GILEAD BALM
KNIGHT ERRANT

Gilead Balm had most things to recommend him—youth, comeliness, a bright intelligence, an excellent heart, a flawless digestion; best of all, an indestructible capacity for interesting himself in the affairs of the world into which he was born. He was fresh, fair, shapely, and of that graceful height which, as representing the classic perfection of symmetry, disposes the vision at the most reasonable level for contemplating the true stature of things, and their relative, mundane, proportions. His eyes were calm and fearless, his voice soft, his courtesy unimpeachable. If he had a weakness, it was for seeing two sides to a question, one or the other of which was apt to tickle his sense of humour. But humour, after all, is the saving grace of mankind, and, without it, there may be much achievement but little charity.

With all these advantages, pleasantly worn at the age of twenty-four, Gilead lacked, in the world’s eyes, the crowning advantage of an income. Or, at least, such an one as he enjoyed was far from adequately representing the value of his qualities. He was, in fact, a second division clerk (higher grade) to the Charity Commissioners at Whitehall, on a salary of two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and to that, barring promotion, he must look for his living. He was an orphan; his parents had died—fortunately after launching him on his career—insolvent; he had no negotiable prospects, so far as he knew, actual or problematic. But nature had endowed him to his content; and if, at times, some dream of affluence would come to disturb him, its motif was as far removed from an unworthy lust of gain, as his soul was from the ambitions and appetites of the majority of his fellows. Yet, what of vulgar acquisitiveness lacked in him was supplied somewhat by the spirit of the romantic quest. His bright soul would occasionally covet a larger scope for its experiences, and, to that end, the means—the only earthly means—to their enlargement. If he ever thought of money, it was as the golden key to the complex heart of the world.

It was his custom, during the luncheon hour, to read the Daily Post. All government clerks read the Daily Post, because it is the organ of the élite. Gilead differed from the most, however, in that he read the Daily Post wholly and solely for the sake of its front page advertisements; and he was wise. Leading articles will be prejudiced, reporters unscrupulous, foreign telegrams will illustrate the art of political selection. Only in the calling of wares, the births, deaths and marriages, the cries of the Agony Column, does Nature speak in unequivocal terms. It was upon the Agony Column of the Daily Post that Gilead was wont to whet his appetite for the emotional truths of life.

We all know this Agony Column. It is unique amongst its Daily fellows—more stirring, more motley, more shrill with the personal note than any other. It is not that its ciphers are more elegantly cryptic, that its moneylenders are more large-hearted and open-handed in a princely unsuspecting sort of way, that its private enquiry agencies are more distinguished, or its face-creams more modish than those to be found quoted in other Agony Columns—though, to be sure, a certain aroma of exclusiveness might be claimed for the sellers of wares advertised under the ægis of an aristocratic name. It is its perpetual undaunted appeals to the rich and benevolent, or to the fashionable and needy, which make it wholly singular among its class. Reading and pondering these day by day, Gilead came to the conclusion that the Daily Post was not so much the organ of the Tariff, or of any other reformers, as the organ of benevolence pure and simple. How otherwise could this persistent cry for help be maintained in it? There must be some response to justify its clamour.

He seldom read further than that first page. Its matter perennially fascinated and haunted him. He would have liked to trace every one of those essentially human cries to its source, and, according to its motive, still it, or give it cause to howl on a different note. And, if he had wealth, he would do it, he told himself. To play the Haroun Alraschid to suffering worth, to alleviate misery and expose imposture, by way of the countless channels offered by a popular ‘Daily’—what a rare purpose it would give to unmitigated opulence! And what an interest! No picture-galleries, no free-libraries, no lifting of international Cups for ostentation’s sake; but just an unnoticed pursuit of the individual submerged one, and his quiet resuscitation and well-comforted dismissal.

But there was another, and even more attractive side to the picture; and that was the mysteries his quest would penetrate, and of which the Agony Column of the Daily Post afforded some potential examples. How might not one gratify here one’s loving-kindness and one’s romanticism in a breath! The imaginative prospect was quite captivating to Gilead.

He divided the advertisements, generally, into five classes, Cosmetic, Private Enquiry, Situations (which revealed some others of the oddest), Nondescript (including anything from “Remember the Cats,” to a request to some titled lady to act as godmother to a gentleman’s child, or a suggestion that a third lady should join two others in arranging, and paying for, a series of painful experiments on human subjects), and, last and most numerous of all, Requests for Loans. Many of these found Gilead doubtful. While the appeals, from clergymen and others, on behalf of poor parishes, ruined homes, unemployed labour and so forth, affected him so sensibly that he would have liked to be able to answer every one of them with help proportionate to the needs it voiced, there were certain piteous entreaties for cash which left him cold. They smacked too much of the cunning and versatility of the professional mendicant; somehow they seemed a little shy of the inquisition of those clear contemplative eyes of his under their level brows. At the best they were couched in that key which argued, if not a constitutional absence, at least a temporary surrender of pride and self-respect. But he was no Pharisee, and very remote from judging wrung poverty by the standards of comfort and a competence. The question was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and to the pursuit of that he would have rejoiced to devote whatever fortune the Fates might allot him.

And, perhaps because his aspirations were so singular in a very ordinary world, taken with the fact that his temperament was even a curiously calm and virginal one, the Fates, who are a rather spinstery and spiteful triplet on the whole, were moved to do the unexpected thing by him—and in a very handsome and appropriate manner—by causing Messrs Plover, Stone and Company, the respectable solicitors, to insert an advertisement in the Agony Column of that very Daily Post, inviting the next-of-kin of the late Mr Lemuel Lamb to call upon them and hear of something considerably to his advantage.

Gilead read the advertisement in due course, and considered it with characteristic sobriety and an even pulse. “If,” he thought, “there is anything out of the common in this, I shall not forget my pledge to the Quest.”

He finished his chop placidly, recalling some traits of the departed Lemuel, who, he could little doubt (though with a philosophic reservation for contingencies) had been his sole surviving relative on the mother’s side. He remembered, with a certain easy gratification, how this disregarded uncle of his, from being a scapegrace and rather impossible waster, had been reported—from Australia, whither he had withdrawn—a reformed character of late years, which he had devoted to the amassing of a considerable fortune made out of stock—but whether soup or sheep Gilead did not know. Nor did he care in the least. All money was dirty stuff in the making. The moral of acquisition was in the cleansing of the hands that followed.

He brushed a crumb or two from his waistcoat, paid his bill, and returned to Whitehall to request a short leave of absence. None might have guessed from his exterior the issues which turned upon that petition.

It is not my purpose to recount the details of the interview which followed, or the processes by which identification was secured, and a claim substantiated. Suffice it to say that ‘Loquacious Lemuel,’ as he was known in the land of his adoption, had turned his natural predatory instincts to phenomenal profit during the few years that opportunity had allotted him for their full play, and had then, in a mood of magnificent atonement, bequeathed the whole of his gigantic fortune to the credulous brother-in-law in England whom he had once been instrumental in impoverishing, and whose sole heir Gilead remained by will. The young man—to jump formalities, and eschew all bewildering calculations of figures—entered upon his new world rich, in the stereotyped phrase, beyond the dreams of avarice—as if avarice ever had any dreams worth mentioning but of orts and candle-ends. But he faced his position with a clear brain, and a full appreciation of the ten thousand rapacities and importunities it would invite. As to that his plans were quite decided. He would employ a confidential secretary, and some subordinate agents and amanuenses, and to them entrust the active business of philanthropy, while he himself would stand in the background (the unconfessed one, the “nominis umbra,” like Junius) to direct operations, and give his personal attention to such cases as seemed to offer scope for the romantic quest.

He advertised, somewhat in the following terms: “Private Secretary wanted by a gentleman of means. Good salary offered to one willing to devote himself wholly to the interests of his employer. Address, in the first instance—” here followed the number of a house in Victoria Street, a suite of rooms in which Gilead had already furnished and turned into a central bureau for his operations. The result gave him food for thought. He received seven hundred and forty-nine replies, one hundred and sixty-eight of which were delivered on the date of the advertisement. He recognized at once his single incapacity for dealing with that vast stack of correspondence, and put on his hat and went to see Mr Plover in Arundel Street.

Mr Plover’s appearance and expression needed, perhaps, the assurance of his firm’s time-honoured reputation to make them convincing. He was a slack-lipped, beautifully white-whiskered old gentleman, wearing gold-rimmed pince-nez, which, being near the tip of his nose, were wont occasionally to topple over and get in the way of his speech. One had to put some force upon oneself to read legal profundity in features which seemed to betray even an excess of amiable vacuity. But one knew that the antiquity of the firm and its weighty connexions stood behind, and so one resigned oneself, like Longfellow’s good Christian, to a pious confidence in the things which “are not what they seem.”

Mr Plover applied to the difficulties of this immensely important new client that Napoleonic method which resolves all complexities by annihilation.

“Seven hundred and forty-nine!” said he. “Dear, dear! Now, take my advice, and make a bonfire of the lot, and start afresh.”

“Would that be fair?” said Gilead.

“Only one can succeed, you know,” said Mr Plover. “Make it the seven hundred and fiftieth.”

He sat back in his chair, tilted his head, and his glasses lost their balance. “Seven hundred and fiftieth,” he mumbled crookedly behind their lenses.

“Yes?” said Gilead, calmly inquisitorial.

“I venture to think I know the very man for your purpose,” said Mr Plover, smiling, with the glasses in place once more.

“Yes?” said Gilead again.

“His name is Nestle,” said the lawyer—“Herbert Nestle. He is a man of immense industry and capacity, and at present out of a situation.”

“What was his last?” asked the client.

“He was conveyancing clerk,” said Mr Plover, “to Broker and Borrodaile, since in liquidation. There was some question of trust funds, and Nestle was scandalously misused. A man with clean hands—he has my strong personal recommendation, Mr Balm, if that counts for anything with you.”

“It settles a difficulty,” said Gilead, rising.

He left Mr Plover preparing to draw out and sign several folio pages of cheques, a task, deputed to him by his partners, which he greatly enjoyed, and executed with the minutest care and precision, ruling all the cross lines.

CHAPTER I.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

Mr Herbert Nestle, knocking confidently and entering softly, laid the morning’s Daily Post before his Chief, who had just entered and was pulling off his gloves.

“Anything especial?” asked Gilead.

“I have thumb-marked one,” said the secretary, “which seemed to me perhaps worth your personal attention.”

The Bureau—known as Lamb’s Agency—was already in working order, and daily settling into its pace. Its operations so far had seemed wholly to justify its existence, and its founder was satisfied. During this first month of its being some score of deserving cases had been helped, and almost as many shams exposed. The world was happier and cleaner by that measure; and, for the future, professional cadgers promised to grow shy of risking the inquisition of a body so merciless in its penetration, behind which stood a force so mysterious in its origin, and having, apparently, such inexhaustible funds at its disposal.

Gilead kept his little private office on the floor above the Agency, and from that shrouded adytum issued the motive power to the mechanism below. There he sat, or thence departed, unheard, unapproachable, an enigmatic, formidable figure to his employés, holding vast destinies in the hollow of his hand. No one of them, saving the privileged secretary, was permitted to apply to him on general grounds; and to his rare appearances in the offices was accorded, particularly by the two lady typewriters, a hushed deference almost religious in its character. Much of this was due, no doubt, to the halo of countless gold which surrounded him; but indeed Gilead’s charm of person, serene, passionless, clear-eyed as an angel’s, and as coldly beautiful, had at least its influence on the flutterings of susceptible hearts.

His establishment comprised, in addition to the secretary and the two ladies, half a dozen correspondents or book-keepers, and as many active agents, sound men and sagacious, whose business it was to visit and report upon the cases. To them was entrusted the investigation of the ‘Oh, please do help!’ petitions—the five, or fifteen, or fifty, or five-hundred pound loan-requests, for the saving of a home, or the buying of a business, or the stocking of a fashionable millinery, or the settling of debts incurred through Bridge or speculation, or the enabling a sporting curate to purchase a motor-bicycle, or the shipping of a promising family to Canada, or the feeding of a clergyman’s sick aunt on jellies and port wine. The plaints (many from titled lips) soon became susceptible to classification, and were found generally weakest on the side which betrayed the most agonized “derangement of epitaphs” and the most fervent ejaculations. The result in all ways was instructive, as much in its revelation of the systematic fraud which battened on timid uninvestigating charity, as of the pitiful flimsiness of the bulwark which stood between the light of social respectability, with a name and a number on its door, on the one side, and the outer darkness, with its obliteration of all personality, on the other. Gilead’s heart often grew sick, as this dissected stuff of craft and misery, of shamefulness and shamelessness, was submitted to his judgment. But his comfort lay in the sanitary acumen of his Bureau, and so long as that continued to work unimpaired, he had no intention of taking his hand from the lever.

The month, so far as his individual quest was concerned, had proved a dull one, void of romantic incitement. He received, therefore, his secretary’s statement with some quickening of interest. Quiet and unemotional in his decisions, he had satisfied himself that Mr Plover’s eulogium on this man had been justified. He found him acute, resourceful, penetrative, energetic, humane—such a coadjutor as he could most have desired. Nestle virtually managed the agency on its practical side, and possessed his chief’s full confidence. His features and unjarring personality were pleasant things moreover to his master, who was habitually fastidious in the matters of conduct and appearance. The secretary was a very good-looking young man, in a fair boyish way, and so gentle in voice and manner that one might never have guessed the spirit of determination which underlay that soft exterior. In suggestion he was subordinate angel to the other, though somewhat older, and far more full of worldly wisdom. But the only visible mundane feature about him was his spectacles.

Gilead sat down in his padded office-chair, and crossing his legs easily, consulted the paper lying on the desk before him.

“Indeed, Nestle?” he said. “Which is it?”

The secretary, bending respectfully over, ran a fresh white-nailed finger down the Agony Column, and stopped it at a three-line advertisement:—

“Lady (young) a victim to persecution, seeks honourable employment to extricate her from pressing difficulties. Good typewriter and linguist. Address Viatrix, Rufus Cottage, Knight’s Hill, West Norwood.”

Gilead read and considered, his hand thoughtfully caressing his chin. Then he looked up.

“You think it promising?” he said.

The secretary, withdrawn a little, deferred to his employer.

“If I am right, sir, in interpreting your mood.”

Gilead reflected.

“There has been a monotony, I admit, hitherto,” he said. “You differentiate this, somehow, from the others?”

“It is, if I may use the expression, sir, manly—no cringing. There are tokens of culture; and the hint of persecution, the mystery, puts it in another category. Certainly it is a lady—and young.”

“You have misread me, Nestle,” said his master, “if you can hint that as an objection. I should be a useless agent in this business were I constitutionally susceptible. The sex has never more than an abstract attraction for me, and any desire I may have to possess it is limited to its idealised presentments in art.”

He returned to the advertisement, frowning a little, while the secretary murmured an apology. Presently he looked up, with decision.

“I will undertake,” he said, “this case in person. You will of course allow no hint of the fact to escape you.”

“Of course, Mr Balm.”

They spent the subsequent hour or two in discussing the business of the Bureau, and at two o’clock Gilead, having lunched lightly at Victoria Station, took a train thence for West Norwood.

Alighted there, and enquiring his way, he found himself in a decent suburban road, which ascended at a steepish angle between a broken double line of houses, detached or in ranks. There were terraces, some shops, many raw modern villas, a few large mansions, of an older date, standing in their own grounds, and here and there, contemporaneous with these, a detached cottage or maisonette, almost hidden behind the shrubs and foliage of its front garden. Reading Rufus Cottage upon the gate-post of one of these last, situated high on the hill, Gilead turned into a tiny drive, and rang the door bell of a little sober brown-brick house built after the sturdy architecture of the fifties. As he waited, he had time to observe that the scrap of lawn behind the shrubs was weed-grown and neglected, and the general atmosphere of the place fuscous and wet-smelling like an over-ripe walnut. And the next instant the door was opened by a weeping servant maid.

“I am sorry,” said Gilead, chivalrous to all. “Is anything the matter?”

She was small and moist, of the “tweenie” breed; and her emotion had inflamed her little nose and shaken her cap awry. She gazed at him open-mouthed, seeing an angel alighted on her step; but she answered nothing.

“I called about the advertisement,” he began tentatively; “but, of course—”

She caught at a sob to interrupt him.

“I was to show anyone in as did. O! dear, dear, I doesn’t know what to do!”

The mystery, it seemed, was already crying on the threshold. That was quite as he would have had it.

“Come,” he said; “I am here to help. Tell me what is wrong, child.”

“A telegram come for her,” said the girl, gasping and wiping her eyes on her apron; “and she’d no sooner read it but what she gave a ’eave and fell down flat on the sofy; and there’s she’s laid ever since.”

“You are speaking of?” said Gilead.

“My mistress,” answered the girl.

“How long ago was that?”

“More’n half an hour. O, dear! and I’m all alone with her; and I can’t get her to speak or move; and I doesn’t know what to do.”

“Hadn’t you better run for the doctor?”

The girl hesitated.

“Who’s to look after her while I’m gone?”

“I will,” said Gilead.

She gaped at him aghast, blinking her swollen lids.

“You?” she whispered; then added, “please, what’s your name?”

He told her. Something in the answer, vaguely associating it with a Sunday-school memory of peace and righteousness, appeared to reassure her. She backed against the wall to let him enter. He found himself in a cool dark little hall, having a door ajar and a flight of stairs to the left, and a closed door in front. This last the girl approached, snuffling and on tiptoe, and opening it softly, revealed a pleasant green-toned room which gave, through French windows, upon a square of embowered garden. She peeped fearfully round the door-edge, hesitated, then re-emerged and beckoned the visitor.

“There she is,” she whispered hysterically, “jest as she went down.”

Gilead stepped gently into the room. It was quite warm and cosy and still—like a bower almost to the little green pleasance beyond. And, in keeping with its vernal privacy, it had its sleeping nymph. She lay upon a green sofa, like a waxen figure upon a “property” bank. Gilead’s first thought was of the lovely St. Amaranthe in the Tussaud exhibition, which had once haunted his childish dreams. Only the artificial figure had seemed to breathe more naturally than this. There were here, however, the same beautiful immobile face, the same rose-petal complexion—cream just rounding into pink under the closed eyes—the same ripe perfection of form, the same suggestion of eternal restfulness. That other figure, he remembered, had always stood to his innocent mind for the embodiment of the Sleeping Beauty; and here she was, incarnated out of wax. Her dress—of velvet, or velveteen, a deeper shade of green than the sofa—fell in a slumberous bloom of folds; one milk-white arm, half buried under a coil of brown hair, cushioned her head; the other, limp and motionless, trailed its relaxed fingers upon the carpet, whereon lay a telegraph form.

Gilead stood some moments regarding the beautiful picture with the enthusiasm of a virtuoso. “It would be a black shame,” was something of his thought, “to let this fine work fall into the clutches of a Vandal!” The terms of the advertisement were in his mind.

“It looks like a cataleptic seizure,” he said to the girl. “Is she subject to them, do you know?”

The tweenie shook her poor little watery noddle.

“I’ve never known her do the like,” she said, “since I come here.”

“How long ago was that?”

“A week, sir,” said the girl. “I’ve been with her ever since she took the ’ouse a week ago.”

“Well,” he said, “you’d better go for the doctor at once.”

The words were hardly out of his mouth, when the girl gasped:

“I see her lids twitch! She’s a’comin’ to!”

It appeared that she was right. Some perceptible emotion stirred under the wax-like surface; the flush of pink deepened in the rounded cheeks. The suddenness of the change confirmed Gilead in his suspicion. “These instant recoveries,” he thought, “are characteristic of the complaint.”

He backed towards the door.

“She mustn’t find me here,” he whispered. “The shock might cause a relapse. I’ll wait outside. Let me know by and by if she wishes, or does not wish, to see me.”

Even as he spoke, a deep sigh issued from the sleeper’s lips, and he went hastily from the room, closing the door behind him.

He had, not, however, lingered, the most scrupulous of intruders, ten minutes in the little cold hall, when the girl came out to him radiant.

“She’d like to see you now, sir, if you please,” she said.

