A Secret of the Sea: A Novel. Vol. 1 (of 3)

Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source: Internet web archive
https://archive.org/details/secretofseanovel01spei
(University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

A SECRET OF THE SEA.

Transcriber's Notes (Volume 1):
1. Page scan source: Web Archive
https://archive.org/details/secretofseanovel01spei
(University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

A SECRET OF THE SEA.

A Novel.

By T. W. SPEIGHT,

AUTHOR OF
"IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT," "UNDER LOCK AND KEY," ETC., ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON. 1876.

(All Rights Reserved.)

A SECRET OF THE SEA.

[CHAPTER I.]

IN THE LAWYER'S OFFICE.

It was a December morning, clear and frosty. The timepiece in the office of Matthew Kelvin, attorney-at-law, Pembridge, Hertfordshire, racing noisily after the grave old Abbey clock which had just done chiming, pointed to the hour of ten. With his back to the welcome fire, and turning over yesterday's Times with an air of contemptuous indifference, stood Mr. Podley Piper--whose baptismal name was universally shortened into "Pod"--a short, thickset young gentleman of the mature age of sixteen. His nose was a pure specimen of a pug, and his short scrubby hair was of a colour sufficiently pronounced to earn him the nickname of "Carotty Pod" from sundry irreverent small boys of his acquaintance. His nose and his hair notwithstanding, Pod was a keen, bright-looking lad, with an air of shrewdness and decision about him by no means common in one of his age.

"Awfully dry reading--the Times," muttered Pod, tossing the paper on Mr. Kelvin's desk. "Only one suicide, and not a single murder in it. It's not worth buying. And yet there must be something in it, or so many people wouldn't read it. I suppose that by the time I'm fifty, and wear creaky shoes and carry a big gold watch in my fob, and have to count my hairs every morning to see that I haven't lost one overnight,--I suppose, when that time comes, I shall think as much of the Times as Sir Thomas Dudgeon does. But just at present I'd rather read the 'Bounding Wolf of the Prairies.'"

Hardly were the last words out of Pod's mouth, when the inner door was opened, and Matthew Kelvin walked silently into the room. In silence he sat down at his desk, after one sharp glance at Pod and another at the fire, and set to work at once at the task immediately before him. This task was the opening of the pile of post letters which had been placed ready to his hand by Pod. A brief glance at the contents of each was generally sufficient. In very few cases did he trouble himself to read a letter entirely through. Three or four of the more important documents were put aside to be attended to specially by himself; the rest of them had a corner turned up on which Pod pencilled down in shorthand Mr. Kelvin's instructions for the guidance of Mr. Bray, his chief clerk. It was his cleverness at shorthand that had gained Pod his present situation.

"That will do," said Mr. Kelvin, after a few minutes of this sharp work. "Give those papers to Mr. Bray, and tell him not to come in till I ring."

Something out of the ordinary way was evidently the matter with Mr. Kelvin this morning. After making one or two futile attempts to read over for the second time, and more carefully than before, the letters left behind by Pod, he gave up the attempt as a bad job.

"I don't feel as if I could settle down to anything this morning," he said. "And no wonder. How well the secret has been kept! Even I had not the remotest suspicion of such a thing. What a strange example of the irony of events that I, of all men in the world, should have to break these tidings to Eleanor! What will my proud beauty say when I tell her? I could never have devised so exquisite a revenge. And yet it is not my hand that will drag her down. It is the hand of Jacob Lloyd that smites her from out his grave."

He fell into a reverie which lasted till he was disturbed by a knock at the door. "Come in," he said mechanically, and the head of Pod was thrust into the room.

"A lady to see you, sir. Says her name is Miss Deane."

"Olive Deane!" said Mr. Kelvin, in surprise. "Show her in."

Matthew Kelvin at this time was thirty-five years old. He was a handsome, large-nosed man, with full grey eyes and rather prominent teeth. He was already partially bald; but what hair he had left was carefully trimmed and parted down the middle, while his bushy dark-brown whiskers showed no traces of age. He always dressed well, and was very particular as to his boots and gloves and the cut of his trousers. He had studied the art of dress as carefully as he had studied many other things, and the result was a success.

For his inferiors and those in his employ, Mr. Kelvin had a brusque, imperious manner that was not unmixed with a sort of hard contemptuousness. For his rich clients and those above him in the social scale, he had a pleasant, smiling, dégagé style, which sat upon him so easily and naturally that it was impossible to doubt its genuineness. To such people he was a man who never seemed to have much to do beyond trimming the nails of his very white hands, and sniffing at the choice flowers in his button-hole, and now and then dashing off his signature at the foot of some document which he never seemed to be at the trouble of reading.

Yet no one ever seemed to doubt Matthew Kelvin's ability in his profession, unprofessional as he was--judged by the ordinary types of provincial lawyers--in many of his ways and doings. But, then, he was a sort of second cousin to Sir Frederick Carstairs of Wemley, and that perhaps made some difference. Many people thought it did, for the Carstairs were a very old family; and where's the use of having good blood in one's veins unless it declares itself in some shape or other?

Mr. Kelvin was fond of hunting, and subscribed liberally to the Thorndale pack. Few faces were more familiar in the field than his, and he was always nominated as one of the stewards of the Hunt Ball. Having a good voice, and being fond of singing, it was only natural that he should be a member of the Pembridge Catch Club; besides this, he was chairman of the Literary Institute. One winter he gave a couple of lectures on "Some Recent Discoveries in Astronomy," with illustrative drawings by himself; while on more than one occasion he had treated the whole of the workhouse children to an Orrery or a Panorama, and even to that wicked place--the Circus.

Matthew Kelvin lived with his mother, in the house where he had been born. His father had been dead some twelve years when we first make his acquaintance. The business had come down from his grandfather, who had been the first Matthew Kelvin known in Pembridge.

Perhaps the finest trait in Matthew's character was his love and reverence for his mother, who had been more or less of an invalid for many years. For her sake, when she was ill, and hungered for his presence by her bedside, he would give up his most pressing engagements, and sit by the hour together reading novels to her--a class of literature to which he rarely condescended at other times.

Mrs. Kelvin, who was a sensible, clear-sighted woman enough in the ordinary affairs of life, still cherished a strange preference for the milk-and-water novels and vapid romances of the Minerva Press school, such as had been fashionable when she was a girl; and it was pleasant to see her son reading out this rubbish to her with the gravest air possible, hiding his contempt and weariness under a well-feigned interest in the fortunes and misfortunes of some book-muslin heroine, or some hero with chiselled features who was never anything less than a lord in disguise.

Of such books as these Mrs. Kelvin never seemed to tire. It may be that they carried her back for a little while to the days of her youth, when she too was young and blooming; and that when buried in their pages she forgot for a brief hour or two that she was nothing now but a grey-haired woman--old, sickly, and a widow.

There were people still alive in Pembridge, to whom the one romantic episode in the life of Barbara Kelvin was known in all its details. It was this:--The present Mathew Kelvin's father had run away with and married Miss Barbara Carstairs, an orphan niece of the late Sir Frederick Carstairs of Wemley, one of the chief magnates for twenty miles round. Miss Carstairs, to be sure, had not a penny that she could call her own, and was living the life of a genteel dependent at Wemley, when young Kelvin--who was passing backwards and forwards between Sir Frederick and his father, in connection with certain law business--persuaded her to elope. But the fact that Miss Carstairs' sole earthly possessions consisted of the clothes on her back and a solitary spade guinea in her purse, by no means lessened the magnitude of the offence of which the audacious young lawyer had been guilty. There was an outcry of horror, accompanied by a turning up of eyes and a holding up of hands, as the news spread from one country house to another; but nothing could be done save to excommunicate the late Miss Carstairs, with "bell, book, and candle," and try to forget that any such creature had ever had an existence.

Whether, when the romance of girlhood was over, Mrs. Kelvin ever regretted that she had forgotten the obligations of caste in order to become the wife of a provincial lawyer, was a fact best known to herself; but if any such regret ever made itself felt at her heart, it never found expression at her lips. Her husband was fond of her, and never stinted her in any way, and her life, quiet though it was, was not without its consolations. It was surely better to have a husband and a home, and to be the recognized leader of middle-class Pembridge society, than to live and die in single blessedness, a wretched nobody, in her uncle's grand cold mansion at Wemley. Like a sensible woman, she made the best of her position. She had her little re-unions, her Tuesdays, when everybody that was worth knowing in Pembridge, met in the little drawing-room over her husband's office, and where her simple hospitalities were dispensed with a grace and refinement that would have done no discredit to Wemley itself. But all those things now belonged to the past. At the time we make Mrs. Kelvin's acquaintance she had seen her sixtieth birthday, and was a confirmed invalid.

