others the task of enforcing it. Thus when the old man renewed his demand to be allowed to go at once to Park Lane and get the picture, he was met by a refusal which if very polite was also final.

“Mr. Gedge, my daughter holds this picture in trust for your niece, who I am informed by the Hospital, has been most cruelly used by somebody. She accepts--we both accept--the story told by your niece as to how in the first instance she came to possess this most valuable thing, which by the way this young man has been able to confirm. If you persist in trying to establish your claim I am afraid you must apply to the law.”

This speech, delivered with judicial weight, was a bomb-shell. With a gasp the old man realized that the game was up; yet as soon as the first shock had passed he could hardly mask his fury. By his own folly the chance of a lifetime had been thrown away.

As he was now to find, he was bereft of more than the Van Roon. He had lost the trust and affection of William. In the first agony of defeat, S. Gedge Antiques was far from realizing what the fact would mean, but it was brought home to him poignantly two days later.

William’s first act, when Sir Arthur had left the shop, was to go to the Hospital. Here he was received by a member of its staff who told him that the patient was too ill to see anyone, and that even if she recovered, her mind might be permanently affected. The doctor who discussed the case with the young man allowed himself this frankness, because he was very anxious for light to be thrown on it. The girl had been cruelly knocked about, there were heavy bruises on her body and marks on her throat which suggested that she had had to fight for her life; and this was borne out by the delirium through which she was passing. In the main it seemed to be inspired by terror of a man whom she spoke of continually as Uncle Si.

The visitor was questioned closely as to the identity of the mysterious Uncle Si. He was pressed to say all that he knew about him, for the Hospital had to consider whether this was not a matter for the police.

William was shocked and rather terrified by the turn things had taken. The scales had been torn from his eyes with a force that left him bewildered. He had trusted his master in the way he trusted all the world, and now disillusion had come in a series of flashes which left him half blind, he felt life could never be the same. His own world of the higher reality was after all no more than the paradise of a fool. Perversely he had shut his eyes to the wickedness of men and their weak folly and in consequence he now found himself poised on the lip of a chasm.

Two days after the terrible discovery which had changed his attitude to life, he told his master that he was going to leave him. It was a heavy blow. Not for a moment had such a thing entered the old man’s calculations. He had got into the habit of regarding this good simple fellow as having so little mind of his own that for all practical purposes he was now a part of himself.

So inconceivable was it to S. Gedge Antiques that one wedded to him by years of faithful service could take such a step, that it was hard to believe the young man meant what he said. He must be joking. But the wish was the anxious parent of the thought, for even if the old man’s sight was failing, he was yet able to see the disdain in the eyes of William.

“I can’t part with you, boy,” he said bleakly.

That, indeed, was the open truth. To part with this absolutely honest and dependable fellow who had grown used to his ways, for whom no day’s work was too long, for whom no task was too exacting, who was always obliging and cheerful, whose keen young sight and almost uncanny “nose” for a good thing had become quite indispensable to one who was no longer the man he had been; for S. Gedge Antiques to lose this paragon was simply not to be thought of.

“Boy don’t talk foolishly. I’ll raise your wages five shillings a week from the first of the New Year.”

The old man could not see the look of slow horror that crept into the eyes of William; yet in spite of his other infirmity, he did not fail to catch the note of grim pain in the stifled, “I’ll have to leave you, sir. I can’t stay here.”

Obtuse the old man was, yet he now perceived the finality of these broken words. As he realized all they meant to him, the sharp pain was like the stab of a knife. William was not merely indispensable. His master loved him. And he had killed the thing he loved.

“Boy, I can’t let you go.” Human weakness fell upon the old man like a shadow; this second blow was even more terrible than the loss of the Van Roon which was still a nightmare in his thoughts. “I’m old. I’m getting deaf and my eyes are going.” He who had had no spark of pity for others did not scruple to ask it for himself.

William was a rock. Primitive as he was, now that he could respect his master no more, he must cease to serve him. The revelation of that master’s baseness had stricken him to the heart; for the time being it had taken the savour out of life itself.

One hope, one frail hope remained to S. Gedge Antiques, even when he knew at last that his assistant was “through” with him. In times so difficult the young man might not be able to get another job; yet he had only to mention it to discover it was not a staff on which he would be able to lean.

William, it seemed, had got another job already.

“At how much a week?” Habit was so strong, there was no concealing the sneer in the tone of surprised inquiry.

Three pounds a week was to be William’s salary. The old man could only gasp. It brought home to him, as perhaps nothing else could have done, the real worth of the treasure he was about to lose. It was four times the rate at which he had thought well to reward these priceless services.