CHAPTER II.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (continued)

Gilead re-entered the quiet little room with a feeling as if he were desecrating a woodland shrine. As yet he could not associate that figure of immortal loveliness with the piteous vision of the advertisement. He saw her risen to greet him, all warm and flushed, a maid, yet seeming young-motherly in the soft plenitude of her form, with evidences of some suppressed emotion in her eyes. Her drooped right hand held the telegram. She addressed him in a voice of sweet low embarrassment:—

“Your visit, I am afraid, was badly timed—for me. I am so sorry. It has reference, I understand, to my advertisement in the Daily Post. Will you please tell me in what way?”

She motioned him to seat himself, and herself sank somewhat languidly upon the sofa she had just quitted.

“I trust,” he began; but she stopped him:—

“Please do not speak of it. It was a momentary recurrence of a seizure which had overtaken me once before, and was due—”

She paused. “To the receipt of a telegram?” he suggested gently.

She turned her head away; then refaced him, with a deeper flush on her cheeks.

“I am quite recovered,” she said. “I am very much to blame for my weakness.”

“I beg you not to think me impertinent,” said Gilead. “Your servant volunteered the information.”

She smiled, a little wanly.

“Well, it is quite true,” she said; “and I can have no purpose in denying it.”

“You must pardon me,” said the young man, “if I associate this seizure somehow with the persecution complained of in your advertisement.”

She looked down, twisting the telegram in her lap in an agitated manner.

“Yes,” she said, in a low voice. “I must admit it.”

“Have you the least objection,” he asked earnestly, “to giving me your name?”

She hesitated a moment; then raised her eyes to his steadily.

“Would it not be right for you to acquaint me first,” she said, “of the object of your visit?”

“Here, as always,” he answered, with measured clearness, “to succour the unfortunate or unhappy.”

A little irrepressible sigh escaped her.

“Naturally,” he continued, “you will ask my credentials. Is it possible that you have heard mention of ‘Lamb’s Agency’?”

She shook her head slightly.

“It was founded,” said Gilead, “by a person having great wealth, and a keen desire to apply it to the most helpful uses. Any wronged or persecuted innocence has a first claim upon it, I may say. My name is Gilead Balm, and I represent the Agency in this instance.”

Her eyes opened upon him wonderingly.

“Does such an institution exist?” she murmured. “I am very fortunate.”

He bowed gravely.

“The good fortune is ours, madam, where our purpose is vindicated.”

“I understand you,” she said. “You must guard against the wiles of the unscrupulous?”

“An exhaustive investigation is the only way,” he said.

“That needs no apology,” she answered, flushing a little. “I cannot be blind to the fact that the terms of my advertisement invited some comment. I was indeed very distracted when I wrote it.”

“You will not, then,” said Gilead, “attribute to mere prying impertinence on my part a desire to ascertain the nature of this persecution, whether to arm myself for your protection against it, or—”

“Or,” she interrupted him, with a faint smile, “to form your own opinion as to the truth of my story?”

“As to our capacity for assisting you,” he corrected her, staidly and courteously.

“Thank you for putting it that way,” she said quietly. “My name is Vera Halifax. Were I to give you the outlines of my history, you would accept the statement as a confidence, I am sure?”

“Most certainly,” he answered.

“I mean a personal confidence,” said the girl.

“If you should desire it.”

“I do desire it, if you please. Ill-chosen as were, no doubt, the terms of my appeal, I never proposed to myself to enlarge upon them save to the sympathy which should seem to justify my trust by its practical sincerity. You will understand me, I am sure, Mr Balm, when I ask you how you propose to deal with my difficulties, if convinced of their reality?”

“Why, how can I answer,” he said, breaking into a smile, “until I know their nature?”

She looked down, toying with the telegraph form. “I should have thought,” she said, “that that mention of my poor accomplishments would have been sufficiently illuminating.”

“Pardon me, then,” he answered, “for being explicit. You are threatened, I am to assume, with a loss of livelihood?”

“Yes, utter,” she said low.

“Very well,” he answered. “Then you are to understand, please, that we will endeavour to compensate you in proportion as our estimate of the wrong you have suffered tallies with yours.”

“Compensate!” she exclaimed.

“I mean,” he said, “with all respect for your independence. You shall work for your living—if you desire it, at the Agency itself.”

She glanced at him swiftly, and away. There were signs of tears in her beautiful eyes.

“I can only acknowledge such consideration, such generosity,” she said, “with a full confession of the truth. Would you wish to hear it?”

“I seek it perpetually,” he answered, “and from many lips. If it is an ugly truth here, even yours shall not redeem it or win its pardon.”

She blushed deeply, and half averting her face, held out to him the telegram which had been responsible for her seizure.

“Will you glance at that first?” she murmured. “You will not understand it; but it will pave the way to an explanation.”

He took the paper from her hand, and read these four enigmatic words:—

“Be prepared. Winsom Wyllie.”

“Winsom Wyllie!” he ejaculated in astonishment, looking up.

She shivered, and gave a little gulp.

“He is the cause, he is the cause!” she whispered, and appeared for the moment incapable of further speech. And then suddenly she collected herself.

“I must appear insane to you,” she said. “Perhaps it is true that an exaggerated fear has unhinged my mind for the moment. But I will tell you my story.”

“If you please,” he said; and she began:—

“My mother died when I was quite young, leaving me the sole charge of a preoccupied father. He was a man of science, devoted to the pursuit of insects, and for the greater part of his life was engaged in procuring material for his great work on the Butterflies of Europe. After my mother’s death, I was put to a school in Cheltenham, where I remained for a number of years, forgotten, but on the whole happy, doing fair credit to my training, and spending my holidays, for the most part, at the homes of the various mistresses. When I was eighteen, a chance visit to the Cotswold Hills reminded my father of my existence. He was growing old, and his eyesight dim, and it occurred to him that I might prove useful to him in his occupation. He took me from school, and thenceforth I was his companion and assistant in his varied journeyings at home and abroad. I had no other relation in the world, and no fixed home; but I confess I enjoyed the life, with its freedom from restraint, and its perpetual charms of change and open-air employment. My father, as each specimen was captured, was in the habit of sitting down and making on the spot an exact water-colour drawing of it to scale. This work, finding I had a natural facility with the brush, he deputed to me as also much of the netting of the insects themselves, at which, being active and clear-sighted, I soon proved myself an expert. I was quite happy and engrossed in my curious life until the day when there entered into it a stranger of an unusual and sinister cast. His name was Winsom Wyllie.”

She paused a moment in some agitation, and, putting her handkerchief to her lips, averted her face yet a little more.

“He professed a profound interest in the great work,” she continued presently, “and was indeed not a little forward in contributing to it. He attached himself to us, accompanied us everywhere, and quickly made himself indispensable to my father, who regarded his skill and courage with something approaching infatuation. There was no rock so high, no swamp so perilous, but Mr Wyllie would dare it in pursuit of valuable specimens. He seemed endowed with a demoniac energy, to possess a charmed life. He was wonderful, I admit; but there was always something about him that repelled me, that made me conscious of an instinctive antipathy in his presence. My dear father would habitually, when possible, revive and release the drugged insects after finishing with them; Mr Wyllie, on the contrary, would strip off their beautiful wings with a savage zest, or crush them between his coarse fingers into glittering meal. He was a dangerous man, and he always carried about with him, pinned into the inside crown of his flat-topped felt hat, a dried specimen of the moth called the Death’s Head. It was his piratical emblem, he would declare; and indeed it was a suitable one. Judge, then, of my horror and disgust, when I came to realize, as I did, that his pursuit all this time was not of my father’s interests, but of my father’s unhappy child!”

Her fair head drooped, and she spoke in a lower voice.

“I will not dwell upon the details of my discovery, but will hasten to the conclusion. Unthwarted by my declared aversion, confident in my father’s sympathy, this man made no secret, after his first avowal and repulse, of his intention to possess me. My father was blind to my misery and deaf to my protestations. The other held him in complete moral subjugation. I was at this time grown to be a woman, and of an age to assert myself. I was forming some wild scheme of escape, when the blow fell that for a while deprived me of my reason. One day my father, having rashly climbed a cliff-side in pursuit of a specimen, slipped, and was hurled lifeless at my very feet. The shock threw me into a cataleptic trance, from which I did not recover for several weeks.

“That occurred in Switzerland, in the Zermatt valley, and when I awoke to my senses it was to find myself lying in a little hospice at St Niklaus which latterly we had been making our headquarters, and Mr Wyllie assuming the sole charge of my fortune and destinies.

“I cannot describe the feelings with which I realized my unhappy orphaned position, or the intensified horror with which I regarded this man, now justified in some measure in claiming my gratitude. He had devoted himself, while I lay insensible, to my affairs and my comfort, and might have expected some acknowledgment; but I looked upon him with an indescribable loathing, which, struggle as I would, I could make but a poor show of concealing. He was fully conscious of my attitude, of course, and, finding all efforts to conciliate me useless, brought matters very quickly to a crisis. One day he asked me abruptly what I proposed doing for a living, if I persisted in my refusal to join my fortunes with his. I stared at him in amazement; when he informed me, with the utmost sang-froid, that, by a lately executed will, my father had left him all his small fortune (including the material for the book) in trust for me, provided that I married him within a year of the testator’s death, and to him solely, in the event of my rejecting that condition. Furthermore he acquainted me with the facts that a considerable undischarged debt lay to my discredit at the hospice, that, so far as he knew, I was entirely without means, and that if he came forward to assist me, it must be on the express stipulation that I would give myself to him in pledge for that accommodation, when he would hope to convince me in time of the wisdom and policy of my subscribing to the terms of the will.

“Mr Balm, I seemed to see in a flash the whole black depravity of the man. More, I remembered then that he had been on the hill with my father on the day of the fatal accident, and, in a fit of ungovernable passion and horror, I denounced him to his face. I accused him of having coerced my father into making the will, and then, in order to secure the permanency of its provisions, of tempting my unhappy parent to his destruction.

“I thought for a moment he would have killed me; and then he answered. I wish never again to invite a scene so appalling in its revelation of the secret abysses of wickedness. Utterly unnerved and overcome, I stammered out some propitiatory phrases, and escaped to my room. My only thought, my only hope was flight. I had a sum of money in my possession—for of late years my father had committed to me the business of our expenditure—and with that, and my small stock of jewels, I stole out in the grey of the next dawn, and made my way to Visp. I need not trouble you with the details of my flight—its happy accidents and living apprehensions. It is enough to say that I succeeded eventually in reaching London in safety. The experience of my later life had taught me wisdom and caution, and I was fortunate in keeping my head and my wits in somewhat bewildering circumstances. I parted with my jewels for a fair sum, and then, wishing to remove myself as far as possible from the likely arena of my persecutor’s enquiries, decided to bury myself in some obscure district of the suburbs, where I could rally my small forces, and think out the means to procure myself a livelihood. My travels combined with my early studies had made me fairly proficient in several European languages, and my father had always carried about with him for his correspondence a portable typewriter, which I had soon learned to manipulate. Finally, accident established me here, where I have now lived, in doubt and agitation, for a little over a week.”

She ended, and for a full minute a profound silence succeeded her narration.

“Pardon me,” said Gilead, then: “there is something more.”

“The telegram?” she answered, with a broken, most pitiful sigh. “O! Mr Balm, I can only assume that, ambiguous as I had supposed my advertisement to be, he must have seen and profited by it to get upon my tracks. It reached me only shortly before your arrival, and upon its receipt I had a short return of the illness with whose first attack he had been so fatally associated. He may be even here now, close by, somewhere in the neighbourhood!”

She rose, with the word, in great agitation, and stood holding her hand to her bosom. Gilead rose also.

“I beg you to calm yourself,” he said. “What have you to fear from him?”

“Fear!” she whispered, with an awful significance. “Ah! you do not know him. He will break me to his will.”

“No, that must not be,” said the young man. “Has this creature no permanent address?”

“Indeed none that I know of,” she faltered.

“And the will was indisputable?”

“Quite, I fear.”

“We might contest it upon the grounds of undue influence? And in the meantime—”

She gazed at him with her wide haunted eyes. Certainly the flowery lepidopteral ways had produced a very comely nymph.

“Yes?” she whispered.

“You must come with me, please.”

“Mr Balm!” she exclaimed in astonishment. “Do you know what you say?”

“Perfectly,” he answered, quite self-possessed. “By your own showing you invite your ultimate ruin by staying here. The man is obviously a villain, and if we cannot expose, we can defy him. I will make it my business to discover his whereabouts, and to pay-off your debt to him. In the meanwhile a lady member of our staff will procure you suitable lodgings near the Agency, and any obligation you may owe to us it shall be in your power to discharge by way of services to our office. To-morrow, one of our agents shall visit here to make such arrangements with your landlord as are necessary for acquitting you of your agreement with him, and to dismiss your servant. You can trust to my absolute honour and sincerity in the whole matter. It is for such purposes that we exist. You will greatly oblige me by consenting.”

She appeared genuinely moved and perplexed. She could find no answer for some moments.

“I don’t know what to say,” she murmured at last.

“Say nothing,” he answered; “but, if I may venture to suggest, make a little bag of your immediate necessaries, and come straight away with me. The rest can follow.”

While she was gone from the room a thing or two relative to the unreasoned extravagances of women did occur to him. “Thus,” he thought, “they will, when in dire distress and within sight of absolute penury, rent a neat little furnished house and hire a servant, when cheap lodgings would have served all their purpose.” But he dismissed the reflection as bearing too hardly upon the small worldly-wisdom of one bred in comparative luxury, without experience, and very young in years—probably not much over twenty. And, for the rest, he contemplated with serene gratification his return from his first romantic quest in company with this visible beautiful earnest of its success.

CHAPTER III.
THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

Man wanted immediately to assist in practical refutation of calumny. Apply Judex: Raxe’s Private Hotel, Aldwych.

The above advertisement met Gilead’s eyes a day or two after his adventure with the beautiful lepidopterist. He fastened upon it at once.

“I shall follow this up,” he said to the secretary. “What can a ‘practical refutation’ mean?”

Nestle shook his head, with a smile.

“I really can’t guess, sir,” he said. “Unless it refers to the argumentum baculinum.”

Gilead mused a little.

“It says ‘immediately’,” he reflected. “I must go at once, then, or I shall be forestalled.”

He rose, and looked about him.

“Miss Halifax enters to-day, you understand,” he said, “upon her duties as my personal typewriter and amanuensis. You will see that she is made comfortable here in my absence.”

Perhaps the ghost of a smile twitched the soft-speaking secretary’s mouth, as he answered that his chief’s commands should be scrupulously obeyed.

Gilead took a cab to Raxe’s Hotel, and enquired at once for “Judex.” He seemed conscious of a twinkle in the right eye of the hall-porter who took his name, and of that of the boy who went off with it, as if some telegraphic levity had passed between them. But in a little the boy came back, with a perfectly sober face, and informed him that Mr Judex would see him. He was shown upstairs into a private sitting-room, where by a table sat a little old man, shrewd and withered, but of a very spruce appearance. His eyes were piercing black, his lips kept a perpetual chewing motion, like a crab’s, a few threads of white hair clung to the barren slopes of his scalp. But he was very neatly dressed in grey twill frock-coat and trousers, with a shepherd’s plaid bow at his neck.

“A LITTLE OLD MAN, SHREWD AND WITHERED.”

“Mr Judex?” said Gilead.

“My name, sir,” said the stranger. “You thought it a pseudonym, no doubt. Now, usher!”

The exclamation was addressed to the boy, who vanished.

“I called in answer to your advertisement,” said Gilead, not unprepared for surprises.

“Be seated,” said the stranger. The bright eyes bent upon him. “You are young, and a gentleman, I take note, Mr Balm,” he said. “A hard-up one—eh?”

“No, not hard-up.”

“What then?”

“A seeker after the truth,” said Gilead. “I pursue it day by day through the columns of the Daily Post. Money is no object to me.”

The little old man bent forward, and eagerly scanned his visitor.

“If that is so,” he said, “fortune could not have sent me a better coadjutor. You are dispassionate, disinterested, whole-hearted?”

“Entirely,” said Gilead.

The old man rubbed his palms gleefully together.

“It is a providence,” he said. “It is to demonstrate a truth, a momentous truth, that I advertised for an agent.”

“May I ask,” said Gilead, “what truth.”

“Hush-sh-sh!” said Mr Judex, putting a finger to his lips with exaggerated gravity. “It lies to prove in the wine-cellar of number forty-one, Belgrave Crescent—a very deep and dark cellar.”

Gilead’s eyes opened a little; but he sat calm and collected. He thought he perceived that he had to do here with an eccentric, not to say a daft old gentleman. But, if the quest was to bear fruit, he must betray nothing of his feelings. The other stretched out, and put a soft impressive hand upon his arm.

“Have you a clean conscience?” he said.

“I believe I may claim one,” answered the young man, smiling.

“No sense of guilt anywhere within?”

“Nothing to trouble me.”

“Exactly. You are not afraid of being alone with your thoughts?”

“O! no.”

“Even in the dark?”

“Even in the dark.”

“If you were conscience-stricken, on the other hand, you might dread your own company unspeakably?”

“It is very likely, I think.”

“Especially in the dark?”

“I daresay.”

“So much so as to be urged to any means to escape it, perhaps?”

“Indeed,” said Gilead, “I could not answer for myself under the circumstances.”

Mr Judex threw himself back in his chair with galvanic quickness and a beaming face.

“Nothing could be happier,” he said delightedly. “It lies in your power to exonerate me from a very gross and cruel accusation.”

“So far as my conscious probity is concerned,” said Gilead, “I am at your service.”

The old man bent forward again, and patted him three times on the knee.

“Meet me,” he said, “at nine o’clock—this evening—outside number forty-one—Belgrave Crescent.”

For one moment Gilead hesitated. The oddity of the request, the lateness of the hour named, the suggestion of something sinister and uncanny connected with that abysmal crypt so darkly alluded to, impressed him with a sense of some unseemliness in prospect which it would be wiser in him to leave unexplored. What could possibly bear upon the refutation of a calumny in those obscure depths? An aspersed bin (he reflected, with concern, that he had no palate for “bouquets”)? A deceased butler? An immured traducer, like him in the terrific Mr Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado!”? Nothing, he hoped, to do with buried corpses or concealed “swag.” But in the end the spirit of the Romantic Quest decided him.

“I will be punctual to the appointment,” he said, and rose from his chair.

He returned to the Bureau to find Miss Halifax already installed in his private office. She struck him as looking a supremely attractive amanuensis, and he congratulated himself on the good fortune which had attended his first personal venture. If she should prove as sympathetic to his aims as she was grateful to his vision, he would come to hold, he told himself, having the perfect feminine on one side of him and the perfect male on the other, the most admirable balance between reason and emotion. In fact he informed her so, quite frankly and quietly, and she blushed as she made a very pretty and modest acknowledgment of his kindness, and of her determination to win his good opinion.

“Mr Winsom Wyllie is first down among my mental notes,” he told her. “I shall not forget him.”

He went, indeed, that very afternoon to Somerset House in order to ascertain if the Will had as yet been proved, but was unsuccessful in his search. “Never mind,” he thought. “Such a rapacious scoundrel will not be long in realizing his ill-gotten gains, and in a very short time, I fancy, we shall be possessed of a clue.”

He was as little inclined to effusive confidences as to senseless reticence; but for some reason he told Miss Halifax about his forthcoming venture. To his surprise she received his story with some signs of emotion.

“I don’t think it sounds nice,” she said. “I wish you would let one of the others go instead.”

He looked at her kindly.

“What do you doubt?” he answered; “my proficiency, or my discretion, or my savoir-faire?”

“None of these,” she said—“or your courage or generosity. Forgive me and my presumption in offering advice so soon.”

“I should have thought,” said he, smiling, “that the success of my first essay would have inclined you to a greater confidence in my judgment.”

She seemed to hang her head a little, biting her full lower lip.

“I have no right whatever to speak,” she murmured. “Only please, please be on your guard.”

“Trust me,” he said. “But timidity, you must remember, Miss Halifax, never won to a vision of the Grail.”

She raised her head, and looked at him a moment with shining eyes; then returned to her work.

The evening closed in dark and sinister, bringing with it black rushes of wind and sudden avalanches of rain. Gilead despatched a simple but recherché dinner at a choice restaurant, and, at twenty minutes to nine, betook himself on foot to the rendezvous. It was part of his principle to avoid every show of ostentation in his adventures. He wished to decide them on their own exclusive merits, and any confession of his resources would have tended to confuse the issues. Exactly at the hour appointed, he stood, battling with his umbrella, outside number forty-one Belgrave Crescent.