This home of the Kelvins for three generations was a substantially-built red-brick house that dated from the era of the second George. It was not in the Pembridge main street, but formed one of a dozen houses similar to itself in a short retired street that opened out of the busier thoroughfare. It was the kind of house that--if houses could do such things--you would naturally expect to shrink into its foundations with horror, if ever compelled to have for its next-door neighbour anything so vulgar as a shop. The massive front door, with its lion's head knocker, opened into a good-sized entrance-hall, at the far-end of which was a tiny glass-fronted den sacred to the use of Mr. Piper; from which coign of vantage that ingenuous youth could see everybody who came in or went out, could tell this person to wait or usher that one into his master's office, and answer all inquiries; and could furthermore refresh himself by keeping up a guerilla warfare of repartee and chaff with the clerks as they passed into or out of their office. On the left as you entered from the street was the door which opened into Matthew Kelvin's private office. On the right hand were, first, the door which opened into the clerk's office, and secondly, the door of a waiting-room. Beyond these was a door which opened on to a private staircase. The real entrance to the private part of the house was down a covered passage at the side. Such passages were by no means infrequent in Pembridge. Many of the best houses in the place opened, not from the street, but from these side entries. Behind the house was an extensive piece of garden ground, containing fruit trees and rustic seats, and any quantity of old-fashioned sweet-smelling flowers such as our grandfathers and grandmothers dearly loved, but which look so dreadfully out of place in these days of riband-gardening and floral mathematics.

"Why, who on earth expected to see you?" said Mr. 'Kelvin, as he shook hands heartily with Miss Deane.

"Not you, I daresay, Matthew," answered Miss Deane, with a blush and a little sigh, as she looked straight into his handsome face.

"Why not I as much as anyone?" queried her cousin with a smile, as he placed a chair for her at no great distance from his own. "You always were fond of change, Olive."

She smiled again, a little bitterly. "Why don't you add--like all my sex?"

"Because I was speaking to one of your sex. Had I been talking to a man, I should probably have used those very words. Olive, I'm really glad to see you, whether you come holiday-making, or whether you come because you have left Lady----Lady----?"

"Lady Culloden. Yes, I have left her. I grew tired of my situation. Slights innumerable; one petty insult after another: my position not properly recognised: till at last I felt that I must speak my mind or die. I did speak my mind, and in a way that her ladyship is not likely to forget. We parted. I felt a longing to see Pembridge and my old friends. I wanted to see my aunt--and you."

"You know that you are always sure of a welcome here."

"But my aunt--how is she?" asked Miss Deane.

"No better, I am sorry to say; neither do I see much prospect of her ever being so. She is confined very much to her own room."

"Poor dear aunt! I am very very sorry to hear that she is no better. Does she keep up her good spirits?"

"Yes," replied Mr. Kelvin; "her spirits are, as they have always been, something wonderful."

"I believe, Matthew, that I love her better than I ever loved my own mother."

"No one can know my mother without liking her," he returned.

"And then what a gentlewoman she is!" said Olive. "There is as much difference between her and Lady Culloden as there is between a flower cut out of a turnip and a real camellia."

Olive Deane at this time was twenty-eight years old. The money which her mother--a sister of the second Matthew Kelvin--had taken as a dowry to her husband had soon been squandered in wild speculations, and it had been impressed upon Olive's mind, almost from the time when she could remember anything, that she would have to earn her own living; and she started with that idea the very first day she went to school. Her mother died when she was ten years old, and her father when she was fifteen; and from the latter age till now she had been altogether dependent on her own exertions for her daily bread. The Kelvins would gladly have assisted her, both then and subsequently, but the girl would accept no help. She went out as nursery governess in the first instance, and had gone on, step by step, till she could now command her ninety or hundred guineas a year as finishing governess in families of distinction. Olive Deane had taken to teaching as naturally as a duck takes to water. She had had five years at a really good French school before her father's death, but everything else she owed to her own love of knowledge and indomitable perseverance. The wasteful extravagance of which she had been a witness when a child at home, had not been without its effect upon her. She grew up thrifty, self-denying, economical in every way; and now, at twenty-eight years of age, she was mistress of four hundred pounds, which her cousin Matthew had advantageously invested for her in Pembridge gas shares.

Olive's sole recreation was a visit now and then to the theatre. A classical play of the sterling old school, she delighted in. She was an omnivorous reader. Anything, from a French novel to the last philosophical essay, had an interest for her. To learn: to know: was all she asked. The quality of the knowledge mattered little or nothing. Wherever she might be, she generally contrived to have half an hour's reading of the Times, so as to keep herself au courant< br> with the chief political movements of the day. She had a clear, hard masculine intellect, with no sentimental nonsense about it, as her cousin Matthew often declared--and he was a great admirer of Olive: in fact, he had been heard to say that if Olive had been a man he would have made her his partner long ago.

Miss Deane was a little above the ordinary stature of her sex. She had a lithe, slender figure, and in all her movements she was graceful, easy, and self-possessed. She had clearly-cut, well-defined features, and many people would have called her handsome. But she certainly lacked colour. Her clear olive complexion--strangely in accordance with her name--was too clear and too colourless. Only on very rare occasions was its waxen pallor flushed through with the faintest tinge of damask. She had magnificent eyebrows, and eyes of the darkest brown, that looked jet-black by candlelight, with a keen, watchful look in them, begotten, perhaps, of the time when, little more than a child, she had to fight her way through the world and found a thorn or a pitfall at every step she took. Her hair, too, was black, but a dull, dead, lustreless black, without the slightest gloss of brightness in it, and very fine in quality. She almost invariably dressed in black, with white linen cuffs turned up from the wrist, and a white linen turn-down collar fastened with a simple bow of mauve or violet riband. No ear-rings, no brooch, no ornaments of any kind visible, except an inch of the gold chain that held her watch.

"I thought we should have heard the news of your wedding before now, Olive," said Mr. Kelvin.

"The news of my wedding, Matthew! You will never hear that."

"Never is a long word, Olive. Such a nice, clever girl as you are can't be destined to live and die an old maid."

Olive's black eyebrows came together for a moment, and she tapped the floor impatiently with her foot.

"It almost seemed at one time, Olive, as if you and I would have come together," went on Kelvin, while his fingers toyed absently with a paper-knife. "Those were pleasant days--those old days on the sands at Redcar, when I was recovering from my sprain, and you did your best to nurse me. You used to read novels to me, and play to me on that vile old lodging-house piano; and out of gratitude I taught you cribbage and écarté. I have never enjoyed a holiday like that. Do you remember our long row by moonlight, and how we kissed as we stepped out of the boat on to the wet sands?"

No word from Olive: only a far-away look in her eyes, and the thin straight line of her lips looking thinner and straighter than before.

"And yet it all came to nothing!" resumed Kelvin, glancing carelessly at her. "It might have come to something: who knows? Only, two hours later, I was telegraphed for to London, and----

"And, as you say, Matthew," interrupted Olive, "it came to nothing. So much the better probably for both of us."

"Certainly so much the better for you, Olive; but whether or not for me, may be open to doubt. Why, even in those old days that now seem so far away, when you and I were girl and boy together, how fond we were of each other! Do you remember that afternoon when the swing broke down and I pitched on my head, and how you cried over my bruises as if your heart would break?"

"I have not forgotten," said Olive, in a low voice.

"Whenever I go into a chemist's shop, it takes me back in memory to your father's little surgery. How cleverly you used to help him with his drugs and mixtures! You seemed to know the contents of every gallipot and bottle almost as well as he did. If you had been a man you would have been a doctor."

"Possibly so," said Olive.

"I remember when Farmer Sinclair's dog bit you," continued Mr. Kelvin, "how bravely you bore the pain. The dog died a week after, and some people said you had poisoned it; but I scouted the idea."