“Who is being fool enough to give you that money?” he sneered, the ruling passion still strong in him.

“Mr. Hutton, sir, at the top of the street,” was the mournful answer.

S. Gedge Antiques dug a savage tooth in his lower lip. Joseph Hutton was a young and “pushful” rival whom on instinct he hated. “Fellow’s a fool to go spoiling the market,” he snarled.

Alas, the old man knew but too well that as far as William was concerned, it was not at all a question of spoiling the market. That aspect of the matter would never arise in his mind.

LV

EVERY day for a fortnight William went to the Hospital, only to be denied a sight of the patient. June was fighting for life. And even when the crisis was passed and it began to appear that the fight would be successful, she had to face an issue just as critical and yet more terrible, for the fear remained that she would lose her reason.

In this time of darkness William was most unhappy. But as far as he was concerned, events moved quickly. He said good-bye to his master, removed his belongings from Number Forty-six, New Cross Street, and entered the employ of a neighbouring dealer, a man of far more liberal mind than S. Gedge Antiques; one who, moreover, well understood the value of such a servant.

For William, it was a terrible wrench. He was like a plant whose roots have been torn from the soil. With the ardour of a simple character he had loved his master, trusting and believing in him to an extent only possible to those endowed with rare felicity of nature. In spite of himself he was now forced to accept the hard and bitter truth that the old man upon whom he had lavished affection was not only a miser, but something worse. When the passion which ruled his life was fully roused he was tempted to anything.

Life, felt William, could never be the same again. There was still the beauty of the visible universe, the pageantry of the seasons to adore; the harmony and colour of the world’s design might still entrance the senses of an artist, but not again must he surrender his being entire to the joy of abounding in these wonders. It was the duty of every man who dwelt upon the earth, however humbly, to learn something of the hearts of others. One could only live apart, it seemed, at one’s peril.

While in the lower depths and beginning to despair of seeing June again, he called as usual at the Hospital one afternoon, to be greeted by the long-hoped-for news that the patient had taken a turn for the better. Moreover she had begged to be allowed to see him; and this permission was now given.

Carrying the daily bunch of flowers, by means of which June had already recognized his care for her, he was led along the ward to the bed in which she lay. The change in her appearance startled him. Little remained of the whimsical yet high-spirited and practical girl who had mocked his inefficiency in regard to the world and its ways. To see those great eyes with the horror still in them and that meagre face, dead white amid the snow of its pillows, was to feel a tragic tightening of the heart.

Tears ran down June’s cheeks at the sight of the flowers. “I don’t deserve your goodness,” she said. “You can’t guess how wicked I am.”

As she extended to him her thin arms he found it hard to rein back his own tears. What suffering he had unwittingly brought upon this poor thing. But it was impossible to keep track of her mind which even now was in the thrall of an awful nightmare. God knew in what darkness it was still plunged.

Shuddering convulsively at the memories his voice and his presence brought to her, the words that came to her lips tore his heart. “Am I struck? Am I like the Hoodoo? Am I like Uncle Si?”

To him, just then, this wildness was hardly more than a symptom of a mind deranged. His great distress did not allow him to pursue its implication, nor could he understand the nadir of the soul from which it sprang. Yet many times in the days to follow he was haunted by those words. They came to him in his waking hours and often in lieu of sleep at night.

Returning from this short and unhappy interview to his new home at Number 116, New Cross Street, he found a surprise in store. A visitor had called to see him and, at the moment of his arrival, was on the point of going away.

His late master, looking very grey and frail, had come to beg him to return. He declared that he was now too old to carry on alone. Sight and hearing were growing worse. He had another quarrel with the char and had been obliged to send her permanently away, although the truth of the matter was that an oppressed female had risen at last against his tyranny and had found a better place.

S. Gedge Antiques was now a figure for pity, but William, fresh from the lacerating presence of the niece whom he had so cruelly thrown out of doors, had none to give.

The whine and snuffle of their last meeting, at whose remembrance rose the gorge of an honest man, were no more. Instead of the crocodile tricks were now the slow tears of a soul in agony. The truth was, this childless and friendless old man, who in the grip of the passion that had eaten away his life, had never been able to spare a thought for his kind, simply could not do without the one human being he had learned to love.

Their relations, as the old miser had discovered, were much closer than those of servant and master. William stood for youth, for the seeing mind, for cheerful, selfless giving, for life itself. The tones of his voice, his kindly readiness, his tolerance for an old man’s megrims; even the sound of this good fellow moving furniture in the next room and the sense of him about the place had grown to mean so much that, now they were withdrawn, all other things grew null.