The street, in this stately district, was almost entirely deserted at this mid-prandial hour. The dark garden which contained one side of it stood not more lifeless in suggestion than the black house-fronts opposite. Here and there a gas-lamp winked in the driven tumult; here and there a thread of light under a blind gleamed like a gold stitch in the curtain of night. Far up a solitary motor-car throbbed against the kerb; the thunder of remote traffic spoke like a distant surge; other token of human contiguity there was none.

In such a universal eclipse of things there was little to differentiate one respectable building from another; wherefore the watcher was unable to draw any exclusively portentous suggestion from the gloom and silence of the house he faced. It appeared like any other of its neighbours in the essentials of brown brick and closed shutters, and the rain that plashed off its sills into the deep area was burdened with no exceptional sound of omen or melancholy. The brass knocker was hospitably bright, the antique extinguishers on the rail-posts of the steps were even suggestive of home, and an asylum gained at last from obscure wanderings in the streets. Gilead moved closer to examine one of them.

“Faithful Achates!” said a small voice at his elbow. He started and turned about.

He had come up and upon him without a sound, a little weird blown figure, hopping under an umbrella like some odd-winged night-fowl. His eyes gleamed like drops of ink; he pinched Gilead’s arm in a shrewd ecstasy, while that young man, momentarily paralysed, stood speechless. In truth the apparition had taken him from an unexpected quarter; he had looked to Mr Judex, for some reason, to emerge from the house itself.

As they dwelt thus an instant, a clap of wind took the little figure, and seemed to blow it clean up the steps.

“Quick!” he whispered from that eyrie, closing his umbrella. “I am pressed for time in all things these days—quick!”

A little reluctantly Gilead joined him.

“Pressed for time,” repeated the other, bending and fumbling; “and my movements must be swift and secret. This is excellently fine of you. Your reward shall consist in the vindication of a calumniated soul. Quick! We will make straight for the cellar.”

He was busy with a labelled latchkey as he spoke, fitting it into the lock.

“Procured from the house agents,” he murmured. “My own key and my own house; but they weren’t to know that.”

The door fell open with the word, revealing a cavern of chill blackness. Involuntarily Gilead shrunk a little. The other noticed and protested.

“There is nothing to apprehend—neither goblins nor conspirators,” he said. “You were quite confident as to the dark, you know.”

With a blush of shame, Gilead entered; and instantly the little man shut the door softly upon them both, and producing an electric lamp from his breast-pocket, switched on a spark, whose tiny brilliancy hung in the gloom like a fen-candle, obscurely peopling its thickness. But it was enough to reveal a desert of bare walls, carpetless floors and lightless ceilings. Gilead, after one look around, addressed his companion firmly:—

“This is your house, you say?”

“Unquestionably.”

“It is empty—unoccupied.”

“But it is my house, all the same.”

The young man considered. A deserted building, a conceivably demented owner, and the rest of the circumstances! What was he to conclude? He seemed to be on the verge of some disturbing discovery. But it was his duty, to himself and his Bureau, to proceed. Certain diffident tremors in him had of late weakened of their force. He had enjoyed his incredible possessions long enough to evolve that sixth sense of omnipotence which is peculiar to plutocracy. All risks appeared easily negotiable to him, endowed with that Fortunatus’s purse. Luckily for the world, as it happened, the chances that tempted him were all on the side of chivalry and justice.

“Will you come?” said Mr Judex.

He went before, treading softly, and holding his lamp high overhead. Gilead followed as quietly, through the empty hall, to the head of the basement stairs, and down them into a vortex of reeling night. Domestic catacombs, rows of cobwebby bells, disconnected gas-meters, a remote gurgle of drain-water, horrible, secret, suggestive of blood-choked lungs labouring somewhere in the darkness, a clammy smell of distempered walls and icy flags—all these things, glimpsed or divined in passing, were spectrally impressed upon his consciousness as he pursued the tiny jack-o’-lantern dancing before him into foundering glooms. And then suddenly, turning off into a deep alcove, they had brought up before a door, strong and solid, standing slightly ajar, with a great key in its lock. “The wine-cellar!” whispered his guide; and he gingerly swung open the door, and backed to the wall.

“I await your solution of the problem, sir,” he said. “Will you oblige me by pronouncing upon it?” With a curious tingling in his nerves, Gilead entered.

“At the other end, if you will favour me,” said Mr Judex.

Thrilling in the prospect of some unconscionable discovery, Gilead advanced an uncertain step or two. On the instant the light went out, and a heavy slam and snap at his back told him that the door had been shut and locked upon him.

He stood for some moments absolutely still and incredulous; then turned in a labouring way, and saw the intense darkness split low down with a faintest edge of light. He stumbled towards it, and found the door.

“Mr Judex!” he cried—“Mr Judex!”

A tiny chuckling laugh reached him from without.

“How can I resolve the problem without light?” he pleaded, conscious of a sudden moisture breaking out over his face and chest.

Again the small laugh came to him, followed by a voice.

“Darkness is the very essence of the problem, Mr Balm. I wish you to remain there, entirely by yourself, until the morning, when I will return to release you.”

“Mr Judex, why? In God’s name, why, Mr Judex?”

He dwelt in anguish on the answer.

“Shall I tell you?” said the voice, apparently after consideration. “I wish you no harm—I wish you no harm whatever, Mr Balm. On the contrary, in your mastery of fate lies my hope. Did you ever hear of Mr Justice Starkey?”

“Yes.”

“I am he, Mr Balm, and this is my house. You will pardon, I am sure, the deception, excusable and necessary under the circumstances. I desired to demonstrate to the world the wickedness of its conclusions in holding me primarily responsible for the man Maudsley’s suicide. Confinement in the dark cell would, I am convinced, never drive a guiltless conscience to self-destruction. It remains with you, if you have not lied to me, to substantiate that truth.”

Somewhere in his racing thoughts, Gilead found and caught at a memory. It was of a notorious recent case in which a prisoner, sentenced to a term of penal servitude, and too late proved innocent, had strangled himself in the dark cell to which he had been committed for insubordination. There had been considerable press comment on the matter, when aired, and Mr Justice Starkey, who had summed up flagrantly against the accused, in despite of a strong presumption in his favour, had met with some caustic criticism, with the result that he had shortly after retired from the bench and withdrawn into seclusion.

“Into the seclusion of a madhouse,” thought Gilead, appalled; “and he has either escaped or been discharged from it.” Such, indeed, appeared the fair presumption. He leaned against the solid door, gasping for speech.

“I daresay the man,” he began, and stopped. He had been going to say, “was guilty after all;” but, even in that crisis, he would not commit his soul to a conscious untruth.

“Yes?” enquired the voice.

“Was unsophisticated, unselfpossessed in the sense of educated reason,” he finished.

“I admit that the cases are not parallel,” answered the voice. “The advantage is certainly on your side in that respect.”

“I would submit,” said Gilead, “that the test, to be adequate, should be applied to a like unintelligence.”

“I am dogged and spied upon,” said the voice. “The time is too short, and the risk of delay too instant. A bird in the hand—eh? And you make it your interest to pursue the truth. I am sure you will surmount the ordeal triumphantly. Good-night! I shall be here again in the morning.”

The thread of light went out. Gilead threw himself against the door, yelling and battering; but its jambs were solidly sunk in the brick-work, and he barked his knuckles in vain. Pausing in the midst of his frenzy, he heard a far distant boom as of the hall door shutting, and knew that he was left alone, immured deep down in the deserted house.

On the instant he recollected himself, and, with a violent wrench of will, brought all his reason to bear on the situation.

To be buried for a few hours in a dark crypt! What was there in that to appal an educated mind? He tried to laugh; but stopped aghast to hear his own voice in that tremendous silence. It seemed to evoke somewhere a wicked response. That was nonsense, of course. There was nothing inherently sinister in his position or his surroundings. He was merely shut into the commonplace wine-cellar of a commonplace house. Let him consider the prospect and its obvious necessities. The first was to forget himself—in sleep, if possible. That should be obtainable by a calm method of reflection.

He had not moved as yet—had not dared to. The blackness was gross, terrific. Now, all of a sudden, he remembered his matchbox, and with a sigh of relief felt for and found it. Opening it with infinite caution, he fingered a couple of matches, no more. One on the instant slipped from his nervous hold, and fell to the floor. Taking an instinctive step to recover it, his foot trod out a little flare and explosion, gone in a moment, and only a single match remained to him. He clutched it as a drowning man a straw.

Should he nurse that little potential spark—keep the moral of its consolation always between himself and despair? Better, he thought, to resolve at once the mystery of his prison than to torment himself with imagined terrors.

The match was a stout wax one. Giving himself no time for reflection, he struck it, and, guarding the flame jealously, held it aloft.

The cellar he found himself in was fairly deep, but nothing out of the common. Stone bins pigeon-holed all one side of it; the other was the bare wall. Moving pallidly, Gilead examined all its bricked-up length. At the last moment he recollected the door, and thinking to return to it and investigate the lock, found the match burned low in his fingers. Only a second or two of life remained to it; he was standing by the ultimate bin, when he perceived a heap of sacking lying within it. He dragged the mass hurriedly out, and, casting it on the floor, observed a solitary bottle which it had concealed. He had but time to grasp this by the neck, when the match burned his fingers, and, with a gasping exclamation, he dropped it, and was in utter darkness once more. Feeling for the sacking, he let himself down upon it, hugging his find.

And now, in truth, he was committed to the ordeal, with only a bottle for his companion. He was a completely temperate man, and in any case he had no idea what the bottle contained; yet somehow the feel of its sleek sides was a solace to him. Unopened it seemed to cheer and inebriate, as the presence of a jovial comrade might, though fast asleep by one’s side in a haunted house. He patted it fondly, and closed his eyes.

The blackness weighed upon them, instantly and horribly. He opened them with a start, as if he had only emerged just in time from drowning waters. But they took no comfort from that sightless recovery. He strove to concentrate his thoughts on his interests, his ambition, even his gold. It was all useless. Light, he realized, or at least some dilution of darkness, was necessary to sane thought as it was to healthy growth. Without it all things stagnated and fed upon themselves. The coffers of his banks might be bursting with his hoards; they were impotent to buy him one moment of self-forgetfulness. All his omnipotence could not command him a right ray of reason.

“This will not do,” he thought. “It is childish and contemptible.” Lying on his side, he closed his lids again determinedly; and straight with the action, it seemed, there was shut into his mind a torturing demon. “The innocent man,” it kept whispering to him, “failed, for all his innocence, to keep his reason. No self-conscious probity can be proof for long against these supernormal conditions. A hardened conscience could resist them more effectually.”

He reviled the tempter, hated him, found himself suddenly listening to him, with his forehead all clammy and his hands shaking. To be goaded into strangling himself in this black and loathsome pit! The thought was monstrous, incredible—and it clung to him. He sat up in a gasping panic. He forced himself to repeat hundreds of lines and passages from memory. Presently he found that his tongue was running involuntarily into inanities and blasphemies, and he stopped.

“What on earth is the matter with me?” he reflected. For the moment a re-dawn of sanity glowed within him; his pulses slowed. “It is too utterly ridiculous!” he said aloud.

He rose to his feet, and, feeling by the wall, went up and down, up and down, hoping to tire himself in a normal way. But gradually he seemed to become conscious, every time he approached the door, of some evil invisible presence lurking outside. The vast emptiness of the house above occurred to him with a horror even greater than his cell inspired. “They are trooping down,” he thought awfully, “to listen at my door.”

Who the ‘they’ were only his excited imagination might say. Little by little, he contracted his area, until he was standing once more motionless by the heap of sacking.

“Solitary confinement in a dark cell is an unutterable wickedness—an unutterable wickedness,” he kept repeating to himself. Then, in a spasm of horror, he turned, and clawed blindly at the wall, like a trapped animal. He dared not go near the door again, or he would have concentrated all his strength on one frenzied effort to burst it open. But he had come to dread horribly the thought of evoking an uproar in that blind silence. As long as he was quiet they might keep outside.

Presently, his legs seeming to give under him, he sank down again upon his rough couch. An hour went by in such mental suffering as he had never before experienced or conceived. And then, suddenly, with a ghastly groan, he pulled himself together and sat up.

“I can stand no more,” he whispered, and, reaching for the bottle, knocked its head off against the wall. A gush of liquid came over his hand, a stinging fragrance to his nostrils—brandy!

“Thank God!” he ejaculated fervently, and without hesitation put his mouth to the shattered edge, indifferent to consequences, and gulping once or twice, replaced the bottle on the stones. The potent stuff poured into his veins; its fumes rose to his brain. Like any overtaken sot, he toppled prone, and lapsed into quick insensibility.

A cry in his brain, a pertinacious worry of light in his eyes, awoke him, and he raised his head. There were people in the cellar—his secretary, Miss Halifax, a curious stranger, a police constable holding a dark-lantern. The lady, from whom the pity-stricken exclamation seemed to have come, stood, one hand poised at her lips, a little apart. The secretary bent over him.

“It’s all right, sir,” he said. “He’s caught, thank God!”

Gilead, with assistance, staggered to his feet.

“What—where!” he exclaimed wildly—“Mr Justice Starkey?”

“Ah!” said the secretary; “you know his name, then?”

“He told me plain enough,” said Gilead faintly—“and his purpose; but that was after he’d locked me in. How did you know? how did you find me?”

“It was Miss Halifax, sir,” said the secretary. “You told her about the appointment, you know, and the thing worried her—worried her to that degree that in the evening she must come round to confide her fears to me. I didn’t like the sound of it myself, and, after consultation, we decided to take a cab to Raxe’s hotel and discover what we could about Mr Judex. That was near ten o’clock, and we reached the place to find it in a commotion over the man himself. It appeared that he had escaped from a private asylum at Sutton, and had eluded recapture until his own advertisement gave him away. The attendants had been waiting for his return to the hotel, and had nabbed him just before our arrival. I stated our fears to them, and sure enough, on overhauling him, they found in his possession the key of his own front-door, which he had procured, under his assumed name, from the house-agents. This gentleman representing the asylum, we all came on together, and engaging the services of a constable, entered the house. From a hint let fall by the madman, we gathered that we should find you locked in somewhere down here, and your snoring, sir, led us to the spot.”

Gilead, with a faint blush, glanced down at the tell-tale bottle.

“He said it was his wish to demonstrate,” he murmured, “how the dark cell could hold no terrors for the impeccable conscience, and how, therefore, arguing per contra, the man Maudsley must have been guilty of the crime for which he was sentenced.”

The constable put in a word:—

“He went mad on it, sir, did his Lordship. The papers and his own conscience druv him off of his head.”

“Thank you,” said Gilead quietly; “and thank you, too, Nestle.” He crossed, with some sign of emotion, to where Miss Halifax stood by the wall. “You advised me,” he said, “and I have had a fine lesson in self-sufficiency. It is humiliating to have to own that I owe my reason, such as it is, to a chance bottle of brandy which I found in one of the bins. But for that, I am afraid, you would have exhumed a gibbering idiot. I shall think more mercifully of one form of drunkard for the future, and less confidently of myself.” He turned. “If this gentleman,” he added courteously, “will favour me with his address, I shall take pleasure in acquitting myself of my considerable obligations to him. You, Constable, will no doubt find an opportunity of calling at Lamb’s Agency some time during your off-hours, when a closed envelope will be put into your hands.”

He bowed punctiliously to each, offered his arm to Miss Halifax, and, waiting for the Constable to lead, quitted the place of durance.

CHAPTER IV.
THE QUEST OF THE DOG

Gilead had often encountered in the Daily Post—sandwiched, say, between a heart-moving appeal on behalf of the outcast and houseless, and a last drowning cry for help from a soul almost submerged—a plea for some dog or cat seeking a kind home, and had reflected on the curious variety and varied quality of the petitions which a medium for benevolence was calculated to attract. He hoped that those, thus fondly appealing to charity for their animal beloveds, were in the habit of scrutinizing the lists in which their advertisements appeared, and of justifying their own title to help in one form by vouchsafing it in another. But he believed he had always noticed that an excessive devotion to animals entailed a rather ironic attitude towards the needs of the human family, and it was in no very sympathetic mood, therefore, that he read the first words of the following advertisement, which his secretary one morning pointed out to him:—

“Will anyone give a kind home to Pilot, a dog. O, please do help! This is genuine. No money-lenders need apply. Address Judy, Marshlock Old Rectory, Shipton-on-Thames.”

“Why do you show me this, Nestle?” he said, looking up.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the secretary. “Have you read to the end?”

Gilead bent to the paper again, and smiled.

“What a very odd advertisement!” he said. “Is it nonsense or innocence, do you think?”

The secretary shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“Supposing we ask Miss Halifax’s opinion, Mr Balm?”

Gilead said “certainly,” and leaned back in his chair as the secretary carried the paper to the young lady, who was engaged at her desk over correspondence.

“Do you take that for a hoax, Miss Halifax?”

The beautiful amanuensis read and considered.

“No, Mr Balm,” she said. “This was written, I am sure, by some distressed child, whose people take in the Daily Post. If it were a hoax, some covering address would have been given.”

Gilead rose.

“Give me the paper, please,” he said.

She smiled, rather wistfully.

“I knew the very suggestion of a child would win you,” she said.

He looked at her kindly.

“It is your feminine perspicacity that wins me,” he said. “I cannot tell you how it touches me to find us all three in such accord over this business of humanitarianism, and so superior, in its pursuit, to ignoble jealousies and misunderstandings.”

That was a tribute to the secretary, who had never shewn the least resentment over the lady’s inclusion in the inner confidences of his Chief. Nestle stood quiet a moment or two, as Gilead, having spoken, left the room; and then, moving softly, addressed a word to the amanuensis. She waved him away; and he saw at once, to his curious concern, that she was crying.

Gilead, foreseeing a long day and a queer experience, drove to Paddington Station, whence he took a train presently to a distant up-river junction, from which a short branch line carried him leisurely to Shipton-on-Thames. It was a quiet torrid day in late April, hot as the ideal Midsummer, and, after asking his direction, he started on foot across the fields for the Old Rectory, which, it appeared, was situated at no great distance away on the banks of the river. His path was a pleasant one, remote and peaceful, leading him by sweet-smelling pastures and lanes to a waterside hamlet, where a scrap of church-tower, ruined and ivy-grown, and a fragment of antique graveyard at its foot spoke of some ancient benefice long since discontinued or translated. He was looking about in this sleepy retreat for someone to correct his way for him, when a sound of youthful voices breaking out if a leafy road reached his ears, and he saw two children, a boy and a girl, turn a corner and make in his direction. He advanced to meet them.

“Can you tell me the way to the Old Rectory?” he asked.

The boy went on without answering, but, finding that his little companion had stopped embarrassed, swaggered round and came back.

“Beg your pardon?” he said.

Gilead repeated his question.

“Well, we’re going there,” said the boy. “You can come with us, if you like.”

He was a meaty youth of some twelve summers, with an imbecile self-satisfied face and porky eyes; but his stylish white flannels and little Oxford-blue blazer with the yellow badge on its pocket spoke him quite the riverside dandy.

Gilead fell into pace with the two, and the little girl kept peeping up at him from the other side of her cavalier. She was the dearest charmer of nine, dressed in a sort of sweet Directory frock with heliotrope sprays; and the shepherd’s straw hat on her head had its mauve ribbon poked full of real daisies.

Presently the boy, shouldering his companion a little apart, spoke something in her ear, and she whispered back “O, Georgy!” and flushed as pink as an apple-blossom.

“Please,” she said, being nudged to the soft impeachment, “Georgy says he believes you must have come about Pilot.”

Gilead smiled, oddly enlightened.

“The dog mentioned in the advertisement?” he said. “Did you put it in?”

“No, I did,” said the boy, sniggering. “I say, what a lark! Have you really come about him?”

“Supposing I have,” said Gilead; “what then?”

The boy grinned, but did not answer.

“Is this Judy, by any chance?” asked the young man.

“Yes, it is,” said the boy.

“Your sister?”

