Helen Vardon's confession
brought me back to some sense of my position; though, to be sure, what
I had overheard concerned me as much as it concerned anyone. Quickly
slipping the book back on the shelf, I ran on tip-toe past the study
door and up the stairs; and even then I was none too soon; for, as I
halted on the threshold of my room, the study door opened again and
the two men strode across the hall.
“You are taking a ridiculously wrong-headed view of the whole affair,”
I heard Mr. Otway declare.
“Possibly,” my father replied, stiffly. “And if I do, I am prepared to
take the consequences.”
“Only the consequences won’t fall on you alone,” said Mr. Otway.
“Good afternoon,” was the dry and final response. Then the hall door
slammed, and I heard my father walk slowly back to the study.
Chapter II.
Atra Cura
As the study door closed, I sank into my easy chair with a sudden
feeling of faintness and bodily exhaustion. The momentary shock of
horror and amazement had passed, giving place to a numb and chilly
dread that made me feel sick and weak. Scraps of the astounding
conversation that I had heard came back to me, incoherently and yet
with hideous distinctness, like the whisperings of some malignant
spirit. Disjointed words and phrases repeated themselves again and
again, almost meaninglessly, but still with a vague undertone of
menace.
And then, by degrees, as I sat gazing at the blurred pages of the book
that still lay open on the reading-stand, my thoughts grew less
chaotic; the words of that dreadful dialogue arranged themselves anew,
and I began with more distinctness to gather their meaning.
“Seven years penal servitude!”
That was the dreadful refrain of this song of doom that was being
chanted in my ear by the Spirit of Misfortune. And ruin--black,
hideous ruin--for my father and me was the burden of that refrain; no
mere loss, no paltry plunge into endurable poverty, but a descent into
the bottomless pit of social degradation, from which there could be no
hope of resurrection.
Nor was this the worst. For, gradually, as my thoughts began to
arrange themselves into a coherent sequence, I realised that it was
not the implied poverty and social disgrace that gave to that sentence
its dreadful import. Poverty might be overcome, and disgrace could be
endured; but when I thought of my father dragged away from me to be
cast into gaol; when, in my mind’s eye, I saw him clothed in the
horrible livery of shame, wearing out his life within the prison walls
and behind the fast-bolted prison doors; the thought and the imagined
sight were unendurable. It was death--for him at least; for he was not
a strong man. And for me?
Here, of a sudden, there came back to me the rather enigmatical speech
of my father’s, which I had heard without at the moment fully
comprehending, but which I now recalled with a shock of alarm.
“Please bear in mind, Otway, that I am not a convict yet, and possibly
may never be one. There are certain conceivable alternatives, you
know.”
The cryptic utterance had evidently puzzled Mr. Otway, who had clearly
misunderstood it as referring to some unknown resources. To me, no
such misunderstanding was possible. More than once my father had
discussed with me the ethics of suicide, on which subject he held
somewhat unorthodox opinions; and I now recalled with terrible
distinctness the very definite statement that he had made on the
occasion of our last talk. “For my part,” he had said, “if I should
ever find myself in such a position that the continuance of life was
less desirable than its termination, I should not hesitate to take the
appropriate measures for exchanging the less desirable state for the
more desirable.”
In the face of such a statement, made, as I felt sure, in all
sincerity and with sober judgment, how could I entertain any doubt as
to the interpretation of that reference to “certain conceivable
alternatives”? To a man of culture and some position and none too
robust in health, what would be the aspect of life with its immediate
future occupied by a criminal prosecution ending in an inevitable
conviction and a term of penal servitude? Could the continuance of
such a life be conceived as desirable? Assuredly not.
And then imagination began to torture me by filling in with hideous
ingenuity the dreadful details. Now it was a pistol shot, heard in the
night, and a group of terrified servants huddled together in the
corridor. But no; that was not like my poor father. Such crude and
bloody methods appertain rather to the terror-stricken fugitive than
to one who is executing a considered and orderly retreat. Then I saw
myself, in the grey of the morning, tapping at his bedroom door:
tapping--tapping--and at last opening the door, or perhaps bursting it
open. I saw the dim room---- Oh! How horribly plain and vivid it was!
With the cold light of the dawn glimmering through the blind, the
curtained bed, the half-seen figure, still and silent in the shadow.
Horrible! Horrible!
And then, in an instant, the scene changed. I saw a man in our hall. A
man in uniform; a railway porter or inspector. I heard him tell, in a
hushed, embarrassed voice, of a strange and dreadful accident down on
the line.… And yet again this awful phantasmagoria shifted the scene
and showed me a new picture: a search party, prowling with lantern
around a chalk pit; and anon a group of four men, treading softly and
carrying something on a hurdle.
“Dear God!” I gasped, with my hands pressed to my forehead, “must it
be--this awful thing! Is there no other way?”
And with that there fell on me a great calm. A chilly calm, bringing
no comfort, and yet, in a manner, a relief. For, perhaps, after all,
there _was_ another way. It was true that my father had rejected Mr.