The old man felt now that he could not go on, and at any other moment, the force of his appeal might have touched the gentle nature to whom it was made. But the stars in their courses fought against S. Gedge Antiques. He was a figure to move the heart, as he stood in the shop of a rival dealer, the slow tears staining his thin cheeks, but William had the shadow of that other figure upon him. The wreck of youth, of reason itself, seemed infinitely more tragic than the falling of the temple upon the priest of Baal whose wickedness had brought the thing to pass.

William denied his master. And yet hearing him out to the bitter end, he was unable to withhold a little pity. All feeling for the old man was dead; the bedside from which he had just come had finally destroyed the last spark of his affection, yet being the creature he was, he could not sit in judgment.

“I’ll pay you twice what you are getting now if you’ll return to me,” said the old man. “As I say, I can’t go on.” He peered into that face of ever-deepening distress. “What do you say, boy?” He took the hand of the young man in his own, as a father might take that of a beloved son. “I’ll give you anything--if you’ll come back. I haven’t long to live. Return to-night and I’ll leave you the business. Now what do you say?”

Had it been human to forgive at such a moment, S. Gedge Antiques would have been forgiven. But William could only stand dumb and unresponsive before the master he had loved.

“I’m a warm man.” The voice of the old dealer who had made money his god, sank to a whisper becoming a theme so sacred. “My investments have turned out well. There’s no saying what I _am_ worth--but this I’ll tell you in strict confidence--I own property.” The hushed tone was barely audible. “In fact I own nearly half my own side of this street. Now what do you say? Promise to come back to me to-night and I’ll go right now and see my lawyer.”

The young man stood the image of unhappiness.

“Only speak the word and you shall inherit every stick and stone.”

It was a moment to rend the heart of both, but the word was not spoken. For the second time that afternoon William was hard set to rein back his tears; but he had not the power to yield to this appeal.

Overborne by the knowledge that the hand of Fate was upon him, S. Gedge Antiques, leaning heavily on his knotted stick, moved feebly towards the dark street.

LVI

WILLIAM continued his daily visits to the Hospital, but he was not allowed to see June. Life itself was no longer in immediate danger, but she had had a relapse and the doctors were still afraid that the mental injury would be permanent. Time alone could prove if such was the case or no, but the mood induced by the interview with William, and the strange words she had used to him, which seemed to belong to some fixed and secret obsession, were not a good sign.

Following his visit there had been a rise of temperature. And this meant further weakening of a terror-haunted mind. Even if the need for anxiety was less acute, full recovery at best would be slow and more than ever doubtful.

June was still menaced by the shadow when an event occurred which intensified William’s distress. One morning, about a week after he had rejected his master’s last appeal, an inspector of police came to see him. Neighbours of S. Gedge Antiques had called attention to the fact that the shop had remained closed for several days, and as it was known that the old man had lately been living alone, the circumstance had given rise to a certain amount of suspicion. William’s name had been mentioned as lately in his employ and he was asked to throw what light he could on the mystery.

“The neighbours think we ought to enter the shop and see if anything has happened,” said the police inspector.

William thought so too. Remembering the last meeting with his master, which had left a scar he would carry to the grave, a kind of prophetic foreknowledge came to him now of a new development to this tragedy.

It was not convenient just then to leave the shop as he happened to be in sole charge of it, therefore he was unable to accompany the inspector down the street. But half an hour later, on the return of his new employer, curiosity forced him to put on his hat and go forth to see if the thing he feared had come to pass.

The police, already, had made an entry of Number Forty-six. Moreover a knot of people was assembled about the familiar door, which was half open. Its shutters were still up, but two constables were guarding the precincts. William caught the words “Murder--Suicide--Robbery” as he came up with the throng.

In a state of painful excitement, he made his way to the door.

S. Gedge Antiques, it seemed, had been found lying dead on the shop floor. The young man wished to pass in, but the police had instructions to allow no one to enter. A doctor summoned by telephone, had not yet come.

William was still discussing the matter, when the inspector whose acquaintance he had made already, hearing voices at the door, came from the shop interior to see if it was the doctor who had at last arrived. He recognized William at once and invited him in.

Outside was a murky November day, but with the windows still shuttered, it was necessary for three rather ineffectual gas-jets to be lit in the shop. The light they gave was weird and fitful, but it sufficed to enable the young man to see what had occurred.