“Not much. I say, you know!” exclaimed the youth. “Her name’s Brown. My name’s George Wimble. My father’s Captain Wimble. We live at the Court. I only made it up for her, and got old Gask the stationer to send it on.”

“I see,” said Gilead. “What was that about no moneylenders applying?”

“O! I don’t know,” said the boy. “You aren’t one, are you?”

“No, I’m not one.”

“I made it up out of the advertisements,” said Master Wimble. “They always put in that sort of thing. I did it for her.”

“Father said I might,” ventured the little girl, between apology and self-defence. “At leastways he said I might try and find a good home for him.”

“He didn’t mean that way, you bet,” said the boy, glancing slyly up at the stranger.

“No,” said Judy, her small mouth tightening a little. “When he saw it in the newspaper this morning he was simply furiated. He is a very boracic man.”

The boy stifled an explosion.

“Isn’t she funny?” he whispered.

“O! boracic,” said Gilead; and added, in some vague association of ideas, “Is he a doctor?—O! no; a clergyman, I suppose?”

The boy plucked his sleeve.

“He’s neither the one nor the other,” he confided to his private ear. “He’s a radical.” He spoke the word with a weight of social significance. “He stood for Henley in the last by-election, but our man beat him at the post. He doesn’t live here. He’s only taken the house for the summer. He isn’t a gentleman, you know; he’s a radical; but she’s all right.”

The magnificence of the distinction quite silenced Gilead. He walked on while the boy strutted on; but suddenly he was moved very sweetly to feel little confiding fingers thrust into his.

“Please,” said the little girl, who had slipped round to his side, “have you really and truly come about Pilot?”

“Really and truly,” said Gilead, looking down with a smile. “Do you want to part with him?”

“No,” said the child, flushing very pink.

“Perhaps someone else does?” suggested Gilead.

“Yes, father.”

“Shall I see him about it, then?” She did not answer. “What’s wrong with him—the dog, I mean?” asked the young man.

The boy answered for her, with a contemptuous laugh.

“He bit somebody. Anybody would have, her.”

Gilead kept a discreet silence.

“Here’s the gate of the Rectory, if you want to see Mr Brown,” said the boy, stopping; and then Gilead saw that the little girl was in floods of tears. He bent down, very concerned.

“If he has to go, Judy,” he whispered, “he shall find a good friend.”

“O! don’t be such a ninny,” said the boy. “What’s a dog anyway? I’m not going to go fishing with you, you know, if you’re going on like this.”

He walked off, whistling. She sniffed once or twice, dried her eyes on her sleeve, and fled after him. Gilead, watching the two a moment, turned through a gate into a leafy drive, which swept round a semi-circle of lawn to the front of a white-latticed creeper-hung house of two storeys, where, ringing the bell, he sent in his card to Mr Brown.

He had not waited a minute in an untidy tobacco-reeking study, into which he had been informally and rather suspiciously shown, when a gentleman came hurrying in with an air of effusive cordiality which took him completely by surprise.

“Mr Balm?” said the gentleman. “This is kind of you—this is more than kind. To come in person to answer my appeal? I had not expected such distinction, such consideration, and it makes me proud. Pray take a chair, sir, and let us discuss this matter.”

Gilead, immensely perplexed, bowed and seated himself. He saw before him a fluffy fiery little man, wearing spectacles like burning glasses, and clad in a blazing rhubarb tweed, with knickerbockers and bright brown shoes. He was snappy in his movements, jerky in his speech, and, in disposition, he alternated, it seemed, between white heats of enthusiasm and dead ashes of depression.

“Your Agency, sir,” he said, “justifies its title to being the most prompt and princely institution of its kind. I am favoured in a visit from its founder.”

“Its representative,” corrected Gilead.

Mr Brown raised his hands and eyes with an air of polite deprecation.

“True,” he said; “we know your humour and respect it, Mr Balm. I say no more. I am completely dumb.”

“Well,” said Gilead, a little chilly: “as to the purpose of my visit, sir, I was led to suppose that the—the form of appeal somewhat lacked your sanction.”

“Not at all,” said Mr Brown, with a surprised look. “How could you have gathered that impression when I dictated its terms myself?”

“O! I didn’t know,” said the visitor. “I was misenlightened, no doubt—made the victim very possibly of a trifling hoax.” He smiled. “Then the little lady’s name was an intentional mask?”

“I don’t know, sir, what you mean by a mask,” said Mr Brown with some apparent heat. “It was quoted to illustrate a very genuine sentiment. If you had said a bait, I might have admitted the impeachment.”

“A bait, then,” said Gilead—“and a sweet one.”

“I am indebted to you for the term, Mr Balm,” said the gentleman, with a certain dry dignity; “but I can hold it hardly applicable to a personality endowed with such supreme gifts of force and intelligence. I would as soon call the Mother of the Gracchi sweet, sir, for my part.”

Gilead felt himself at a loss for words. Could it be possible that the little girl so contradicted her appearance as to be an infant phenomenon of an advanced type?

“Well, sir,” he said, utterly at sea—“a bait of whatever nature you please. In any case, I am to understand, its purpose was to find someone who would be willing to take this discarded pet off your hands?”

Mr Brown rose from his chair.

“Sir—Mr Balm!” he exclaimed.

“To secure a kind home for it,” explained Gilead, “whether because it is old, or because it bites, or—”

Mr Brown seized up a heavy paper-weight, poised it an instant furiously, and replaced it on the desk calmly.

“I think, I am sure,” he said, “that there must be some mistake.”

Gilead, risen also, faced him gravely.

“Would you mind telling me,” he said, “to what you are alluding all this time?”

“I am alluding, sir,” said Mr Brown, with sarcastic emphasis, “to the letter I had the honour of addressing to you yesterday, and the substance of which, I flattered myself, you had come to answer in person. My name is Brown.”

“I am unfortunate,” said Gilead. “I have much correspondence and a poor memory, and a name, however distinctive, is apt to slip me. I devoted, I am afraid, but a cursory examination to this morning’s letters. The penalty is mine.”

Mr Brown bowed stiffly.

“Assuredly not, sir, since, it seems, I have appealed to your munificence in vain.”

“The misfortune, sir,” said Gilead, “is, by your favour, easily amended for both of us.”

His courtesy was so charming, that the indignant gentleman was instantly mollified.

“You are very good,” he said. “Your frankness invites a warmer confidence than that I had already ventured in a sacred cause. You are acquainted, no doubt, with the name of Mrs Craddock Flight?”

Gilead bowed.

“Of all the militant sisterhood,” said Mr Brown, “the bright particular star. It was she, if you remember, who chained herself to the wheel of the Prime Minister’s carriage, just as he was about to enter it to drive to the House of Commons, and so forced him to seek his infamous destination on foot. A woman of extraordinary resource and originality.”

“Extraordinary,” said Gilead. “If I recollect, she was nearly killed by the horses becoming restive before she could be released.”

“She would have been glad to die, sir,” said Brown, “in that glorious situation—a second St Catherine broken on the wheel for her faith.” He looked at his visitor searchingly. “Do not distress me, Mr Balm,” he said, “by affirming that the cause is to be denied its share of the vast resources at your disposal. No, no, you must be with us, sir. It was for that purpose that I wrote to you; it was for that purpose that I identified myself in my letter with a name calculated to shed refulgence on any propaganda to which it should elect to give itself—the name of Mrs Craddock Flight. That name, sir, and that cause lack nothing but the devotion of a sympathetic capitalist to ensure their immortality. It was to that stately name that I questioned the right application of so sugary an epithet as ‘sweet’. Finally, sir, that name—if I may dare the confidence—has pledged itself to become, on a single condition, my priceless possession; to adorn with its widowed lustre my no less widowed insignificance. I confess, sir, that I yearn to bask in that reflected glory—to follow in the tail of its comet-like flight to the new world its radiance is destined to discover to the enraptured vision of posterity.”

“You allude—?” said Gilead.

“I allude,” said Mr Brown, “to a world reconsecrated, through the political enfranchisement of woman, to reason, justice and purity. Everything, you will grant, is wrong as it is. Civilization, as a male imposition, has proved itself a depressing failure. Men, on true premises, labour to false conclusions; women, on false, jump to true. Their unerring moral sensitiveness penetrates all massed and complicated sophistries, and pierces in a flash to the heart of the real. Unbiassed by formulas, untrammelled by dogma, they will blow through our corrupt institutions like a cleansing gale, whirling the dead leaves of discredited systems before them. Woman is not conscientious, so to speak, in the prescriptive sense. She will strip from equity, justice and the moral law the trappings in which they have been too long confounded, and show us nature again, primitive and fearless.”

“Indeed?” said Gilead. “You surprise me.”

“There will be many surprises when the time comes,” said Mr Brown grandiloquently; and, on the very word, suffered a surprising change of countenance. “Why, why,” he cried, flushing scarlet; “my letter—my letter, sir, in which I expatiated at some length on this very subject. You have not seen it, you say? To what, then, am I to attribute the honour of your visit?”

“To an advertisement, sir,” said Gilead quietly, “about a dog.”

The effect of his words was startling. Mr Brown seemed to burst at the head, like an over-charged bottle of ginger-beer, and thence to spout a volume of incoherent expletives. He then, as if impelled by some uncontrollable emotion, went racing up and down the room, until, the pressure slacking, he gradually slowed, and finally came to a stop opposite his visitor, the steam, so to speak, all out of him.

“I see it all,” he said, in a state of the limpest depression. “By an irony of circumstance scarce credible, the sympathies I sought to engage have been forestalled by my own child in a trivial matter.”

“By a young friend of your child, sir, if I am correctly informed,” said Gilead kindly.

“You mean the boy Wimble?” said Mr Brown bitterly. “No doubt, sir, your information—”

“It was at first hand,” put in the visitor, smiling. “I met the young people outside, and got into talk with them. The boy, he himself confessed to me, composed and inserted the advertisement.”

“The grotesque impertinence of it!” cried Mr Brown, boiling over; “the assurance and the inopportuneness!”

“I understand,” said Gilead, “that you authorized the little lady to find, if possible, a home for the animal?”

“Go on, sir, go on!” said Mr Brown resignedly. “Tell me that I authorized her to hold her father up to ridicule before the world.”

“Nay, sir,” said Gilead, “I am quite at sea in the matter.”

“I will acquaint you, Mr Balm,” said the father dismally, “with the facts of the case—especially as they bear in some measure on a confidence I have already reposed in you. Mrs Craddock Flight, sir, made it a condition of our union that the dog should be destroyed.”

“It was the single condition to which you referred, I assume,” said the visitor. “May I venture to ask what suggested it?”

“The dog had bitten her, sir. They will take these unaccountable aversions. It was during a short visit she lately paid us.”

“Pardon me,” said Gilead, “if I enquire if your little girl is not very attached to the animal?”

“There is no denying,” said Mr Brown, “that Judy is devoted to Pilot, and Pilot to Judy. It was on that account that I was moved to sanction the compromise of a new home, in which compromise, I have not the least doubt, Mrs Flight’s superior reason will acquiesce, particularly when she is informed of the character of the applicant.”

Gilead bowed. “May I see the dog?” he asked.

Mr Brown shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands in a manner of patient repudiation.

“With pleasure,” he said, and evidently without the least. “We will go at once.”

He led the visitor out by a back door, across a fair but neglected lawn, through a space of untended kitchen garden, and so down to the river bank, where, by some water steps and a little boat-house, stood a dog-kennel of considerable dimensions. And straight, on the sound of their approach, there issued from this last, with a rattle of iron links, a magnificent Newfoundland.

Gilead exclaimed.

“But he is superb! I am quite astonished! His value, Mr Brown!”

The master was engaged in releasing swivel from collar. The beautiful dog, fawning and delighted, made up to him endearingly.

“Judy, I am sure,” said Judy’s father in a suppressed voice, “would never dream of making a transaction of her pet. Yes, there’s your little mistress, boy.”

The great dog, released, went bounding joyously and sniffing riverwards. There was a punt out there in mid-stream, and a small meaty boy was upright in it, endeavouring to find soft bottom, for fishing purposes, with one of its poles. A little girl in a flowered hat sat in the stern.

“It seems a harsh necessity,” said the father, in a voice which made Gilead approve him for the first time; “but the cause, sir, the cause is paramount.”

Gilead, quite fascinated, called to the dog—approached him. At that instant there came a shrill cry from the father: “Sit down, Judy, sit down! My God!”

There was an answering screech from the river; a splash; the small boy, slipping his hold in a panic, went down among the thwarts, and the punt, leaving its pole sticking in the mud, began to swing downstream. Judy, in anguish of the scene enacting on the banks, thinking to see her pet ravished away before her eyes, had stood up, and, blind with grief, had lost her footing and tumbled overboard. She could not swim; neither of the men could swim; the boy in the punt, nerveless and blubbered, was worse then inept. A dreadful moment of paralysis followed, and then two little arms and a draggled head came above the surface.

“A SOFT, SEAL-LIKE HEAD WAS SEEN DRIVING ACROSS THE SHINING FLOOD.”

Gilead, in agony, stumbled for the boat-house; the father, sobbing and staring, was already waist-deep in the water. “My little child!” he gasped—“my little child!”—there went by them both a great bound and surge, and swift and unerring a soft seal-like head was seen driving across the shining flood. They stood like things of stone, hardly breathing—and then there came a swirl, a reasoned snap; and the little face, wild and choking, was lifted above the surface. Good Pilot! Loyal and lovely friend! He brought her, crying, to the steps, and there having deposited her, shook himself, and crouched, somewhat appealing, as if he had taken a liberty.

* * * * *

The little girl, well-frightened but unharmed, was asleep upstairs; the greater dog lay blinking on the hearthrug; Gilead, by his host’s particular desire, delayed his departure yet a little.

Very few words had passed between them, and the young man was considering with what manner of blessing he could best terminate a visit, whose prolongation, in view of the subdued and obviously self-tormented figure before him, seemed an impertinence, when a ring at the bell sounded through the silent house, and its master was presented with a telegram. Its perusal appeared to act upon him like an instant and amazing stimulant. He rose, his spectacles seemed to glare, his head to bristle. Patently on the verge of an explosion, he stepped across to Gilead with an exaggerated softness, and laid the paper before him. “Oblige me by reading that,” he said. The young man, wondering, obeyed.

“Have just seen advertisement. Either the dog must be destroyed or our compact ends. Answer prepaid. Isabella.”

Gilead looked up.

“Yes, from her,” said Mr Brown, still with an icy quietude, in answer to the mute enquiry. And then the burst came—only a little rent at the outset, but rapidly roaring to a breach:—

“Now, isn’t that just like a woman—without reason or justice or decency—mere venomous spite, indifferent to the consequences to others so long as it can injure the object of its resentment. Sympathy? Nonsense! Tell me why, in the University boat-race on this river, nine women out of ten will be Cambridge? Out of pity for its persistent ill-success? Not in the least, sir. Simply because they think the colour the more becoming.” (The breach widened) “Consistency? Bosh! with minds the sport of any chance mood? Veering as the compass—changeable as the weather—you may forecast ’em fair in the morning, and be drenched or frozen by ’em in the afternoon?” (The breach split resoundingly) “Principles? Lunacy! Their one indestructible principle is vanity, and in their wild rush for personal notoriety of any sort, all principles and all decencies may go to the devil” (The breach, with a roar, rent from hem to hem). “From this moment I repudiate the cause,” shouted Mr Brown, glaring and dancing; “from this moment I refuse to identify myself with a sex so utterly deficient in the moral sense. Votes for women! Not unless we wish to see our national character for reason and fair-play thrown by the board! Not unless we wish to see our most cherished institutions of order and justice degraded to the uses of irresponsible malice. Incapable of governing, even themselves—a set of chattering harpies lusting for the blood of heroes!”

He ended with a roar. Gilead rose to his feet.

“The maid is waiting for an answer, sir,” he said; and, indeed, the poor girl stood as if petrified.

“Give me the paper!” yelled Mr Brown. He snatched it from the young man’s ready hand, slung out a pencil from his watch-chain, dabbed at the reply form, fuming and sputtering.

“HE DABBED AT THE REPLY FORM, FUMING AND SPUTTERING.”

“The dog must die, must he?” he panted ironically. “My child must be sacrificed to a swollen-headed harpy’s caprice! A useful lesson; I thank you, madam”—and he dashed off the following message. (Gilead had the assurance to glance at it, as he handed it to the girl): “Offer declined. The dog remains with me. Theophilus.”

A minute later, Gilead, being assured of the departure of the telegraph boy, took his own with much satisfaction, leaving Mr Brown fondly stroking the head of the great dog as he lay upon the rug.

CHAPTER V.
THE QUEST OF THE MARBLE STATUETTE

Gilead, the most disinterested of utilitarians, had no sympathy with that order of State socialism which would deprive all personal effort of its motive and initiative by illegalising private Capital. On the contrary, he perceived in individual wealth the driving-wheels to an immense multitude of lesser parts, which, without that stimulus, would move sluggishly or not at all. Theoretic equality was no doubt a beautiful vision, only, as long as man should go lacking the eight beatitudes, he did not believe it a practical one. Disorder was the order of the human race, and that being so, no monotonous perfection, once attained, would long be suffered in peace. It was the way of the world, which builds on change and destruction, and will always of choice prefer the excitement of a picturesque and dangerous situation to the security of a tame one.

Now, while exhibiting in himself as complete a justification of capital as the world could afford, Gilead had by no means any qualms about spending his money exactly as he pleased. He was a young man of cultivated and artistic tastes, and these tastes he did not hesitate to indulge liberally. He had taken a set of rooms in the Albany, and was much interested in their equipment. On a certain occasion he spent three whole days hunting Japanese colour prints with an art expert, whom he much employed, without once going near the Agency. But on the fourth he recovered the thread of his duties.

Herbert Nestle, having as usual placed a copy of the Daily Post before his principal, stood by to await his comments. One soon followed, à propos the following advertisement, which Gilead read out aloud:—

“Young lady urgently in need of financial assistance to avert ruin. Every enquiry courted. No securities, but will repay honourably by installments. Address 023597 Daily Post.”

“I think,” said Gilead, “I shall make this my personal affair.”

He looked across at Miss Halifax, who, conscious of the implied challenge, answered evenly, but with a slight flush on her beautiful cheek:—

“Losses at bridge, probably, or motor fever. Granting that, it sounds plausible, Mr Balm.”

She was by this time an experienced and perspicacious Gileadite.

“Why, I think so too,” said her employer.

“The little bait,” she ventured, “is the only questionable part.”

“Bait? What bait?”

“She might have omitted the young, you see,” said the amanuensis. “People may construe it into an invitation to a personal interview.”

“Well, what harm, then?”

Miss Halifax turned one instant to him and, looking down again without speaking, resumed her work. He sat with his eyes fixed on her. Her sympathy and sweet reasonableness were generally so dependable that this sudden confession of the feminine sting in her a little surprised him. He did not like to think of it as wilful. His admiration for her was very great, and sometimes disturbing to himself. She had taken latterly to a black dress, as most becoming her official position, and the contrast it made with her creamy neck, and flower-like face, and lovely hair was sometimes dazzling. He found it often difficult to dissociate the beauty of her soul and body, or to estimate from which she drew her greater attractiveness.

He went out almost immediately, and without another word, and the moment he was well away the young lady turned on the secretary.

“Why did you let him see that advertisement at all?”

“It is its third appearance in three days,” answered Nestle, “and I judged it no good to keep from him what he had probably already noticed. What is it you fear?”

He took a calendar containing a scrap of mirror from the mantelpiece, and put it down before her face. She pushed his hand away, with a peevish shrug of her shoulders, and he laughed and went off about his business.

In the meanwhile Gilead had taken his way to the business offices of the Daily Post, where he made an enquiry at the desk appropriated to the reference number advertisements. “I desire,” said he, “to be put into communication with this,” and he signified to the clerk the appeal already quoted.

“‘I DESIRE TO BE PUT INTO COMMUNICATION WITH THIS.’”

The man accepted it with a profound deference. Gilead was well known at the bureau, and the privileges accorded to incalculable wealth, with a known tendency to giving, were always his without the asking. The editor himself would have rejoiced, if personally approached, to put his entire resources at his disposal; but the young plutocrat, with a very proper pride of fitness, would allow no claims of his own to ride at any time superior to the ordinary claims of courtesy or good-breeding.