"But I did poison the brute," replied Olive.

"You did?"

"Why not? It bit me in the wrist. I have the scar now. It was not fit to live."

Matthew Kelvin shrugged his shoulders, but did not rejoin.

"But why call up such reminiscences?" said Olive. "I want to hear about yourself. A rising man like you, Matthew--a man born to fight his way upward--how is it that you are still unmarried? A rich wife would do so much to help forward your ambitious schemes!"

"My ambitious schemes, indeed;" said Kelvin, with a sly twinkle in his eye. "What has a simple-minded country lawyer like me to do with ambition?"

"I know you too well, Matthew, not to feel sure that in ten years from this time you hope to be in a very different position."

Kelvin dropped the paper knife with which he had been playing, and gazed steadily at his cousin for a moment before speaking.

Her eyes met his unshrinkingly.

"You are right, Olive," he said, speaking 'gravely enough now. "I do< br> cherish some strangely bold dreams. I am an ambitious man; but you are the only person who seems to have divined that fact. I am far richer than the world knows of; and, but that it would almost break my mother's heart, I should have given up the old business years ago. In any case, I shall dispose of it before long. I can afford now to put it behind me. The first step in my ambition is to get into Parliament. And so you think I ought to get married, eh?"

"Yes--to a woman who could help you forward in your career by sympathizing with and comprehending the aims and objects of your ambition. No mere drawing-room doll must be your wife, but a woman fitted in heart and brain to be your companion."

"I won't say that you are not right," said Mr. Kelvin. "But in these matters men rarely do that which their friends think they ought to do. Cupid, you know, never went to school, and his problems cannot be worked out by rule-of-three."

"That may apply to a very young man, who lacks sense to know what is best for him and where to look for it; but not to you."

"That is just where you make a mistake, Olive. What will you say of my strength of mind--of my common sense--when I tell you that I have fallen in love with a simple country girl with nothing to recommend her save a pretty face and the finest eyes in the world?"

Olive Deane rose slowly to her feet. Her face grew whiter; her eyes blacker; her thick brows made a straight, unbroken line across her forehead. If looks had power to slay, Mr. Kelvin would have been annihilated on the spot. But his face was turned the other way. His own thoughts held him. He was gazing meditatively into the fire.

"And she--she accepted you, of course?" said Olive, at last, her voice hardly raised above a whisper.

"On the contrary, she rejected me."

"How I hate her for it!" Then she added, under her breath, "But I should have hated her worse if she had accepted him."

"You are the only person in the world, Olive, to whom I have breathed a word of this."

"Your confidence is safe with me, Matthew."

"I am sure of that, and it is a relief to me to talk to you. To you, Olive, I can always talk as to a sister."

"Yes--as to a sister," she said, with a slow nod of the head. Then she shivered slightly, as if with cold, and held out her hands to the blaze. "Go on, Matthew. You are sure of my sympathy in any case."

"Need I tell you any more, Olive?"

"I want you to tell me all about the affair, from beginning to end. You have piqued my curiosity, and now you must satisfy it."

Kelvin paused for a moment or two, as if to pull himself together.

"It seems strange to take even you into my confidence," he said, "and yet I feel as if I must tell some one--especially after what happened yesterday. To begin, then. I fell in love with this girl, Eleanor Lloyd--madly, desperately in love. Her father, Jacob Lloyd, was a well-to-do small landowner, whose affairs I managed for him. He seconded my suit, but, as I have said already, the girl rejected me. I am a patient man. I waited six months, and then I spoke to Miss Lloyd again--spoke more warmly and strongly than a less infatuated man would have done. Again she rejected me; this time in a way that I can neither forget nor forgive. I vowed that I would some day humble her haughty pride--and that day has come. Six months ago Jacob Lloyd died without a will. He had been speculating greatly for years, and Eleanor Lloyd, much to her own surprise and that of everyone else, found herself an heiress to the amount of something over twenty thousand pounds. When I first knew this, I thought that the day of my revenge had gone by for ever. But I was wrong. Such was the state of affairs yesterday: to-day they are very different."

"In what way are they different to-day?"

"Listen. Before administering to Mr. Lloyd's will, it was necessary that I should be in a position to prove that Miss Lloyd was really the person the world believed her to be. Jacob Lloyd left an immense mass of papers behind him, amongst which I was not long in finding his marriage certificate; but I failed to find any document having reference either to the birth or baptism of his daughter. Having some other important matters on hand just then, and there being no particular hurry in the affair, I did not prosecute my search very vigorously. I knew that about the time Miss Lloyd was born, Jacob Lloyd and his wife were travelling, either for health or pleasure, from place to place, and I had little doubt that when a proper search came to be made I should be able to find the information I wanted. A few days ago, however, there came into my hands certain documentary proofs, full and complete, of the truth of what I am now going to tell you. Eleanor Lloyd is not the daughter of Jacob Lloyd, nor any relation of his whatever. She is neither more nor less than a child adopted in infancy by him and his wife, they having no family of their own. The fortune left by Jacob Lloyd is the property of a nephew, Gerald Warburton, now living somewhere on the Continent. The woman who rejected me is an 'absolute pauper."

"A strange story--a very strange story, indeed, cousin Matthew!"

"Eleanor Lloyd has to come here two hours hence to sign certain deeds. She will enter this room a rich woman; she will leave it penniless!"

"And you will be revenged?"

"And I shall be revenged."

They were both silent, thinking their 'own thoughts.

"Where has she been living since the death of her father?" said Olive.

"She has been living very quietly at Bridgely, her own home."

"But has it not been her intention to take up a position in society, such as her supposed wealth would entitle her to occupy?"

"Lady Dudgeon, the wife of one of out Pembridge magnates, has taken her by the hand, and has constituted herself Miss Lloyd's chaperone. Eleanor is to accompany her ladyship to London in the spring, and will then make her début."

"To how many people is Miss Lloyd's true parentage known?"

"Not a soul in the world knows of it except myself--and you."

"Good. And your idea of revenge is to break this news to Miss Lloyd suddenly here--this very morning--and so crush her?"

"It is."

"A man's idea--poor and commonplace. Shall I tell you what mine--a woman's idea of revenge--would be in such a case?"

"You are a clever girl, Olive, and you pique my curiosity."

"Were I in your place, I would keep my discovery a profound secret for some time to come. I would let her for a little while taste all the pleasures that wealth can confer. I would let her go on till a life of ease and self-indulgence should have become as it were a second nature to her I would let her live on in blissful ignorance, of the thunderbolt you have in store for her till she has learned to love--perhaps even till she is engaged to be married."

"Eleanor married to another! I never thought of that," said Kelvin, under his breath.

"Then, when you think the comedy has lasted long enough, you shall go to her some day when she is surrounded by her fine friends--on her wedding morning itself, if it so please you--and, touching her on the shoulder, you shall say to her, 'Eleanor Lloyd, you are a beggar!' Her fall from wealth to poverty will then seem infinitely greater than it would do now, and yours will be a revenge worthy of the name."

"A devilish scheme, Olive, and one which only an Italian--or a woman--would have thought of!"

"You flatter me," said Olive, with a little lifting of the shoulders, and the ghost of a smile playing round her thin lips.

To say that Mr. Kelvin was thoroughly startled, is to say no more than the truth. Olive was right. There would be a refinement--a subtlety--about such a scheme which his own scheme altogether lacked. But, would it not be a mean and dastardly advantage to take of an innocent girl like Eleanor Lloyd? He got up from his chair and crossed to the window, and then walked slowly back again and sat down without a word. He was a man whom circumstances had never before tempted to step out of the beaten track of morality. The orthodox path had for him been paved with golden guineas. So far as he had seen, it was only reprobates who went astray, or were foolish enough to do anything which the general opinion of society condemned; simpletons, in fact, who could not understand that to do right--in a worldly point of view--was a far better paying game than to do its opposite. But Olive's words had found the weak place in his armour. His judgment did not fail him so utterly as to mislead him with regard to the meanness of what he meditated, but his own wishes and desires in the matter threw a sort of lime-light glamour over it, which made it seem something altogether different from what it really was.

