CHAPTER VII.
RECOUNTS A STRANGE SCENE IN CHURCH
Unfortunately life does not stand still for any one of us; and since she had left Arthur’s office, poor Winifred Pontifex had been carried through a maze of bewildering incidents, some of them, no doubt, trivial in themselves, but others of prime importance to the proper understanding of this narrative.
It is, of course, easy enough to resolve on a course of heroic action, when hope beats high within us and self sacrifice stands out before us irradiated by the glories of all its early brilliancy and beauty. It is, unfortunately, quite another thing to pursue it when the cold night has passed, when the early glow has worn off, and when, in the end, we see nothing stretch out before us but a long clear path of duty and renunciation.
For the first few hours, Winifred found life at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage exceedingly pleasant. The Reverend Duncan Kilroy’s wife was all that Vera’s maid had led her to expect--a gentle, quiet, dove-like little woman, who never seemed to have got over the wonderful and beautiful thing that had happened to her when she married the loud-voiced and pompous Duncan. At first sight, it was obvious that she had no more an opinion of her own on household matters than she had on the Church and religion--the greasy, ever-perspiring Duncan ruled those with as much assiduity as he toadied to the richer members of his congregation. Happily, she took at once to poor tear-stained Winifred, and, for the first night, at least, the poor distracted girl’s lot was as tolerable as, perhaps, it well could be in such melancholy circumstances.
Next morning at breakfast a change came over the household--or rather over the seemingly exceedingly shallow and preposterous mind of the Reverend Duncan Kilroy. The day happened to be a Sunday; and at first Winifred was inclined to attribute this change of his to the weight of an exceedingly heavy undischarged amount of eloquence, that, as the day wore on, would naturally right itself.
As the meal progressed, however, Mr. Kilroy seemed to forget her presence, and extracted from an inner pocket a letter and a folded newspaper, the former of which he began to read carefully. Some day some subtle psychologist will explain why, when a communication like this affects ourselves, our eyes are drawn irresistibly towards it. For the moment it may be enough to record that in some curious way, Winifred felt that this letter had an important bearing on her own comfort: and when the Reverend Duncan turned over the note-paper with a heavy frown, she was startled to see a signature which she had very good reason to fear--that of Ventris Blake.
“Humph!” said Mr. Kilroy to his wife finally laying down the letter and removing his eye-glasses with a good deal of deliberation. “This is very curious, my dear Matilda Jane, very curious. I really don’t know what to say to it. I suppose I must do what the man asks, but really, with such an aristocratic congregation as mine, it is quite unusual to resort to sensational methods, better suited to the Church Army and our dear lamented brother Mr. Haweis.”
The little brow-beaten woman looked anxiously in the direction of her lord and master. “To what do you refer, Duncan darling?” she cooed, sympathetically. “I saw you had a letter from our good friend Mr. Ventris Blake, but, of course, I have no idea what he had to say to you.”
Mr. Kilroy coughed furtively. Then, with a quick glance from under his hairless eyebrows at Winifred, he cleared his voice ostentatiously and began: “Perhaps my dear Matilda Jane, the fairest thing for me to do, is to read you this rather puzzling communication. It runs as follows:--
“My Very Dear Friend,--
“In an hour of darkness and affliction like mine, it may seem rather worldly and thoughtless of me to write to you on such a purely earthly matter as the maintenance of my own good name. Yet, when I come to recollect those long and intimate talks we had in happy days doomed alas! it seems never to return again, I feel I shall not be misunderstood by you at least--nay, even more, I might have helped by your prayers, your advocacy, and your advice.”
For a second an indescribable sense of nausea seized poor Winifred, as she heard this horrible hypocrisy from a man she knew to be a most unutterable scoundrel. A wild longing started up within her to cry aloud and denounce him; but a quick glance at the fat pendulous jaw of the Reverend Duncan, whose voice now seemed broken with emotion, and at the silent flood of tears that were flowing from the poor, sympathetic little Mrs. Kilroy warned her how useless would be her protest, and with a great effort she restrained herself, and heard the clergyman proceed:--
“As no doubt you have seen from the daily papers, my poor, dear wife, has been cruelly killed at Scarborough. Indeed, I remember now, what a beautiful letter you wrote to me about this most awful occurrence. What, however, you cannot have seen, is the Saturday-night edition of the Sunday paper which I enclose with this, and from which you will gather, that as the days wear on, the mysteries connected with this terrible crime will only deepen. Please read the report with great care, and if you can, in your sermon, say something strong and kind and helpful about the great bereavement that has made my home and my heart desolate, no friend in London will be more thankful to you to-day than
“Your devoted, “Ventris Blake.”