Somewhat to his surprise, the clerk, having rapidly scanned the item, leaned forward to invite his ear to the opening in the brass wire netting which divided him from the public.

“There’s the advertiser herself, Mr Balm,” he whispered, “standing by the swing door.”

He signified the entrance into the street. This atrium to the great establishment was extensive, and glossy with mahogany and brass. Counters ran down either side of it, and its doors were as imposing as a bank’s. By one of these stood a slight young woman, awaiting apparently the termination of a sudden shower which was deluging the streets. She made a quite insignificant figure among the many that thronged the hall.

“One word,” said Gilead. “She has been to enquire about answers, I suppose? Were there any?”

“Not one, Mr Balm.”

Gilead nodded, and turned away. A slight smile was on his lips. ‘The bait,’ he was thinking, ‘does not appear to have been a very killing one.’

At that moment the young lady moved, pushed at the swing-doors, and disappeared into the open. Gilead, following, started in pursuit, and very quickly overtook her.

She went before him down Fleet Street, into the Strand, and, at Wellington Street, turned to cross the bridge. She walked fast, and he had enough to do to keep pace with her. It was still raining, and it struck him as curious that, although she was quite daintily attired, she never seemed to think of opening the umbrella she carried in her hand. The fact gave him a qualm, and in some way prepared him for the scene to follow. About the middle of the bridge he was delayed by a momentary pressure in the foot traffic, and, darting round and beyond the obstruction, suddenly saw his quarry in the grasp of a policeman.

The next instant he formed one of the group, sympathetic and protective.

“She was going over, Constable?” he whispered. “Is that so?”

The man recognized him at once. He was known to half the force.

“I see it in her eye, Mr Balm,” he said. “She’d have gone the next moment.”

He held the girl by the elbow, and Gilead saw her face for the first time. It was youth stricken into instant age, white, stunned, breathless. She made no effort to speak or escape—indeed she could not. The strung nerves had snapped at a touch, and she was paralyzed.

“I’ll make myself responsible for her,” said Gilead. “Quick, we mustn’t let a crowd gather.”

The constable, prompt man, bent down to the half blind, half deaf young face.

“You’re took bad, Missy,” he said; “you aren’t yourself. Now you just go with this gentleman, who’ll do you more good than all the doctors in the world.”

He held her, spoke to her, shouldered away an over-officious bystander or so, and stopped an empty four-wheeler, all with that comprehensiveness of resource which characterizes the London policeman. In another minute Gilead was rolling away, in charge of his poor little capture.

He did not address her for some time, not until, cowered into her corner, she suddenly gave a moan, and put her hands before her face. And then he spoke, in the voice that was like his name:—

“You mustn’t be frightened; you mustn’t mistrust me. I had come to answer your advertisement, to offer you help, when you were pointed out to me and I followed you. Now the help is very near—as near as the end of your trouble, I am sure.”

She appeared to listen; but no power was yet hers to answer.

“I know,” said Gilead, “I know. Some misery; someone’s wickedness—we have many such cases, and I know. I am going to take you where you will find rest, and sympathy, and strong wills to back you. You must just believe me, and not speak a word.”

He had his intention formed, and drove straight to the luxurious little flat, situated in the neighbourhood of Victoria Street, which his princely liberality had enabled Miss Halifax to take and furnish. He desired to retort upon that young lady with the fruits of her own scepticism, and to make her good-humouredly answer for it by succumbing to the bait which she had erstwhile depreciated. Arrived there, he delivered his charge, now partly recovered, but dazed and inclined to tears, to the lift-porter, with orders that he was to convey her to Miss Halifax’s rooms, and there keep her under unobtrusive observation until his return; having done which, he returned to his office, and confided the whole business to his fair amanuensis.

“Now,” said he, “I know nothing personally about the attractiveness of the bait; but I am very sure that no appeal is necessary to you to swallow it with a perfect grace. I have asked no questions, and penetrated no secrets. Why should I, when, in the loving sympathy and understanding of one of her own sex, she could seek the confidence which it would have been only an unjustified impertinence in me to offer.”

She looked at him, with her eyes shining.

“I think, Mr Balm,” she said softly, “that the Quest of the Holy Grail is still inspiring some Knightly spirits in the world”—a cryptic utterance which he could not quite interpret.

They lost no time in returning to the flat. She addressed her lovely face to him on the threshold.

“I believe,” she said, smiling, “that you have never once yet condescended to visit the beautiful home which I owe to your kindness.”

“I merely found the setting for a thing of value,” he said, with perfect sincerity. “I can only say that it seemed to me, when I first went over it, something less than an adequate acknowledgement of your great services to the office.”

She sighed, a very little sigh, and they entered the lift together. He never had a doubt of the solace he was bringing to the poor little life above with its broken wings; and, indeed, the instant the child saw Vera enter, she rose, and standing breathless a little, with her face like a white wet flower, threw herself suddenly into the warm generous arms, and abandoned herself and her cause to that lovely refuge.

Gilead turned away, and, while he stood thus, he heard the first words of understanding uttered, and of reassurance, and of mastering control. Then a door shut, and he was alone in the room.

He was quite satisfied, and prepared to await developments as long as necessary. The appointments of the room pleased him extremely. He had hardly expected such taste, remembering the Norwood villa; but that, he reflected, had not represented Miss Halifax’s independent views. Here all was simple and harmonious, straight lines and flat tones, with rich sombre gleams of brass and pottery for their sole emphasis. The only photograph (blest deficiency) that was visible, stood on a Sheraton bureau in a dusky corner by the window. Venturing to inspect it, Gilead discovered to his concern that it was one of Herbert Nestle.

He shrank away, as if he had unwittingly surprised a secret. An odd pang shot through his breast. He turned and stood for a long while staring at nothing out of the window. And then he came about, with a grave smile, and a resolve in his heart.

“Why should I wonder,” he thought. “And still more, why should I grudge it? It would be, after all, an ideal union of interests. And there is no reason why it should separate us. On the contrary, it might very well cement our partnership. I will certainly use my best unobtrusive efforts to promote the match.”

When Miss Halifax returned to him, which she did only after a pretty long interval, he received her with a manner of courteous distinction, which, as eschewing all claim to familiarity, evidently surprised and disturbed her. She looked about her for a reason; and, being astonishingly quick-witted, instantly divined the right one. She bit her lip, and went a trifle pale; but immediately controlled herself and proceeded to the matter in hand.

“I have heard the whole story,” she said. “It has made my blood boil, Mr Balm. The poor little thing! Heaven certainly sent her her protecting angel to retort upon a villain.”

“No,” said Gilead, perfectly unconsciously, “the retort is my business. Tell me as much of the story as is necessary to my taking action in the matter.”

“There is nothing to conceal,” answered Miss Halifax, “save—” she flushed a little—“one’s natural disgust in handling a reptile. His victim—or his intended victim, thank goodness—has been candid to me with the candour of a child. I have completely won her confidence and trust. She is asleep now, quite worn out. I shall keep her with me, Mr Balm, until you have decided upon the course you will pursue with her.”

Gilead bowed, with his eyes kindling.

“Of course,” he said; “I knew. If I ever found myself mistaken in you, Miss Halifax, I think I should close the Agency, and abjure my whole faith in human nature.”

She looked down, wreathing her fingers in her lap. For some moments she seemed unable to proceed.

“The child,” she said at length, with a resolute effort at self-command, “is no more than eighteen. Her name is Clarissa Snowe. She is an orphan these two years, during which time she had kept, until latterly, a little post of nursery-governess in a small family at Clapham. Some two or three months ago, however, her health broke down, and she had to cease work for a while. On her recovery she failed, utterly failed, to secure a fresh situation. She is very pretty, as no doubt you noticed?” (She paused; Gilead shook his head. “I was thinking of her misery, poor soul,” he murmured)—“and employers,” continued Miss Halifax, “especially of domestic labour, do not favour attractiveness of that sort. Clarissa had her little lodging in Battersea, and there she cherished a few heirlooms which had descended to her from her father, who in his turn had inherited them from his. With these, owing to her unhappy situation, and the debts she had incurred during her illness, she was obliged to part one by one—and, no doubt, at absurdly small figures—until there remained to her of them all only a single marble statuette of a child with a bird. She had kept this to the last, as her father, she knew, had always referred to it as a thing of value. But now, urged by desperation, she resolved to sell it. Somebody recommended to her Globesteins, the great art dealers in Chalk Street, Piccadilly, and thither she bore the statuette in a cab.”

Gilead nodded. “I have had some considerable dealings with Mr Globestein,” he said. “He is one of the first experts in London.”

“And one of the greatest cheats and villains,” cried Miss Halifax indignantly. “I hope, Mr Balm, you had someone to advise you?”

Gilead smiled.

“It is very possible you are right,” he said. “But, as there is no morality in art, you can hardly expect it in its dealers. Did Miss Snowe inform you of the name of the sculptor of this statuette?”

“Yes; it was Pigalle, or something of that sort.”

“Pigalle? Indeed. And Mr Globestein bought it of her—?”

“For ten pounds.”

Gilead winced—in his lips, and frowned and nodded.

“O!” cried Miss Halifax. “If it was, as I suppose, a wicked fraud, that was only the beginning of his villainy. Mr Globestein—who is, it seems, unmarried—after asking the poor thing a few penetrating questions, suggested that she should become governess-companion to his motherless children. She consented, of course, happy beyond measure over her good fortune, and removed her small belongings to his private house. There were no children there; and she was put off from day to day with plausible accounts of their present absence and soon return. The rest I may hurry over. Once secured in his home, this man persuaded her to take occasionally a hand at cards with himself and some of his friends. She lost, of course; he advanced her money; at length things reached the point at which he had been aiming, and he had her completely in his power. It was ruin for her either way; he threatened—”

Gilead put up a gentle hand.

“Spare yourself the pain. She was good, she was desperate—I understand—and as a final resource she decided to implore the help of strangers through the public press. The barrenness of the result, the inhuman silence, drove her in the end to her last chance of escape through self-destruction. I hold the child a heroine. Great God, the stony indifference of the world to her appeal!—no wonder it killed her heart. This man is a particular scoundrel. He shall bleed, Miss Halifax, he shall bleed, I promise you.”

She did not know, actually, if he implied a moral or a physical blood-letting, and she did not care. He was to her like a God whose decrees were never to be questioned. If he had killed, and said “This is just,” she would have believed him. She rose, as he did, and looked at him with her bosom heaving; and, without another word spoken by either, he left her.

A few minutes later he telephoned from his private office for his art adviser to come and see him at once.

“Dexter,” he said, when that gentleman was closeted with him, “what is the market value of a statuette by Pigalle?”

“Marble, Mr Balm?”

“Yes.”

“If indisputable, and his best work, anything from one to two thousand guineas and upwards. An example, not so long ago, fetched three thousand guineas at public auction.”

“Globestein has lately secured one for ten pounds. I want you to bear that in mind.”

“I will not forget it, Mr Balm. It is quite likely. The man is a clever rogue.”

“Very well. Now come with me to his place.”

They found Mr Globestein in. He came hurrying, all smiles, to greet his most distinguished patron. His rooms were luxurious caves of treasure-trove, to the gathering of which he had sacrificed whatever conscience he had once possessed. He was a tall, black-moustached man, neither ill-looking nor ostentatious in dress, but, if anything, somewhat over glossy in appearance. He gave one the impression of having rubbed shoulders with gentlefolks to the extent of acquiring all their superficial polish, and nothing more. His nose was fleshy, his lips were a little gross; there was a suggestion in his smile, assured but a trifle sickly, of a challenge to justice to prove a case against him.

“Mr Globestein,” said Gilead, “I have been told that you have a statuette by Pigalle for sale. Is that so? Tell me plainly. I desire no huckstering.”

He, the prince of courtesy, could be unmerciful to baseness. He treated this famous expert with a haughty intolerance which should have closed all dealings on the spot.

“It is perfectly true, Mr Balm,” said the dealer smoothly; “there is no reason why I should deny it.”

“You know best, sir,” answered Gilead. “You will let us see it, if you please.”

Mr Globestein conducted them into a further room, enriched like the other, and led them to a pedestal, on which stood a little marble figure of a girl, with a bird settled on her uplifted hand. They all stood silent by it for a while.

“Well, Dexter?” said Gilead presently.

“Unimpeachable,” answered the adviser; “and a first example.”

Mr Globestein laughed.

“You do me proud, Mr Dexter, sir,” he said, with a shadow of mockery in his voice. “I was really afraid you were going to impugn my judgment.”

The adviser came erect with a smile.

“Surely, Mr Globestein,” he said, “you should be the last to recommend the buying of a pig in a poke.”

“Enough, sir,” said Gilead. “Tell me, if you please, what is the price you ask for this?”

The dealer shrugged his shoulders slightly, and extended his hands.

“Pigalles,” he said, “are scarce and costly, Mr Balm. They rarely, very rarely occur. I could not, in justice to myself, ask a penny less than three thousand guineas.”

“It is too much.”

Mr Globestein sighed, shrugged again, and said nothing.

“It is too much, I say.”

“I will not deny, Mr Balm,” said the expert, “that your patronage and good opinion are of the first importance to me. I will make a concession to them, unprofitable enough to me, but I will trust to you to make it up in other directions. You shall have the statuette for three thousand guineas less the shillings, the exact price I gave for it.”

“You will let me have the statuette for the exact price you gave for it?”

“That is so, Mr Balm.”

“Dexter,” said Gilead; “you mark that?”

The adviser answered in the affirmative, wondering what was to come.

Gilead went to a desk, produced a cheque-book, wrote out a cheque, and handed it to the dealer. Mr Globestein accepted the draft obsequiously, glanced at the amount smilingly, started imperceptibly, and paled obviously.

“This is a pleasantry, Mr Balm,” he said, in a jocular voice that quaked somewhat. “Your cheque is for ten pounds only.”

“‘THIS IS A PLEASANTRY, MR BALM,’ HE SAID.”

“The exact price, sir, you gave for the statuette.”

He rose, frowning, in the sternness of his anger, and the dealer, in the very effort at a protest, cowered and shrunk silent before him.

“Perhaps, sir,” said Gilead, “it may have occurred to you by now that the nature of the task I have set myself brings me acquainted with the secrets of many underhand dealings. This morning was fortunate in revealing to me the destined victim of a piece of quite unexampled cupidity and baseness—your own. It need not concern you to know how, but it may to learn that a certain young lady has found the friends and protectors of whom she stood most sorely in need. You may refuse to permit me to remove this statuette, which is most surely mine on your own undertaking. In that case I shall take particular care to acquaint the world of the nature of your dealings, with what effect to yourself, coming from such a source, you may judge. If, on the other hand, you are wise, you shall still possess the opportunity to reacquire, by private treaty if you wish, and at the figure at which you implied it was worth your while to obtain it, the object in question. You shall have, Mr Globestein, the statuette back at the price of three thousand guineas; or you can cancel all obligations by accepting this cheque for ten pounds here and now. Which is it to be?”

Mr Globestein, speechless, and white to the lips, could only wave his hand renunciatory towards the pedestal.

“Dexter,” said Gilead, “have this carried down, and oblige me by calling a cab.”

He re-turned, with perfectly recovered serenity, upon the dealer.

“Mr Globestein,” he said, “you must permit me to congratulate you on the acumen which still does not fail you in a deal. You need not fear that I shall abandon you in your need of a prosperous customer. In your line you are invaluable, and no one would dream of accusing you of attempting to palm off upon inexperience a sham Pigalle. But in morality you are no expert, and it would do you no harm to take a lesson or so from much humbler individuals. Now, it may interest you to know that I shall very probably—always granting you the first refusal—retain this statuette for my own, while investing in the name of its former possessor a sum equal to your highest valuation. For the rest, it is quite likely that I shall be visiting you on business in the course of a few days. What a pity it is that you do not interest yourself in Japanese prints. I am investing quite a sum in Koriusais, and Haronobus, and Yeishis and the rest. I wish you a very good morning, Mr Globestein.”

“Good morning, Mr Balm, good morning, sir,” said the dealer—“and thank you.”

CHAPTER VI.
THE QUEST OF THE ROSE-RING

I.

Wanted, old parrakeet skins, in particular the rose-ringed. Description: Green Plumage; black band extending from chin nearly to nape; rose-coloured collar. Length about 16 inches. A fair price given for all and suitable. Apply 14a Lower Marsh, Westminster Bridge Rd.

Herbert Nestle, the astute, the resourceful, stood questioningly behind his principal as the latter ran through the above advertisement submitted to his consideration.

Gilead looked up, with a slightly puzzled expression.

“Certainly an odd requirement, Nestle,” he said. “But what do you see in it?”

“Nothing, indeed, sir,” answered the secretary, “but its oddity. It is a somewhat strange thing that the identical advertisement is repeated in another part of the paper, under the usual ‘Wants’ heading. The demand for parrakeet skins, especially for one description of parrakeet skins, should be urgent.”

“Are they the vogue?”

“Miss Halifax tells me not signally—not more than any other attractive plumage.”

“Nor rare and costly?”

“No, I think not. But of course I know little about such things.”

“Well, Nestle?”

“One might imagine, sir, that it was not parrakeet skins in general, but one parrakeet skin in particular that the advertiser had in view. The rose-ringed, you see, is the only one described in detail.”

“Perhaps it is the most marketable?”

“Yes, sir, perhaps.”

“You do not think that that is the reason?”

“No, frankly, sir, I do not—not a sufficient one to account for the distinction.”

“What is, then?”

“Ah! that, sir, I cannot guess. An inquiry might yield a very ordinary solution, or it might yield a surprising, or even a dramatic one. Things have been quiet of late. I thought no more than that here was a possible opportunity for you.”

“Well, I am obliged to you, Nestle. I will think it over.”

Gilead cogitated the matter, in fact, until he quite kindled to its possibilities. It looked trivial enough on the surface, to be sure; but by now he had had a sufficient experience of the tragedies often hidden under the blandest masks of commonplace. At the end of an hour he separated, folded, and put in his pocket the front page of the Daily Post, and, leaving the office, took a taxicab for the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, where he enquired for a certain assistant Keeper in the ornithological department, who happened to be a personal friend of his.

“Dereham,” he said abruptly, after an exchange of greetings, “please to tell me about the family of parrakeets, their names and their points.”

Mr Dereham laughed. He was accustomed, like many another of Gilead’s intimates, to regard the young plutocrat as the most courteous, admirable and lovable of cranks.

“O, certainly!” he said, and reeled off a string of names. “There are the Blue Mountain, the Crimson-fronted, the Jerryang, the Ground Parrot, the Dulang, the Coolich, the familiar Budgerigar, the King’s parrot, head, neck and body scarlet, tail shot black and green, the New Holland, with a yellow crest and grey-brown body, the Alexandrine, the rose-ringed, green, with a red collar and black stock, the—”

“Stop. That’s the one I want.”

“O, indeed?”

“Is it rare?”

“Not in the least.”

“I mean any reason for attaching an especial value to it, or to choice specimens of it?”

“None whatever. It’s a quite common species.”

“Where does it come from?”

“O! India and the Malay Archipelago and thereabouts.”

“Could I, do you think, procure a specimen of it—unstuffed; its skin, I mean?”

“Dozens, I have no doubt. Any taxidermist could do your business.”

“Thanks immensely, Dereham; I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Don’t mention it. What’s in the wind now?”

Gilead laughed, shook hands, and bolted.

A couple of days later he walked into Lower Marsh Street, with a brown-paper parcel under his arm.

It was a dreary depressing morning, brown grease under foot and brown fog in the air. The street from its appearance might have been sinking into the ooze and slime of the old Lambeth marshes from which it took its name. The basement windows of its houses were blinded with mud; a steady precipitate of soot descended upon it from impenetrable glooms. The moist squalor of the scene, the low unclassified shops, the shambling traffic and half stealthy half sinister aspect of a majority of the populace, wrought sombrely upon the young man’s spirits. It was in such places, he reflected, that the breed of human carrion-flies was hatched, swarming, to poison civilization, out of these bodies contaminate and decomposing carcases of houses. A sense of foreboding was already on him as he paused in front of a seemingly unoccupied shop and read, written on the head-board over its closed door and empty window: 14a J. Jenniver Clear-starcher 14a.