"I'll do it, Olive," he said at last. "Yes; for good or for evil, I'll do it! I'll crush her proud spirit to the dust. I will humiliate her as she humiliated me. She shall suffer as I suffered. I will repay scorn with scorn: insult with insult. At the moment of her greatest triumph I will strip her of love, of wealth, of friendship; and show her to the world for what she really is--a pauper and an outcast!"

"Bravely spoken, Matthew! Don't let her soft looks or winning ways melt you from your purpose," said Olive, as she pushed back her chair. "And now I will go upstairs to my aunt."

Kelvin put his elbows on the table, and rested his face in his hands. Olive stood looking down at him for a moment. There was a tear in the corner of her eye, but a smile played round her mouth. She went up to him and laid her hand gently on his shoulder. "I shall see you later in the day, shall I not?"

"Yes--later in the day," he answered, absently, without looking up.

Olive went; and presently Mr. Piper's head was seen.

"Captain Dixon, sir, has sent for you. He's been taken ill and wants his will drawn up without delay."

Kelvin roused himself from his abstraction. "Another fool who has put off till the day of his death what he ought to have done years ago." He began to put his papers together, but still in an absent-minded way. "This is a damnable thing to do. I despise myself for promising to do it," he muttered. "And yet why should she not suffer? I have only to call to mind her words--her looks--that summer evening in the garden, when for the second time I pleaded my love before her: I have only to remember how she turned on me, as if I were a reptile, to feel my purpose harden within me, and every grain of pity melt out of my soul!"

[CHAPTER II.]

MISS BELLAMY.

The place was Miss Bellamy's lodgings in Ormond Square, Bayswater, and the time eight p.m., on a frosty evening in mid-winter. The people were two: Miss Bellamy herself, and her guest, Mr. Gerald Warburton.

Miss Bellamy was forty-five years of age, but looked older. She was spare in person and lengthy in nose, but still retained considerable traces of former good looks. She wore her hair, which was fast turning grey, in three old-fashioned curls, fastened down with combs on either side her face. She always wore silk in an afternoon, either brown or black--thick, rustling silk, made to wear and last, that would turn and dye, and then look nearly as good as new. Privately, Miss Bellamy used spectacles, but no one had ever seen her wear them except Eliza, the maid-of-all-work; and it was currently reported in the house that that young person had been bribed with two half-crowns never to divulge the terrible secret.

Gerald Warburton was a tall, dark-complexioned young fellow, some six or seven and twenty years old. He had a refined aquiline face, a pair of dark eyes, behind which a smile seemed always to be lurking, and black, silky hair. He had an easy, lounging, graceful manner, more common among Frenchmen or Italians than among us stiff-necked islanders; but then, he had lived so much abroad that he could hardly be said to belong to one country more than another. He possessed the happy faculty of adapting himself with ease to whatever place or persons he might be associated with. Whether living among Laps and reindeer, or smoking the pipe of peace in an Indian wigwam, he made himself equally at home; and what was still rarer, he made those with whom he happened to be feel that, for the time being, he was one of themselves. No Frenchman would have made a mistake as to his nationality, but in a walk down Regent Street or Pall Mall it is not improbable that half the people who noticed him would have set him down as a foreigner.

Just now he was employed, after a thoroughly English fashion, in the slow but sure consumption of a thoroughly English beefsteak. Occasionally he paused to refresh himself from the cup of fragrant tea at his elbow. Miss Bellamy sat opposite to him, looking on with admiring eyes. The more beefsteak he ate and the more tea he drank, the more Miss Bellamy admired him, from which we may conclude that she at least was thoroughly English. Gerald had just reached London, after twenty-four hours of unbroken travelling.

"I wish I could induce you to take another lump of sugar in your tea," said Miss Bellamy. "I never think that you get the real flavour of the leaf without plenty of sugar to assist it."

"There you must allow me to differ from you," said Gerald. "To put sugar in tea seems to me simply to spoil it." Miss Bellamy smiled and shook her head.

"Then you really have some faint recollection of having seen me when you were a child?" she said, after a pause.

"Yes, a very clear and distinct recollection of sitting on your knee and being fed with sugar plums."

"Ah, you are far too big now to care for sugar plums," said Miss Bellamy with a little sigh.

"Not at all too big. Only that I now require a different kind of sugar plum to keep me good, from those I cared for then."

"Why, you could not have been more than four years old!"

"I suppose that was about my age."

"And I never saw your poor dear mamma after that day!"

"I was just ten years old when I lost my mother," said Gerald, gravely.

"Four of us, there were, all bosom friends, and they called us the Four Graces in the little town where we were born and brought up; and now I am the only one that is left alive!" said Miss Bellamy, with a little quaver in her voice. "There was Ellen Barry; she married your uncle, Jacob Lloyd. Then there was Minna, Jacob's sister, who married your father. The third was Mary Greaves, who married Mr. Ambrose Murray. There seemed to be no husband left for me: but, thank Heaven, I have never felt the need of one!"

"It is never too late to make a change for the better," said Gerald, demurely, as he pushed away his plate.

"In my case it would have been for the worse. I should only have tormented some poor man's life out of him, and no one can lay that to my charge now."

As soon as Eliza had cleared the table, Miss Bellamy put a tiny copper kettle to simmer on the hob, and then produced a bottle of whisky, a lemon, and the other materials necessary for brewing a glass of punch. From another cupboard she brought out a box of cigars, which she had made a special journey into the City to buy. Being no judge of such articles, or their cost, she had brought back a box of what Mr. Piper would have called "duffers."

"Snuff-taking among gentlemen is going quite out of fashion nowadays," she had said to herself. "But I've no doubt Gerald is fond of a cigar, and I'll not trouble about the curtains for once."

"You don't seem in the least curious about the news I've got to tell you," said Miss Bellamy at last.

"No, I'm very comfortable," said Gerald as he sipped his grog, "and more than that a man need not wish to be."

"And yet you have come all the way from the south of France to hear it?"

"And yet I have come all the way from France to hear it! But I daresay it will keep a little longer."

"Just your poor mother's careless way of looking at things," said Miss Bellamy with a smile and a shake of the head. "Just the same easy way that I remember so well." She gazed into the fire for a few moments, her mind far away among the things of the past.

"How long did you say that your father has been dead, Gerald?"

"A little more than two years."

"And no reconciliation ever took place between your uncle Jacob and him?"

"None whatever. My father knew he was in the wrong, and that only served to embitter him still more against my uncle. My uncle could neither forgive nor forget my father's cruel treatment of my mother. I believe that if a woman's heart was ever broken, hers was."

"Don't talk in that way, Gerald. You must not forget that the man was your father."

"Can I ever forget it?" said Gerald, bitterly. "You were my mother's friend, and I tell you distinctly that my father broke her heart. The bitterest tears that ever I shed, or that I ever can shed in this world, were those with which I mourned her loss."

"You left home soon afterwards, did you not?"

"I was thirteen years old when I ran away to sea. By that time my father's tyranny had become unendurable. One victim had eluded him by dying, but I was still left. On the morning of my birthday I left home to seek my fortune, my sole earthly possessions being four-and-sixpence in money, two ally-taws, an apple, and a thick slice of bread."

"But you saw your father again after that?"

"On two occasions only, and then only at an hotel where we met by appointment. Time had softened my bitterness against him, but not his against me. Had I been a dog at his feet he could hardly have treated me worse. Reconciliation on the terms proposed by him was impossible."

"Were you not with him when he died?"

"No. He died rather suddenly, and I was abroad at the time."

"But at least, he surely did not forget you in his will?"

"He left everything to different charities in the town where he died. There is some talk of erecting a statue to him."

"My poor boy! And how have you contrived to live, all these years?"

"As I best could; but all things considered, I have not done amiss. I stopped at sea till I was seventeen; then I got a situation as a storekeeper on a South American hacienda, and there I stayed till I was twenty. Growing tired of that, I set up a photographic apparatus and travelled some thousands of miles with it, earning my bread as I went. Those were some of my happiest days. When I was of age, I came into possession of two hundred and fifty pounds a year, left me by my mother. Since that time I have lived chiefly on the Continent, pottering about among antiquities, buying now and again a bronze, a coin, or a tazza in a cheap market, and selling it in a dear one; writing at odd times an article for one or other of the magazines; having no settled home, leading a vagabond, Bohemian kind of existence, but by no means an unhappy one."

"You did hear that your uncle Lloyd was dead?"