Otway’s proposal, and such was my habit of implicit obedience that,
with his definite rejection of it, the alternative had, for me, ceased
to exist. But now, with the horror of this dreadful menace upon me, I
recalled the words that had been spoken, and asked myself if that
avenue of escape were really closed. As to my father, I had no doubt;
he would never consent; and even to raise the question might only be
to precipitate the catastrophe. But with regard to Mr. Otway. The
manner in which my father had met and rejected his proposal seemed to
close the subject finally. He had called him a blackmailing scoundrel
and used other injurious expressions, which might make it difficult
or, at least, uncomfortable to re-open the question. Still that was a
small matter. When one is walking to the gallows, one does not boggle
at an uncomfortable shoe.
As to my own inclinations, they were beside the mark. My father’s life
and good name must be saved if it were possible; and it seemed that it
might be possible--at a price. Whether it were possible or not
depended on Mr. Otway.
I recalled what I knew of this man who had thus in a moment become the
arbiter of my father’s fate and mine. My acquaintance with him was but
slight, though I had met him pretty frequently and had sometimes
wondered what his profession was, if he had any. I had assumed, from
his evident acquaintance with legal matters, that he was a lawyer. But
he was not in ordinary practice; and his business, whatever it was,
seemed to involve a good deal of travelling. That was all I knew about
him. As to his appearance, he was a huge, unwieldy man of a somewhat
Jewish cast of face, some years older, I should think, than my father;
pleasant spoken and genial in a somewhat heavy fashion, but quite
uninteresting. Hitherto I had neither liked nor disliked him. Now, it
need hardly be said, I regarded him with decided aversion; for if he
were not, as my father had said, “a blackmailing scoundrel,” he had,
at any rate, taken the meanest, the most ungenerous advantage of my
father’s difficulties, to say nothing of the callous, cynical
indifference that he had shown in regard to me and my wishes and
interests.
It may seem a little odd that I found myself attaching no blame to my
father. Yet so it was. To me he appeared merely as the victim of
circumstances. No doubt he had done something indiscreet--perhaps
incorrect. But discretion and correctness are not qualities that
appeal strongly to a woman: whereas generosity--and my father was
generous almost to a fault--makes the most powerful appeal to feminine
sympathies. As to his honesty and good faith, I never doubted them for
an instant; besides, he had plainly said that no fraudulent intent
could be ascribed to him. What he had done I had not the least idea.
Nor did I particularly care. It was not the act, but its consequences
with which I was concerned.
My meditations were interrupted at length by an apologetic tap at the
door, followed by the appearance of our housemaid.
“If you please, Miss Helen, shall I take Mr. Vardon’s tea to the
study, or is he going to have it with you?”
The question brought me back from the region of tragedy and disaster
in which my thoughts had been straying, to the homely commonplaces of
everyday life.
“I’ll just run down and ask him, Jessie,” I answered; “and you needn’t
wait. I’ll come and tell you what he says.”
I ran quickly down the stairs, but at the study door I paused with a
sudden revival of those terrors that had so lately assailed me.
Suppose he should open the subject and have something dreadful to tell
me? Or suppose that, even now, already----
At the half-formed thought, I raised a trembling hand, and, tapping
lightly at the door, opened it and entered. He was sitting at the
table with a small pile of sealed and stamped letters before him, and,
as I stood, steadying my hand on the door knob, he looked up with his
customary smile of friendly welcome.
“Hail! O Dame of the azure hosen,” said he, swinging round on his
revolving chair, “and how fares it with our liege lady, Queen Anne?”
“She is quite well, thank you,” I replied.
“The Lord be praised!” he rejoined. “I seemed to have heard some
rumour of her untimely decease. A mere canard, it would seem; a
fiction of these confounded newspaper men. Or perchance I have been
misled by the jocose and boisterous Lecky.”
The whimsical playfulness of speech, habitual as it was to him,
impressed me--perhaps for that very reason--with a vague uneasiness.
It was not what I had expected after that terrible conversation. The
anti-climax to my own tragic thoughts was too sudden; the descent to
the ordinary too uncomfortably steep. I perched myself on his knee, as
I often did, despite my rather excessive size and passed my hand over
his thin, grey hair.
“Do you know,” I said, clinging desperately to the common-place, “that
you are going bald? I can see the skin of your head quite plainly.”
“And why not?” he demanded. “Did you think my hair grew out of my
cranium? But you won’t see it long. I’ve heard of an infallible
hair-restorer.”
“Indeed!”
“Yes, indeed! Guaranteed to grow a crop of ringlets on a bladder of
lard. We’ll get a bottle and try it on the carpet broom; and if the
result is satisfactory--well, we’ll just put Esau in his place in the
second row.”
“You are a very frivolous old person, Mr. Pater,” said I. “Do you know
that?”
“I hope so,” he replied. “And again I say, why not? When a man is too
old to play the fool, it is time to carry him to the bone-yard. Am I
going to have any tea?”
“Of course you are. Will you have it here alone or shall we have tea
together?”
“What a question!” he exclaimed. “Am I in my dotage? Should I drink
tea in musty solitude when I might bask in the smiles of a lovely
maiden? Avaunt! No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Jimmy. I’ll just
telephone down to the office and see if there is any silly nonsense
there that may distract me from serious pursuits, and, if there isn’t,