Of all trades the least appropriate, one might have thought, to the district. Gilead, hesitating a moment, looked about him. It came to him suddenly how empty the street was of policemen. He had not remembered, to be sure, its contiguity to the New Cut. He was standing in the close vicinity of penny gaffs and penny dreadfuls, of the indigenous coster and the cosmopolitan flat-catcher, of brokers’ shops, Sunday trading, chronic drunkenness, buffetted faces and vice in its most sodden aspect. But, if the realization gave him a thrill, it left his nerves unshocked. He was always imperturbable in his unselfconscious sanctity of motive. He felt his strength to be “as the strength of ten” because his heart was pure—though he did not, like Sir Galahad, applaud the fact in the first person.

Now suddenly, as he stood indetermined, and wondering if, after all, this quest was proper to his custom, the door of the shop opened, and there appeared in the aperture the figure of a young woman, speaking back, as she emerged, to someone within:—

“Yes, same place as the other, Doddington Grove. I say, I must hurry. So-long, Georgy!”

She ran out—a slight anæmic girl, a sempstress by her pallor, soberly dressed, but elaborate as to her head and low as to her neck—and, with a wondering stare at Gilead, sped on her way towards the tram terminus hard by. Regarding her retreat an instant, Gilead turned to see the figure of a man standing conning him from the shop-door.

He was a pert, wiry, truculent-looking young fellow, the very type of combative cockneyism. His nose was retroussé, his cheeks pink; an incipient red-gold moustache on his lip had been coaxed into two little upstanding stings or spikes; his cloth cap, tilted back from his forehead, revealed a rudimentary ‘cow-lick’, elaborated from a somewhat cropped head of the same Apollonian hue. He stood whistling softly, with his hands thrust loosely into his trouser pockets. Gilead stepped towards him.

“Jenniver?” he said. “Is that the name?”

“You may lay on it, my lord,” answered the young man, coolly blocking the way.

“O!” said Gilead; and produced his newspaper extract. “I came about an advertisement.”

The stranger nodded, eyeing the brown-paper parcel.

“Yus?” he said.

“I have a skin or two here of the sort you mention.”

“O! have you?” said the young man. He appeared to consider a moment. “Well, no harm in looking at ’em,” he said. “Come in.”

He led the way into a little dirty dismal shop with shelves and a counter, and all as empty as the window. A door at the back seemed to give upon remote and silent regions. There was not a sign of traffic, of any description whatever, in the whole place.

The stranger accepted the parcel, opened it, and revealed half a dozen parrakeet skins of sorts. He turned them over, examining each minutely, and looked up.

“You’ve forgotten about the ‘old’,” he said.

“Old!” echoed Gilead.

“Now, look here,” said the young man, in a sudden access of violence; “what the hell’s your little game?”

Gilead, taken completely by surprise, lacked words to answer.

“You’re a toff,” went on the stranger. “These skins ain’t old, but fresh-bought, with the importers’ labels still on ’em. What the devil do you mean by trying to pass them off on me as old?”

“I really didn’t realize that age was a sine qua non,” said the customer.

“Sine what?” said the young man. “O! didn’t you, now? You’re a pusson of observation, you are. Now, what do you mean?”

“Frankly,” said Gilead, who had recovered his self-possession, “I don’t quite know. My object was to find out what you did.”

“O! was it?” said the dealer, with a violently derisive emphasis. “Jest so.”

“There’s a skin there,” said Gilead, “which answers exactly to the description of the one you most require.”

“So I see,” said the dealer.

“Only it’s not old?”

“Only it’s not old.”

“Well, I suppose there’s a virtue in antiquity.”

“Don’t you know there is, being a toff?”

“I confess,” said Gilead, “that mangy plumes excite no emotion in me.”

“You’d understand their use, maybe, if you was curator to a perishing museum,” answered the dealer.

Gilead opened his eyes.

“Is that the explanation?” he said. “I humbly beg your pardon, Mr Jenniver. My curiosity is rebuked. Come, I apologize. But the advertisement really seemed to me such an odd one that I couldn’t resist following it up.”

“Well,” said the young man, with some appearance of relief, “you let your friends know my object, and we’ll say no more about it. I dussay as there’s plenty of fine ladies of your acquaintance what would like to get a price for their cast-offs.”

“It’s likely enough,” said Gilead. “I’m sorry to have seemed so obtrusive. Good morning, Mr Jenniver.”

The young man did not answer, and the customer left the shop. He walked rapidly at first, urged by a certain sense of humiliation; but in a little his steps had slackened, and he was proceeding on his way sunk deep in reverie.

The fact was that the dealer’s explanation, accepted as so plausible in its first utterance, was, as he reconsidered it, failing more and more to satisfy him. Perishing museums, forsooth! Was it in reason to arrest decay by patching it with decay? Besides surely secondhand stuff of the sort was easily procurable without having recourse to expensive advertisements. The elucidation appeared to him on reflection to have been rather inspired, and on the instant, by his own comments. And then the empty shop, the sinister neighbourhood, the aggressiveness and obvious suspicion of the dealer that he was being got at? No, he was convinced that he had actually touched the hem of some mystery, harmless possibly, but so far without a shadow of a clue to its meaning. And yet, the more puzzling it appeared, the more was he stimulated to persist in an endeavour to unravel it. He confided his non-success to Nestle when he reached the office.

The secretary listened very attentively to the end.

“In a matter of this sort, sir,” he said, “any word linking an outer with an inner association is of value. The young woman, you say, mentioned Doddington Grove. Well, my advice is, transfer your investigations to Doddington Grove.”

“It seems ridiculous, Nestle. What possible base have I to my inquiries?”

“A morbid craving for old parrakeet skins, sir,” said the secretary.

Gilead laughed.

“I am half afraid,” he said, “that the cause of the Quest has given me a morbid craving for mares’ nests. Where is Doddington Grove?”

It was not likely that there would be a second of that name, and in fact, referring to the map of London, they traced the street they sought to the locality of Kennington Park. Gilead made his way thither that very afternoon.

He found the Grove to occupy one side of a dully respectable little congeries of squares and places covering a considerable estate to the north of the Park. There was nothing more remarkable about it than about any other semi-suburban avenue of bricks and mortar. The houses were the substantial middle-class houses of an orthodox neighbourhood, detached for the most part, and cased in stucco. A parrot in a brass cage standing in a window was the nearest approach to a clue vouchsafed him. Clearly the place itself was utterly barren of suggestion; and indeed what else could he have expected?

Pausing at length, and gazing about him, the young gentleman lapsed into a good-humoured smile and turned to retreat. “No,” he cogitated. “I haven’t the faculty, I’m afraid. I can’t produce a rabbit, or even a parrakeet, from an empty hat.”

So he decided, and walked away—and there in a moment before his eyes lay the end of the very clue he sought to follow. Fate, no doubt, had been captivated as always by the sweetness and modesty of his disposition.

For many days succeeding that excursion Mr Balm, during his somewhat rare visits to the Agency, appeared deeply preoccupied and rather unapproachable. Even the privileged amanuensis would venture no attempt to penetrate his reserve, though the heart in her fair breast suffered some pangs thereby, which, in a baser nature, might have been attributed to jealousy. She would have been indeed quite satisfied to leave him to himself, were she assured that that was the sole company he affected; but men, she knew, were often, when appearing most alone, most particularly vis-à-vis with visionary comrades, and the image of some rival to her own and the secretary’s interests occupying that silent and inscrutable mind would occasionally rise to perturb her.

How her apprehensions were relieved will appear in the sequel, where we are to pass at a leap from the meagre opening to the prolific close of that same little affair of the bird-skins.

II.

Mr Ingram, Chief Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department, was sitting in his office at Scotland Yard one chill afternoon, when a respected visitor, Mr Gilead Balm, sent in his name with a request for an immediate interview on a matter of urgency. The gentleman was at once shown in.

Gilead, courteous and quiet as ever, failed nevertheless to conceal from the astute officer some evidences of suppressed excitement in his demeanour. There was a suggestion in his face of a subdued self-satisfaction, of a conscious victoriousness, as it were, which both impressed and tickled the Superintendent.

“Well, Mr Balm,” he said, “you’ve pulled it off single-handed this time, and no mistake.”

Gilead, taking the chair offered him, with an expression in which astonishment and a certain twinkling sobriety fought for mastery, asked “Pulled what off?”

“I haven’t a notion,” said the Superintendent.

Gilead stared a moment and then laughed.

“What! Is my manner such an index?” he said. “Well, I confess I am just a little elated—or conceited. Please to read that, Ingram.”

The Superintendent accepted and examined the page of the Daily Post offered him.

“The marked ‘ad’?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve read it, sir.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Make?” The Superintendent, quite at a loss, shook his head in a guarded way.

“Anything suspicious?” demanded the client.

“Not that I can see.”

“Ah!” Gilead mutely requested the return of the paper, folded, and restored it to his pocket. “Now, I’ll tell you, Ingram,” he said quietly. “That advertisement represents a quite transcendent piece of fraud and trickery, and, with no more to go upon than you see, I’ve traced it, as I believe, to its source. Could any one of your men have done better, do you think? But I wont believe he could, and I’m just as proud as Punch of my success. If I’m wrong, I will cry off all detective work for the future. But I may be right, and yet miss my quarry through circumstance or misjudgment. I want you to lend me a plain-clothes officer, a strong, skilful, and trustworthy man.”

“Certainly, Mr Balm. Will you tell me—”

“I’ll tell you nothing, Ingram. I’m going to claim to myself all the honour and glory of this business. I’ll tell you nothing; but—yes, I’ll ask you a question. Do you know George Lightfoot by name?”

“Wait—wait—George Lightfoot? Yes, sir, I remember the man.”

“And the crime for which he was sentenced?”

“Yes, to be sure.”

“Would it be legal to arrest him on a charge of larceny arising out of that crime, but subsequent to it?”

“Better take out a warrant.”

“Very well, procure me a warrant for the arrest of George Lightfoot, and send it on with the officer to the Agency.”

“You won’t tell me the charge?”

“No.”

“Well, sir, we must stretch a point for you. What time do you want them?”

“At six o’clock this evening, punctually. I undertake full responsibility for this course, you understand, Ingram? If anything, in any way, should miscarry, I am the one to blame.”

His manner had grown suddenly very grave and earnest. He left the Superintendent curious, but impressed against his will.

At six o’clock to the tick the detective arrived at the office, presenting the appearance of a stalwart, silent man, who knew how to keep his thoughts to himself. Gilead, after a few words of instruction, slipped an electric torch into his pocket (a precaution impressed upon him through his late experiences in the Empty House), locked up the place, and, descending to the hall, deposited the keys with the porter and issued with his companion into the street.

It was a shrill inclement evening. Bitter north-easterly winds had succeeded to the fogs of the week past, and the mud in the roads was long crumbled into an arid dust, which was swept up in clouds and blown in stormy veils above the house-tops. The pavements were as white as picked bones; the very flames of the lamps shivered in their little glass-houses; one took the stinging blasts headforemost, grinding them in palpable grit between one’s teeth, and, detesting all things and people, butted aggressive into struggling pedestrians, and gloried in the proverbial coldness of charity.

Gilead was constitutionally incapable of such spleen; yet even his invincible courtesy found a difficulty in keeping, so to speak, its equilibrium; and when, as it once happened, a little cold grimy hand, gripping a couple of match-boxes, was thrust across his path, he drove half-consciously upon the obstruction, and scattered it to the winds.

The act, repented as soon as done, had been due more to a sense of urgency than of irritation; but it had the effect of checking his somewhat excited career, and of restoring to him his moral balance. The fortunate urchin, having profited by it to the tune of a gold piece, dropped voicelessly behind.

The two men beating up Victoria Street, and across the cold comfort of Broad Sanctuary, headed for Westminster Bridge with set teeth. If they had attempted speech, the wind would have howled them down. It was a charging voice, a destructive terrorist, that shivered the lamps on the river into splinters of light, and hammered screeching on the doors and windows of the timid, and blew such an accumulation of human fuel into the public-house bars that they blazed and roared again.

It was for this reason, no doubt, that Lower Marsh exhibited, when they turned into it, a darkly depopulated aspect. Its traffic seemed shrunk to a minimum, the bones of its squalid ugliness were laid bare, the small grime of humanity that drifted down its pavements appeared of less account than the dust whirled about its lamp-posts. It was in the shadowy neutral ground between two of these that Gilead halted his companion, and pointed to the name of J. Jenniver written above their heads.

“It’s here,” he whispered—“and so is he.”

A weak perpendicular edge of light drawn upon the lowered blind of the shop seemed indeed to witness to the presence of someone in the back room, the door of which was patently ajar.

“I never doubted that he would be,” whispered Gilead, excusably vainglorious. “We’d better not delay. He’s vicious and suspicious. Now, officer! And be prepared for contingencies.”

“You won’t wait, then, sir, for the young woman’s arrival?”

“No, I think not. Better make sure of our bird in the hand. We shall find her more amenable to argument when once we’ve settled with her confederate. She’s little to blame, poor creature—his tool, no worse. Now.”

“Very well, sir. Stand by. It’s like he’ll take us for her.”

He tapped on the door. Almost with the sound, the streak of light vanished from the blind, and left all in darkness.

No response followed. They waited a breathless minute.

“Queer!” muttered the detective. “The young woman can’t have arrived before us, I suppose?”

“Not if I’m right in my calculations,” said Gilead. “Try again.”

The officer knocked a second time, and louder. “It’s all right,” he whispered in a moment. “I hear steps. He’s coming.”

But still the door was not opened—only some indefinable consciousness of a presence standing silent behind it was conveyed to them.

The detective rapped again.

Then suddenly, so close that it made Gilead start, a voice spoke through the keyhole—an odd strained little voice, with a hiccup in it.

“Who’s there? What d’you want?”

Gilead, glancing at the detective, put his finger to his lips and bent to respond:

“I’ve brought some bird skins.”

“I don’t want no bird skins,” answered the voice.

“But you advertised.”

“I don’t care. I’ve got all I need.”

“Won’t you look at them?”

“No.”

“Just a squint, while I stand here. I’m short of cash.”

“Wos that to me? You clear out.”

“You advertised, you know. I’m not going to be put off without a reason. If you won’t open, I’ll kick the door in.”

“Gosh! will you? Now, look ’ere; I’ll consider of ’em just this once to oblige you, if you’ll pass ’em in and take my answer and git. Is that a bargain?”

“All right.”

A chain rattled; a key was turned; the door opened an inch or two—and quick as thought the detective shot into the aperture an inflexible munition boot. There followed an oath, a crash; the vicious elastic figure of Mr Lightfoot, alias Jenniver, glimmered one moment in semi-darkness, and the next they were in, and the man was gone.

“The room behind! Quick!” cried Gilead.

They were round and into it on the echo of his cry. As they stumbled forward blindly—for the light had been extinguished—a flash and explosion met them full face, and Gilead tripped and half fell against the wall. But in the very act he remembered his electric torch, and whipped it out and pressed the button. The sudden flash revealed two men down upon the floor, wrestling together in a mortal grip.

“Make for his revolver!” gasped the detective—“quick, before he can get at it.”

Gilead saw where the weapon had fallen, and, snatching at it on the instant, presented it at the young dealer’s head.

“Give in, Lightfoot,” he said, in a voice as cool as judgment. “I allow you two seconds.”

With a ghastly groan, the man rolled over and surrendered.

They got him to his feet and handcuffed. From the moment of his defeat he appeared void of all volition. His face was as grey as streaked putty; the sockets of his eyes were white; drops of sweat stood on his forehead. They relit the gas, and helped him all limp into a chair, where he sat half-collapsed.

“Good God!” whispered Gilead: “has he shot himself?”

“Not he,” said the detective, coolly picking the dust of the fray from his coat. “A mercy he didn’t one of us. You’re all right, sir?”

“Yes. And you?”

“A bit scorched—no more. I wonder at you, Lightfoot. You’ve made a bad mess of this business, my lad.”

Gilead uttered a sudden cry.

“It’s there! Look!”

The room was empty, save for a common chair or two and a bare deal table; and in the middle of the latter lay a single folded parrakeet skin, green, with a rose and black collar round its neck.

He stood staring a moment, then went and lifted and balanced the thing in his hand. And, so holding it, he turned, with a lost expression on his face.

“Why,” he said, “I must have miscalculated after all, and she’s been here before us.”

The detective uttered a quick exclamation:—

“Look at the man! What’s taken him?”

He was writhing and tearing at his bonds. Suddenly he broke into a whining unearthly cry, that tailed off into a string of inarticulate blasphemies.

“Officer,” said Gilead whitely: “there’s something beyond what I looked for in this business—something, I believe, infinitely blacker and more deadly. Stay you here while I go over the house.”

The prisoner, straightening himself convulsively, moved as if to spring.

“All right, sir,” said the detective, prompt to interpose. “You can leave him to me.”

Gilead, clipping his little torch into flame, hurried instantly out of the room. A deadly constricted feeling was at his heart; he looked with certainty for some horror to be revealed in a moment. Yet he had no least reason for blaming himself. He had merely watched, not directed, the course of events. Indeed, Providence, it might be said, had appointed in him its unconscious Nemesis. Would only that it had permitted him to forestall in that character the deed he feared.

In the passage he paused an instant to shut and relock the front door, which had remained open from their first entrance. Then he turned to consider his ground. A narrow flight of stairs rose before him; beyond, at the black end of the passage, a second dropped into the basement. He mounted the former in the first instance, his heart beating thickly, and came to a little cluster of rooms, three in all, which revealed nothing but dust and emptiness and peeling wall-paper. Satisfied that they contained, and could contain, no secret, he left them, and, returning to the passage, descended to the basement. He knew now that what he sought, if it existed, must be hidden somewhere here. A sense of something monstrous to be revealed tingled in his veins; stealthy things seemed to rustle and escape before him; at the bottom of the flight he hesitated, momentarily sickened from his quest.

What business was it of his? A bugbear, very likely, of his own fancy! The shock of unforeseen defection in an act of larceny was no doubt sufficient to account for the state of the man above.

A glow came to his face in the darkness. He was glad that heaven and he had been alone together with that shameful thought. He breathed out all his pusillanimity in a great scornful sigh—and the sigh was answered.

He stood a moment as if paralysed. It had been little and tremulous, but unmistakable—an echo, perhaps, of his own. Vaulted darkness gasped at him in front, exhaling a smell of cold flags and cold soot. Close beside him was the near-closed door of the coal-cellar. In a sudden spasm of horror he pushed this open, and, casting his light before him, saw the body of a young girl lying prone upon her back on the stones.

Now a great sorrow and pity came on the instant to nerve him. He bent to look into the bloodless face and saw its eyes closed, its white lips parted; but the nostrils quivered slightly and he knew that she still lived. There was little need to question what had struck her down. High on the bosom of the cheap frock she wore was a crimson splash, and from under her shoulder spread and crawled a black and sluggish little pool.

But she was not dead. God help him yet to mend a deed so foul and inhuman! He rose—hope was to the swift. As he turned to go he saw leaning against the wall a spade and mattock, and he shuddered in the knowledge of their purpose.

It was with a face as set as stone that he came hurrying into the little room above.

“He has shot her,” he said. “She is lying in the cellar—but she still breathes. Look to him there while I run for a doctor.”

He was gone before the officer could speak. But, at his words, the abject figure in the chair had ceased to moan and writhe. It sat up; it made an attempt with its damp manacled hands to repoint the little red spurs on its lip; it spoke even in a thick unsteady voice:—

“I’ll make you all pay hell for this. It’s a plot to rob me. She shot herself—she did on my living oath. What have you done with my rose-ring?”

The detective exerted some cool pressure.

“It’s my duty to warn you, Lightfoot,” he said, “that I’ve a warrant for your arrest in my pocket, and that whatever you say now will be used as evidence before the magistrate.”

III.

“Of course it is an acquired taste,” said Gilead. “All education is acquired. Do you like olives?”

“No, I can’t bear them,” said Miss Halifax, making a face over the unexpected question.

“They are invaluable,” he answered, “in bringing out the bouquet of claret. So it is with that Japanese print” (he was standing with her before a fine hachirakaki by Masonobu, which hung upon the wall). “Take it in the right spirit, and then see what that exquisite little arrangement by Whistler yonder owes to it. Why you yourself, you know, are truly insensible of your obligations to this same Masonobu among others.”