"Quite by chance I saw the announcement in an English newspaper."

"And yet you never thought it worth your while to inquire whether he had remembered you in his will?"

"Knowing that he had a daughter, and that he had never seen me since I was six years old, it did not seem to me worth while to make any such inquiry."

"It might have been," said Miss Bellamy, drily.

"Your uncle died between seven and eight months ago," resumed Miss Bellamy. "I was away in Guernsey at the time, and did not hear of it till my return to London, some seven week's since. It was a great shock to me. Your aunt and I had been like sisters, and after her death the friendship between Mr. Lloyd and myself remained unbroken. It is only about eighteen months since I left Pembridge and came to reside in London; and up to that time I was a frequent visitor at Bridgeley, the place where he lived for the last eighteen years. Several years ago Mr. Lloyd put into my hands a sealed packet of papers, addressed to a certain person, and labelled 'not to be opened till after my death,' with a request that I should keep it till that event took place, and then forward it to the person to whom it was addressed. At the time that he placed the packet in my hands he told me of what the contents consisted. The chief document was a statement of certain events in his personal history which were already well known to me, and about which he and I had often talked. As already explained, I did not know of your uncle's death till six or seven weeks ago, consequently it was not till six months after that event that the packet I held could reach the person to whom it belonged. That person ought to have acted on the contents of the packet without a day's unnecessary delay. Seven weeks have gone by, and as yet he has taken no action in the matter. It is for that very reason that I sent you so imperative a summons to come to me here as quickly as possible."

Gerald stared across the table at Miss Bellamy as if he could hardly believe the evidence of his ears. "But in what possible way can all this affect me?" he asked.

"All this affects you very nearly indeed," answered Miss Bellamy. "Your uncle Lloyd had been a prudent man. When he was dead, it was discovered that he was worth something over twenty thousand pounds. He died without a will, and you are his heir-at-law."

"I my uncle's heir-at-law!" said Gerald, with a little laugh. "How can that be, my dear Miss Bellamy? You seem to forget that my uncle had a daughter."

"Your uncle had no daughter."

Gerald sat speechless for several seconds. "If my cousin Eleanor is dead, I certainly never heard of it."

"You never had a cousin Eleanor."

"My dear Miss Bellamy," said Gerald, "will you kindly run a pin into my arm, so that I may make sure I am not dreaming."

"You are not dreaming, Gerald Warburton. The young lady you have hitherto believed to be your cousin, is no relation whatever to you, neither was she any relation to your uncle, Jacob Lloyd. She was simply his adopted daughter."

After hearing this startling news, Gerald's silence was not to be wondered at. He woke up like a man rousing himself from a dream.

"You have all along known what you have just told me, Miss Bellamy?"

"Yes, I have known it all along. But to no one else was the secret ever imparted by your uncle and aunt. Eleanor was adopted by them when she was quite a little thing, and when they were living in a town more than two hundred miles away from Pembridge. For certain reasons they gave her their own name. She never knew, she does not know now, that they were not really her parents. She loved them as such, and they could not have thought more tenderly of her had she been that which the world believed her to be. But Jacob Lloyd was not only a kind-hearted man: he was a just one. He shrank from revealing the truth to Eleanor while he was alive, but it was imperatively necessary, for certain reasons which I may one day explain to you, that she should become cognisant of everything after his death. Hence the sealed packet: which contains a duly authenticated statement of these facts."

"You take my breath away! There is nothing in the 'Arabian Nights' half so exciting," exclaimed Gerald.

"The one unfortunate feature of the case is this," resumed Miss Bellamy. "From what your uncle hinted to me at different times, I am perfectly convinced that it was his intention to provide very handsomely for Eleanor. Unfortunately, he kept putting off the making of his will till it was too late. One morning he was found dead in his bed, and the girl whom he brought up and cherished as his own child is left an absolute beggar."

A tear stood in Miss Bellamy's eye, as she ceased speaking. "There need be no trouble on that score," said Gerald emphatically. "If, as you state, I am my uncle's heir, and the young lady, through an unwise oversight, has been left penniless, why, then, my duty lies clearly before me. Whatever may be the amount that will come to me from my uncle, whether it be a hundred pounds or twenty thousand pounds, this young lady, whom I cannot help looking upon as my cousin, is clearly entitled to half of it. And half of it she shall have, as sure as my name is Gerald Warburton!"

"Don't make any rash promises, Gerald, in the heat of the moment. You may regret them afterwards."

"Such a promise as this I could never regret. I should indeed be base."

"It was certainly not in my province to send for you, and tell you all that you have just now heard," said Miss Bellamy, "and, under other circumstances I should not have thought of doing so. The lawyer in whose hands was the management of Mr. Lloyd's affairs is the proper person to have communicated with you. He ought to have broken the news to Eleanor, and have communicated with you at the same time. The sealed packet has been in his hands for upwards of seven weeks, and, as yet, he has done neither one thing nor the other."

"May I ask how you know that he has not yet broken the news to Miss Lloyd?"

"Because I had a letter from Eleanor only three days ago, written from Stammars, the residence of Sir Thomas Dudgeon, where I find that she is visiting. She talks of coming to London with Lady Dudgeon very shortly, and says that her ladyship treats her quite as one of the family--proof positive that Eleanor is still living on in happy ignorance."

"Perhaps the lawyer did not know where to find me? Perhaps he has delayed breaking the news to Eleanor on that account?"

"No: I suspect that there is some other motive at the bottom of Matthew Kelvin's strange silence. He has sense enough to know that any letter addressed to you at Brexly would be sure to find you. He knows all about Brexly, and the quarrel between your father and Mr. Lloyd."

"Kelvin--Matthew Kelvin?" said Gerald, musingly. "I seem to have heard that name before."

"You can readily understand why I never breathed even the faintest suspicion of the truth to Eleanor. Such a revelation would be too painful for me to make to a person whom I have known and loved from a child. Therefore I have sent for you: and my advice is that you at once go down to Pembridge, see Mr. Kelvin, give him to understand that you know everything, and demand from him an explanation of his singular silence."

"Is this Mr. Kelvin aware that you have any knowledge of the real facts of the case?"

"No: I am convinced that he has no such knowledge."

"His silence certainly seems rather singular; but we shall probably find on inquiry that he has been ill, or away from home, or something of that sort."

Miss Bellamy shook her head. She was far from being convinced. "A clever schemer, but not to be trusted," she said, presumably with reference to Kelvin.

"But about this cousin who is no cousin--about Eleanor," said Gerald. "You know that I have never seen her. What is she like? Is she good-looking? Is she nice?"

"I don't know what you young gentlemen call nice," said Miss Bellamy. "I don't see young ladies with the eyes that you see them with. Eleanor Lloyd is a dear good girl; slightly impulsive, perhaps, but open and honest as the day--a girl that any man might be proud to call his wife."

Gerald pursed his lips a little. Miss Bellamy's outline was too vague to take his fancy. "A country-bred hoyden, evidently, with red cheeks and large hands, and a healthy appetite," he muttered to himself.

"There is one point that you have not enlightened me upon," he said presently. "But perhaps it is one on which I have no right to question you."

"Tell me what it is."

"You say that Eleanor, when an infant, was adopted by my uncle and aunt. She must have been somebody's child. You have not yet told me who and what her friends were."

Miss Bellamy's face became more grave and troubled than Gerald had yet seen it. "Pardon me," he said, "if I have unintentionally wounded your feelings."

"You have not wounded my feelings. You have only brought back the memory of a very old trouble. But, as I have told you so much, I see no reason why I should not tell you the remainder. You must learn the story sooner or later, and you had better hear it from my lips than from the lips of anyone else."

"I am so sorry----" began Gerald.

"Pray don't say another word. How were you to know?--Yes, Gerald Warburton, I will tell you the story, painful though it be--but not now. You have heard enough to ponder over and dream about for one night. I shall just mix you one more glass, and then I shall send you oil to bed."

[CHAPTER III.]

THE STORY OF THE MURDER.