“Poor man! poor man!” muttered Mrs. Kilroy, directly the reading of this extraordinary effusion came to an end, and the Reverend Duncan laid down the note beside his plate, and once again exchanged a look with Winifred, whose face now looked cold and stern. “Do tell me what the cheap Sunday paper says about the crime. I remember poor, darling Mrs. Blake very well, and I always thought she was a very nice and sweet woman.”
Mr. Kilroy blew his nose vigorously with the large red pocket handkerchief which he always scrupulously affected, and, picking up one of the least known of the Sunday papers--which, truth to relate, was practically the sole property of Mr. Ventris Blake, and always directly inspired by him, with all his little nasty personalities, innuendoes and suggestions, against which even the best people were powerless, because the concern was so heavily encumbered with mortgage debentures--he read aloud as follows:--
“THE TERRIBLE AFFAIR AT SCARBOROUGH. “MYSTERY UPON MYSTERY.
“At a late hour last night, news of the most surprising nature reached this office, about the murder of Aimée Blake, which it is not too much to say, has stirred fashionable London to the most profound depths since the intelligence was first flashed across England by our youthful but ever enterprising contemporary, _The Moon_.
“Naturally, at this point, we have to speak with a great deal of reserve, for up to the present the police have made no move in the direction indicated, and by our informant, it is thought doubtful whether Scotland Yard is acquainted with the extraordinary development we show, as under:--
“We are assured, on very good authority, that the murdered woman was not really the wife of Ventris Blake, the beneficent millionaire of Park Lane. But, some five years ago, when she was a poor and struggling artist in Northamptonshire--when her pictures would not sell in the provincial town in which she had taken up her quarters, and where, like most provincial towns, the art of Portraiture was very largely at a discount--she was married secretly to a certain wealthy house-agent in the city of London, who promptly deserted her and later gave out that he was dead, whereas, he was very much alive and betrothed to a very charming girl, whose beauty was the talk of last year’s Drawing-Room.
“Next week we hope to have more to say about this Romance in High Life. Meanwhile, we venture to offer our sympathies to Mr. Ventris Blake, who seems to us to have been very cruelly used all the way round.”
The Reverend Duncan Kilroy, folded the paper up very carefully and restored it to his pocket. Then he took up his cup of coffee and drained it slowly. “Of course,” said he reflectively. “I see what Mr. Blake wishes me to do--it is to make some allusion to this event in the course of my sermon, and to beg his friends amongst the congregation to withhold any judgment they might be inclined to form until at least these new particulars leak out. The thing he proposes is irregular, very irregular, but when I recollect the thousands of pounds the poor dear fellow has spent in the parish, I can well understand his anxiety to be put right with my people.”
“Certainly,” said Mrs. Kilroy stoutly. “Really Duncan, you ought to waive a point in this matter, and oblige him, for you know he once obliged you.” And even the Reverend Duncan had the grace to blush at this reminder of how he bled Ventris Blake of two thousand pounds to get himself out of the clutch of a certain unscrupulous money-lender.
“Well, well,” he said quickly, “I must trust to the words that are given me at the time to say the right thing and to make a right impression. I suppose, Miss Pontifex,” he went on, turning to where sat Winifred, too disgusted to raise even a word of protest against the foul calumnies on her sweetheart, “you will honour us with your presence in the Vicarage pew this morning. I am sure my friend Mr. Langford would wish that a niece of his should take advantage of all spiritual occasions that present themselves to her--and even my poor little address may do something to assist you in realising the importance of the new career you have undertaken in this household, and give you strength to bear all the afflictions that are the common lot of we poor mortals.” And with something between a groan and a grunt he applied himself to the huge plateful of porridge in front of him, and left poor Winifred alone with her troubles.