It was a Sunday afternoon, and he had invited his secretary and amanuensis to tea with him in the Albany, with the express purpose of relating to them, for their personal and private edification, the history in detail of the bird-skins, about which, during the whole day preceding, he had maintained an amused but impenetrable reserve. They knew that he had been successful in his quest, and they knew little else. He tantalized them even now by delaying the recital.

“My obligations!” said the young lady, raising her brows in a very pretty puzzled way. “How, Mr Balm?”

“Why,” said he, “to what, beyond a naturally refined taste, do you think you owe the judgment so charmingly displayed in the decoration of your own rooms? It was these early Japanese artists who were as responsible as any for the growth among us of a spirit of true appreciation of the beauty and value of line in decorative composition. You must really learn to honour your artistic ancestry, Miss Halifax.”

She sighed.

“I will try; only I do wish my ancestry had adopted a more attractive convention for its faces. They have no more expression than eggs. It will do, I suppose, if I taste Masonobu and drink in Whistler. You tell me, you know, to love the wine for the olive, and not the olive for the wine.”

He laughed.

“That is well answered; but I don’t despair of you yet. You shall come by and by to love the olive for its own sake. Yes, that is the Pigalle.”

“Isn’t it a dear!” she exclaimed, this time with a whole-hearted admiration.

“It ought to be,” he answered. “I gave three thousand guineas for it.”

She smiled lovelily on him, thanking him silently for the little whimsical significant confidence. “Mr Balm,” she said plaintively: “when, please, are we to hear about the Quest?”

“At once,” he answered. “I was only waiting your command. I am just spoiling, as the Americans say, for an audience. You shall own, Nestle, that I have managed, in spite of the French proverb, to draw oil from a wall.”

He brought and settled them snugly about the fire, went to a cabinet, and, returning with some article in his hand, placed a little occasional table in their midst ready for its reception.

“You will remember,” he said, “the terms of the advertisement, and the emphasis laid on a particular species of parrakeet skin—the rose-ringed, in short. It was from the first our astute secretary’s opinion, Miss Halifax, that the advertiser had in view less that species than a single example of that species, and he was perfectly right. I hold the proof in my hand.”

He offered it for their inspection. Nestle, uttering an exclamation, bent to look.

“Take it,” said Gilead, “examine it, weigh it, and return it to me. What do you make of it?”

“It answers to the description certainly,” said the secretary—“green plumage, rose and black band. It is about sixteen inches long, and it has been worn. Two things only strike me.”

“What?”

“The weight of its head, and the fact that it has eyes.”

“Precisely. Now will you lay it down here awhile? It came into my hands the night before last under pretty tragic circumstances. There was an attempt at murder—yes indeed there was, Miss Halifax—of which an unhappy girl was the victim. I arrived on the scene too late to prevent the crime, but not too late to have the criminal arrested red-handed. It was only then that I reached a final solution of the problem I had set myself to unravel, and which solution it needed no more than a single piece of corroborative evidence, since supplied, to confirm. By the courtesy, or perhaps I should say the particular favour, of Chief Superintendent Ingram, I am allowed the temporary custody of these pièces-de-conviction. Yes, Miss Halifax?”

“The girl? the poor victim?”

“She is not, I am happy to say, so mortally hurt as at first it was feared. There is a chance, at least, of her recovery. The bullet has been extracted.”

“The bullet?”

“I am beginning, you see, at the end, like a Chinese book.”

“O! please to go on. I will not interrupt you again.”

“As often and as much as you like. By the way, where am I to begin?”

“O! from your visit to Doddington Grove. I know so far.”

“Very well. Now, as you may suppose, I found nothing whatever in Doddington Grove, a respectable street in a respectable neighbourhood, to afford me the slightest clue to what I sought. I had, in fact, after a hopeless investigation, come to realise my complete inability to make bricks without straw, when chance, or Providence, directed my steps, in retreating, past a shop in the Kennington Road, in the window of which I saw something which brought me to an instant stand. This something was nothing less than a bundle of bright-coloured bird-skins, tied round with a piece of red tape.

“I went at once into the shop. It was one of those second-hand concerns, used by small brokers for the disposal of articles picked up by them at sales; and I ascertained without any difficulty that the packet of skins—which I bought there and then—represented the remainder of a considerable parcel, the bulk of which had been sold to a hat and bonnet shop proprietor in the Borough. The original lot, had, I learned, figured in its entirety among the effects in a sale at a house in Doddington Grove; and with small pains I was able to discover the number of that house, the date of the auction, and the name of the late tenant, who it appeared, had been a Mrs Barclay Rivers, a widow.

“So far, so good. I had secured at length a definite base from which to conduct operations, and I felt considerably elated. I must beg you both to bear always in mind that from first to last I was my own sole detective in this matter. Any doubt in that respect would seem to tarnish my laurels, of which I am inordinately vain.

“Now, to continue. There was here, you will perceive, at least a certain relation established between a Mrs Barclay Rivers and a packet of bird-skins, with the man and girl in Lower Marsh for the hyphen connecting them as it were. How to ascertain the nature of the relationship, the degree of kindred so to speak, was the question. Obviously, the simplest course was to hunt out the widow herself, and to make a frank offer to her of my services; and that was the course I adopted.

“The auctioneers who had sold the property were fortunately in a position to acquaint me with the present address of the lady. She was living in lodgings in the Earl’s Court Road, they informed me, and, to supplement her income, which was small, she gave music lessons. They opined that her husband’s death—which occurred in the Malay Peninsula some eighteen months ago—had left her very ill provided for, and that the sale of her household effects had been due to that cause. I must confess that both here and elsewhere I did not hesitate to quote, when necessary, my credentials. You may think that hardly playing the game; in which case I offer no defence. But it saved a world of explanations.

“I called upon Mrs Rivers. She was accessible, of course, professionally, and I took the opportunity to introduce myself and to state my object in visiting her. Fortunately she was well acquainted with the reputation of our Agency, and from that first moment all, so far as she was concerned, was plain sailing. It is unnecessary for me to enter into particulars; but I may say, generally, that she gave me her complete confidence.”

Miss Halifax, fluttering butterfly lashes, shot one glance at the secretary. He sat absorbed and intent, and her lids fell again.

“She was the widow, it appeared,” continued Gilead, “of a Captain Barclay Rivers, who, at the time of his death, had been abroad on a scientific expedition in the Malay Peninsula, and its contiguous islands. Some few weeks before the news of his death had reached her, there had arrived from him through a shipping agency, and directed in his handwriting, a small bale of bird-skins, but unaccompanied by any letter or notification of their despatch. There was nothing about the parcel to lead her to attach any particular significance to its contents, or to any part of its contents, and she put the skins aside, after a brief examination, fully expecting to hear from her husband by the next mail. Instead there came to her the tragic information of his death from swamp fever.

“She was left—needless to elaborate the reasons—in such restricted circumstances that it became necessary for her to realize on her every stick of property, and to retire into obscurity. The parcel of skins was included in the sale, and it found a purchaser. Such was the sum total of her testimony. She had no reason for assuming that the parcel had contained anything extraordinary, and, interested as she was in my view of the case, she was inclined to the belief, I fancy, that it would lead me to no more than the discovery of a beautiful mare’s-nest. Questioned about the contents of the bale, she admitted that, to the best of her memory, it had contained a single skin of the sort described; but she could not in the least recollect if that especial skin had been included in the lot sold by auction. She had, however, no reason for supposing otherwise.

“Well, here was something more gained, if a little less than suggestive. I had, of course, already minutely examined my purchase. It included no rose-ring, and yielded no solution. My next step was to return to the broker’s shop, to enquire if any previous customer had overhauled the packet that I had bought. Judge of my gratification when I learned that a week or two before, a man, answering in every description to my friend of Lower Marsh, had considered, and, after a careful scrutiny, had declined, the purchase. From that moment I saw the connection proved, and knew that it needed no more than tact and persistence to bring me to the heart of the mystery.

“Now it occurred to me that the bonnet shop in the Borough—known as Mélanies’—which had acquired from the broker the bulk of the lot purchased by him, should form my next subject for enquiry, and thither I bent my steps one morning about mid-day. As I reached the place, by a truly extraordinary chance the hands were trooping out to dinner, and amongst them I saw and recognised at once the figure of the girl whom I had seen issuing from the empty shop in Lower Marsh. Fortunately I passed unobserved by her, or she might have suspected something. But it came to me in a flash that she was in league with Jenniver, or whatever the man’s name might be, to trace the rose-ring to some customer of the firm, and that since she had been presumably unsuccessful, the rose-ring could not figure among the stock at Mélanies’, and therefore it was useless my pursuing my enquiries further in that direction. Really, I think, Miss Halifax, I was inspired in all this.”

“I am sure you were, Mr Balm. What was your next step?”

“Why, to induce Mrs Barclay Rivers to come with me to see if by any chance she could identify the man Jenniver himself. It was just possible, and it might explain everything.”

“And did she?”

“She came, with great reluctance. But I was by then, I am afraid, so eager in the quest that I would have abducted her had she refused. My intention was to introduce her to the man as one of those fashionable acquaintances whose custom he had desired; but he saved me the trouble. As we approached the shop he himself, accompanied by the identical young woman of my former acquaintance, issued from it, and the two, unconscious of our presence (it was raining, and our umbrellas were up), went down the street before us. ‘There he is,’ I whispered; ‘and the very girl I told you about with him. Quick! Do you recognize either?’ ‘Both, I am sure,’ answered Mrs Rivers, much agitated. ‘The girl, I am certain, is Annie Milner, a former maid of mine, whom I had to send away for misconduct; and he—wait—I seem to know him; but I’m so flustered.’ At that moment the two stopped at a door, and the man knocked—a double rap. ‘O!’ said my companion on the instant. ‘I know him: He was a postman in our district.’ I started; I turned her swiftly about. I almost ran her from the neighbourhood—for she had given me in those few words the clue I desired, and from that moment everything was clear to me.”

“Mr Balm! How? O, please go on!”

“One moment. I went straight, after seeing her home, to Scotland Yard, and, by virtue of those same credentials, secured an examination of the portraits of convicted criminals. The man of Lower Marsh figured amongst them. ‘Who is he?’ I asked. ‘George Lightfoot’ was the answer; ‘a Kennington postman sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for letter-stealing, and discharged, after serving his term, within the last few weeks.’ There, Miss Halifax!”

“O! but I’m not there, indeed.”

“Why, you see, Captain Barclay Rivers had written a letter to his wife, telling her that he was forwarding the bale of skins, and mentioning a secret connected with one of them; and that letter Lightfoot had stolen amongst others. But, before he could formulate any plan for acting upon the information contained in it, he was trapped and arrested on another charge and sent to prison, only to find upon his release that the lady had been made a widow, and the bale sold and its contents scattered during his confinement. Hence his advertisement, and, generally, his determined efforts to trace the several items of the parcel; hence, moreover, his subornation and ruin of the unhappy girl at Mélanies’, whom he had known and courted when he was a postman and she a maid at Mrs Rivers’s, and whom he had, since his release, tracked to the shop in the Borough, and won to his nefarious purposes.”

“And you saw through it all in that single instant?”

“I will not go so far. But I had at least a vision of the truth. Still there remained to discover the nature of the secret, and the whereabouts of the lost skin—for by now I was convinced that the rose-ring, and the rose-ring alone, the one specimen of its kind which, it would seem, the parcel contained, held the solution of the mystery. Well, I discovered it; but at a fatal moment for one poor creature.”

“O, don’t stop!”

“I must hurry rather. There is much ground to cover in a few words. You will take for granted, Miss Halifax, the tedious process of inquiry they represent. In brief, I questioned Mrs Rivers as to her former ménage, and learned that in the time of Annie Milner there had been but one other servant in the house, namely a cook, Bessie Cotton by name. It was just possible that she might know something about the lost rose-ring.

“I traced this girl to the situation she had procured through her former mistress, from that situation to another; finally, to small lodgings she was occupying in the neighbourhood of Newington Butts. I found her at home, and opened upon her at once on the subject of the rose-ring. To my amazement she broke into a passion of tears and half coherent protestations, denouncing, as I understood, her former fellow-servant Annie Milner for having brought the law on her—as she supposed, in my person. It was long before I could convince her that I was not a plain-clothes constable, long before I could quiet and reassure her; but I succeeded at length, and persuaded her little by little to make a full confession to me of the truth. And what do you think it was?”

“It was she who had stolen the rose-ring?”

“It was she—a mere impulsive misdemeanour—a mere sin of vanity, committed for the purpose of adorning a cherished hat—which hat still survived so adorned. Seeing the parcel of bright skins so little regarded she had succumbed one day to the temptation of the rose-ring, attracted by its eyes and its singularity, and had appropriated it to herself.

“But now observe the irony of circumstance—or was it, perhaps, an instance of subconscious telepathy, of simultaneous suggestion? Anyhow, it appeared, Annie Milner and I had conceived at the same moment the same hypothesis about this girl her former fellow-servant; only—Annie had been an hour or so beforehand with me in giving practical effect to her hypothesis. In short, she had paid a visit that very morning to Bessie Cotton during her dinner hour, had wormed the truth out of her, and had demanded the hat itself as the price of her silence. And Bessie had yielded up her plunder intact, and Annie had carried it away—whither?

“For a moment, as you may imagine, I felt completely nonplussed. And then it occurred to me that Annie, having already sacrificed her dinner time to this quest, would for certain postpone carrying her prize to Lower Marsh until after business hours. I acted promptly upon that conjecture—which fortunately proved the correct one—you shall hear with what result.”

Gilead then related to his absorbed listeners the adventure with which we are already acquainted.

“We cannot gather,” he said at the end, “whether the villain had predetermined upon murdering his victim, with a view to silencing an untrustworthy confederate, or whether, as he himself declares, she drove him to madness at the last by coquetting with him, witholding her capture, and threatening to give the whole thing away unless he agreed to her extravagant terms. The fact that he made a jealous preserve of the premises—which he was renting for a few weeks at a few shillings a week from a local landlord—the fact of the spade and mattock in the cellar—these are at least subjects for grave suspicion. But likely enough we shall never know the truth.”

“And the mystery, Mr Balm. O, Mr Balm—please!”

Gilead laughed at the impatient young lady, as he raised the parrakeet-skin from the table.

“I told you,” he said, “that there was but one missing link needed to complete the chain of evidence. That missing link was, of course, Captain Barclay Rivers’s letter, which was found on Lightfoot. It told, in brief, of the Captain’s startling discovery, among the ruins of a temple of Kandy in Ceylon, of an almost priceless gem; of his apprehensions that this treasure might be lost or stolen from him in his varied wanderings, and of his final determination to send it home in a parcel of the skins of birds shot by him, concealed within the head of a rose-ringed parrakeet, the only specimen of its kind, he was careful to explain—with an elaborate description of the bird for his wife’s instruction—that the bundle contained.”

With these words Gilead, lowering the skin for the eager scrutiny of his two guests, laid open the body, and showed them how the whole cavity of the skull was filled with a single dark stone, which, projecting to the sockets, seemed to form the eyes. Then, delicately inserting a finger and thumb, he produced the gem for their inspection.

“It is an incomparable sapphire,” he said—“in a fine state always one of the most precious of precious stones. This example may be pronounced, in bulk and depth of colour, no less than superlative.”

As he spoke, his man entered the room.

“What is it, David?” he exclaimed.

“A lady to see you, sir.”

“What name, man? Why don’t you show her in?”

“Hearing you had visitors, sir, she begged if you would come to her instead.”

He proffered a card.

“It is Mrs Barclay Rivers herself,” said Gilead, turning gleefully to his guests. “I had half-expected her. Excuse me a moment.”

As he left the room, Miss Halifax, with a heart-felt sigh, turned to the secretary.

“Damn!” said that young gentleman laconically.

“I’m convinced she’s young and beautiful and romantic,” murmured the amanuensis unhappily. “Did you notice how shyly he referred to their confidences? A designing creature! Visitors, indeed! I’ve a presentiment we’re going to have our poor little noses put out of joint, Herbert.”

“Hush!” he whispered.

Voices were audible in the passage, and the next moment Gilead laughingly re-entered the room, ushering in his visitor. Miss Halifax rose with a frigid demeanour and a cold feeling at her heart—and encountered the figure of a buxom red-faced woman of sixty, waddling in like a jovial duck.

“Well, I’m blessed!” said Mrs Barclay Rivers, “if this ain’t like a scene out of Dickens, and the conspirators all met together in old Joe’s rag shop! What a pretty frock, my dear!”

Miss Halifax, with a delicious laugh, ran to take the hand offered.

CHAPTER VII.
THE QUEST OF THE WAX HAND

It was not to be supposed that the Agency, so catholic, so philanthropic, so disinterested in its labours, and withal so boundlessly endowed, would long escape the notice of those social powers, which, through all changes of creed and government, work steadily on in the cause of the human decencies. With these Gilead’s name was soon to become an almost apostolic one, and gradually, as he proceeded on his way, the executive, the police, the Home Office itself became his informal allies. A latitude was permitted him in the matter of technical infringements of the law, and he was made secure against official and officious interference. In his clean and fearless spirit of Knight-errantry, he probably realized little of the indulgence granted him, and, in cases where his way was made inexplicably smooth, accounted the fact to nothing more than the inherent rightness of things. On more than one occasion, indeed, Scotland Yard flagrantly abetted him in acts which, strictly speaking, were illegal. But then, if it had withheld its support, a scoundrelism or so would have prospered. It is true that Gilead was accustomed to give practical expression to his admiration of the force in princely gifts to its charities and awards to individual merit; but I for one will not believe that such generosity would, if construed into bribery, have induced it to condone for a moment a real offence in him. The police favoured him because he contributed, and contributed largely, to their power for good.

One morning the following advertisement, thumb-marked by the Secretary for his consideration, engaged Gilead’s attention:—

“In despair. A young man, in urgent need of £50, asks the help of the rich and benevolent to save him from complete ruin. No repayment; but will give services in any capacity required.”

The usual reference number followed. Gilead thought a moment, then looked up.

“This, Nestle,” said he, “is hardly out of the common.”

“Hardly, sir,” replied the secretary. “Only the offer of services guarantees it as genuine. But if you would rather it went through the ordinary channels—”

“No,” said Gilead. “If you have nothing better to offer, I will take it. Romance, after all, must walk sometimes on the highway, if we have the eyes to distinguish her. I will undertake this, Nestle.”

He requested Miss Halifax to make an appointment with the advertiser to call on the morning next but one, and there left the matter for the time being.

At the hour specified the expected visitor arrived, and was shut in to his interview with the head, Miss Halifax, as usual, being present. Gilead’s ready sympathy was awakened on his first sight of the young man, who, in addition to a nervous white complexion and troubled eyes, was disfigured by the loss of his right hand, the place of which was supplied by a stump and hook.

The calm eyes of the young plutocrat would yield at first, however, no ground to sentiment. Enough experience had taught him to safeguard his emotions.

“You advertised for help,” he said. “May I ask, in the first instance, your name?”

“Dobell, sir,” answered the stranger, in a low voice—“Felix Dobell.”

He hung his head. He was patently in great mental suffering. His age appeared to be about that of his questioner’s; but some illness of life had lined his face prematurely. In appearance he might have stood—on that line of social demarcation which divides the accepted from the not quite acceptable—for a clerk on the lower grade. But his speech was educated and his dress quiet.

“And your vocation?” asked Gilead.

“I was cashier, sir, to a firm of law stationers.”

“Was?”

He noticed and emphasised the past tense.

“I was forced to leave, sir,” said the visitor scarce audibly.

“Forced?”

Again he accentuated the word, quietly, but significantly.

“No, not in that way, sir,” answered the other—“not, indeed. It was because I feared to be tempted to it that I left. I come to you with clean hands so far; indeed I do, sir.”

He put out his arms with an instinctive movement, and withdrew them as quickly. Miss Halifax, leaning over her table, shaded her eyes with her palm. But Gilead sat, to all appearance, as cold as judgment.

“You will forgive me,” he said; “it is necessary. You proposed, if I remember rightly, some indiscriminate form of service in return for this loan?”

“I have trained my left hand, sir,” answered the visitor eagerly, “to do the work of my right, and better. Anything in my power I will do gladly.”