Gerald Warburton had not been in London for some time, and two or three days passed quickly and pleasantly away in hunting up old acquaintances, and in seeing sights that he had never seen before. Besides which, he wanted a little time to familiarize himself with the thought of his new-found fortune. By nature and disposition, he was one of the least worldly of men, and the wandering life he had led for many years had tended to make him more unpractical than he might otherwise have been. For money, as money, he cared nothing: nay, he told himself that he thoroughly despised it: but that was probably an exaggeration. He was one of those men who never think of saving--of putting away for a "rainy day," as the phrase goes--and who never can save, not even when their incomes are doubled or trebled, unless some pressure of an extreme kind (a thrifty wife, for instance, who has a will of her own) is brought to bear upon them.

As a matter of course, despite all Gerald's unpracticality, one of the most frequent thoughts in his mind just now--a thought turned over and over in his brain during his long solitary walks through London streets--was what he should do with the ten thousand pounds that was coming to him. He had quite made up his mind that the other ten thousand should be handed over to his cousin Eleanor, as he could not help still calling her to himself. Had anyone asked him a few days previously whether ten thousand pounds would have satisfied all his earthly wants from a monetary point of view, he would have laughed, and answered that half that sum would satisfy his every wish. And yet, now, when so much money was really coming to him, it was quite remarkable what a long list of things that might almost be considered indispensable he could count up in his mind. Instead of ten thousand, thirty or forty would be needed before he could get through even the first few pages of his mental catalogue.

But having got so far, Gerald was obliged to pull himself up suddenly. He called to mind that it was not ten thousand a year that he was coming into, but simply one sum of that value; and that, however pleasant it might be to think how easily and agreeably to himself he could have spent the whole of it in the course of a few days in London or Paris, it would be the height of folly so to do; such an act would indeed be killing the goose with the golden eggs. No: by judiciously investing his ten thousand pounds, he might secure for himself a comfortable little income of five hundred a year, which sum, when added to the income he could already call his own, would serve to make life tolerably pleasant in time to come. He would live in Paris, of course: somehow he always felt more at home in Paris than in London. He would be able to dabble a little more than heretofore among his favourite bronzes, and coins, and old cups and saucers. He could afford a stall rather oftener at the Opéra or the Français. He would drink a choicer wine to his dinner, and honour his wine with a better repast. A month or six weeks among the glaciers, or in the Black Forest, need no longer be a serious question with him on the score of expense. Altogether, he felt very well satisfied with the pleasant future that seemed looming before him. That he was somewhat of an Epicurean, addicted to self-indulgence, and hardly knowing the meaning of self-sacrifice, cannot be denied; but it is to be hoped that we shall not altogether lose our interest in him on that account. He had many vague noble impulses, as most of us have at one time or another; but, as yet, no necessity had arisen in his life for testing whether those impulses were strong enough to bear chaining down to the hard rough usages of everyday life.

Often in his solitary musings he would ask himself of what possible use or service he was to the world in which he found himself; and now and then a dim idea would trouble him for awhile that there were many kinds of wheels turning in it, to one or other of which, if he were so minded, he might put his shoulder with some little profit both to himself and his fellows. But when next day came, it would find him leading his old slip-shod far-niente kind of life. Amid the glitter and bustle of the Boulevards, noble impulses and vague ideals seemed of the stuff that poets rave about, and girls weave into the tissue of their dreams.

The more Miss Bellamy saw of Gerald, the better she liked him. The easy geniality of his disposition, and the soft courtesy of his manner, were alike pleasing to her. Gerald, on his side, conceived a very warm regard for the true-hearted lady who had been his dead mother's dearest friend. He soon got into the way of calling her "aunt"; the relationship seemed a natural one between them, and the assumption was satisfactory to both.

Miss Bellamy's sitting-room was a pleasant apartment, with three French windows that opened on a balcony and that looked out on the grass and trees of the square. It was pleasantly furnished, too; in a somewhat old-fashioned style it must be admitted; but then, Miss Bellamy herself was somewhat old-fashioned, so that there was nothing incongruous between the room and its mistress.

One of Miss Bellamy's most valued possessions was a portrait of her uncle, the late Dean of Winstead. It was a three-quarter-length in oils, with a very ornate frame, and it occupied a post of honour, being hung immediately over the chimney-piece, where it at once attracted the eyes of all who came into the room. The Dean, a very atrabilious-looking gentleman, with a bald head, was represented as seated at a table with one elbow resting on three thick volumes of his own sermons, and with his thumb and forefinger pressed lightly against his cheek. Pens and ink were upon the table, and the Dean was presumably thinking out another of his discourses. Several copies of his sermons, together with an income of three hundred a year, had come to Miss Bellamy on the death of her reverend relative, so that she had ample reasons for cherishing his memory. You could not pay Miss Bellamy a higher compliment than to tell her that there was a strong family likeness between herself and her uncle, and her admiration for him rose almost to the height of hero-worship. She made a point of reading one of his sermons through every Sunday of her life. Her firm belief was that there were no such eloquent and soul-stirring appeals to an unawakened conscience to be met with in the lukewarm religious literature of to-day, and that you must go back to the days of Jeremy Taylor to find anything like their equal. From long habit, when sitting near a table, either thinking or working, she naturally fell into the same pose as that of the Dean in his picture--her elbow resting on the table, her thumb and forefinger pressed against her cheek--and those who knew her weakness--her friends, her toadies, and her pensioners--whenever they saw her sitting thus, would not fail to remark to her how like she was to her Very Reverend Uncle.

However deeply Gerald's curiosity might be excited to hear the sequel of the strange story which Miss Bellamy had promised to tell him, the subject was evidently so painful a one to her that he could not venture even to hint at his wishes in the matter. There was nothing for it but to wait patiently till she should feel in the humour to tell him what he wanted to know. He was in no particular hurry to take the journey to Pembridge, and a few days more or less in London were of no consequence to him. She had promised to tell him all about Eleanor, and he felt sure that she would not break her promise. In so thinking Gerald was quite right, but it was not until the evening of the fourth day after his arrival in London that Miss Bellamy recurred to the subject in any way.

"I will tell you to-morrow," she said to him that evening, as he shook hands with her at parting. "And then you must get down to Pembridge as quickly as you can. You have lingered in London quite long enough."

Miss Bellamy was a believer in suppers. In fact, she still stuck to the old-fashioned hours for meals to which she had been accustomed when a girl at home: dinner at half-past one, tea at six, and supper at ten. In such a case supper is generally the pleasantest and most sociable meal of all; people then seem more inclined for talking than at any other time, and subjects that one hardly cares to mention during the day seem to assimilate themselves quite naturally to the time and place, and come to be discussed without much difficulty.

Supper was over, and the cloth removed. The night being cold, Miss Bellamy had drawn her easy chair up close to the fire, and now sat resting her chin in the palm of one hand, and gazing silently into the glowing embers. Gerald, prepared to listen to a sad story, had thrown himself into an easy chair opposite Miss Bellamy on the other side of the fire. At length Miss Bellamy roused herself with a sigh, and turned on Gerald a face that seemed suddenly to have grown five years older.

"Twenty years ago, this very month," she said, "a terrible murder was committed. All murders are terrible in a greater or a lesser degree, but this one was terrible, not merely from the crime itself, but from the after consequences that arose out of it. The name of the murdered man was Paul Stilling; the place where he was murdered was the Pelican Hotel, Tewkesbury; and the name of the man who was accused of the crime was Ambrose Murray."

Gerald started.

"Stilling was a young man, the junior partner in a firm of Birmingham jewellers. At the time he met with his death he had property on him of the value of four thousand pounds. It was for the sake of this property that he was murdered. He was found dead in his bed, stabbed to the heart. In the portmanteau of Ambrose Murray, who was stopping that night in the same hotel, was found a bracelet of the value of two hundred pounds, which had belonged to Stilling. No other portion of the property has, to my knowledge, ever been found from that day to this.

"Ambrose Murray was arrested, committed for wilful murder, subsequently tried, and condemned to death in due form," went on Miss Bellamy. "Before, however, the time had come for carrying out the last dread sentence of the law, symptoms of undoubted insanity manifested themselves in the condemned man, and his sentence had to be commuted into imprisonment for life."

Gerald sat lost in wonder.