Luckily Monica soon distracted her attention, with her little childish wants--and almost before the girl had time to realise the hideous trial she was destined to bear, she found herself in the front pew in the fashionable church of St. Sepulchre, listening to a sweet-voiced young curate, who read the beautiful morning service of the English Church, with all the fiery passion of a boy who has been recently ordained, and who feels very keenly the sacred responsibility of his calling. As the minutes slipped on too, the organ notes that rose and fell in the Gregorian setting of the psalms, brought balm to her troubled spirits, and for a time, the weight of anxiety seemed to press no longer upon her, and she found herself joining with strange prayerful earnestness, in that eternal cry of the stricken Psalmist:--
Lord I cry unto thee; make haste unto me; give ear Unto my voice, when I cry unto thee.
Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; And the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.
Mine eyes are unto Thee, oh God the Lord: in Thee is my Trust; leave not my soul destitute.
Hence, by the time the sermon was reached, her mood was one of peace, yet exaltation, and almost without a tremor she saw the Reverend Duncan Kilroy climb into the pulpit and begin his discourse.
As usually happened at St. Sepulchre’s, there was a rustle of skirts and the shuffle of feet, as the fashionable crowd settled themselves down for a meditation that would be totally undisturbed by any of the Reverend Duncan’s laboured commonplaces. This time, however, he had got a genuine surprise for them, for, without waiting to give out his text, he leaned impressively over the front of the pulpit, and spoke apparently with great feeling:--
“My dear friends,--I cannot begin this discourse without I express to you the profound detestation and horror felt by the terrible calamity that has fallen upon our good parishioner, Mr. Ventris Blake. Happily, by the latest reports, I see that the shame and the horror of the tragedy of his wife may to some degree be removed from him. Pray heaven it is indeed so, and that the story I read to-day that Mrs. Blake was not really his wife at all--”
He stopped suddenly. Somebody had risen in front of him.
“That is a wicked lie,” suddenly cried a woman’s voice at the back of the church; and before the congregation could recover from the profound astonishment into which they had fallen by Mr. Kilroy’s own innovation, they were horrified to see the young woman, clad from head to foot in black, run swiftly down the aisle and up the stairs of the pulpit, when she caught the clergyman tightly by the surplice.
“That’s a lie,” she repeated fiercely, “and you, Duncan Kilroy, know it. How dare you stand there. Come down at once!”
Of course the sensation created by this strange woman’s sudden appearance on the pulpit-stairs at a fashionable church like St. Sepulchre’s, at the height of a Sunday morning’s service, was tremendous. Half the congregation rose, horrified, to their feet--there was a sound of shrieks and of cries, during which several ladies, including Mrs. Kilroy, fainted--then a hub-bub of eager, excited conversation, followed by a rush of church-wardens and sidesmen to the East-end, to secure the offender.
The strange woman, however, did not lose her self-possession, but, with a look of some wild creature, she turned away from the cowering wretch in the pulpit above her, and faced the noisy little crowd of fat and prosperous-looking church officials, that puffed and panted about her.
“Do not touch me,” she cried, with an imperious wave of her arm. “I have done no more than my duty, and I am not ashamed of one word I have said to you. That is the man,” pointing to the cowering clergyman, whose face now was horribly grey with fear; “that is the scoundrel you ought to drag to judgment. _He knows_ he lies to you, when he says that poor Aimée Blake was not the wife of Ventris Blake at all. _He knows_ when he gets your sympathy for that man in Park Lane, he is taking part in a crime to ruin a fellow creature that never did him a moment’s harm. Look at him!” her voice now rising to a shriek, “he dare not deny my words, he cannot; call on him, not me, to explain.” And with a magnificent gesture as of an outraged queen, she swept all the startled crowd away from her path, and, before anybody could stretch out a finger, she had stepped swiftly out of the church.
No doubt, she would have been followed, and questioned, if not given into custody, had not the condition of poor Duncan Kilroy at this point claimed the entire congregation’s attention. By this time, he had recovered some semblance of his composure; and advancing to the front of the pulpit, he had raised his arm and attempted to offer some words of explanation, but although his mouth moved, and his muscles twitched, his flock were terrified to see he could not utter a single word.