As yet the body had not been touched. In accordance with custom in such cases, it had to lie just as it was until viewed by a doctor, for if moved by unskilful hands, some possible clue as to the cause of death might be obliterated.

The old man was lying supine, before the Hoodoo. One glance at that face, so drawn, so thwarted, and yet so pitiful in its ghastliness, was enough to convince William that death had come directly from the hand of God. With a shiver he recalled the words of a strange and terrible clairvoyance, of late so often in his ears. “Am I struck? Am I like Uncle Si? Am I like the Hoodoo?”

As the old man lay now, in all the starkness of his soul, with only the essence shewing in that tragic face, William was overcome by his likeness to the image. It was as if, at the last, his very nature had gone out to some false god who had perverted him. That splay-footed monster, so large of maw, an emblem of bestial greed, was too plainly a symbol of the mammon of unrighteousness to which the master had devoted his life.

Consumed by pity, William turned away from a sight which he was no longer able to bear.

LVII

SPRING came, and June who had had to fight for life and then for reason, won slowly to a final sense of victory. This came to her on a delicious April day, when the earth waking from its long sleep, was renewed with the joy of procreation. Her own nature, which had passed through so many months of darkness, was quickened to response in this magic hour.

The force of the emotion owed much, no doubt, to the spirit of environment. Life had begun again for June under conditions different from any she had known. Powerful friends had been gained for her by a singularly romantic story. Of certain things that had happened she could not bring herself to tell; but when as much of the truth came out as could be derived from facts precariously pieced together, she became a real heroine in the sight of Sir Arthur Babraham and his daughter.

But for her courage and keen wit a great work of art might have passed out of the country without anyone being the wiser. These staunch friends were determined that justice should be done in the matter, and kindly folk that they were, did not spare themselves in the long and difficult task of restoring her to health.

The middle of April saw her installed in the gardener’s cottage at Homefield in the care of a motherly and genial housewife. Here she almost dared to be happy. The phantoms of the long night were being dispersed at last in an atmosphere of sunny and cordial well-being.

Miss Babraham, who walked across the park from the house every morning to see her, had become a sort of fairy godmother whose mission was to see that she did not worry about anything. She must give her days and nights to the duty of getting well. And she was going to be rich.

Riches, alas, for June, had the fairy godmother but known, were the fly in the ointment. They could only arise from one source, and around it must always hover the black storm clouds. She had no real right to the money which was coming to her, and although she had no means apart from it, she felt that she must never accept a single penny. It was morbidly unpractical perhaps, but there the feeling was.

When June had been at Homefield about a week, Miss Babraham found her one morning in the sunny embrasure of the pleasant little sitting room improving her mind by a happy return to her favourite “Mill on the Floss.” In passing out of its mental eclipse, the angle of June’s vision had shifted a little; her approach to new phases of experience was rather more sympathetic than it had been. Before “that” had happened, she had been inclined, as became a self-respecting member of the Democracy which is apt to deride what it does not comprehend, to be a little contemptuous of “Miss Blue Blood,” a creature born to more than a fair share of life’s good things. But now that she knew more about this happy-natured girl, she felt a tolerance of which, at first, she was just a little ashamed. Envy was giving place to something else. Her graces and her air of fine breeding, which June’s own caste was inclined to resent, were not the obvious fruits of expensive clothes; in fact, they owed far less than June had supposed to the length of the purse behind them.

The kindness, the charm, the sympathy were more than skin deep. In the first place, no doubt their possessor had been born under a lucky star; much of her quality was rooted inevitably in the fact that she was her father’s daughter yet the invalid could not gainsay that “Miss Blue Blood” had manners of the heart. Now that June saw her in her own setting among her own people this golden truth shone clear. And in the many talks June had with her good hostess, Mrs. Chrystal, the wife of Sir Arthur’s head gardener, one radiant fact rose bright and free: there was none like Miss Babraham. Her peer was not to be found on the wide earth.

No doubt there were spots on this sun as there are spots on other suns, but June agreed that as far as Miss Babraham was concerned these blemishes were hidden from mortal eye. And each day gave cogency to such a view. This morning, for example, the distinguished visitor was brimming with kindliness. She talked simply and sincerely, without patronage or frills upon the subjects in which June was now interested. She had read _all_ George Eliot and gave as the sum of her experience that the “Mill on the Floss” was the story she liked best, although her father preferred “Adam Bede” or “Silas Marner.”

“Before my illness,” said June, “I was getting to think that all novels were silly and a waste of time. But I see now that you can learn a lot about life from a good one.”