"So far, I daresay, you see nothing uncommon in my story--nothing that has any particular interest for you. But when I tell you that Ambrose Murray's wife was my intimate friend, as well as being the intimate friend of your mother and your aunt--when I tell you that Ambrose Murray's wife died heart-broken within twelve months of the time her husband was taken from her; when I tell you that the child adopted by your uncle and aunt was none other than the child of a man condemned to death for murder, and that Eleanor Lloyd is in reality Eleanor Murray--when I tell you all this, you cannot say that my story has no interest for you, you cannot say that I have claimed your attention without sufficient warrant for so doing."

"What a strange chapter of family history you have opened for me," exclaimed Gerald. "What you told me the other night seemed to me sufficiently wonderful, but this is stranger than all. Poor Eleanor poor girl!" he added. "Although I have never seen her, I have always felt that when we did meet I should come to regard her as a sister; and now you tell me that I cannot even claim her as a cousin."

Miss Bellamy said nothing. She was gazing into the fire again, but with thoughts that were far away. She was roused at last by a direct question from Gerald.

"How much of the story you have just told me will be known to this Mr. Kelvin, when he comes to open the sealed packet which you sent him by my uncle's instructions?"

"He will know that Eleanor is no relation of your uncle, and that is the news which he will have to break to her. Inside his own packet is a second packet, sealed up and directed to Eleanor, and to be opened by her alone. This packet will tell her everything."

"What a shock for a girl like her!"

"You are right, Gerald; it will be a terrible shock. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I have been spared the pain of enlightening her."

"About her father. Did you believe him to be guilty or innocent?"

"I would stake my life on Ambrose Murray's innocence. No one who ever knew him would for a single moment believe in his guilt. He was one of the gentlest-hearted men I ever met. There was something almost feminine about him. His was, indeed, a most lovable disposition."

"What was he by profession?"

"A doctor. He had been staying at Malvern for the benefit of his health--he was always delicate--and was walking home by easy stages. He had got as far as Tewkesbury, and happened to be stopping there on that one particular night when Paul Stilling was murdered."

"Is he still alive?"

"He is. I saw him only a few months ago. In fact, I have been in the habit of visiting him at intervals ever since his wife's death. For many years he did not know me. But gradually--imperceptibly almost--his reason has come back to him, and he is now, and has been for the last five years, as sane as either you or I."

"Is there no prospect of his ever being released?"

"None whatever, I'm afraid. You see, the crime--assuming him for the moment to have been guilty of it--was committed before his insanity declared itself. It is not as though he had been a lunatic at the time of the murder."

"What a terrible fate! Does he know that his daughter is alive?"

"He knows everything. It is at his own wish that Eleanor has been kept in ignorance of her real parentage for so long a time; and, had Jacob Lloyd lived, the secret would not have been told her even now."

"But how did it happen that none of the gossips of Pembridge found out that Eleanor was not my uncle's child?"

"It was not till about a year after their adoption of the child that your uncle, aunt, and Eleanor made their first appearance at Pembridge, your uncle having just bought Bridgeley, where he lived till he died. They had come from a town two hundred miles away, and did not know a soul in the place."

"Has no rumour of the truth ever crept out?"

"Never, I am certain."

"And Eleanor herself has never had any suspicion?"

"Not the slightest, so far as I know. How should she? She was but eleven months old when her mother died: far too young to have the faintest recollection of anything that happened."

At this moment, they both heard a knock at the front door, but without paying any heed to it. Miss Bellamy was never troubled with late visitors. There were other lodgers in the house, and the knock could come from no one in search of her.

But presently came the sound of footsteps on the stairs, followed by Eliza's timid tap at the room door. "Come in," said Miss Bellamy, a little more sharply than usual. She felt annoyed that her tête-à-tête with Gerald should be thus interrupted.

The door opened, and Eliza's head was intruded. "A gentleman to see you, ma'am. He won't give no name."

"A gentleman to see me!" said Miss Bellamy, as she started up in surprise. She felt slightly scandalised to think that any gentleman should be so indiscreet as to call upon her at such an hour as eleven o'clock p.m.

But by this time the gentleman, who followed the girl upstairs, had pushed himself into the room; and Eliza, a little frightened at his audacity, slunk timidly out and shut the door quickly behind her.

"May I ask, sir----" began Miss Bellamy frigidly, and then something in the stranger's face suddenly froze her into silence.

And yet not much of his face was to be seen, all the lower part of it being hidden in the folds of a large plaid, and the upper part shaded by the broad brim of a soft felt hat, from under which looked forth two dark melancholy eyes of singular beauty. Miss Bellamy's hands began to tremble, and she leaned against the table for support.

The stranger did not speak, but swiftly unrolling his plaid, let it half drop to the ground and took off his hat. Miss Bellamy's face grew as white as death. She started forward; and then she shrank back, all a-tremble. Gerald Warburton's eyes turned from the stranger to her, and then went back to the man; a tall, thin, frail-looking figure, with a long white beard, and white hair that fell over the collar of his coat.

"Sir--you--you are either Ambrose Murray or his ghost!" slowly gasped Miss Bellamy. "In Heaven's name, what has brought you here?"

"I have escaped!" exclaimed the man in a low, hoarse voice. "Escaped at last!"

He clasped his hands suddenly above his head, gave utterance to a short, sharp, hysterical laugh, staggered forward a few steps, and would have fallen to the ground had not Gerald Warburton caught him in his arms.

[CHAPTER IV.]

A BROKEN LIFE.

Gerald Warburton did not leave London for Pembridge next day, nor for several days afterwards.

When Ambrose Murray learned that Gerald was the nephew of Jacob Lloyd, the man who had so befriended his daughter, and that Gerald's mother was the Minna Lloyd whom he remembered, and who had been one of his wife's dearest friends, he clung to him as a man who is being carried away by the tide will cling to the life-buoy which his hands have unexpectedly grasped. And, indeed, this man, who, after having been closely shut up from the world for twenty years, found himself thrown again on the great stream of life, seemed as helpless and bewildered as some weak swimmer who contends in vain against the resistless tide that is fast carrying him away. He was more than bewildered--he was frightened by the vast whirlpool of London life in which he found himself such an infinitesimal atom. There had always been an element of weakness, of vacillation, in his character. He had always been one of those men who are inevitably crushed into the background in the great rush and struggle for life with which they are mixed up--men not lacking talent, but simply from want of energy and physique, and power of elbowing their way to the front, drifting year after year helplessly into the rear, seeing themselves distanced by younger and fleeter feet, and seeing the prizes that in the flush of youth seemed so close at hand and easy of attainment, receding hopelessly into the distance. Sometimes disappointment and bitterness of heart sour such men for ever; sometimes they sink into mere dreamers and idealists, who console themselves for the buffets of the real world by living as much as possible an inner life of their own, in which destiny is carved out by them in accordance with their varying fancies, and in which they grasp--in imagination--whatever prizes please them best.

If at twenty-five years of age Ambrose. Murray had been ill-fitted to withstand the rubs of fortune, it was hardly to be expected that his armour should be stronger or his sword brighter after his twenty years of incarceration from the world. It was, indeed, evident from the first, both to Miss Bellamy and to Gerald, that he would have to be treated in many ways as if he were neither more nor less than a grown-up child. He had forgotten so much, and he had so much to learn! The march of events had left him so terribly in the rear, that it seemed doubtful whether he would ever be able to reach the world's full stride again.

Then, again, as time went on and they grew to know him better, a doubt would sometimes make itself felt, both with Miss Bellamy and Gerald, as to whether some shadow of the terrible affliction which had overclouded his mind for years did not linger there still. On ninety-nine topics out of a hundred he would talk as sanely and sensibly as anyone; but the introduction of the hundredth would elicit from him some observation so bizarre, so outrageous, or, on the other hand, so childishly simple, that his hearers could only look at each other in dismay, and change the conversation as quickly as possible.

Ambrose Murray's chief employment in prison since the recovery of his reason would seem to have been the cleaning and repairing of all the clocks and watches in the establishment. When a boy of twelve at home he had been able to take his father's watch to pieces, clean it, and put it together again. The delicacy of the workmanship, and the exquisite adjustment of each part with reference to the whole, had for him, even at that age, a fascination, a charm, that might have led him, step by step, into the highest walks of mechanics, had not a stern parental will decided for him that he was born to be a doctor.