Of course Winifred had started to her feet with the rest of the congregation, immediately the woman sprang so fiercely at her employer, but when she found herself swept down the main aisle by the pressure of the crowd, who ran in various directions to fetch water and chairs for different terrified old ladies and their own minister, an irresistible desire seized her to follow this strange creature herself and to learn what mystery it was that had driven her to so outrageous a course as to denounce the Reverend Duncan Kilroy in his own church.
“After all,” she reasoned quickly, “it is my duty to follow up this clue for the sake of the man I love. To me it is quite obvious that this woman has not risked so much as this without some remarkable motive. Certainly she must know a great deal more about Ventris Blake and Mr. Kilroy than she has just told the congregation. At all events, she spoke out very nobly and bravely for Arthur, and maybe, when she sees who I am, she may show me how I could help Arthur too.”
While these thoughts were flashing like lightning through Winifred’s brain, her feet were carrying her almost unconsciously in the direction of the open street, so that, by the time she had reached this last conclusion, she was rejoiced to discover herself in Piccadilly, where, away in the direction of the Circus she could see the strange woman she wanted to speak to, hurrying out of sight.
Just at that moment too a hansom happened to pass, and signalling the driver, Winifred, careless of what Mrs. Kilroy or the world might say of her, jumped into this cab and told the driver to track down this stranger--and she would give him half a sovereign.
Encouraged by the bribe, the man lashed his horse, and, in two or three minutes, had succeeded in coming upon the strange woman in Shaftesbury Avenue, where she was evidently intent on finding some street she had been told about, but had never previously been to--in Soho.
Luckily the driver proved to be a discreet whip, and, as soon as he drew level with the person he had been sent in search of, he allowed his horse’s gallop to drop into a walk; and thus, until the Palace Theatre was reached, the two women--the one so eager to escape attention, the other so anxious to learn her secret--proceeded on the same path. No sooner, however, did they get level with Compton Street, than the strange woman made a quick turn to the left, and, advancing rapidly towards the end of the street, she drew up in front of a cheap-looking Italian café, decked out in white paint and gold that had long since grown dirty and faded, on which, in bold staring letters was inscribed the name of the Café Faustina.
For a moment, but only for a moment, she hesitated at the entrance, then without looking round, she pushed her way through the swing doors, and disappeared entirely from sight.
Now, intensely eager to bring the affair to a conclusion, Winifred sprang out of the hansom and handed the driver the half sovereign she had promised him. At any other time, in any other circumstances, her natural reserve would have prevented her taking any strong line like this, and she would have stood for some time on the pavement, faltering helplessly. As it was, however, she realised what tremendous issues hung upon her dexterity and promptness, and, nerved by the thought that she was doing this for the man whom she loved more dearly than her own life, she too pushed open the swing doors and entered the café.
As chance would have it, the woman she had followed so eagerly was seated at a small marble-topped table, her face buried in her hands, apparently sobbing violently. Far away, at the end of the restaurant, could be seen two or three foreign-looking waiters, busily preparing in a recess,--and only Winifred could see that this strange creature was in tears.
With a tense movement of the hands and shoulders, Winifred advanced to the place where this woman was seated, and sat down in front of her. For several minutes, the stranger did not seem conscious of her presence, but, bit by bit, her sobs grew less violent, and finally, when a waiter advanced with a tray full of tea things, which she had evidently ordered the instant she entered the café, she recovered her composure with an effort and sat up and faced Winifred.
Curiously enough, she betrayed no excitement on seeing the girl in front of her, looking at her with great, anxious pleading eyes. On the contrary, her expression seemed softened, and she stretched out a caressing hand and touched Winifred gently on the arm.
“Ah! Miss Pontifex,” she said, in a low penetrating voice, that revealed at once the owner was a trained actress, “so it was you who followed me all the way from St. Sepulchre’s this morning, was it? I knew somebody had come after me, but, truth to tell, I was too upset to worry about you, or even to look who you were.
“Ah!” she went on, after another pause, “we women are strange creatures, aren’t we? First we resolve that nothing on earth shall prevail on us to pursue a certain line of action. Then the mere fact that we have resolved not to do it makes the idea burn and burn within us, until we feel we must do this thing, or perish. Lastly, in one mad moment, we do it--do it with all the power and passion we are capable of; and what happens? Why we sit down and cry, like tired children, when their toys, like men’s love, have proved mere folly and they wonder how they ever came to see any beauty in those painted figures.”