“Fifty pounds is a large sum. For what purpose do you require it?”

“To pay a debt.”

Again the answer was hardly audible.

“Very well,” said Gilead—“and if I accept your terms, and require you, in exchange for the gift, to pick a man’s pocket for me?”

Miss Halifax rose in soft amazement. The stranger rose too.

“I have come to the wrong place,” he said. “It is only a judgment, I suppose; but—O, let me go, sir! let me go before I make a fool of myself.”

“You won’t do it?”

“No.”

The amanuensis forestalled him at the door.

“Mr Balm!” she whispered, in a voice from which every expression but wonder was gone.

Gilead rose, with a smile, and crossing the room swiftly, put a firm detaining hand on the young man’s shoulder.

“Come,” he said, “tell us all about it from beginning to end.”

His tone was unmistakable. With one amazed look at him, the young fellow dropped his face into his single palm, and bowed his shoulders as if quite broken with grief.

“Come,” said Gilead a second time; “it was a test, no more. Don’t you know us, man?”

It was evident that he did not. In a few sweet sympathetic words Miss Halifax informed him of the nature of the harbour of refuge into which he had drifted—in despair, it appeared; almost without a hope. Even when he realized at last his happy fortune, it was minutes before they could restore him to a frame of mind meet for explanations. But at length, abashed, grateful, half stunned in the prospect of help, he faltered out a desire to be questioned—and condemned, if need be.

“That is very well, then,” said Gilead. “You must tell us, if you will, as much about your life and circumstances as is necessary to an elucidation of the matter.”

“If you will only begin by questioning me, sir,” answered the visitor, evidently greatly overcome, as he seated himself diffidently on the chair to which he was motioned. “I think—I believe that I should find it easier to answer than explain. There is so much that is bewildering, as well as so much that is shameful in my story. But I will speak the whole truth; I will leave out nothing. Only question me.”

Gilead, seated opposite, nodded his assent reassuringly.

“I am sure you will,” he said. “Tell me, in the first place, who you are.”

“My father,” answered the young man, “was a respectable print-seller and frame-maker in Southampton Row. He gave me a good education. My mother, who died young, I never knew.”

“And yourself?” asked Gilead.

“When I was twenty-one,” said the young man, a sudden pink suffusing his wan features, “my father procured me a situation in the studio of Mr Auguste Lerroux, who dealt with him.”

He appeared to have prepared himself for the slight start which his words evoked. He looked up quickly, and dropped his eyes again, a deadly pallor replacing the momentary flush on his cheeks.

“The well-known artist and sculptor?” asked Gilead, resolutely commanding himself. “Well?”

“My father,” went on the visitor, in a low voice, “over-estimated some small ability which I possessed, and persuaded Mr Lerroux to take me on as his assistant, with a view to better things. I had not been with Mr Lerroux a year when my father died.”

He paused, in painful embarrassment, and again Gilead encouraged him to proceed.

“My father,” continued the young man, with evident difficulty, “was always, I fear, improvident and unpractical. It was deemed necessary after his death to sell the stock and goodwill of the business in order to discharge the debts with which it was encumbered. They proved greater than expected, and, for nett result, I found myself thrown virtually penniless upon the world. It was then that I succumbed to temptation.”

“Ah!” said Gilead, in a tone which he strove to make appear unconcerned. “And now we come to it, Mr Dobell.”

“Yes, sir,” said the visitor. He looked up, his eyes shining; but there was a piteous tremor about his lips. “I succumbed, sir,” he said, “and to my everlasting shame. I want to put it before you quite plainly, without extenuation or self-defence. It was this way. Mr Lerroux had engaged to pay me a certain small salary, but, as a matter of fact, he did not keep to his promise, or only so scantily and fitfully that, at the time of my father’s death, I had been able to put by no more than a pound or two, which represented my entire savings. There was a reason for this, as I knew. My employer figured large before the world of critics, but he was not a popular artist, and his patrons were few. He was generally hard-pressed for cash, and I knew, and know now most bitterly to my cost, that he had recourse to the money-lenders. At the time of which I speak he was in a desperate state, and I must believe that he had no choice but to discharge me. Anyhow he did discharge me, I thought harshly and cruelly, and at twenty-two I found myself cast adrift without means or prospects.”

He paused. “Come,” said Gilead, “we are no Pharisees here.”

“At first,” said the young man, lowering his eyes, “I hardly realised my position. I was strong and hopeful, and foresaw no great difficulty in procuring a situation. I did not understand that, without especial attainments, my chance was almost nothing in the struggle for existence. But I was quickly disillusioned. In a few weeks’ time I was utterly destitute, and at my wits’ end to know what to do or where to turn.”

“I was used to frequent a free library in the district where I lodged, to read the advertisements in the papers and answer such of them as I thought promising. One day the devil put it into my head that the walls of this room offered a resource to a starved and desperate man. There were hung on them a number of Japanese prints” (Gilead stirred and drew in his breath), “the gift of an eccentric patron, some of which my knowledge gained under Mr Lerroux told me were of considerable market value. What loss, moral or material, would their removal entail upon the frequenters of such a place? Christmas cartoons, I thought, would prove infinitely more to their taste. I dismissed the temptation, but it returned again and again, and each time more formidable. Presently, half involuntarily, I satisfied myself of the ease with which the room could be entered at night from the back, which abutted upon an empty yard. And then—and, then, sir, at last, I fell.”

Trembling all over, he took from his breast a pocket-book, and from the book a number of papers, one of which he selected and, rising, carried across to Gilead.

“Will you please to read it sir?” he said. “It is a damning witness, but a reminder and a warning which I can never make up my mind to part with.”

He stood with bowed head, while Gilead accepted and examined the slip presented to him. It was merely a printed paragraph, a cutting of a newspaper report, and it ran as follows. Gilead read it out in a low voice, that Miss Halifax might hear:—

“Late on Wednesday night the B... Free Library was broken into, and an attempt made to steal a number of Japanese colour prints from the walls of the reading-room. The thief procured an entrance through a window easy of access from an unoccupied yard at the back of the premises, and was in the act of removing the prints from their frames for the purpose of making an inconspicuous parcel of them, when he was alarmed, it is conjectured, by the movements of the caretaker above, and decamped, leaving his spoil behind him. The prominence lately given, through the Happer and other sales, to the commercial value of these works of art, was no doubt accountable for the attempt, which should prove instructive to the librarian. The police have a clue, it is said, in some finger-marks, and in one thumb mark in particular, left by the burglar upon the wet plaster of a wall in the window embrasure, which that very day had undergone some repairs.”

Gilead looked up with a reassuring smile.

“Let him that is without sin among us cast the first stone,” he said.

The young fellow gave an irrepressible gasp.

“God bless you!” he said; “God bless you, sir, for that! But there is worse to follow—something infinitely more horrible and distressing.”

His listener’s brow darkened a little.

“Some later crime?” he asked softly.

“I will not—I must not say another word,” answered the visitor in agony, “until you have gone through this also. It is dated only three days later.”

Half dreading what was to come, Gilead accepted a second newspaper cutting from his hand, and, bending with compressed lips, read it out as he had the former:—

“It is our painful duty to record the death—whether by his own hand or that of another it remains to prove—of the well-known artist and sculptor Mr Auguste Lerroux. Mr Lerroux occupied a maisonette and studio in Edwards Square off the Kensington Road, and, upon entering the latter apartment at seven o’clock yesterday morning to light the fire, the maid servant discovered to her horror her master lying dead upon the floor with a bullet wound through his head. The weapon, an air-pistol, with which the injury had been inflicted lay beside the body, and the shot from it had apparently penetrated the brain through the right eye. No adequate cause can be assigned for the unfortunate gentleman’s suicide, and at present the affair remains a mystery. The police, who were summoned at once, are very reticent in the matter; but it is hinted that they are in possession of a certain clue which in some mysterious way associates the crime, if crime it be, with an attempted theft of Japanese prints from the B ... Free Library, as reported in our columns some days ago.”

Gilead looked up from his perusal of the paper without a word.

“No, sir,” cried the young man—“before God I am guiltless. You must believe it, or there is an end of all hope for me.”

“I believe it, Mr Dobell,” said the soft clear voice of Miss Halifax.

Gilead smiled.

“You have your advocate, you see, sir,” he said. “And now, if you please, you will give us your true version of this affair, the main particulars of which are of course known to me. It will spare you pain, perhaps, if I recall them. My Lerroux was known to have possessed a pistol of this description, he was known to be in embarrassed, even in desperate circumstances, and he had been heard to threaten self-destruction. At the same time, the mere fact of his possessing the pistol was held to be no necessary proof of his having used it against himself, and the hint of a second party in the studio gave an ugly complexion to the affair. The evidence as to Mr Lerroux’s habits was inconclusive, the medical testimony was inconclusive, and in the end, if I remember rightly, the Coroner’s Jury brought in a open verdict.”

“They did, sir,” said the young man in great emotion; “but, for detective purposes, all reference to the clue which the police possessed had been withheld from them. But I knew what it was—I knew. I knew that I had touched blood, and printed with it upon the doorpost the very damning sign that had already once marked me down.”

“Sign!” exclaimed Gilead.

“I had,” said the other, hardly able to articulate, “a cross-cut, an old wound, upon the thumb of my right hand which, once detected, could not fail to betray me.”

“Your right hand!” Miss Halifax, standing a little apart, breathed out the words between pity and amazement.

The young man fought to command himself, and presently continued in a stronger voice: “Listen to me, sir—only listen to me, and, God helping, I will win your belief and pity. I tried to rob the library—it is all true—and at the last moment my courage failed me. I got home, got to bed, the most abased cowering reptile on God’s earth. Rising the next day to the full horror of my fall, I read in the evening paper of my own mad attempt and of the clue I had left behind me—a thumb-mark on the wall. From that moment hell seemed to have opened. I pretended to have cut myself, and enclosed my thumb in a stall. While in the very act a thought like a stab struck into my heart. I might take what precautions I might: there was another witness to that tell-tale scar in the studio of Mr Lerroux. If the police were to secure it before I could, my doom was sealed. I threw away the useless stall—I was mad by then with shame and apprehension, incapable of judging the extreme improbability of their alighting on this remote piece of evidence. At first I thought I would call on Mr Lerroux and implore him to give me the thing I needed; but the terror of exciting suspicion thereby, and so defeating my own ends, was a sufficient deterrent. Then in a moment my acquaintance with his house and way of life rushed upon me. He lived alone, somewhat freely, and was careless of precautions. I knew that after dinner he never went near his studio, and that to enter it from the back, where a door gave upon a strip of garden, should be a very easy matter. I ask you to believe, sir, that I was by then in a state of mind beyond the reach of reason. Moreover I only intended to appropriate what was already in a manner my own. About ten o’clock I crept round the studio side, treading upon flower-beds, and found, as I had expected, the door unlocked. I listened a moment, and then opened it with infinite caution. All was silent and dark within, save for a red gleam from the stove which stood to one side a little away from the wall. I knew where the thing I had come to seek was deposited; but, fearful of stumbling over some obstruction, I decided to kindle momentarily a spill of paper in order to take my bearings. Stealing to the stove on tiptoe, I saw an envelope or wrapper lying handy, and stooped to secure it. My fingers came up wet and sticky, and, as I kindled the paper, and turned with it in my hand, I saw—O, my God!—my old master lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood.”

Grey as ashes, the narrator, unable longer to support himself, sank back into the chair from which he had risen. His listeners hurried to sustain and reassure him.

“Say no more, my poor fellow,” said Gilead. “It is all plain, and you shall spare yourself. It was like this, was it not? In the midst of your horror, the awful responsibility, the awful peril you had incurred smote you out of stupefaction, and, without giving another thought to your purpose, you turned and fled, leaving that tragic thumb-mark for a clue to your pursuers?”

The young man thanked him with a look full of pathos and gratitude.

“I thought I should die, mercifully die,” he whispered, “when I heard what I had done. It must have been on the door-post, which I clutched to save myself from falling. Somehow I got home unobserved, and washed my hands; and then—O, my God, the cruel irony of Fate!—I found a letter awaiting me, offering me a post in a big law-printers and stationers to whom I had applied. If it had only come a week earlier!”

Miss Halifax, with a motion of infinite pity, touched his mutilated arm. Her intuition had already guessed the truth. He looked up at her with a faint smile.

“Yes, Miss,” he said—“the day that I began work, I was standing by a printing machine, when I heard one of my companions read out that very description of the suicide I showed you, and learnt for the first time of the clue I had left. I was again wearing my thumb-stall, and, not out of courage, but in a simple impulsive frenzy, I thrust my hand among the moving machinery, and the next moment fainted. When I came definitely to my senses, it was to find myself—with joy and relief—secure for ever from the witness I most feared. But, heaven help me, it was only a respite.

“The firm were very good to me, and kept me on, as having been injured, accidentally as it was supposed, in their service. And I tried to repay them by devotion to my work. In time the capacities of my two hands seemed all concentrated in the one left, and I became expert with it as I had never been with my right. Months past, and nothing happening to alarm me further, I grew by degrees to a certain confidence, and to a hope that the police had ceased to interest themselves in the matter of the thumb-marks. And then one day, all in an instant, my silly self-delusion was scattered to the winds. I received a visit in my lodgings from an enemy I had never conceived or dreamed of.”

He passed a hand across his damp forehead. Gilead patted his shoulder reassuringly.

“You remember, sir,” continued the young man, “my reference to money-lenders? There was one of these, a Mr Raphael Colfox, of Great Queen Street, who was often with my employer Mr Lerroux. I think he not only bled him pretty freely, but, with an eye to future possibilities, was in the habit of acquiring from him at nominal prices works of his. Among those that had passed into his possession was, it appeared, that very piece which I had risked my soul to obtain. He had come to tell me so, with the intimation that his late appearance in the matter was due to nothing more than the difficulty he had found hitherto in running me to earth. He had seen, he said, the thumb-mark on the post, and had at once identified it with another in his possession; and he offered me his silence at a price. All my explanations and protests were in vain, and he ended by convincing me that he held my life in his hands.”

The narrator, whose voice had sunk lower and lower, gave a little choke here, and stopped.

“I see,” said Gilead, “I am beginning to see very clearly. Tell me only, if you can, what was this article you desired so much to get into your own possession.”

“It was a cast of my right hand, palm uppermost, sir, that Mr Lerroux had taken most beautifully in wax. And my name was on it.”

There followed a short silence; and then Gilead spoke in the soft ominous voice that it always thrilled Miss Halifax to hear.

“This is all quite plain, Mr Dobell, and I thank you for coming to us in your difficulty. I should like to ask you a final question or so. This first visit of Mr Colfox’s—when did it occur?”

“About six months ago, sir.”

“And he has been—we won’t mince matters—blackmailing you ever since?”

“He forced me to accept a promissory note, sir, for an imaginary accommodation, and he has been—yes, he has been bleeding me on it ever since. I owe him fifty pounds at this moment, and he is pressing for its payment under threat of exposure. I had to leave my situation a month ago, or I don’t know what would have happened. I am not strong, and this constant misfortune and persecution seem to unbalance my reason. It was his own suggestion that I should advertise as I did in the Daily Post.”

“Exactly. You are convinced, of course, that he actually possesses the wax cast?”

“I have seen it, sir.”

“Where?”

“He keeps it in a safe in his office.”

“Does he, do you know, sleep on the premises?”

“No, I am sure he does not, sir. I know his private address.”

“Very well, Mr Dobell. And now I am going to place you in the hands of my secretary, Mr Nestle, who will make himself responsible for your present custody and well-being. Be assured that you have nothing to fear and everything to hope; that this nightmare shall not be permitted to demoralise you much longer. Come.”

The young man tried to articulate his thanks, but, utterly failing, Gilead took him gently by the arm and led him from the room.

Half an hour later Mr Balm presented himself at Scotland Yard, and, requesting an interview with the Chief Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department, was immediately shown in to that weighty official.

“Mr Ingram,” said the visitor, “I want you to introduce to me an extremely expert burglar.”

The Superintendent laughed, and, leaning his elbows on his desk and propping his chin on his clasped hands, regarded the other humorously.

“Come, Mr Balm,” he said; “what’s your latest little game?”

Their interview was a long one, and its termination left the Superintendent immensely interested and surprised. He whistled reflectively to himself more than once.

“So,” said he, “this is the explanation of the thumb-marks—as odd a coincidence as I’ve known, sir.”

“How about my burglar?” asked Gilead.

The Superintendent slapped his hand softly on the desk.

“Mr Balm,” he said, “you’re an odd one—upon my word you’re an odd one, sir. But I like your idea. What’s the harm, now? Nothing interfered with and nothing taken. I think I may say you may look to us in the matter. Of course, if the thing remained, and the man chose to produce it, your prodigy might have a devil of a business to clear himself. And we should be forced to take action, with what result the Lord only knows. But this alternative, if you can carry it through, ends the matter, and without loss to anyone but the skunk that deserves the worst. Go and see him, sir, and make sure, if you can; and then come back and report to me. In the meantime there’s a man—Jerry Trimmer’s his name—well, it’s my opinion that if you were to lock up that man nekked in a safe, he’d find means to bore his way out somehow. I’ll make enquiries about him.”

Mr Raphael Colfox had his offices in a dull stuccoed block of building that neighboured on the north-east corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here, high up, he laid his web for the hard-pressed flies that always came buzzing in plenty about that legal honey-pot. Gilead, being brought in to him by way of a dismal little ante-den, smelling of damp ledgers and having a shrewd anæmic child in it for clerk, found his gentleman a genial strong-voiced figure of sixty or so, with stubby white eyebrows, stubby white moustache, and white hair brushed forward of his ears at the temples. He wore a full grass-green bow at his neck, his frock coat bulged a little in the waist, and the only spot of colour in his face was supplied by his nose, which was somewhat shapeless and inflamed and sown with short white hairs.

“And now, sir,” said he, after some brief preliminaries, “what can we do for you?”

Gilead’s natural repugnance for the fellow made him a little short in his answers. His own clear candour never took such offence as it did at those who, experience told him, would be ready to flout him unknown, and to lick his plutocratic boots were he to reveal himself. He had no mercy on such toadeaters, and found any dissimulation, even for the best ends, difficult in their presence.

“That remains to see, sir,” he said. “Nothing, I may premise, in the way of loans or accommodations.”

“Not?”

Mr Colfox, sitting back at his ease, raised his eyebrows and nothing else.

“I will come to the point at once,” said Gilead. “I am something of a collector, a virtuoso, and I am told that you possess works, which you may not be unwilling to sell, by the late Auguste Lerroux.”

The moneylender pricked up his ears. Here, for the first time, was shadowing itself out a justification of his foresight. His nerve of cupidity thrilled. He must make the best of this chance.

He nodded his head agreeably.

“You are told,” he said. “May I ask by whom?”

Gilead Balm, knight errant

GILEAD BALM
KNIGHT ERRANT

[COPYRIGHT]

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

GILEAD BALM

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

CHAPTER II.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (continued)

CHAPTER III.
THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

CHAPTER IV.
THE QUEST OF THE DOG

CHAPTER V.
THE QUEST OF THE MARBLE STATUETTE

CHAPTER VI.
THE QUEST OF THE ROSE-RING

I.

II.

III.

CHAPTER VII.
THE QUEST OF THE WAX HAND

Gilead Balm, knight errant

GILEAD BALMKNIGHT ERRANT

[COPYRIGHT]

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

GILEAD BALM

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I.THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

CHAPTER II.THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (continued)

CHAPTER III.THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

CHAPTER IV.THE QUEST OF THE DOG

CHAPTER V.THE QUEST OF THE MARBLE STATUETTE

CHAPTER VI.THE QUEST OF THE ROSE-RING

I.

II.

III.

CHAPTER VII.THE QUEST OF THE WAX HAND

GILEAD BALM
KNIGHT ERRANT

CHAPTER I.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

CHAPTER II.
THE QUEST OF THE SLEEPING BEAUTY (continued)

CHAPTER III.
THE QUEST OF THE EMPTY HOUSE

CHAPTER IV.
THE QUEST OF THE DOG

CHAPTER V.
THE QUEST OF THE MARBLE STATUETTE

CHAPTER VI.
THE QUEST OF THE ROSE-RING

CHAPTER VII.
THE QUEST OF THE WAX HAND