As a result of his labours on the prison clocks and watches, Mr. Murray had contrived, little by little, to save up the sum of twelve pounds. Ten pounds of this amount he placed in the hands of Miss Bellamy the morning after his arrival in London, with a request that she would act as cashier for him in every way as far as the money would go, and that when it was exhausted she would not fail to let him know--although what he would have done in such a case to replenish his purse it would have puzzled him to say. Just then, however, no such consideration troubled his mind. In his best days he had not understood or troubled himself much about money matters, and nowadays ten pounds seemed amply sufficient to last him for an indefinite length of time. And it did last him a very long time, thanks to Miss Bellamy's remarkable management; for when, at the end of two months, he said to her, "I think the ten pounds must be getting rather low, Maria"--he had always been in the habit of calling Miss Bellamy by her Christian name--she only answered with a smile: "That shows how little you know about money matters. There's more than half of it left yet." Ambrose Murray was quite content to think that it was so, and troubled himself no further about the matter.

That first night Gerald took him to his own rooms; but the question that had to be settled next morning was, where he should live for the future. In London he would undoubtedly be safer from pursuit and detection than in the country; besides which, he wanted to be near Miss Bellamy. She was the one link that connected him with the past: away from her he would have felt as helpless as a being who had wandered by mistake on to a wrong planet. As it happened, there were two furnished rooms to be let in the next house to that in which Miss Bellamy lodged, and it was decided that there, for awhile at least, the fugitive should pitch his tent. It was highly necessary that he should both change his name and disguise himself to a certain extent--not that Murray himself would ever have thought of adopting any such precautions, but would have gone about as openly and unsuspiciously as the freest man in England. That some pursuit would be attempted, that some effort would be made to recapture him, there could be no manner of doubt; and both to Miss Bellamy and Gerald it seemed quite evident that unless some few obvious precautions should be adopted, his whereabouts could not long remain unknown to the police. It was accordingly agreed that for the time being he should change his name from Murray to Greaves--that having been his wife's maiden name; and that he should pass as a cousin of Miss Bellamy, who had come to London to look after some property that was in Chancery. The next thing to do was to reduce the length of his flowing white beard and of his long white hair. What was left was then died black--its normal colour--and this simple change was enough to disguise him beyond the chance of recognition by any one who had only seen him as he was when he first took off his hat and plaid in Miss Bellamy's room.

As he was still barely fifty years old, there was nothing incongruous about his black hair and beard; and when his sartorial needs had been duly attended to, the world saw him as a rather tall, frail-looking man, with a thin, scholar-like face, who stooped a little as he walked, and who seemed ever more intent on his own secret thoughts than concerned with anything that was passing around him. Not that the world, as exemplified by Ormond Square and its neighbourhood, ever saw much of him. He rarely stirred out of the house till dusk, and more frequently than mot it was ten or eleven at night before he crossed the threshold, except when he went to see Miss Bellamy--which he did every day; but as he had only to step from one house into the next in order to do that, it could hardly be considered as going out. The noise and bustle of the streets distracted him--even daylight itself, except when it came winnowed through the interstices of the venetian blinds, seemed distasteful to him. The friendly silence of the long, dark suburban streets, where were no gaudy shops or glaring gin-palaces, suited him best. There he could think his inmost thoughts and commune with his strange fancies in silence and peace. There he could feel sure that no keen eyes were prying into his, and trying to find therein some gleam, some lurking trace, of that terrible demon whose fingers had scorched his brain once already, and who still, at times, seemed terribly near at hand, waiting--as in his childish days he believed robbers used to wait for him--round some dark corner no great distance away, with his black cloak in his hands, ready to throw it over his victim's head the moment he passed that way.

After awhile both Gerald and Miss Bellamy were able to tell when this demon was haunting Murray's steps more closely than common. At such times, when not conversing with others, he would talk inaudibly to himself for hours together, unless interrupted, his lips moving as though in earnest assertion, but no sound coming therefrom. At such times, when walking out, he would turn his head slowly from side to side, but without raising his eyes from the ground, as though in search of something.

On the first occasion that Gerald noticed this peculiarity, they were walking together, and he said to him, "Have you lost something, Mr. Murray?"

Murray started, looked up, smiled, and pressed his companion's arm more closely.

"Yes, I have lost something," he said, with a little sigh. "I don't exactly know what it is--but it's something. I shall find it again one of these days, I do not doubt."

His voice was full of pathos as he spoke. Gerald never mentioned the subject again.

"Now that you are settled for some time to come, I presume that you will not be long before you break the news to Eleanor? You must remember that as yet she knows absolutely nothing."

So spoke Miss Bellamy to Ambrose Murray one evening across the tea-table. Gerald was also there. This was the first time that Eleanor's name had been mentioned since Murray's arrival, and Miss Bellamy could bear the father's strange silence no longer.

"It is not my intention to tell my daughter anything at present. Why should I?" said Murray.

Miss Bellamy looked at him as though she could scarcely believe her ears.

"Why should you not?" she said. "It seems to me that one of the very first things you ought to do is to tell everything to your only child."

Murray stirred his tea slowly for a few moments before answering.

"Eleanor is well and comfortable, I hope," he said at last.

"Quite well and quite comfortable."

"She is still living among her friends at Pembridge?"

"She is."

"And wants for nothing?"

"And wants for nothing, so far as I know."

"That is well. And she still believes that Jacob Lloyd was her father?"

"I am not aware that anyone has undeceived her on that point."

"Why should I be the first to undeceive her?"

"Jacob Lloyd is dead. You are her father, and you are now a free man."

"Precisely so. I am a free man because I have broken my prison bonds. I am a free man who is liable to recapture at any moment. I am a free man to whose name the stain of murder still clings."

"But Eleanor would never believe you to be guilty, as I have never believed you, to be guilty."

"Possibly not. But why distress her by making her the recipient of so painful a revelation?"

"She is your daughter, and she has a right to be told the truth."

"As you say, she is my daughter, and perhaps she has a right to be told. But seeing that her ignorance has lasted for twenty years, it cannot matter greatly if she be kept in the same ignorance for a few weeks or a few months longer. That ultimately everything will be told her, I do not doubt; but not now--not till--till----" Overcome by some hidden emotion, he faltered, and was dumb.

"Not till what, Ambrose?" said Miss Bellamy very gently.

"Not till I have proved my innocence to the world."

Miss Bellamy sighed, but said nothing. If Eleanor was not to be told her father's story till his innocence should be proved, then would it remain untold for ever.

"Do not think," resumed Ambrose Murray, "that I have not thought over, times without number, all that can be urged either for or against the telling of my story to Eleanor, but I have come to the conclusion that for a little while to come it had better remain untold."

"And do you think, Ambrose, that after such a length of time there is any chance, however remote, of your being able to prove your innocence?"

"I don't know: I cannot tell. I can simply hope. The world is full of apparent wonders, and Providence works out its ends in a way that we cannot fathom. I know how vain and futile must seem to you the prospect of my ever being able to prove my innocence; but it is for that purpose, and that alone, that I am now here. Had I not been sustained by such a hope, I believe that I should not have cared to seek my freedom. Years since, the desire for freedom, for freedom's own sake, burnt itself to a cinder in my heart by its very intensity. I came at last to cling to the narrow walls that had been my home for so long a time, as a limpet clings to its boulder on the beach, neither knowing nor caring for any horizon beyond its own few inches of rock and sand. How is it possible for me to make you comprehend what simple things may become dear to a man who has been cut off from the world as I have been? The pair of robins that I used to feed, the candy-tuft that grew outside my bedroom window, the head-warder's motherless child, the laurel-walk in the garden, my box of tools--the source of so many happy hours: it was not without a pang of bitter anguish that I cast these behind me for ever, even though freedom itself was beckoning to me from the hill-tops!

"But an inner voice seemed to urge me forward, a will superior to my own seemed to guide my footsteps. In saying this I may be merely the victim of self-delusion. My hopes and wishes in this matter may have no better foundation than a few incoherent dreams. Once already my mind has been like an empty room that is open to every wind that blows; and sometimes even now--Heaven help me!--I seem as if I had hardly strength enough to hold the door against the troop of demons that press and hustle to get in, and complain that I have dispossessed them of their home. But be this as it may, I am held and sustained by the hope of which I have spoken. It may prove to be nothing better than a broken reed, but till it is so proved, I will in no wise let it go: and till that time shall come, my daughter and I must remain to each other the strangers we have hitherto been."