“Perhaps,” put in Winifred gently, “it is not all so black as you think. Somehow, it always seems to me that when a person does a thing that is right, the thing itself brings its own consolation, however tired or upset you may be as the result of your effort to do good.”
The strange woman raised her face to Winifred’s and smiled faintly. It was not what the world might call a pretty face--perhaps, there was too much fire in those dark brown eyes, too much passion about the finely chiselled mouth and chin--too much breadth and depth in the forehead, over which the hair had been arranged with many a dainty touch and artifice. But, notwithstanding that the features spoke of the artificial life on the stage and a heart too quickly torn by wild whirling gusts of affection and emotion, it was a face which another woman would instinctively trust; and even as she looked, Winifred felt that in this strange wild creature she had found a very sincere friend.
“We must stop these idle speculations, though,” said the woman softly, “after all, you did not come here to talk to me of the Higher Moralities, did you, Miss Pontifex? You wanted to hear something personal and immediate, that I could tell you, didn’t you? Now, what is it, let us come to the point.” And she gave the girl in front of her, a quick, enquiring look.
“I quite admit that,” returned Winifred promptly, bravely encountering the scrutinising look that had been cast upon her. “As you seem to know my name, no doubt you will know that I am very keenly interested in the case Mr. Kilroy mentioned, for I am engaged to Mr. Arthur Hudson.”
“I know, I know,” repeated the woman slowly, and then she added, in an accent that was almost a prayer: “Poor girl, poor girl.”
Winifred’s lips trembled, but she went on steadily with the conversation. “Do you mind,” she said, still very gently, “telling me, in confidence, why you got up in the church just now and openly accused Mr. Kilroy of telling a falsehood? He is not a strong man, perhaps, maybe he is not a good man, but I didn’t think that he was quite a bad man.”
“He is--a very bad man,” snapped the woman fiercely. “He is one of Ventris Blake’s most dangerous puppets. Take my advice, get out of that house as soon as you can; the place is accursed, and sooner or later that man’s sins will rise to judgment.”
“But can’t you tell me precisely what he has done wrong in connection with this murder of Mrs. Blake,” persisted Winifred, half terrified by the tornado of denunciation she had brought upon herself. “After all, nobody can do any good unless you give them the facts.”
“There is really no need to give anybody any facts,” declaimed the woman fiercely, “let them look into that man’s private life, and they will discover all that there is to be known. But they won’t, I know they won’t, for a millionaire is behind him, and what money can do in London to-day is enough to make the heart of every good woman break, for practically not even the best and wisest seem free from its influence.”
“But,” queried Winifred, still more puzzled, “how is it you know that Mr. Kilroy’s statement, that this poor woman was not the wife of Ventris Blake, was a lie?”
“Well, I do, and that is sufficient,” the strange woman rejoined sharply. “What is more, at the right moment, I intend to prove it, so neither you nor Mr. Hudson need have any fears about that certificate of that sham marriage at Peterborough. I will take care that you are cleared of all the odium that may arise from that.”
The woman spoke with such intense conviction that even Winifred felt that her words could be absolutely relied upon, and almost before she knew what she was doing, she had caught up her hands and pressed them warmly as an earnest of her heartfelt gratitude.
Then, unconscious of the fact that over an hour had passed since she sped out of the church in hot pursuit of this woman who had dared to go right to the pulpit-steps to denounce the vicar, poor Winifred stepped out quickly in the direction of St. Sepulchre’s gates. By this time, however, all the excitement had died down, the congregation had dispersed to their homes, there to discuss the scandal and shame of this remarkable occurrence, and on a conspicuous board had been written the warning-notice:--“In consequence of the sudden and regrettable indisposition of the Vicar, the Reverend Duncan Kilroy, M.A., D.D., there will be no service this evening in this church.”
Even in the Vicarage there was externally no reminder of the turbulent scene that had so recently engulfed at least one of its principal inmates. On the contrary, everything seemed to be managed so as to give the impression that the incident had practically no lasting importance. Thus, when Winifred entered, Mrs. Kilroy and Monica were just sitting down to dinner, and when Winifred herself took her place at the table, Mrs. Kilroy simply contented herself by saying her husband was not at all well, and then fell to discussing such commonplaces of life as the weather, cookery, and the difficulty of getting good voices in a London church choir.
Nevertheless, although everything appeared on the surface to go forward very much as usual, Winifred was conscious of a certain difference in Mrs. Kilroy’s attitude towards her. The old frank trust and good humour seemed to have vanished, and, in their place had come a subtle suggestion of resentment--a suggestion that in some vague, mysterious way, Winifred herself had been responsible for the trouble that had all at once fallen upon that household, and that sooner the black cloud was removed by the agency of the girl herself, the more tolerable would the domestic atmosphere become.
Winifred herself, however, was plunged in a series of melancholy reflections of her own. For one thing, she was genuinely concerned that she had heard no recent news of Arthur, and the paragraph which Mr. Kilroy had read that morning about his being linked up with the murdered woman, filled her mind with a score of serious misgivings. More than that, try how she would, she could not rid herself of the vivid impression which the strange woman had made upon her mind; and again and again, she asked herself whether she ought not to take careful notice of the advice that had been given to her, and to flee altogether from that roof, under which Ventris Blake appeared to exercise so potent a spell.
It was therefore, with a feeling of positive relief, that she saw a maid appear, and go to Mrs. Kilroy with a request from the Vicar that she should ask Miss Pontifex to come to him to his library for a few minutes’ private conversation. True, she had now conceived the greatest distrust and dislike of this smug greasy-looking parson, but nevertheless she recognised that he had considerable influence upon her future, and that it might be unwise to make an open enemy of him before she got to know exactly how much he could do to clear the good name of her sweetheart.
When she entered his room, she found him huddled up in a great armchair, close to the fire, a great red Turkish rug wrapped about his knees and the set expression of an early Christian martyr going resignedly to the stake, about his face.
With a feeble little plaintive cough, which seemed to rack his frame in inverse ratio to its loudness, he motioned her to a seat on the other side of the fireplace. For two or three minutes they sat thus, without a word being spoken. Then, he passed a fat flabby hand dramatically across his forehead, and in imagination, threw back a long curling lock that might years ago have been long enough to fall across his temples.
“This is a sad business, Miss Pontifex,” he murmured at length, carefully pumping up a sigh. “Very sad business. Can you explain it?”
Winifred looked puzzled. “I don’t quite understand,” said she. “Do you refer to the incident in Church, or,” she added maliciously, “to the bereavement sustained by Mr. Ventris Blake?”
The man winced. “I mean,” he exclaimed, slowly “your connection with that terrible depraved creature that dared this morning to defame the sanctuary of the Most High.”
“My connection,” repeated Winifred incredulously, “why I have never seen the woman before in my life.”
“Indeed,” exclaimed Mr. Kilroy cynically, “then perhaps you will explain how it came about that you were seen by my verger to race out of the church after that abandoned creature, to jump into a hansom, and to follow her up Shaftesbury Avenue, and finally to sit closeted with her for some fifteen or twenty minutes in a dirty little café in Soho.”
Winifred’s blood boiled at the tone the man had adopted towards her. There was something hidden in its depths that seemed to rouse all the latent pride and delicacy of feeling and sense of right treatment that is instinctive in every good woman’s nature; and for once she ceased to be the quiet, gentle, self-sacrificing girl, ever ready to lay aside her own prejudices to help a suffering fellow mortal, and became the quiet and resolute woman, quick, condemnatory, eager, critical.
“Are we not both labouring under some misapprehension, Mr. Kilroy,” she began, in that low, penetrating voice of hers, that somehow made the man in front of her writhe unconsciously. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think there is any necessity for me to explain anything that happened this morning to you, and certainly, I shall not do so unless you give me a certain amount of satisfaction. First and foremost, I should like to ask you what you mean by taking up the cause of a scoundrel like Ventris Blake, in the manner you have done? It is all very well to pretend the man has been rich and beneficent in his church offerings--there are hundreds of men like that in London, yet decent members of your cloth, wouldn’t soil their fingers with shaking the hand of such creatures, who would be better employed paying back their ill-gotten thousands to the countless widows and children they have ruined.”
“Mr. Ventris Blake is a friend of mine,” the man answered feebly, “he is misunderstood, of course. So are heaps of other noble and charitable souls. I believe in him, I know his worth.”
“That may be,” proceeded Winifred steadily. “That does not say that when he calls upon you to take as governess, a girl you have never seen before, you should do so, and simply turn yourself into a cheap vehicle for conveying insults from this very noble and self-sacrificing creature direct to her, when she is powerless to avenge them.”
“What do you mean,” gasped the clergyman, going very white.
“I mean,” proceeded Winifred steadily, “that I know very well all that has happened between you and Mr. Ventris Blake. I mean, I know that he ordered you to give me this situation, and that you dared not refuse him. I mean, I know that he sent that letter to you this morning, and that cruel paragraph in the newspaper, purposely that you should read them aloud to me at the breakfast table, which you did, without a thought of the terrible pain which you might inflict upon me. Now, I want to ask, how does this stand with your prayers and litany, when you call upon your God to defend the fatherless children and widows. I am a fatherless child--and I am not receiving from you the common consideration that I might expect from the ordinary man of the world, who has been bruised and battered by commercial life, but who still retains some recollection of the early lessons in chivalry he learned at his mother’s knee.”
“It is false,” Mr. Kilroy whimpered--but the girl was now standing over him, and her indignation was something terrible to witness.
“It is true,” she repeated firmly, “quite, quite true, and you know it, only you are such a pitiful coward that you dare not admit it even to me. Nor is that the worst of the questions I have to put to you. What did that woman in the church mean when she denounced you in public, as one who knew Ventris Blake was married to that poor murdered woman, and yet for some private sinister purpose of his own, did not scruple to pretend that this was not the fact?”
“I refuse to answer,” snapped Duncan Kilroy, rising too, and feeling that he had stood more than he could stand again.
“Go to your room at once, and think over the vile and wicked things you have said to me, and remember that although I may forgive you, and not avenge myself, your punishment will come sure and swift and complete enough.”
“It is like you to threaten,” sneered Winifred, now roused to fever heat, “threats like these are the stock-in-trade of men of your kind, but to anybody who knows as I do that the world is founded on right and justice, and that in the long run good always triumphs over evil, they are both futile and foolish. I will go to my room as you tell me, but it will not be to meditate on the home truths I have told to you, for I see it is useless to hope for any good out of you. Understand, I will not stay in this house to be made a target for Mr. Blake’s brutal witticisms. I shall go upstairs and pack my things, and leave the house at once.” Saying which she swept out of the room, and marched up to the nursery where she flung herself on her knees in front of her trunks, and began in a quick and methodical fashion, to pack away her things.
Thus engaged in an exercise that soothed her overwrought nerves and brought back to her mind the peace and dignity she had lost in the library, she did not hear a stealthy footstep ascending the stairs of the nursery, from the floor beneath. Indeed it was only when the Reverend Duncan Kilroy himself stood in the doorway, that she was conscious that she had been followed, and then she turned swiftly and found herself faced by a man almost beside himself with mortification and rage.
“You think,” he hissed, his face purple with passion. “You think I shall permit you, Miss Pontifex, to go out into the world and sow any falsehoods you like about me amongst the people I have a right to regard as my friends. In that, I can assure you, you are much mistaken. I have no intention of permitting you to play ducks and drakes with my good name, even if you choose to do so with your own--so please consider yourself a prisoner until you come to a better frame of mind.” And saying that, he suddenly shut the door, turned the key, and fled down the stairs, leaving Winifred fast under lock and key in a room, the windows of which, were tightly barred with iron.
Meanwhile, the Sunday papers had hurried out a special edition. Even then, the newsboys were tearing up and down Piccadilly, shouting: “The Murder of a Millionaire’s Wife! Extraordinary development! Arrest of a well-known London house-agent. A terrible scandal in high-life feared.” Meanwhile too, Paul Renishaw was knocking vainly at the door of the Vicarage in the hope of seeing Miss Pontifex. Winifred was a prisoner, and was doomed to undergo some very bitter experiences before she escaped from the clutches of the Reverend Duncan Kilroy, M.A., D.D.